The Aquitaine Progression (48 page)

“You say men like me give your profession—which is my profession as well—a seriously bad name,” said Leifhelm. “Has it occurred to you, Commander, that we might elevate that profession to one of indispensable greatness in a world that needs us badly?”

“Needs us?” asked Connal. “We need the world first and not your kind of world. You tried it once and blew it, don’t you remember?”

“That was one nation led by a madman trying to impose his imprimatur over the globe. This is many nations with one class of self-abnegating professionals coming together for the good of all.”

“Whose definition? Yours? You’re a funny fellow, General. Somehow I question your benevolent tendencies.”

“Indiscretions of a deprived youth whose name and rightful opportunities were stolen from him should not be held against the man a half-century later.”

“Deprived or depraved? I think you made up for lost time pretty quickly and as brutally as you could. I don’t like your remedies.”

“You have no vision.”

“Thanks be to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it’s not yours.” The singing out in the corridor faded briefly, then swelled again, more discordant and louder than before. “Maybe that’s some of your old Dachau playboys having a beer bust.”

Leifhelm shrugged.

Suddenly the door burst open, crashing into the wall as three men raced in, spits filling the air as silenced guns fired, hands jerking back and forth, the surface of the table chewed up, splinters of wood flying everywhere. Fitzpatrick felt the repeated stabs of intense pain in his arm as the automatic was blown out of his grip. He looked down and saw the blood drenching the fabric of his right sleeve. Though in shock he glanced about him. Ilse Fishbein was dead, her bleeding skull shattered by a fusillade of bullets; the chauffeur was smiling obscenely. The door was closed as if nothing had happened.

“
Stümper
,” Leifhelm said as one of the invaders cut the ropes around his wrists. “I used that term only yesterday, Commander, but I did not know how right I was. Did you think a single telephone call could not be traced to a single room? It was all too coincidentally symmetrical. Converse is ours and suddenly this poor whore comes into immense riches—
American
riches. I grant you it was entirely possible—such bequests are made frequently by sausage-soaked idiots who don’t realize the harm they do, but the timing was too perfect, too—amateurish.”

“You’re one son of a bitch.” Connal shut his eyes, trying to force the pain out of his mind, unable to move his fingers.

“Why, Commander,” said the general, getting out of the chair, “do I sense the bravado of fear? Do you think I’m going to have you killed?”

“You sense it. I won’t give you any more than that.”

“You’re quite wrong. Considering the nature of your military leave, you can be of minor but unique service to us. One more statistic to disrupt a pattern. You’ll be our guest, Commander, but not in Germany proper. You are going on a trip.”

Converse slowly opened his eyes, a dead, iron weight on his lids and nausea in his throat—blurred darkness everywhere—and a terrible stinging at his side, on his arm, flesh separated from flesh, stretched and inflamed. Blindly he tried to touch the offending spot, then gasping, pulled back in pain. Somewhere light was creeping around the dark space above him, picking its way through moving obstructions, peering into the shadows. Objects slowly came into focus—the metal rim of the cot next to his face, two wooden chairs opposite each other at a small table in the distance, a door also in the distance, but farther away and shut … then another door, this one open, a white sink with a pair of dull-metal faucets on the left in a far-away cubicle. The light? It was still moving, now dancing, flickering. Where was it?

He found it: high in the wall on either side of the closed door were two rectangular windows, the short curtains billowing in the breeze. The windows were open, but oddly not open, not clear, the spaces interrupted. Joel raised his head, supporting himself on his forearm and squinted, trying to see more clearly. He focused on the interruptions behind the swelling curtains—thin black metal shafts vertically connecting the window frames. They were bars. He was in a cell.

He fell back on the cot, swallowing repeatedly to lessen the burning in his throat, and moved his arm in circles trying to lessen the pain of the … wound? Yes, a wound, a gunshot! The realization jarred his memory; a dinner party had turned into a battleground filled with hysteria. Blinding lights and sudden jolts of pain had been accompanied by strident voices bombarding him, incessant echoes pounding in his ears as he tried desperately to repel the piercing assaults. Then there had been moments of calm, the drone of a single voice in the mists. Converse closed his eyes, pressing his lids tightly together with all his strength as another realization struck him
and disturbed him deeply. That voice in the swirling mists was
his
voice; he had been drugged, and he knew he had given up secrets.

He had been drugged before, a number of times in the North Vietnamese camps, and as always there was the sickening feeling of numbed outrage. His mind had been stripped and violated, his voice made to perform obscenities against the last vestiges of his will.

And, again as always, there was the empty hole in his stomach, a vacuum that ran deep and produced only weakness. He felt starved and probably was. The chemicals usually induced vomiting as the intestines rejected the unnatural substance. It was strange, he reflected, opening his eyes and following the moving shafts of light, but those memories from years ago evoked the same self-protective instincts that had helped him then—so many years ago. He could not waste energy; he had to conserve what strength he had. Regain new strength. Otherwise there was nothing but the numbed outrage and neither his mind nor his body could do anything about it.

There was a sound across the room! Then another and another after that! The grating sound of sliding metal told him that a bolt was being released; the sharp sound of a key followed by the twisting of a knob meant that the door in the far distant wall was about to be opened. It was, and a blinding burst of sunlight filled the cell. Converse shielded his eyes, peering between his fingers. The blurred, frazzled silhouette of a man stood in the doorframe carrying a flat object. The figure walked in and Joel, blinking, saw it was the chauffeur who had electronically searched him in the driveway.

The uniformed driver crossed to the table and deftly lowered the flat object; it was a tray, its contents covered by a cloth. It was only then that Converse’s attention was drawn back to the sunlit doorway. Outside, milling about in anxious contempt was the pack of Dobermans, their shining black eyes continually shifting toward the door, their lips curled, teeth bared in unending quiet snarls.

“Guten Morgen, mein Herr,”
said Leifhelm’s chauffeur, then shifting to English, “Another beautiful day on the northern Rhine, no?”

“It’s bright out there, if that’s what you mean,” replied Joel, his hand still cupping his eyes. “I suppose I should be grateful to be able to notice after last night.”

“Last night?” The German paused, then added quietly, “It was two nights ago,
Amerikaner
. You’ve been here for the past thirty-three hours.”

“
Thirty?
” Converse pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the cot. Instantly he was overcome by dizziness—too much strength had been drained.
Oh Christ! Don’t waste movement. They’ll be back. The bastards!
“You bastards,” he said out loud but without any real emotion. Then for the first time he realized he was shirtless, and noticed the bandage on his left arm between his elbow and his shoulder. It covered the gunshot wound. “Did somebody miss my head?” he asked.

“I’m told you inflicted the injury yourself. You tried to kill General Leifhelm but shot yourself when the others were taking your gun away.”

“I tried to kill? With my nonexistent gun? The one you made sure I didn’t
have
?”

“You were too clever for me,
mein Herr
.”

“What happens now?”

“Now? Now you eat. I have instructions from the doctor. You begin with the
Hafergrütze
—how do you say?—the porridge.”

“Hot mush or cereal,” said Joel. “With skimmed or powdered milk. Then some kind of soft-boiled eggs taken with pills. And if it all goes down, a little ground meat, and if
that
stays down, a few spoonfuls of crushed turnips or potatoes or squash. Whatever’s available.”

“How do you know this?” asked the uniformed man, genuinely surprised.

“It’s a basic diet,” said Converse cynically. “Variations with the territory and the supplies. I once had some comparatively good meals.… You’re planning to put me under again.”

The German shrugged. “I do what I’m told. I bring you food. Here, let me help you.”

Joel looked up as the chauffeur approached the cot. “Under other circumstances I’d spit in your goddamned face. But if I did I wouldn’t have that slight,
slight
possibility of spitting in it some other time. You may help me. Be careful of my arm.”

“You are a very strange man,
mein Herr
.”

“And you’re all perfectly normal citizens catching the early train to Larchmont so you can put down ten martinis before going to the PTA meeting.”

“Was ist?
I know of no such meeting.”

“They’re keeping it secret; they don’t want you to know. If I were you, I’d get out of town before they make you president.”

“Mich? Präsident?”

“Just help me to the chair, like a good ole Aryan boy, will you?”

“Hah, you are being amusing,
ja
?”

“Probably not,” said Converse, easing into the wooden chair. “It’s a terrible habit I wish I could break.” He looked up at the bewildered German. “You see, I keep trying,” he said in utter seriousness.

Three more days passed, his only visitor the chauffeur accompanied by the sullen, high-strung pack of Dobermans. His well-searched suitcase was given to him, scissors and a nail file removed from the traveling kit—his electric razor intact. It was their way of telling him that his presence had been removed from Bonn, leaving him to painfully speculate about the life or death of Connal Fitzpatrick. Yet there was an inconsistency and, as such, the basis for hope. No allusions were made to his attaché case, either with visual evidence—the page of a dossier, perhaps—or through his brief exchanges with Leifhelm’s driver. The generals of Aquitaine were men of immense egos; if they had those materials in their possession, they would have let him know it.

As to his conversations with the chauffeur, they were limited to questions on his part and disciplined pleasantries on the German’s part, no answers at all—at least, none that made any sense:

“How long is this going to go on? When am I going to see someone other than you?”

“There is no one here, sir, except the staff. General Leifhelm is away—in Essen, I believe. Our instructions are to feed you well and restore your health.”

Incommunicado. He was in solitary.

But the food was not like that given to prisoners anywhere else. Roasts of beef and lamb, chops, poultry and fresh fish; vegetables that unquestionably had come directly from a nearby garden. And wine—which at first Joel was reluctant to drink, but when he did, even he knew it was superior.

On the second day, as much to keep from thinking as from anything else, he had begun to perform mild exercises—as
he had done so many years ago. By the third day he had actually worked up a sweat during a running-in-place session, a healthy sweat, telling him the drugs had left his body. The wound on his arm was still there, but he thought about it less and less. Curiously, it was not serious.

On the fourth day questions and reflections were no longer good enough. Confinement and the maddening frustration of having no answers forced him to turn elsewhere, to the practical, to the most necessary consideration facing him. Escape. Regardless of the outcome the attempt had to be made. Whatever plans Delavane and his disciples in Aquitaine had for him, they obviously included parading a drugless man—more than likely a dead man with no narcotics in his system. Otherwise they would have killed him at once, disposing of his body in any number of untraceable ways. He had done it before. Could he do it again?

He was not rotting in a rat-infested cell and there was no terrible gunfire in the distant darkness, but it was far more important that he succeed now than it ever was eighteen years ago. And there was an extraordinary irony: eighteen years ago he had wanted to break out and tell whoever would listen to him about a madman in Saigon who sent countless children to their deaths—or worse, who left those children to suffer broken minds and hollow feelings for the rest of their lives. Now he had to tell the world about that same madman.

He had to get out. He had to tell the world what he knew.

Converse stood on the wooden chair, the short curtain pulled back, and peered between the black metal bars outside. His cabin, or cottage, or jailhouse, whatever it was, seemed to have been lowered from above onto a clearing in the forest. There was a wall of tall trees and thick foliage as far as he could see in either direction, a dirt path angling to the right beneath the window. The clearing itself extended no more than twenty feet in front of the structure before the dense greenery began; he presumed it was the same on all sides—as it was from the other window to the left of the door, except that there was no path below, only a short, coarse stubble of brown grass. The two front windows were the only views he had. The rest of this isolated jailhouse consisted of unbroken walls and a small ceiling vent in the bathroom but no other openings.

All he could be certain of, since the chauffeur and the
dogs and the warm meals were proof he was still within the grounds of Leifhelm’s estate, was that the river could not be far away. He could not see it, but it was there and it gave him hope—more than hope, a sense of morbid exhilaration rooted in his memory. Once before, the waters of a river had been his friend, his guide, ultimately the lifeline that had taken him through the worst of his journey. A tributary of the Huong Khe south of Duc Tho had rushed him silently at night under bridges and past patrols and the encampments of three battalions. The waters of the Rhine, like the currents of the Huong Khe years ago, would be his way out.