“How do you know she used to live here?”
Georg told her about the poster in Françoise’s room in Cadenet, about his looking for her at the cathedral, and about his meeting with Calvin Cope. “And you saw what happened yesterday evening at the game,” he added.
“Are you saying that the only thing you knew when you came to New York was that … I mean, all you had to go on was a poster of a cathedral in New York? I used to have a poster on my wall of Gripsholm Castle!”
“But you didn’t make a secret of the fact that it was Gripsholm Castle. Françoise had cut off the wording at the bottom of the poster and told me it was the church in Warsaw where her parents got married. Be that as it may, I now know that she took part in the theater workshop at the cathedral, and that in any event nobody here seemed to have taken her for Polish or Russian. So she not only speaks French, but also English, and both, it seems, fluently.”
“Does she speak Polish too?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know any Polish.”
“She couldn’t have known that. She must have anticipated that you might know Polish. Go on.”
“I’ve told you pretty much all I know. I have reason to believe that her previous employer has an office near Union Square, and that she might still be working for him.”
“Do you have the address?”
“Yes.”
“You went there?”
“I went a couple of times, but didn’t see her going in or coming out.”
“So you’re saying … you’re saying that the Polish or Russian secret service is operating here in Manhattan? And you know the address? Sixteenth Street, seventh floor, ring three times, KGB sort of thing?”
“No, I’m not saying that. But in Cucuron they threatened me, followed me, and beat me up, and here they’ve been shadowing me. There’s no rhyme or reason for all this, except that it must be the same Polish or Russian secret service. And the fellow who’s been following me goes to work every morning and then returns there in the evening after his day of shadowing.”
“Your spaghetti’s getting cold.”
He pulled the plate toward him and began to eat. “It’s already cold.”
She had finished eating. “So you’re asking me how you should go looking for Françoise because I live in New York and might have some ideas about how to find someone in this city. Good, I’ll share my ideas with you. But whether you like it or not, I’ll also give you a piece of my mind about the story you’ve just told me. First, if you believe your girlfriend is in the clutches of an Eastern Bloc secret service and that you can free her on your own, that’s pure nonsense. If she’s in anybody’s clutches, then the CIA would do a far better job at freeing her. If she isn’t going to the CIA herself, then it’s because she can’t or doesn’t want to be freed. Second, you should go to the CIA too. I don’t know what your dealings with the KGB are, but you should have seen your face when you told me about how they beat you up. Do you want to hit back at them? Do you want to blackmail them into returning your girlfriend to you? Do you want compensation for being beaten up? I imagine these secret services are never worth the money put into them, but if they couldn’t handle someone like you, nobody would invest a cent in them. I’ve just tied in my third point with my second one, but that doesn’t matter. To go to the CIA, but also to leave things as they are, wouldn’t be a bad idea. I like that neighborhood, and it gets to me to hear about a KGB office there. My favorite shops are there and a bunch of galleries are not too far away; there’s a nice new restaurant I like, and then the KGB moves in? I don’t like that! Don’t you feel the same way?”
“Look, Helen, these people have finished me off. They used my love, my abilities, destroyed my life in Cucuron, and beat me up. They instigated a car crash that killed a man. They shot my cats.”
“They did what?”
Georg told her. “Perhaps that’s how they threaten the free world. I don’t mean by instigating car crashes and shooting cats, but by manipulating people. In which case my revenge will have something to do with the worldwide battle between good and evil. But that doesn’t affect me, and I don’t care if they’ve set up shop near Union Square or Moscow or Cadenet—I don’t care a bit. I don’t want to let them get away with what they did to me. I want money from them, even if it won’t bring back my cats or Maurin, whom I didn’t particularly like, but he wasn’t a bad guy and never did me any harm. I want money, because they made my life miserable, and because I don’t want to continue living in misery. And also because it will be a defeat for them.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand you. But, okay: I promised you some ideas. You have that picture of Françoise, right? So I would go to the foreign bookstores, the French and Polish or Russian ones. I don’t know where they are, but I know they exist. I’d also go to libraries with foreign collections. I would go to the restaurants near that office. Above all: since she was in that workshop at the cathedral, she will have lived near here. If she knows French and Polish so well, she will have studied them—probably at Columbia. I’d ask around in the French and Russian departments.”
“Do you have any colleagues there?”
“You can give me a picture of her, and I’ll ask around.” Helen put the picture in her bag, shaking her head. “And when you have your money and your girl—are you going to expose those secret-service people?”
“Expose them? But that would only get them extradited. There was this one guy, Bulnakov, the boss in Cadenet. I would have loved to have strangled him or beaten him to a pulp. I often imagined doing it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. If I could have, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
“The cats, I keep thinking about your cats. Were they anything like Effi?” She narrowed her eyes, and bit her lips. There was horror and sadness in her face.
“One was white, one was striped, and the third was black with white paws. They were all a year apart, and little Dopey was always putting one over on Sneezy, just like Sneezy had done the year before with Snow White.”
“All those names are from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. What I don’t understand: You said that these men destroyed your life in Cucuron. Why did they do it, and how come they managed to do it?”
“I don’t know. They must have some link to the French secret service.”
“How can the Russian or Polish secret service have a link to the French one? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Don’t ask me. Either way, I didn’t get any more translation work, and I had all kinds of trouble with the municipality, the police, the bank, and my landlord.”
“What did they figure they’d get out of this?”
“I’ve asked myself that too. Perhaps they wanted me to be stamped as untrustworthy. Then there wouldn’t be anybody I could turn to with my story.”
“And you think they also found out about your coming to New York from the French secret service?”
“How else would they have? At any rate, the French customs officer asked me all kinds of questions on my way to Brussels to catch my flight to New York. The French secret service could have found all this out from customs, and the Polish or Russians from them.”
“I don’t like all this.”
Georg still felt that she was convinced he ought to go to the CIA. Was she right? For her the issue didn’t seem to be a possible threat to United States’, or to European national security. It doesn’t matter where the secret service sets up shop—it can do so anywhere. That its work is compromised if people report its activities, if its agents are extradited, and its branches have to move, is of less importance than national security. Georg took Helen’s love for the Union Square area seriously. She had a point. Furthermore, he found the idea attractive that a city is a small mirror of the world, containing within it life and work, business and religion, wealth and poverty, black and white, CIA and KGB. That’s what he liked about New York: it is the whole world, more so than any middle-class German city c
ould be. He tried to explain this to Helen, but couldn’t convince her.
31
GEORG ASKED IN FOREIGN bookstores and libraries whether anyone knew Françoise. He showed her photograph at the cash registers and the counters of diners and stores near the MacIntyre Building. To no avail. He called Helen every evening, and she always came up with some excuse about why she hadn’t called him, though she had promised to. She hadn’t reached any of her colleagues yet.
He no longer cared whether he was being shadowed or not. On the last day of his reconnaissance in the area around the MacIntyre Building, he went into a diner, and, as he stood waiting for a table, saw the redhead having lunch. The diner was packed, and waiters were rushing past with laden trays, while the owner sat more customers by shouting at them where to sit. The redhead was eating a hamburger, drinking a Coke, and reading a newspaper. Just another regular.
Georg made his way through the diner and sat down at the redhead’s table. For an instant the man looked surprised, but then recovered his professional cool. “Don’t let me disturb you,” Georg said. “I think there’s no need for introductions. You might know me better than I know you, but I know you well enough to be able to ask you to pass on a message. There’s a gentleman in your—your organization with whom I would like to speak. He was working in France not too long ago; perhaps he’s still there, I don’t know. He called himself Bulnakov. A short man, stout, sixtyish. Do you know him?”
The redhead didn’t say anything, nor did he nod or shake his head.
“I’d like to speak to him. I doubt you have his schedule handy, so have him call me to set up an appointment. Tell him it’s important. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but tell him too that it wouldn’t be a good idea to have me killed. I’ve written down everything I know, and mailed it out. If my friends don’t hear from me, they’ll mail the information on to Mermoz, the police, and the newspapers.”
“Can I take your order?” the waiter asked.
“Could I have a Coke?”
“Diet?”
“No, regular.”
“Have you ever thought of dyeing your hair?” Georg asked, feeling like all three musketeers in one. The redhead ran his fingers through his hair. No, he didn’t look pleasant after all. His eyes were too small and his nose too wide. Georg didn’t wait for his Coke. He got up.
Outside, he was suddenly gripped by fear. Have I gone crazy? How can I get out of this now? Leave the country? Does he know I didn’t mail anything to my friends? Georg looked around, saw an empty cab, and flagged it. He had to get home. The trip took half an hour, and thoughts swirled through his mind. He broke into a sweat. He stared intensely at the streets, the traffic, and the people: the horse-drawn carriage that turned in to Central Park; Columbus on his tall column; the Metropolitan Opera; the movie theaters; the restaurants that had been too pricey for him and of which he made a mental note for better times; the benches on the median strip of Broadway, where he wanted some day to while away an afternoon; the little park on 106th Street, whose grass, trees, and benches had turned gray from the pollution; the ladders hanging from the fire escapes.
He waited for the elevator, his knees shaking. The other day Helen hadn’t felt too well, and told him “My legs are like noodles,” and he had asked her, “Al dente?” at which she had laughed. The silly scene seemed to him the height of happy normalcy. In his room, he lay down on his bed. He fell asleep and dreamed of Françoise, Bulnakov, and the redhead—he was being shadowed, he ran for all he was worth; then he was sitting on a rock in Central Park, the clouds black and hanging low, but the sun had found a hole and made colors shine. There was utter silence. Georg tugged at a blade of grass, and when it came out of the ground together with a long root, he heard a whimpering that grew louder and louder, until it boomed through the park like a thundering howl. He woke up drenched in sweat. Down in the street a police car had driven by. He heard the siren fade in the distance. He got up and took a shower. His fear was gone. He was ready for action.
32
THE CALL FROM TOWNSEND ENTERPRISES came the following morning at ten.
“Georg! Telephone!” Larry shouted from the kitchen where he was eating breakfast.
“It’s a woman, not Helen, though,” he whispered to Georg. He and Larry had had dinner with Helen the previous evening. Georg had talked a lot, joked, flirted, and Larry and Helen had looked at him in surprise. What had gotten into this quiet roommate and difficult bedfellow? When Georg took Helen home, they walked past a panhandler, and Helen dropped a coin into his cup. She told Georg how in her first few weeks in New York she had been appalled at all the poverty and had put money in all the cups, until a man called out after her, “Hey, you just threw a quarter in my coffee!” Georg shook with laughter. He got the impression that Helen might have liked to take him upstairs but that she found his sudden cheeriness a little frightening. She still hadn’t found anything out about Françoise.
“Mr. Polger? I’m calling from Townsend Enterprises. Mr. Benton would like to know whether you could come by this afternoon. Do you have our address?”
“Please tell Mr. Benton that I’ll be there at four.”
Georg hung up. He could tell that Larry was curious, but didn’t say anything to him. Georg took a cup of coffee to his room, and got a pen and some paper.
Dear Jürgen,
I’m sure you’ll be surprised at getting a letter from me from New York. You’ll be even more surprised that I am asking you to open the enclosed envelope only in the event that you don’t hear from me again within four weeks. I know it sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger, maybe even foolish. It might even remind you of the games we used to play. And yet, it might not sound childish to you at all: as the district judge for Mosbach you must have gotten used to all kinds of things. Be that as it may, I would be grateful if you did this for me, and hope to be in contact with you very soon. Give my best to Anne and the children. Your old friend—
Then Georg wrote down what he knew, guessed, supposed, and feared, and put the thick batch of papers into an envelope, which he crammed into a second larger envelope, and took it to the post office. He didn’t know if he was being watched. But he imagined himself walking to a mailbox, dropping the letter in, walking on, and suddenly hearing a bang, a flame shooting out of the mailbox, with letters fluttering all over Broadway. They wouldn’t be able to blow up a whole post office, though.
At four o’clock he was standing outside the MacIntyre Building. The door was open and painters were working in the lobby. The same dark-haired beauty with the ugly glasses let him in, and showed him into a small, windowless conference room. “Mr. Benton will be with you in a moment.”
The room was gloomy. Dim light came from a slot between the low ceiling and the wall. Six chairs of dark leather stood around a heavy table made of dark wood. Set into the wall was an empty black screen. The air conditioner was humming.
Georg looked around for a dimmer to turn up the light. He couldn’t find one. There was no knob on the door either. The screen lit up with a gentle buzz, and a small image appeared in the middle and grew, coming toward Georg until it filled the screen. There was a lot of black, with flitting yellow and red lights. It took him a few moments to realize that these were video shots taken from a moving car: yellow headlights and red brake lights that jerked with the rattling of the car from which the video was shot. At times the windshield wipers, the hood, the edge of the windshield, or the steering wheel came into the picture. The car was going fast, and yellow headlights came racing by. It was following another car’s red brake lights on the right side of the road and, trailing them, switched to pass the other cars on the left. The passing maneuvers were rough and aggressive, and the approaching headlights shot like a spray of sparks off the screen. The film had no sound. The traffic grew lighter. When there were no more oncoming headlights, and only the red brake lights were ahead, the car swerved next to the other car in front, the camera swinging toward its interior, to the profile of the dr
iver and his hands on the steering wheel. The image kept jumping, showing a trouser leg and the roof of the car, as if the hand holding the camera had been knocked aside. For a few moments Georg couldn’t make out anything. Then both cars were in the picture. They had stopped, one having forced the other into a ditch. In the glare of the headlights, Georg could see two men beating up a third. Pummeling him. The third man collapsed, and the two other men began kicking him. The camera zoomed in, showing the bloody head of the man who was lying motionless on the ground. It showed his face from the side, and the tip of a shoe that pushed his head to the other side. It showed his face from the front. The image on the screen disappeared with a light crackle. A chill ran down his spine. That was him. They had made a video of beating him up on the road back from Marseille.
“My young friend!” The door opened, the room brightened, and an effervescent Bulnakov came bursting in. He was just as fat, but now had on a blue three-piece suit. Gone were the shirt with the unbuttoned collar, the rolled-up sleeves, and the patches of sweat under his arms. There was a hint of eau de cologne. His English had the same hard tone as his French. “I can’t believe Janis made you wait here in this horrible little room. Come with me into my office.”
Georg followed Bulnakov past the map of the world and up the spiral staircase to the next floor, through an empty room with large pictures of trees, and through a double door. Bulnakov was talking incessantly. “This is quite different from my office in Cadenet, isn’t it? I’d have preferred a green carpet here. If you ask me, they overdid it a bit with the color of the wood, and without the green of the leaves, there’s no brown of the trees. The fight I had to put up for those pictures! Ah, but roughing it over there in the south of France had its charm too. Those were good days! Speaking of south, did you know that New York lies on the same latitude as Rome? You’ve already had a taste of the heat and humidity here. You just up and came to New York, to the New World! I’ll admit I was taken aback! I would never have thought you capable of that! But here you are, and I welcome you to the Big Apple and my office!”