Hopscotch (2 page)

Jaynes smiled slowly. “Jesus H. Christ. How the hell could you keep from looking?”

Kendig shrugged. The plain fact was he hadn't cared; but it wouldn't be worth the effort to convince Jaynes of that.

“Well we both did all right, didn't we,” Jaynes said.

Kendig escaped into the
toilette
and afterward went back into the poker chamber to collect his winnings. The woman was alone at the table adjusting, her hair in a handbag mirror. She must have been close to fifty but she hadn't begun to go to seed. “You're leaving?”

“Leaving this game.”

“That's hardly sporting.” But it was not said unkindly; she was smiling. “You don't take much of an interest in it, do you.”

“I suppose not.”

“Such a shame,” she murmured. Then her smile changed. “I don't know which is worse—a helpless puppy or a lost American. The only thing you really want is to get home, isn't it.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I've never met an American who didn't. Why don't you?”

“Perhaps I will.”

“You'll feel better then.”

“Will I?” He nodded to the houseman, who swept the chips into a sack and went away with them after Kendig finished making the count.

She said, “You
are
the one who hounded my trail in Algiers, aren't you?”

“I was one of them. For a little while. They moved me out after a few months.”

“And now?”

“I'm retired,” Kendig said.

“I see.” She didn't believe it for a minute but she was amused rather than angry. “Our Swedish friend just finished telling me what a success you've been on the Continent. Gambling, motorcars, skiing, flying aeroplanes. You've a rather interesting sort of retirement.”

“Yes,” he said because that was easier than denying it.

She pushed the cards together and her hands became still: she stared at his face. “Would you care to come home with me tonight?”

“Thank you,” he said, “I think not.” He executed a slight bow and left the room.

The cashier was waiting for him. “
M'sieur
prefers cash or our cheque?”

“Cash, please.”

“It is a dangerous sum to be carrying on one's person,
M'sieur
.”

“All the same I'll have it in cash if you don't mind.”

“As
M'sieur
wishes.”

The
maître
approached, burly and discreet. “
Monsieur
Kendig?
Téléphone, s'il vous plâit.… Par ici
.”

He took it in someone's office. He picked up the receiver but didn't speak into it until the
maître
had backed out and shut the door. “Yes?”

“
C'est vous
, Kendig?”

“
Oui
.”

“
Ici Michel
.”

Kendig recognized the voice. It was Mikhail Yaskov. Now Yaskov spoke in English:

“You received my note then.”

“Yes.”

“I should like to meet with you, old friend.”

“For what purpose?”

“To discuss a matter which may prove mutually beneficial.”

“I doubt the existence of any such matter, Mikhail.”

“Nevertheless perhaps you will humor me?”

Kendig's shoulders stirred. “Why not then?”

“It must be
tout de suite
I am afraid. I am only in Paris another twenty-four hours.”

“Tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow,” Yaskov said, his voice very controlled. “I shall be with the
messieurs
Citroën and Mercier. Do you know them?”

“Yes.” It wasn't far from here: the intersection of the quai André Citroën and the rue Sebastien Mercier, just below the Mirabeau bridge on the left bank. It was a workers' neighborhood, narrow passages leading back, their drab walls daubed with Communist slogans. Fitting enough.

Yaskov said, “We shall meet at Number Sixteen, yes?”

Sixteen hundred hours: four o'clock in the afternoon. Harmless enough. “All right, Mikhail.”

“I assure you the transaction will interest you.”

Kendig doubted it but he made no reply. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes.
Bonne chance
, old friend.” A soft chuckle and then the line died.

Kendig cradled it and went out and collected his
envelope from the cashier. Jaynes waved at him eagerly from across the room but he only waved back and followed the
maître
to the lift; he rode down in the cage with the old Algerian veteran and went out into the night with a pocketful of money.

– 2 –

B
UT SHE WASN
'
T
discouraged that easily. She was waiting by her car at the curb; she held a cigarette imperiously, waiting to have it lighted. The car was white, a Volvo 1800 a few years old—the super-charged grand-touring coupe they had stopped making in '72. It didn't quite suit her; she was more the Jaguar or Ferrari sort—something juggernauty.

When he held his lighter to the cigarette she drew the smoke slowly into her mouth. Her hair was fashionably Medusan; she had a full ripe body and an earthy manner—saloons, cigarettes, cards, beds.

“Well good night again,” he said and began to turn away.

She ignored it. “You have a first name, don't you?”

“I suppose so.” Everyone always called him Kendig. “It's Miles.”

“Miles Kendig. I rather like that—it has a strong sound. Come on then, get in. I'll drop you wherever you like. You won't find a taxi in this quarter, not at this hour.”

“… Thank you.” He said it grudgingly and went around to hold the driver's door for her.

She managed the car with poor driving rhythm; it was not an implement to which she'd been born—he suspected she'd grown up amid chauffeurs and taught herself to drive at some point in order
to expand the boundaries of her independence but it wasn't anything she'd ever done for pleasure.

He made conversation because evidently she expected it. “You live in Paris all the time now?”

“Live? I imagine one could put it that way. Living is something most of us postpone, isn't it. We sell the present for a chance at a future where we may do our living when we're old and we've lost the talent for it.”

“You don't strike me as a woman who's saving up for her retirement.”

“Well I was fortunate. I have an ex-husband who settled my pension on me prematurely. Did you ever meet Isaac?”

“No.”

“Tycoon, banker, merchant prince. I'm sure you know the type. They're always terrified by their Ozymandian dreams. The future must be guaranteed forever. Ninety-nine-year leases and thousand-year trust funds. It's bloody depressing.”

She drove along the quay. There was a good moon but it was very late for lovers; the evening was silent and uninhabited but for the
clochards
, the human flotsam in rags sleeping in the streets underneath the globular streetlamps that hung like rotted melons on their corroded stalks. The woman said, “They disturb your friend Jaynes, the
clochards
. For some reason they frighten him. Would he have us house them in the best hotels, I wonder? Then where would all the Americans live?”

Her laughter was mocking but not unkind. He didn't respond but he couldn't share in her contempt for Jaynes's compassion: he couldn't deceive himself any longer into mocking anyone else's convictions. He could only envy them.

Past the
Tour Eiffel
, Napoleon's tomb, up the Saint Germain, a tourist's route across the island beneath Notre Dame—the architectural gestures of an ambitious past. His eyes opaque, Kendig watched it all flow past; watched the woman's animated face hovering above the wheel. A tiny Renault squirted in front of her and she shouted at it: “
Cochon!
”

Then they were on the right bank threading the maze below the Opera; his hotel was only a few blocks distant. She hadn't asked where he was staying but evidently she knew. She slid the sports car in at the curb a block short of it. “You honestly didn't care, did you.”

“About what?”

“Your cards. The size of the wager.”

He turned his hand palm up.

“Remarkable,” she said.

“Is it.”

“You find it an effort merely to grunt a word or two, don't you, Miles Kendig. Yet like the ashes of Alexander you were once Alexander. An exciting reputation precedes you, you know.”

He looked at her. “What the hell.” It was said of her that in her bedroom in Neuilly there was a statuette of a Punjabi idol clutching his distended giant member. “I'll go to your place.”

“You needn't have made it such a bloody concession,” she said angrily; but she put the car in gear.

In another few years she might become one of those middle-aged divorcées who take up with young Continental gentlemen who teach Italian. But she had not yet degenerated into that sort of female impersonation; she was vital and she stirred
what juices had not atrophied in him. “At least you're not a zombie
there
,” she told him. He took no particular pleasure from the knowledge.

In the morning he pushed away his plate of breakfast untasted and left her, on foot, strolling in any direction through the
Bois
. She had smiled gently but she'd made no demands when he got up to leave: she was interested but not desperate, she was willing to be casual about it and he thought he might even come back to her some time.

After a while he ambushed a taxi and rode into the snarled center of Paris, made arrangements to have his winnings transferred to Switzerland for deposit, walked to his hotel and met the
concierge
and paid tomorrow's rent as if he believed there would be a tomorrow.

In his room he stripped and bathed and took the trouble to shave; the little daily routines reassured him a bit. In the mirror his face showed the years: every crease. He still had a full head of hair, pepper-grey now; his face was rectilinear, all parallel planes, and his eyebrows were two bushy triangles over his slanted eyes. It was a middle-Caucasion face that had served him well in the chameleon years. In France he passed easily for a Frenchman because it never occurred to the French that a foreigner could speak the language properly. He had posed at one time or another as an Italian, an Arab, a German and a Croat.

From eleven until three he sat in the room waiting, neither reading nor smoking nor otherwise stirring his consciousness. At three he went out.

He had a
croque monsieur
in the Deux Magots and took the bus along to the rue de la Convention,
dismounted at the quay and had a look around, more through habit than from any particular caution. A woman in dusty black hawked tickets to the
Loterie Nationale
. Lower-class Frenchmen sat at dirty checkerclothed tables before a pair of cafés and a
brasserie
, drinking table wine. A block distant a group of street workers leaned on their tools, never laughing, seldom working, ogling a girl who strolled by—just another girl who worked the bars and the men in them, a brittle black-haired borderline alcoholic who probably couldn't remember the faces of the men she'd bedded in the past week; but she held the workers' full attention until she disappeared. In Switzerland, Kendig recalled, the street workers laughed and they worked. And all that energy and spirit had produced, in five hundred years of peaceful civilization, the cuckoo clock.

A coachload of tourists decanted along the quay and Kendig moved around, keeping out of the way of the Americans taking slide photos and Super-8 movies of one another. He was thinking: if you compressed all the matter in a human being, closing down the spaces between cells, the spaces between electrons and nuclei, you would end up with a heavy mass about the size of a one-eighth karat diamond, and far less useful.

Yaskov came along, elegant in a suede jacket with a Malacca cane in his spidery hand; he gave Kendig the benediction of his grave nod. Russians do not smile politely; they smile only when they are amused. It makes them appear rude to outsiders. Kendig fell in step and they walked out to the center of the bridge and down the steps onto the tiny island. The park benches were deserted. “So nice to see you again,” Yaskov said. His gleaming skin
was stretched over the bones almost to the point of splitting. In the profession he was an
éminence grise
; his name commanded respect in all the agencies. He was not the sort of Russian who would be surprised to learn that America was no longer a land of sweatshops and scarlet letters and riders of the purple sage. (It was truly amazing how many of them were still like that.)

Yaskov's urbane English was almost perfect. “You won a great sum of money last night, yes? It was your good fortune I sent you there.”

“Well I'm deeply grateful.” Kendig was wry.

Yaskov too was a gambler; his face never betrayed him. “I'm distressed to see you so lackluster, old friend.”

“It's only post-coital
tristesse
.”

“For so many months?”

He was tired of the roundabout game. “Then you've been keeping tabs on me. Why? I'm out of the game now—you know that.”

“By choice, is it?”

“I'm sure you know that too.”

“Actually I'm not sure I do, old friend. My sources in Langley haven't always been reliable. It's said you were retired—involuntarily.”

“Is it.”

“Is that true?”

“I don't see that it matters whether it's true. I'm retired—that's truth enough.”

“You have fifty-three years.”

“Yes.”

“Absurd,” Yaskov said. “I myself have sixty-one. Am I retired?”

“Do you want to be?”

“No. Avidly no. I should be bored to distraction.”

“Would you now.”

They sat down on a bench. A barge drifted past laden with what appeared to be slag. Its aftercabin had a Citroën 2CV parked on the roof and a line of multihued washing strung like an ocean vessel's signal pennants. The barge's family sunned on the afterdeck—a fat wife, three children—while the husband manned the tiller and smoked. Generations of them were born, lived and died aboard the canal barges. It was a peaceful life and a bastion of unchange.