“There’s only one thing now, Mario, and I want the truth from your lips or I’ll carve them out of your face!”
There was a brief pause from New Rochelle before the pleasant-sounding executioner spoke. “I don’t deserve to be talked to that way, cugino.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There was a book taken from that general’s place in Manassas, a very valuable book.”
“They found out it was missing, huh?”
“Holy shit! You got it?”
“I had it, Lou. It was going to be a present to you, but I lost it.”
“You lost it? What the fuck did you do, leave it in a taxi?”
“No, I was running for my life, that maniac with the flares, what’s his name, Webb, unloading at me in the driveway. He grazed me and I fell and the lousy book flew out of my hand—just as the police car arrived. He picked it up and I ran like hell for the fence.”
“Webb’s got it?”
“I guess so.”
“Christ on a trampoline …!”
“Anything else, Lou? We’re about to light the candles on the cake.”
“Yeah, Mario, I may need you in Washington—a big cannoli without a foot but with a book.”
“Hey, wait a minute, cugino, you know my rules. Always a month between business trips. What did Manassas take? Six weeks? And last May in Key West, three, almost four weeks? I can’t call, I can’t write a postcard—no, Lou, always a month. I got responsibilities to Angie and the children. I’m not going to be an absentee parent; they’ve got to have a role model, you know what I mean?”
“I got Ozzie Nelson for a fuckin’ cousin!” Louis slammed down the phone, and instantly grabbed it as it crashed over on the desk, its delicate ivory stem displaying a crack. “The best hit man in the business and he’s a freak,” mumbled the capo supremo as he dialed frantically. When the line was picked up, the anxiety and the anger disappeared from his voice; it was not apparent but it had not gone away. “Hello, Frankie baby, how’s my closest friend?”
“Oh, hi, Lou,” came the floating, but hesitant, languorous tones from an expensive apartment in Greenwich Village. “Can I call you back in two minutes? I’m just putting my mother into a cab to take her back to Jersey. Okay?”
“Sure, kid. Two minutes.” Mother? The whore! Il pinguino! Louis walked to his mirrored marble bar with the pink angels flying over the Lalique inset above the whisky bottles. He poured himself a drink and took several calming swallows. The bar phone rang. “Yeah?” he said, carefully picking up the fragile crystal instrument.
“It’s me, Lou. Frankie. I said good-bye to Mama.”
“That’s a good boy, Frankie. Never forget your mama.”
“Oh, I never do, Lou. You taught me that. You told me you gave your mama the biggest funeral they ever saw in East Hartford.”
“Yeah, I bought the fuckin’ church, man.”
“Real nice, real nice.”
“Now let’s get to something else real nice, okay? It’s been one of those days, Frankie, lots of turmoil, you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Lou.”
“So I got an itch. I gotta get some relief. Come on over here, Frankie.”
“As fast as a cab can take me, Lou.”
Prostituto! It would be Frankie the Big Mouth’s last service for him.
Out on the street the well-dressed attorney walked two blocks south and a block east to his waiting limousine parked beneath the canopy of another impressive residence in Brooklyn Heights. His stocky chauffeur of middle years was talking pleasantly with the uniformed doorman, whom he had generously tipped by now. Spotting his employer, the driver walked rapidly to the limousine’s rear door and opened it. Several minutes later they were in traffic heading for the bridge.
In the quiet of the backseat, the lawyer undid his alligator belt, pressed the upper and lower rims of the buckle, and a small cartridge fell out between his legs. He picked it up and refastened the belt.
Holding the cartridge up to the filtered light from the window, he studied the miniaturized voice-activated recording device. It was an extraordinary machine, tiny enough and with an acrylic mechanism that permitted it to fly through the most sophisticated detectors. The attorney leaned forward in his seat and spoke to the driver. “William?”
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur glanced up at his rearview mirror and saw his employer’s outstretched hand; he reached back.
“Take this over to the house and put it on a cassette, will you, please?”
“Right, Major.”
The Manhattan lawyer reclined in the seat, smiling to himself. Louis would give him anything he wanted from now on. A capo did not make side arrangements where the family was concerned, to say nothing of acknowledging certain sexual preferences.
Morris Panov sat blindfolded in the front seat of the sedan with his guard, his hands loosely, almost courteously bound, as if the capo subordinato felt he was following unnecessary orders. They had been driving for about thirty minutes in silence when the guard spoke.
“What’s a perry-oh-dentist?” he asked.
“An oral surgeon, a doctor trained to operate inside patients’ mouths on problems relating to teeth and gum tissue.”
Silence. Then seven minutes later: “What kind of problems?”
“Any number of them, from infections to scraping the roots to more complicated surgery usually in tandem with an oncologist.”
Silence. Four minutes later: “What was that last—the tandy-uncle stuff?”
“Oral cancer. If it’s caught in time, it can be arrested with minor bone removal.… If not, the entire jaw might have to go.” Panov could feel the car briefly swerve as the driver momentarily lost control.
Silence. A minute and a half later: “The whole fuckin’ jaw? Half the face?”
“It’s either that or the whole of the patient’s life.”
Thirty seconds later: “You think I could have something like that?”
“I’m a doctor, not an alarmist. I merely noted a symptom, I did not make a diagnosis.”
“So bullshit! So make a dagassnossis!”
“I’m not qualified.”
“Bullshit! You’re a doctor, ain’t you? I mean a real doctor, not a fasullo who says he is but ain’t got no shingle that’s legit.”
“If you mean medical school, yes, I’m that kind of doctor.”
“So look at me!”
“I can’t. I’m blindfolded.” Panov suddenly felt the guard’s thick strong hand clawing at his head, yanking the kerchief off him. The dark interior of the automobile answered a question for Mo: How could anyone travel in a car with a blindfolded passenger? In that car it was no problem; except for the windshield, the windows were not merely tinted, they were damn near opaque, which meant from the outside they were opaque. No one could see inside.
“Go on, look!” The capo subordinato, his eyes on the road, tilted his large head grotesquely toward Panov; his thick lips were parted and his teeth bared like those of a child playing monster in the mirror, he shouted again. “So tell me what you see!”
“It’s too dark in here,” replied Mo, seeing essentially what he wanted to see in the front window; they were on a country road, so narrow and so country the next step lower was dirt. Wherever he was being taken, he was being driven there by an extremely circuitous route.
“Open the fuckin’ window!” yelled the guard, his head still twisted, his eyes still on the road, his gaping mouth approaching a caricature of Orca, the about-to-vomit whale. “Don’t hold nothin’ back. I’ll break every goddamn finger in that prick’s hands! He can do his fuckin’ surgery with his elbows!… I told that stupid sister of mine he was no fuckin’ good, that fairy. Always readin’ books, no action on the street, y’know what I mean?”
“If you’ll stop shouting for a few seconds, I can get a closer look,” said Panov, having lowered the window at his side, seeing nothing but trees and the coarse underbrush of a distinctly back-country road, one he doubted was on too many maps. “There we are,?
?? continued Mo, raising his loosely bound hands to the capo’s mouth, his eyes, however, not on that mouth but on the road ahead. “Oh, my God!” cried Panov.
“What?” screamed the guard.
“Pus. Pockets of pus everywhere. In the upper and lower mandibles. The worst sign.”
“Oh, Christ!” The car swerved wildly, but it did not swerve enough.
A huge tree. Up ahead. On the left-hand side of the deserted road! Morris Panov surged his bound hands over to the wheel, lifting his body off the seat as he propelled the steering wheel to the left. Then at the last second before the car hit the tree, he hurled himself to the right, curling into a fetal position for protection.
The crash was enormous. Shattered glass and crushed metal accompanied the rising mists of steam from burst cylinders, and the growing fires of viscous fluids underneath that would soon reach a gas tank. The guard was moaning, semiconscious, his face bleeding; Panov pulled him out of the wreck and into the grass as far as he could until exhaustion overtook him, just before the car exploded.
In the moist overgrowth, his breath somewhat restored but his fear still at the forefront, Mo released his loosely bound hands and picked the fragments of glass out of his guard’s face. He then checked for broken bones—the right arm and the left leg were candidates—and with stolen stationery from a hotel he had never heard of from the capo’s pocket, he used the guard’s pen to write out his diagnosis. Among the items he removed was a gun—what kind, he had no idea—but it was heavy and too large for his pocket and sagged in his belt.
Enough. Hippocrates had his limits.
Panov searched the guard’s clothing, astonished at the money that was there—some six thousand dollars—and the various driver’s licenses—five different identities from five different states. He took the money and the licenses to turn them over to Alex Conklin, but he left the capo’s wallet otherwise intact. There were photographs of his family, his children, grandchildren and assorted relatives—and somewhere among them a young surgeon he had put through medical school. Ciao, amico, thought Mo as he crawled over to the road, stood up and smoothed his clothes, trying to look as respectable as possible.
Standing on the hard coarse surface, common sense dictated that he continue north, in the direction the car was heading; to return south was not only pointless but conceivably dangerous. Suddenly, it struck him.
Good God! Did I just do what I just did?
He began to tremble, the trained psychiatrically oriented part of him telling him it was posttraumatic stress.
Bullshit, you asshole. It wasn’t you!
He started walking, and then kept walking and walking and walking. He was not on a backcountry road, he was on Tobacco Road. There were no signs of civilization, not a car in either direction, not a house—not even the ruins of an old farmhouse—or a primitive stone wall that would at least have proved that humans had visited the environs. Mile after mile passed and Mo fought off the effects of the drug-induced exhaustion. How long had it been? They had taken his watch, his watch with the day and date in impossible small print, so he had no idea of either the present time or the time that had elapsed since he had been taken from Walter Reed Hospital. He had to find a telephone. He had to reach Alex Conklin! Something had to happen soon!
It did.
He heard the growing roar of an engine and spun around. A red car was speeding up the road from the south—no, not speeding, but racing, with its accelerator flat on the floor. He waved his arms wildly—gestures of helplessness and appeal. To no avail; the vehicle rushed past him in a blur … then to his delighted surprise the air was filled with dust and screeching brakes. The car stopped! He ran ahead as the automobile actually backed up, the tires still screaming. He remembered the words his mother incessantly repeated when he was a youngster in the Bronx: Always tell the truth, Morris. It’s the shield God gave us to keep us righteous.
Panov did not precisely subscribe to the admonition, but there were times when he felt it had socially interactive validity. This might be one of them. So, somewhat out of breath he approached the opened passenger window of the red automobile. He looked inside at the woman driver, a platinum blonde in her mid-thirties with an overly made-up face and large breasts encased in décolletage more fitting to an X-rated film than a back-country road in Maryland. Nevertheless, his mother’s words echoed in his ears, so he spoke the truth.
“I realize that I look rather shabby, madam, but I assure you it’s purely an exterior impression. I’m a doctor and I’ve been in an accident—”
“Get in, for Christ’s sake!”
“Thank you so very much.” No sooner had Mo closed the door than the woman slammed the car into gear, gunned the engine to its maximum, and seemingly launched off the rough pavement and down the road. “You’re obviously in a hurry,” offered Panov.
“So would you be, pal, if you were me. I gotta husband back there who’s puttin’ his truck together to come after my ass!”
“Oh, really?”
“Stupid fuckin’ jerk! He rolls across the country three weeks outta the month layin’ every broad on the highways, then blows his keister when he finds out I had a little fun of my own.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.”
“You’ll be a hell of a lot sorrier if he catches up with us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You really a doctor?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Maybe we can do business.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can you handle an abortion?”
Morris Panov closed his eyes.
22
Bourne walked for nearly an hour through the streets of Paris trying to clear his head, ending up at the Seine, on the Pont de Solferino, the bridge that led to the Quai des Tuileries and the gardens. As he leaned against the railing absently watching the boats lazily plowing the waters below, the question kept assaulting him: Why, why, why? What did Marie think she was doing? Flying over to Paris! It wasn’t just foolish, it was stupid—yet his wife was neither a fool nor an idiot. She was a very bright lady with reserves of control and a quick, analytical mind. That was what made her decision so untenable; what could she possibly hope to accomplish? She had to know he was far safer working alone rather than worrying about her while tracking the Jackal. Even if she found him, the risk was doubled for both of them, and that she had to understand completely. Figures and projections were her profession. So why?
There was only one conceivable answer, and it infuriated him. She thought he might slip back over the edge as he had done in Hong Kong, where she alone had brought him to his senses, to the reality that was uniquely his own, a reality of frightening half truths and only partial remembrances, episodic moments she lived with every day of their lives together. God, how he adored her; he loved her so! And the fact that she had made this foolish, stupid, untenable decision only fueled that love because it was so—so giving, so outrageously unselfish. There were moments in the Far East when he had craved his own death, if only to expunge the guilt he felt at putting her in such dangerous—untenable?—positions. The guilt was still there, always there, but the aging man in him recognized another reality. Their children. The cancer of the Jackal had to be ripped out of all their lives. Couldn’t she realize that and leave him alone?
No. For she was not flying to Paris to save his life—she had too much confidence in Jason Bourne for that. She was coming to Paris to save his mind. I’ll handle it, Marie. I can and will handle it!
Bernardine. He could do it. The Deuxième could find her at Orly or De Gaulle. Find her and take her, put her under guard at a hotel and claim no one knew where he was. Jason ran from the Pont de Solferino to the Quai des Tuileries and to the first telephone he could find.
“Can you do it?” asked Bourne. “She’s only got one updated passport and it’s American, not Canadian.”
“I can try on my own,” answered Bernardine, “but not with any help from the Deuxième. I don’t
know how much Saint Alex told you, but at the moment my consultant status has been canceled and I think my desk has been thrown out the window.”
“Shit!”
“Merde to the triple, mon ami. The Quai d’Orsay wants my underwear burned with me in it, and were it not for certain information I possess regarding several members of the Assembly, they would no doubt revive the guillotine.”
“Can you pass around some money at immigration?”
“It would be better if I acted in my former official capacity on the assumption that the Deuxième does not so swiftly advertise its embarrassments. Her full name, please.”
“Marie Elise St. Jacques Webb—”
“Ah, yes, I recall now, at least the St. Jacques,” broke in Bernardine. “The celebrated Canadian economist. The newspapers were filled with her photograph. La belle mademoiselle.”
“It was exposure she could have done without.”
“I’m certain it was.”
“Did Alex say anything about Mo Panov?”
“Your doctor friend?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Goddamn it!”
“If I may suggest, you must think of yourself now.”
“I understand.”
“Will you pick up the car?”
“Should I?”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t if I were you. It’s unlikely, but the invoice might be traced back to me. There’s risk, however minor.”
“That’s what I thought. I bought a métro map. I’ll use the trains.… When can I call you?”
“Give me four, perhaps five hours to get back here from the airports. As our saint explained, your wife could be leaving from several different points of embarkation. To get all those passenger manifests will take time.”
“Concentrate on the flights arriving early tomorrow morning. She can’t fake a passport, she wouldn’t know how to do it.”
“According to Alex, one does not underestimate Marie Elise St. Jacques. He even spoke French. He said she was formidable.”
“She can come at you from the outer limits, I’ll tell you that.”