The Aquitaine Progression (92 page)

“The difference is I know where Prudhomme’s coming from, you’ve told me. I got an idea what he can do and what he can’t do, but I don’t know anything about Metcalf—except that Sam put him way up on a high priority. Whoever I call first I’ve got to make specific statements to him, accusations and observations that’ll blow his mind. Those are commitments, Val, and I have to go with the strongest.… Try Metcalf again.” Joel turned and headed for the telephone in the bathroom as Valerie dialed the international codes for Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Caller C, message received. Please reidentify yourself twice, followed by a slow count to ten. Stay on the line.”

Joel put the phone down on the edge of the basin and rushed out to the bedroom-sitting room. He walked over to Val, holding up his hand as he reached for a pencil on the desk. He wrote out the words: “Go ahead. Stay calm. P.S.E.”

“This is Miss Parquette speaking,” said Valerie, frowning, bewildered. “This is Miss Parquette speaking. One, two, three, four …”

Converse returned to the bathroom, picked up the telephone and listened.

“… eight, nine, ten.”

Silence. Finally, there were two sharp clicks and the metallic voice came back on the line. “Confirmed, thank you.
This is the second tape and will be microed out when completed. Listen carefully. There is a place on an island well known for its tribal nights. The King will be in his chair. That’s it. We are burning.”

Joel hung up the phone and studied the half-legible words he had hastily scribbled in soap on the mirror above the basin. The door opened and Valerie walked in, a piece of paper in her hand.

“I wrote it down,” she said, handing it to him.

“I wrote it sideways—your way is better. Christ, a
riddle
!”

“No more than the one you gave me. What in heaven’s name does ‘P.S.E.’ mean?”

“ ‘Psychological Stress Evaluator,’ ” answered Converse, leaning against the wall and reading Metcalf’s message. He looked up at her. “It’s a voice scanner you can attach to a phone or a recording machine that supposedly tells you whether the person you’re talking to is lying or not. Larry Talbot played around with one for a while but claimed he couldn’t find anyone telling the truth, including his ninety-two-year-old mother. He threw it away.”

“Does it work?”

“They say it’s much more accurate than a lie detector, and I suppose it is if you know how to read it or use it. It worked in your case. Your voice was matched against the other calls you made, which means this Metcalf is into pretty high-tech equipment. That scanner tripped the second tape, and it was all done by remote, from another phone, otherwise he would have answered himself after you passed the test.”

“But if I passed, why the riddle? Why an island with tribal nights?”

“Because any machine like that can be beaten. It’s why they’re not admissible in court. Years ago Willie Sutton was wired into a lie detector, and according to the result, he never even broke into a piggy bank, much less Chase Manhattan. Metcalf was willing to take a risk, but not all the way. He’s running too.” Converse returned to what Val had written down.

“An island.” Val spoke softly, reading the soaped words on the mirror. “Tribes … The Caribe tribes; they were all through the Antilles. Or Jamaica—tribal nights, Obeah rituals, voodoo rites in Haiti. Even the Bahamas—the Lucayan Indians—they held puberty rituals, they all did.”

“You impress me,” said Joel, looking up from the paper. “How come?”

“Art courses,” she replied. “Those nuts and bolts you won’t grant us that go into the makeup of a culture’s visual work.… And it doesn’t fit. It’s too loose.”

“Why? It could mean someplace in the Caribbean, some resort that’s advertised a lot. The King is an emperor and that has to mean Delavane—Mad Marcus, as in Aurelius. It has to be Marcus; no one’s named Aurelius!… All those television commercials, the newspaper ads—pictures of people doing the limbo under torches with costumed blacks smiling down benignly, counting the dollars. Which
one
?”

“Too loose,” repeated Val. “Too abstract—blocks and geometric shapes without specifics—no representational images.”

“Now what the hell are
you
talking about?” objected Converse.

“It’s too wide, Joel, too many places to choose from, places you might not know anything about. It has to be closer, more familiar to you or to me, something we can recognize. Like Bruegel or Vermeer, littered with specific detail.”

“They sound like dentists.”

Valerie took the paper from him. “
Manhattan’s
an island,” she said softly, reading and frowning again.

“If there are torches and tribal puberty rites, it’s not my part of town.”

“Not tribal rites, tribal
nights
,” corrected Val. “Tribal—not Black but Red? “The King will be in his chair—chair … 
table
. His table. Tribal … nights. Nights! That’s where we’re misreading it.
Nights!
”

“How else can you read it?”

“Not nights but
knights
! With a
k
!”

“And a table,” broke in Converse. “Knights of the Round Table.”

“But
not
the King Arthur legend, not Camelot. Much nearer, much closer. Tribal—
American
natives. American
Indians
.”

“Algonquins. The Round Table!”

“The Algonquin Hotel,” cried Valerie. “That’s it, that’s what he meant!”

“We’ll know in a few minutes,” said Joel. “Go inside and place the call.”

The wait was both intolerable and interminable. Converse looked at his face in the mirror; perspiration began to
drench his face, the salt stinging his scrapes and burning his eyes. Far more telling, his hand shook and his breath was short. The Algonquin switchboard answered and Val asked for a Mr. Marcus. There was a stretch of silence, and when the operator came back on the line, Joel thought he would smash the telephone into the mirror.

“There are two Marcuses registered, ma’am. Which one did you wish to speak to?”

“
Already
it’s a rotten day!” Val broke in suddenly over the phone, startling Converse with her words. “My boss, the
clown
, told me to call Mr. Marcus at the Algonquin right away and give him the time and place for lunch. Now the clown’s disappeared to a meeting somewhere outside and I’m left holding it. Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

“It’s okay, hon, we got a few like that around here.”

“Maybe you can help me. Which Marcus is which? Maybe I’ll recognize a first name or a company.”

“Sure. Lemme plug into Big Reggie. We all gotta stick together when it comes to the clowns, right?… Okay, here they are. Marcus, Myron. Sugarman’s Original Replicas, Los Angeles. And Marcus, Peter … not much help here, sweetie. Just says Georgetown, Washington, D.C.”

“That’s the one. Peter. I’m sure of it. Thanks, dear.”

“Glad to be of help, hon. I’ll ring now.”

The folded
New York Times
resting on his knee, Stone inked in the last two words of the crossword puzzle and looked at his watch. It had taken him nine minutes, nine minutes of relief; he wished it had been longer. One of the joys of having been station chief in London was the London
Times
crossword. He could always count on at least a half-hour when he could forget problems in the search for words and meanings.

The telephone rang. Stone stared at it, his pulse accelerating, his throat suddenly dry. No one knew he had checked into the Algonquin under the name of Marcus. No one!… Yes, there was someone, but he was in the air, flying up from Knoxville, Tennessee. What had gone
wrong
? Or had he been wrong about Metcalf? Was the supposedly angry, sermonizing Air Force intelligence officer one of
them
? Had his own instincts, honed over a thousand years of sorting out garbage, deserted him because he so desperately sought an opening,
an escape from a steel net that was dropping down on him? He got out of the chair and walked slowly, in fear, to the bedside table. He picked up the insistently ringing phone.

“Yes?”

“Alan Metcalf?” said the soft, firm voice of a woman.

“
Who?
” Stone was so thrown by the name he could barely concentrate, barely think!

“I beg your pardon, I have the wrong room.”

“
Wait!
Don’t hang up. Metcalf’s on his way here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please! Oh Christ,
please
! I was tired, I was
asleep
. We’ve been up night and day.… Metcalf. I talked with him two hours ago—he said he was going to reprogram his machine, that someone was trying to reach him since one o’clock this morning. He had to get out of there. A man was killed, a pilot. It was
not
an
accident
! Am I making sense to you?”

“Why should I talk to you?” asked the woman. “So you can trace the call?”

“
Listen
to me,” said Stone, his voice now in total control. “Even if I wanted to—and I don’t—this is a hotel, not a private line, and to do what you suggest would take at least three men on the trunk lines and another controlling the switchboard. And even with such a unit it would be at least four minutes before they could isolate the wire and send out a tracer signal—which initially would only give us an area location, not a specific phone.
And
if you were calling from overseas we’d have to have another man, an expert,
in
that specific location to narrow it down to
perhaps
a twenty-mile radius, but only if you stayed on
your
phone for at least six minutes.… Now, for God’s sake, give me at least
two
!”

“Go on. Quickly!”

“I’m going to assume something. Maybe I shouldn’t, but you’re a clever woman, Mrs. DePinna, and you could do it.”

“
DePinna?
”

“Yes. You left a telephone book open to the blue pages, the government pages. When the
accident
happened in Nevada, I made a simple connection with a listing, and two hours ago I learned I was right. Metcalf returned my call—from a pay phone at an airport. A pilot, a general, had talked to him at length. He’s joining us. You ran from the wrong people, Mrs. DePinna. But as for what I’m thinking, I think the man we want to find is listening on this phone.”

“There’s no one else here!”

“Please don’t interrupt me, I’ve got to use every second.” Stone’s voice suddenly became stronger. “
Leifhelm, Bertholdier, Van Headmer, Abrahms
. And a fifth man we can’t identify, an Englishman who’s down so deep he makes Burgess, Maclean and Blunt look like amateurs. We don’t know who he is, but he’s there, using warehouses in Ireland and offshore cargo ships, and long-forgotten airfields to transport materials that shouldn’t be going out. Those dossiers came from
us, Converse
! We sent them to you! You’re a lawyer, and you know that by using your name I’m incriminating myself or committing suicide if anyone’s taping this. I’ll go further. We sent you out through Preston Halliday in Geneva. We sent you out to build a legal case—from left field—so we could abort this thing with a minimum of fallout, sending all those goddamned idiots back to reality. But we were wrong! They were much further ahead than we ever suspected—
we
ever suspected—but not Beale on Mykonos. He was dead right, and he’s dead because he was right! Incidentally, he was the ‘man from San Francisco.’ It was his five hundred thousand dollars; he came from a rich family, which, among other things, bequeathed him a conscience. Think back to Mykonos! To what he told you—what his life was all about. From celebrated soldier to a scholar—to a killing that must have killed a part of him to commit.… He said you almost caught him up on a couple of things he didn’t mean to say. He said you were a good lawyer, a good choice. Preston Halliday was a student of his at Berkeley, and when this broke a year and a half ago, when Halliday realized what Delavane was doing and how he was being used, he went to Beale, who was about to retire. The rest you can figure out.”

The woman’s voice interrupted. “Say what I want to hear you say.
Say
it!”

“Of course I will! Converse didn’t kill Peregrine and he didn’t kill the commander of NATO. Both of them were marked by Delavane—George Marcus Delavane—because both those men would have taken him and his ilk to the mat! They were convenient,
very
convenient, targets. I don’t know about the others—I don’t know what you’ve been through—but we broke a liar in Bad Godesberg, the major from the embassy who put
you, Converse
, at the Adenauer Bridge! He doesn’t know it, but we broke him, and we learned something. We think we know where Connal Fitzpatrick is. We think he’s alive!”

A male voice intruded. “You
bastards
,” said Joel Converse.

“Thank
God
!” said the civilian, sitting down on the hotel bed. “Now we can talk. We have to talk. Tell me everything you can. This phone is clean.”

Twenty minutes later, his hands trembling, Peter Stone hung up the phone.

General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier ceased the rushing pelvic thrusts of intercourse, withdrew himself from the moaning dark-haired woman beneath him, and rolled over, grabbing the telephone.

“
Yes?
” he shouted angrily. And then he listened, his flushed face growing ashen as his organ collapsed. “Where did it happen?” he whispered, not in confidence but in sudden fear. “The Boulevard Raspail? The charges?… 
Narcotics? Impossible!
”

Holding the phone, the general swung his legs over the side of the bed, listening carefully, concentrating as he stared at the wall. The naked woman rose to her knees and leaned into him, her breasts pressed into his back, her open mouth caressing his ear, her teeth gently biting his lobe.

Bertholdier suddenly, viciously, swung his arm back, cracking the phone into the woman’s face, sending her reeling to the other side of the bed, blood erupting from her broken lower lip.

“Repeat that, please,” he said into the phone. “It’s obvious, then, isn’t it? The man cannot be questioned further, can he? There is always the larger strategy to consider, losses to be anticipated in the field, no? It is the hospital all over again, I’m afraid. See to it, then, like the fine officer you are. The Legion’s loss was our immense gain.… Oh? What is it? The arresting officer was
Prudhomme
?” Bertholdier paused, his breathing steady and audible; then he spoke, rendering a command decision. “A stubborn bureaucrat from the Sûreté will not let go, will he?… He is your second assignment to
be carried out with your usual expertise before the day is over. Call me when both are accomplishments, and consider yourself the aide to General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier.”