The Marching Season Page 22

  Delaroche folded the newspaper and looked out the window. He wondered whether Michael Osbourne, the ambassador's son-in-law, was somehow involved in the incident. The Director had told him in Mykonos that Osbourne had been brought back to the CIA to deal with Northern Ireland.

  The train drew into the Gare du Nord in Paris in the early afternoon. Delaroche collected his small grip from the luggage rack. He passed through the station quickly and caught a taxi outside. He was staying at a small hotel on the rue de Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He told the driver to drop him a few blocks away, on the rue Saint-Honore, and he walked the rest of the way.

  He checked into the hotel as a Dutchman and spoke accented French to the desk clerk. They gave him a garreted room on the top floor with a fine view of the gardens and the Seine bridges.

  He slipped a clip into his Beretta pistol and went out.

  Dr. Maurice Leroux, cosmetic surgeon, kept an office in a fashionable building on the avenue Victor Hugo, near the Arc de Tri-omphe. Delaroche, without giving his name, confirmed by telephone that the doctor was in that day. He told the receptionist he would be around later to see him and hung up abruptly.

  He sat at the window table of a cafe across the street and waited for Leroux to come out. Shortly before five o'clock Leroux emerged. He wore a gray cashmere overcoat, and he seemed to be the last man in Paris to actually sport a beret. He walked quickly and appeared pleased with himself. Delaroche left money on the table and went out.

  Leroux walked to the Arc de Triomphe, then circled the Place Charles de Gaulle and strolled down the avenue des Champs-Elysees. He entered Fouquet's restaurant and was greeted by a middle-aged woman. Delaroche recognized her; she was a minor actress who played bit roles on French television dramas.

  The maitre d' showed Leroux and the aging actress into the club side of the restaurant. Delaroche took a small table on the public side, where he could see the door. He ordered a hash of potatoes and ground meat and drank a half bottle of decent Bordeaux. When there still was no sign of Leroux, he ordered cheese and cafe au lait.

  It was nearly two hours before Leroux and his companion left the restaurant. Delaroche watched them through the glass. It was windy, and Leroux turned up the collar of his cashmere coat dramatically. He gave the actress a theatrical kiss and touched her cheek, as if admiring his work. He helped her into a car. Then he purchased newspapers and magazines from a kiosk and started walking through the buzzing evening crowds along the Champs-Elysees.

  Delaroche paid his check and went after him.

  Maurice Leroux was a walker. With his newspapers tucked beneath his arm, he walked along the Champs-Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. He had no reason to suspect he was being followed, and therefore tailing him was very easy. Delaroche had only to keep pace with him along the busy sidewalks. The cut of his expensive jacket, and the farcical beret, made him easy to spot among the crowds. He crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde and walked for a long time on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Delaroche lit a cigarette and smoked as he walked.

  Leroux entered a cafe bistro near the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres and sat down at the bar. Delaroche entered a moment later and sat at a small table near the door. Leroux drank wine and chatted with the barman. A pretty girl ignored his flirting.

  After a half hour Leroux left the bar, by now thoroughly drunk. This pleased Delaroche, because it would make his task easier. Leroux teetered along the Boulevard Saint-Germain through the light rain and entered a small side street near the Mabillon metro station.

  He stopped at the entrance of an apartment building and punched in the security code. Delaroche slipped in the door behind him before it could close. They entered the lift together, an old-fashioned cage threaded through the middle of the staircase. Leroux punched the fifth floor, Delaroche the sixth. Delaroche chatted about the miserable weather in Parisian-accented French. Leroux grunted something unintelligible. Clearly, he did not recognize his patient.

  Leroux got off at his floor. As the lift rose, Delaroche peered through the grill and watched Leroux enter his apartment. He stepped out of the lift on the sixth floor and walked down one flight of stairs. He knocked gently on Leroux's door.

  The doctor answered a moment later, face perplexed, and said, "Can I help you?"

  "Yes," Delaroche said, and he punched Leroux in the throat with a knifelike fist. The blow left Leroux doubled over in agony, speechless, gasping for air. Delaroche closed the door.

  "Who are you?" Leroux rasped. "What do you want?"

  "I'm the one whose face you took a hammer to."

  He realized it was Delaroche.

  "Dear God/' he whispered.

  Delaroche removed the silenced Beretta pistol from his coat.

  Leroux began to tremble violently. "I can be trusted/' he said. "I've done many men like you."

  "No, you haven't," Delaroche said, and he shot him twice through the heart.

  Delaroche arrived back in Amsterdam early the following afternoon. He returned to his flat by taxi and packed a blue nylon backpack with his painting kit: two small canvases, paints, a Polaroid camera, a portable easel, and the Beretta pistol. He rode his mountain bike along the cobblestone streets to a spot on the Keizersgracht where there was a good bridge with lights on the arches that came on after dark.

  He locked his bike and walked around the bridge for some time until he found a perspective he liked, with houseboats in the foreground and a trio of magnificent gabled houses in the background. He removed his camera from the backpack and made several Polaroid photographs of the scene, first in black and white, so he could see the essential forms and lines of the setting, then in color.

  He set to work, painting quickly, instinctively, racing to capture the fleeting twilight before darkness took hold. When the lights flickered to life on the bridge he set down his brush and simply watched. He studied the reflection of the lights on the smooth surface of the canal for a long time. He waited for the painting to cast its spell—waited for the image of Maurice Leroux's dead eyes to evaporate from his mind—but neither happened.

  A long water taxi slid past, and the reflection of the bridge lights dissolved in its wake. Delaroche packed away his things. He rode along the Keizergracht, gingerly holding the canvas in his right hand. In any other city he might have drawn stares with such a pose, but not in Amsterdam.

  Delaroche crossed the Keizergracht at Ree Straat, then pedaled slowly along the Prinsengracht, until the old houseboat appeared before him. He chained his bicycle to a lamppost, leaned the canvas against the front tire, and hopped onto the deck.

  The Krista was forty-five feet long, with a wheelhouse aft, a slender prow, and a row of portholes along the gunwale. The green and white paint was flaking with neglect. The hatch at the top of the companionway was secured with a heavy padlock. Delaroche still had the key. He unlocked the hatch and stepped down the companionway into the salon, which was dark except for the soft glow of the yellow streetlamps leaking through the dirty skylights.

  The boat had been Astrid Vogel's. They had lived here together the previous winter, after Delaroche had hired her to assist him with a series of particularly difficult assassinations. He could imagine her now, her long body bumping about in the cramped spaces of the houseboat. He looked at the bed and thought of making love to her with rain drumming on the skylight. Astrid had nightmares; she used to pummel him in her sleep. Once, she awakened after a bad dream, surprised to find Delaroche in her bed. She nearly shot him before he could wrench the gun from her hand.

  Delaroche had not been back to the Krista since then. He spent several minutes rifling cabinets and drawers, looking for any trace of himself he might have left behind. He found nothing. There was nothing of Astrid either, just some appalling clothing and a few well-thumbed books. Astrid was used to living in hiding. She had been a member of the Red Army Faction and had spent many years in places like Beirut and Tripoli and Damascus. She knew how to come and go without leaving
tracks.

  Delaroche's obsessive independence made him incapable of loving another, but he had cared for Astrid and, more important, he had trusted her. She was the only woman who knew the truth about him. He could relax around her. They had planned to go to the Caribbean when the job was done—to live together in something approaching a marriage—but Michael Osbourne's wife had killed her on Shelter Island.

  Delaroche climbed the companionway and locked the hatch behind him. He mounted his bike and pedaled toward his apartment through the lamplight. Delaroche killed for two reasons: because he was hired to kill or to protect himself. Maurice Le-roux fell into the second category. He had never killed out of anger, nor had he ever killed for revenge. He believed the blood lust for revenge was the most destructive of emotions. He also thought it was unbecoming of a professional of his stature. But now, cycling through the streets of a strange city, with a face he did not recognize, Delaroche was overcome by a desire to kill Michael Osbourne.

  He saw the German girl waiting on the front steps of the house. He crossed the Herengracht to the opposite side and waited. He had no desire to see her again. Finally, she scribbled a note and shoved it beneath the door before storming off along the canal. Delaroche scooped up the note as he entered the foyer—You are a fucking bastard] Please call. Love, Eva—and pushed his bicycle into the flat.

  He entered his studio and dropped the unfinished painting on a stack of other incomplete works. He hated it suddenly; it seemed contrived, unimaginative, tiresome. He stripped off his coat and placed a large blank canvas on his easel. He had painted her once, but the work, like the rest of his possessions, had been destroyed in Mykonos. He stood there in the half-light, thinking about it for a long time, trying to remember her face. There was a Byzantine quality about it, he remembered: wide cheekbones, a large mobile mouth, liquid blue eyes set slightly too far apart. The face of a woman from another time and place.

  He switched on the harsh halogen lamps suspended from the ceiling and started to work. He discarded one canvas because he did not like the pose and a second because the structure of her facial bones was all wrong. The third canvas felt right from the moment he started to work on it. He painted his most enduring visual memory of her—Astrid, leaning on a rusting wrought-iron railing on a hotel balcony in Cairo, wearing only a man's galabia unbuttoned to her stomach, the setting sun shining through the thin white cotton, revealing the soft lines of her back and her upturned breast.

  He worked through the night until morning. He had polluted his body with coffee and wine and cigarettes. When it was finished he could not sleep because he had a headache. He carried the canvas to his room and propped it up at the foot of his bed. Finally, sometime before noon, he fell into a restless sleep.

  30

  LONDON r. NEW YORK CITY

  Michael Osbourne was forced to remain in London for three days after the Hartley Hall affair, dealing with the real enemy of any servant of the secret world: the bureaucracy. He had spent two days giving lengthy statements to the authorities. He had helped Wheaton clean up the mess of Preston McDaniels's suicide. He had worked with Special Branch to tighten security around Douglas. He had attended a memorial service for the two SAS officers slain in the Sperrin Mountains of Northern Ireland.

  His last day in London was spent in a soundproof cell deep in the catacombs of Thames House, enduring a ritual debriefing by the mandarins of MI 5. When it was over he stalked Mill-bank in the rain for twenty minutes, searching for a taxi, because Wheaton had commandeered Michael's staff car on a dubious pretext. Finally, he retreated to Pimlico Underground station and took the tube. London, a city he loved, suddenly seemed dreary and oppressive to him. He knew it was time to go home.

  Graham appeared in the drive of Winfield House the following morning to take Michael to Heathrow, this time in a Jaguar instead of his department Rover.

  "We have to make a stop on the way to the airport," Graham said, as Michael climbed into the backseat next to him. "Nothing serious, darling. Just a couple of loose ends to tie up."

  The car left Regent's Park and headed south along Baker Street. Graham changed the subject.

  "You see this?" he said, pointing to an article in that morning's Times about the mysterious murder of a prominent French plastic surgeon.

  "I glanced at it," Michael said. "What about it?"

  "He was a naughty boy."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We've always suspected he was earning a little extra cash by fixing the faces of bad guys," Graham said. "The good doctor made several house calls to exotic places like Tripoli and Damascus. We asked the French to keep a watch on him, and as usual they told us to fuck off."

  Michael read the article; it was two paragraphs, with only the barest details. Maurice Leroux was shot to death in his apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris. Police were investigating.

  "What kind of gun did the killer use?"

  "Nine millimeter."

  The Jaguar sped south along the Park Lane, then crossed Green Park along Constitution Hill. A moment later it passed through the gates of Buckingham Palace.

  Michael looked at Graham. "Never a dull moment with you, is there?"

  "I wouldn't have it any other way."

  "It's so nice to see you again, Mr. Osbourne," Queen Elizabeth said, as they entered a palace drawing room. "Please sit down."

  Michael sat down. Tea was served, and her aides and assistants withdrew. Graham Seymour waited outside in the anteroom.

  "I want to thank you for the fine work you did in dealing with the menace of the Ulster Freedom Brigade," the Queen said. "The people of Northern Ireland owe you a tremendous debt. Indeed, so does the whole of Great Britain."

  "Thank you, Your Majesty," Michael said politely.

  "I was very sorry to hear about your agent, the one who was killed in Northern Ireland." She paused a moment, face perplexed, and glanced at the ceiling. "Oh, good heavens, I can't recall the poor man's name."

  "Kevin Maguire," Michael said.

  "Ah, yes, Harbinger," the Queen said, using Maguire's code name. "Such a frightful business that was. I was relieved to hear you weren't seriously hurt. But I know losing an agent like Harbinger in such a horrible way must have affected you deeply."

  "Kevin Maguire wasn't perfect, but there are countless people who are alive today because of him. It took a tremendous amount of courage for him to betray the IRA, and in the end he paid with his life."

  "What are your plans now that the Protestant threat appears to have been neutralized? Do you plan to stay with the CIA or vanish back into retirement?"

  "I'm not sure yet," Michael said. "Right now I'd just like to go home and see my wife and children. I've been away for a long time."

  "I'm not sure I could be married to someone in your line of work."

  "It takes a very special kind of woman," Michael said.

  "So your wife is supportive?"

  Michael smiled. "I wouldn't go that far, Your Majesty."

  "I suppose you have to do what makes you happy. And if working for the CIA makes you happy, I'm sure she'll understand. It's certainly important work. You should be very proud of what you've accomplished here."

  "Thank you, Your Majesty. I am proud."

  "Well, since it appears you're going to remain inside the CIA for the time being, I suppose we'll have to do this in private."

  "Do what, Your Majesty?" Michael asked.

  "Your honorary knighthood."

  "You're joking."

  She smiled mischievously and said, "I never joke about something as important as this."

  She opened a small rectangular case and showed Michael the medal of the Honorary Knighthood of the British Empire.

  "It's beautiful," he said. "I'm honored and very flattered."

  "You should be."

  "Do I have to kneel?"

  "Don't be silly," she said. "Just finish your tea and tell me what it felt like to capture Gavin Spencer."

  "You m
ean I just had sex with a real knight?" Elizabeth said. "I'm afraid so." "I think you're my first." "I'd better be."

  "So what did you two chat about besides Northern Ireland?" "We talked about you."

  "Oh, please."

  "We did."

  "What about me?"

  "She wanted to know whether I was going to stay with the Agency or vanish back into retirement, as she put it."

  "And what did you tell her?"

  "I told her I didn't know."

  "Such a coward."

  "Watch it. I'm a knight, remember?"

  "So what's the answer?"

  "For one of the first times in my career with the Agency, I feel I actually accomplished something. It feels good."

  "So you want to stay on?"

  "I want to hear what Monica has to say before I make any final decisions. And I want to hear what you have to say."

  "Michael, you know how I feel. But I also need you to be happy. It's strange, but listening to you for the last hour, you've seemed happier than you have in months."

  "So what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying that I wish working somewhere other than the Central Intelligence Agency could make you happy. But if it's what you want, and you're going to be content, then I want you to stay."

  She crushed out her cigarette, untied her robe, and rolled on top of him, pressing her breasts against his warm skin. "Just make me one promise," she said. "If you really think October is still alive, let someone else go after him."

  "He murdered Sarah, and he tried to kill us both."

  "That's why someone else should handle the case. Recuse yourself, Michael. Let Adrian give the job to someone else, someone with no personal stake." She hesitated a moment. "Someone who's not out for revenge."

  "What makes you think I'm out for revenge?"

  "Come on, Michael. Don't be dishonest with yourself or me. You want him dead, and I don't blame you. But revenge is a dangerous game. Didn't you learn anything while you were in Northern Ireland?"