Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Ultimatum

"In the name of God, call me back with the information!"

Three thousand miles from Paris, Louis DeFazio sat alone at a rear table in Trafficante's Clam House on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. He finished his late afternoon lunch of vitello tonnato and dabbed his lips with the bright red napkin, trying to look his usual jovial, if patronizing, self. However, if the truth were known, it was all he could do to stop from gnawing on the napkin rather than caressing his mouth with it. Maledetto! He had been at Trafficante's for nearly two hours-two hours! And it had taken him forty-five minutes to get there after the call from Garafola's Pasta Palace in Manhattan, so that meant it was actually over two hours, almost three, since the gumball in Paris, France, spotted two of the targets. How long could it take for two bersaglios to get to a hotel in the city from the airport? Like three hours? Not unless the Palermo gumball drove to London, England, which was not out of the question, not if one knew Palermo.

Still, DeFazio knew he had been right! The way the Jew shrink talked under the needle there was no other route he and the ex-spook could take but to Paris and their good buddy, the fake hit man. ... So Nicolo and the shrink disappeared, went poof-zam, so what the fuck? The Jew got away and Nicky would do time. But Nicolo wouldn't talk; he understood that bad trouble, like a knife in the kidney, was waiting for him wherever he went if he did. Besides, Nicky didn't know anything so specific the lawyers couldn't wipe away as secondhand horseshit from a fifth-rate horse's ass. And the shrink only knew he was in a room in some farmhouse, if he could even remember that. He never saw anybody but Nicolo when he was "compass mantis," as they say.

But Louis DeFazio knew he was right. And because he was right, there were more than seven million big ones waiting for him in Paris. Seven million! Holy Christ! He could give the Palermo gumballs in Paris more than they ever expected and still walk away with a bundle.

An old waiter from the old country, an uncle of Trafficante, approached the table and Louis held his breath. "There's a telephone call for you, Signor DeFazio."

As was usual, the capo supremo went to a pay phone at the end of a narrow dark corridor outside the men's room. "This is New York," said DeFazio:

"This is Paris, Signor New York. This is also pazzo!"

"Where've you been? You pazzo enough to drive to London, England? I've been waitin' three hours!"

"Where I've been is on a number of unlit country roads, which is important only to my nerves. Where I am now is crazy!"

"So where?"

"I'm using a gatekeeper's telephone for which I'm paying roughly a hundred American dollars and the French buffone keeps looking through the window to see that I don't steal anything-perhaps his lunch pail, who knows?"

"You don't sound too stupid for a gumball. So what gatekeeper's what? What are you talking about?"

"I'm at a cemetery about twenty-five miles from Paris. I tell you-"

"A cimitero?" interrupted Louis. "What the hell for?"

"Because your two acquaintances drove here from the airport, you ignorante! At the moment there is a burial in progress-a night burial with a candlelight procession which will soon be drowned out by rain-and if your two acquaintances flew over here to attend this barbaric ceremony, then the air in America is filled with brain-damaging pollutants! We did not bargain for this sciocchezze, New York. We have our own work to do."

"They went there to meet the big cannoli," said DeFazio quietly, as if to himself. "As to work, gumball, if you ever want to work with us, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or Los Angeles again, you'll do what I tell you. You'll also be terrifically paid for it, capisce?"

"That makes more sense, I admit."

"Stay out of sight, but stay with them. Find out where they go and who they see. I'll get over there as soon as I can, but I gotta go by way of Canada or Mexico, just to make sure no one's watching. I'll be there late tomorrow or early the next day."

"Ciao," said Paris.

"Omerta," said Louis DeFazio.

The hand-held candles flickered in the night drizzle as the two parallel lines of mourners walked solemnly behind the white casket borne on the shoulders of six men; several began to slip on the increasingly wet gravel of the cemetery's path. Flanking the procession were four drummers, two on each side, their snare drums snapping out the slow cadence of the death march, erratically out of sequence because of the unexpected rocks and the unseen flat grave markers in the darkness of the bordering grass. Shaking his head slowly in bewilderment, Morris Panov watched the strange nocturnal burial rite, relieved to see Alex Conklin limping, threading his way between the tombstones toward their meeting ground.

"Any sign of them?" asked Alex.

"None," replied Panov. "I gather you didn't do any better."

"Worse. I got stuck with a lunatic."

"How?"

"A light was on in the gatehouse, so I went over thinking David or Marie might have left us a message. There was a clown outside who kept looking into a window and said he was the watchman and did I want to rent his telephone."

"His telephone?"

"He said there were special rates for the night, as the nearest pay phone was ten kilometers down the road."

"A lunatic," agreed Panov.

"I explained that I was looking for a man and a woman I was to meet here and wondered if they'd left a message. There was no message but there was the telephone. Two hundred francs-crazy."

"I might do a flourishing business in Paris," said Mo, smiling. "Did he by any chance see a couple wandering around?"

"I asked him that and he nodded affirmative, saying there were dozens. Then he pointed to that candlelight parade over there before going back to his goddamn window."

"What is that parade, incidentally?"

"I asked him that, too. It's a religious cult; they bury their dead only at night. He thinks they may be gypsies. He said that while blessing himself."

"They're going to be wet gypsies," observed Panov, pulling up his collar as the drizzle turned into rain.

"Christ, why didn't I think of it?" exclaimed Conklin, looking over his shoulder.

"The rain?" asked the bewildered psychiatrist.

"No, the large tomb halfway up the hill beyond the gatehouse. It's where it happened!"

"Where you tried to-" Mo did not finish the question; he did not have to.

"Where he could have killed me but didn't," completed Alex. "Come on!"

The two Americans retreated down the gravel path past the gatehouse and into the darkness of the rising hill of grass punctuated by white gravestones now glistening in the rain. "Easy," cried Panov, out of breath. "You're used to that nonexistent foot of yours, but I haven't quite adjusted to my pristine body having been raped by chemicals."

"Sorry."

"Mo!" shouted a woman's voice from a marble portico above. The figure waved her arms beneath the pillared, overhanging roof of a grave so large it looked like a minor mausoleum.

"Marie?" yelled Panov, rushing ahead of Conklin.

"That's nice!" roared Alex, limping with difficulty up the wet slippery grass. "You hear the sound of a female and suddenly you're unraped. You need a shrink, you phony!"

The embraces were meant; a family was together. While Panov and Marie spoke quietly, Jason Bourne took Conklin aside to the edge of the short marble roof, the rain now harsh. The former candlelight procession below, the flickering flames now gone, was half scattered, half holding its position by a gravesite. "I didn't mean to choose this place, Alex," said Jason. "But with that crowd down there I couldn't think of another."

"Remember the gatehouse and that wide path to the parking lot? ... You'd won. I was out of ammunition and you could have blown my head apart."