Peter Straub - Magic Terror

Impressed, N turned around and took in yellowish-white walls, a double bed that would prove too short, an old television set, a nightstand with a reading lamp, and a rotary phone. Framed embroidery above the bed advised him that eating well would lead to a long life. He pulled the carry-on toward him and began to hang up his clothes, meticulously refolding the sheets of tissue with which he had protected his suits and jackets.

A short time later, he came out into the parking lot holding the computer bag. Visible through the opening, the girl in the blue dress and another woman in her twenties, with stiff fair hair fanning out above a puggish face, a watermelon belly, and enormous thighs bulging from her shorts, were cutting up greens on the chopping block with fast, short downstrokes of their knives. The girl lifted her head and gazed at him. He said ‘ Bon soir.’ Her smile put a youthful bounce in his stride.

The telephone booth stood at the intersection of the road passing through the village and another that dipped downhill and flattened out across the fields on its way deeper into the Pyrenees. N pushed tokens into the slot and dialed a number in Paris. When the number rang twice, he hung up. Several minutes later, the telephone trilled, and he picked up the receiver.

An American voice said, ‘So we had a little hang-up, did we?’

‘Took me a while to find the place,’ he said.

‘You needum Injun guide, findum trail heap fast.’ The contact frequently pretended to be an American Indian. ‘Get the package all right?’

‘Yes,’ N said. ‘It’s funny, but I have the feeling I was here before.’

‘You’ve been everywhere, old buddy. You’re a grand old man. You’re a star.’

‘In his last performance.’

‘Written in stone. Straight from Big Chief.’

‘If I get any trouble, I can cause a lot more.’

‘Come on,’ said the contact. N had a detailed but entirely speculative image of the man’s flat, round face, smudgy glasses, and furzy hair. ‘You’re our best guy. Don’t you think they’re grateful? Pretty soon, they’re going to have to start using Japanese. Russians. Imagine how they feel about that.’

‘Why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do, so I can do what I’m supposed to do?’

N sat outside the café tabac on the Place du Marche in Mauléon with a nearly empty demitasse of espresso by his elbow and a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in near-mint condition before him, watching lights go on and off in a building on the other side of the arcaded square. He had used the telephone shower in his room’s flimsy bathtub and shaved at the flimsy sink, had dressed in a lightweight wool suit and his raincoat, and, with his laptop case upright on the next chair, he resembled a traveling businessman. The two elderly waiters had retired inside the lighted café, where a few patrons huddled at the bar. During the hour and a half N had been sitting beneath the umbrellas, a provincial French couple had taken a table to devour steak and pommes frites while consulting their guidebooks, and a feral-looking boy with long, dirty-blond hair had downed three beers. During a brief rain shower, a lone Japanese man had trotted in, wiped down his cameras and his forehead, and finally managed to communicate his desire for a beef stew and a glass of wine. Alone again, N was beginning to wish that he had eaten more than his simple meal of cheese and bread, but it was too late to place another order. The subject, a retired politician named Daniel Hubert with a local antiques business and a covert sideline in the arms trade, had darkened his shop at the hour N had been told he would do so. A light had gone on in the living room of his apartment on the next floor and then, a few minutes later, in his bedroom suite on the floor above that. This was all according to pattern.

‘According to the field team, he’s about to move up into the big time,’ his contact had said. ‘They think it’ll be either tonight or tomorrow night. What happens is, he closes up shop and goes upstairs to get ready. You’ll see the lights go on as he goes toward his bedroom. If you see a light in the top floor, that’s his office, he’s making sure everything’s in place and ready to go. Paleface tense, Paleface know him moving out of his league. He’s got South Americans on one end, ragheads on the other. Once he gets off the phone, he’ll go downstairs, leave through the door next to the shop, get in his car. Gray Mercedes four-door with fuck-you plates from being Big Heap Deal in government. He’ll go to a restaurant way up in the mountains. He uses three different places, and we never know which one it’s going to be. Pick your spot, nice clean job, get back to me later. Then put it to some mademoiselle – have yourself a ball.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Hey, we love the ragheads, you kidding? They’re customers. These guys travel with a million in cash, we worship the camel dung they walk on.’

The lights at the top of the house stayed on. A light went on, then off, in the bedroom. With a tremendous roar, a motorcycle raced past. The wild-looking boy who had been at the café glanced at N before leaning sideways and disappearing through the arcade and around the corner. One of the weary waiters appeared beside him, and N placed a bill on the saucer. When he looked back at the building, the office and bedroom lights had been turned off, and the living room lights were on. Then they turned off. N stood up and walked to his car. In a sudden spill of the light from the entry, a trim silver-haired man in a black blazer and gray slacks stepped out beneath the arcade and held the door for a completely unexpected party, a tall blond woman in jeans and a black leather jacket. She went through one of the arches and stood at the passenger door of a long Mercedes while M. Hubert locked the door. Frustrated and angry, N pulled out of his parking spot and waited at the bottom of the square until they had driven away.

They did this more than they ever admitted. One time in four, the field teams left something out. He had to cover for their mistakes and take the fall for any screwups. Now they were going two for two – the team in Singapore had failed to learn that his subject always used two bodyguards, one who traveled in a separate car. When he had raised this point afterward, they had said they were ‘working to improve data flow worldwide’. The blond woman was a glitch in the data flow, all right. He traveled three cars behind the Mercedes as it went through a series of right-hand turns on the one-way streets, wishing that his employers permitted the use of cell phones, which they did not. Cell phones were ‘porous’, they were ‘intersectable’, even, in the most delightful of these locutions, ‘capacity risks’. N wished that one day someone would explain the exact meaning of ‘capacity risk’. In order to inform his contact of M. Hubert’s playmate, he would have to drive back to the ‘location usage device’, another charming example of bureaucratese, the pay telephone in Montory. You want to talk capacity risks, how about that?

The Mercedes rolled beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the town and wheeled left to double back. Wonderful, he was looking for a tail. Probably he had caught sight of the field team while they were busily mismanaging the data flow. N hung back as far as he dared, now and then anticipating the subject’s next move and speeding ahead on an adjacent street. Finally, the Mercedes continued out of Mauléon and turned east on a three-lane highway.

N followed along, speculating about the woman. In spite of her clothes, she looked like a mistress, but would a man bring his mistress to such a meeting? It was barely possible that she represented the South Americans, possible but even less likely that she worked for the buyers. Maybe they were just a lovely couple going out for dinner. Far ahead, the Mercedes’s taillights swung left off the highway and began winding into the mountains. They had already disappeared by the time he came to the road. N made the turn, went up to the first bend, and turned off his lights. From then on, it was a matter of trying to stay out of the ditches as he crawled along in the dark, glimpsing the other car’s taillights and losing them, seeing the beams of the headlights picking out trees on an upward curve far ahead of him. Some part of what he was doing finally brought back the lost memory.