The Apocalypse Watch Page 8

  “Did you tell your superior?”

  “No.” The woman paused, then added softly, “I understood immediately that I could analyze and develop the information quicker than anyone else in our section. I’ve brought you the results—in only five hours.”

  “You mean nobody else in D and R knew you were working on this query, including your section chief?”

  “He’s in Calais for the day, and I saw no reason to go to his deputy.”

  “Why not? Didn’t you need authorization? This is a matter that required special assignment. The red flag spells that out.”

  “I told you, I was cleared by the American authorities in NATO and by your own intelligence specialists here in Paris. I’ve brought you what you wanted, and my personal motives are irrelevant.”

  “I guess they are. I’ve also got a few motives of my own, which means I’m going to check and cross-check everything in this file.”

  “You’ll find the entries accurate and confirmed.”

  “I hope so. Thank you, Miss de Vries, that’ll be all.”

  “If I may correct you, sir, it’s not Miss but Mrs. de Vries. I’m a widow. My husband was killed in East Berlin by the Stasi a week before the Wall came down—the Stasi, monsieur. The name was changed but they were as vicious as the most savage units of the Gestapo and the Waffen SS. My husband, Frederik de Vries, was working for the Americans. You may check and cross-check that also.” The woman turned and left the room.

  Stunned, Latham watched as the door was closed so sharply, one could say it was slammed shut. He picked up his phone and touched the buttons on his console for the embassy’s director of security. Once past an irritating secretary who kept practicing her college French, which was less adequate than his own, thought Drew, the security head was on the line.

  “What’s up, Cons-Op?”

  “Who the hell is a Karin de Vries, Stanley?”

  “A major blessing contributed by the NATO crowd,” replied Stanley Witkowski, a thirty-year-plus veteran of Army Intelligence, a colonel transferred to the State Department because of his extraordinary success in G-2. “She’s quick, bright, imaginative, and reads and speaks five languages fluently. Heaven-sent, my friend.”

  “That’s what I want to know. Who sent her?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Her work habits are a little strange. I sent a sealed red flag down to Research, and without authorization or assignment she removed it from the file and processed it herself.”

  “A red flag? That is strange; she knows better than that. A flag has to be signed off by the section chief and his deputy, the assignee approved and registered.”

  “That’s what I thought, and where this operation is concerned, I’m paranoid about leaks and false information. Who sent her here?”

  “Forget that, Drew. She requested Paris, and from the supreme commander down she was golden.”

  “There’s gold and there’s fool’s gold, Stan. She inferred things that went beyond her clearance in this matter, and I want to know how and why.”

  “Can you give me a clue?”

  “I’ll go this far. It concerns the new bad dudes marching around Germany.”

  “That doesn’t help me much.”

  “She said her husband was killed by the Stasi in East Berlin. Can you confirm that?”

  “Hell, yes, even personally. I was stationed on our side of the Wall, busting my balls around the clock making contact with our people on the other side. Freddie de Vries was a young, smart-as-a-whip infiltrator. The poor son of a bitch was caught just days before the Stasi became history.”

  “Then she would legitimately have a serious, even obsessive interest in events in Germany.”

  “Sure she would. You know where most of the Stasi went when the Wall came tumbling down?”

  “Where?”

  “Right into the welcoming arms of the skinheads, those goddamned Nazis.… Oh, speaking of Freddie de V, he worked with your brother Harry. I know because my G-Two coordinated with both of them. Harry wasn’t just upset, he was mad as hell when he heard about Freddie. Almost like he was a kid brother, like you maybe.”

  “Thanks, Stanley. I think I just made an insulting mistake. Regardless, there are a couple of gaps that have to be filled.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “How did Mrs. de Vries know about me?”

  In the shadows of the afternoon sunlight, Jean-Pierre Villier, his face unrecognizable, the nose twice its true size, his eyelids equally bulbous, his clothes tatters and rags, stumbled down the dark alley in Montparnasse. There were drunken bodies intermittently sitting on the cobblestones, their backs against the walls, most slumped, others having collapsed into fetal positions. He sang in an alcoholic singsong cadence, the words slurred.

  “Écoutez, écoutez—gardez—vous, mes amis! I have heard from our dear companion Jodelle—is anyone interested, or am I wasting my old breath?”

  “Jodelle’s crazy!” came a voice on the left.

  “He gets us in trouble!” cried a voice from the right. “Tell him to go to hell.”

  “I must find friends of his, he tells me it’s important!”

  “Go to the northern docks along the Seine, he sleeps better there, steals better there.”

  Jean-Pierre wandered up to the Quai des Tuileries, stopping at every darkened back street and alley he came across, plunging into each with essentially the same results.

  “Old Jodelle is a pig! He doesn’t share his wine!”

  “He says he has friends in high places—where are they?”

  “This great actor he says is his son—such shit!”

  “I’m a drunk and I do not care any longer, but I don’t burden my friends with lies.”

  And then, as Villier reached the loading piers above the Pont de l’Alma, he heard the first words of encouragement from a derelict old woman.

  “Jodelle is mad, of course, but he is always nice to me. He brings me flowers—stolen flowers, naturally—and calls me a great actress. Can you believe that?”

  “Yes, madame, I believe he means it.”

  “Then you are as mad as he is.”

  “Perhaps I am, for you are a lovely woman.”

  “Aiyee!… Your eyes! They are blue clouds in the sky. You are his ghost!”

  “He is dead?”

  “Who knows? Who are you?”

  And finally, hours later, as the sun descended behind the tall structures of the Trocadéro, he heard other words, shouted in another alley, far darker than any previous one. “Who speaks of my friend, Jodelle?”

  “I do,” yelled Villier, walking farther into the darkness of the narrow enclosure. “Are you his friend?” he asked, kneeling beside the collapsed, disheveled beggar. “I must find Jodelle,” continued Jean-Pierre, “and I have money for anyone who can help me! Here, look! Fifty francs.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen fifty francs.”

  “See them now. Where is Jodelle, where did he go?”

  “Oh, he said it was a secret—”

  “But he told you.”

  “Oh, yes, we were like brothers—”

  “I am his son. Tell me.”

  “The Loire Valley, a terrible man in the Loire Valley, that’s all I know,” whispered the derelict. “No one knows who he is.”

  A silhouetted figure suddenly came out of the bright shaft of sunlight into the alley. He was a man of Jean-Pierre’s size when the actor stood upright and was not hunched over as he was then. “Why are you asking about old Jodelle?” said the intruder.

  “I have to find him, sir,” replied Villier, his voice wheezing and tremulous. “He owes me money, you see, and I’ve been looking for him for three days now.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t collect the debt. Don’t you read the newspapers?”

  “Why spend what money I have to read about things that do not concern me? I can laugh over the comics in yesterday’s thrown-away paper, yesterday’s or last we
ek’s.”

  “An old tramp identified as someone named Jodelle killed himself in a theater last night.”

  “Oh, that bastard! He owed me seven francs!”

  “Who are you, old man?” asked the intruder, approaching Jean-Pierre and studying him in the dim light of the alley.

  “I am Auguste Renoir and I paint pictures. Then sometimes I am Monsieur Monet, and often the Dutchman Rembrandt. And in springtime I like to be Georges Seurat; in winter I’ll be the cripple Toulouse-Lautrec—all those warm bordellos. Museums are wonderful places when it rains and is cold.”

  “Ah, you are an old fool!” The man turned and started walking toward the street as Villier hobbled rapidly after him.

  “Monsieur!” cried the actor.

  “What?” The man stopped.

  “Since you were the bearer of this terrible news, I think you should pay me the seven francs.”

  “Why? What kind of logic is that?”

  “You’ve stolen my hope.”

  “I stole what …?”

  “My hope, my expectation. I did not ask you about Jodelle, you accosted me. How did you know I was looking for him?”

  “You shouted his name a few moments ago.”

  “And on that trivial excuse you enter my life and destroy my anticipation? Perhaps I should ask who you are, monsieur. You’re dressed too richly to be acquainted with my friend Jodelle—that son of a bitch! What is Jodelle to you? Why did you come in here?”

  “You’re a lunatic,” said the man, reaching into his pocket. “Here, here’s a twenty-franc note, and I apologize for coming into your life.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir, thank you!” Jean-Pierre waited until the curious stranger reached the sunlit pavement, then raced up the alley, peering around the corner as the man approached a car parked at the curb twenty meters up the street. Again feigning a half-mad vagabond of Paris, Villier lurched onto the sidewalk, prancing like a deformed court jester, shouting at his benefactor. “May God love you and may the holy Jesus embrace you, monsieur! May the glories of heavenly paradise be—”

  “Get the hell away from me, you drunken old tramp!”

  Oh, I certainly will, thought Jean-Pierre, studying the license plate of the departing Peugeot.

  It was late afternoon when Latham took the elevator down to the embassy basement complex for the second time in eighteen hours, not, however, to head for Communications, but instead to the sacrosanct Documents and Research. A marine guard sat at a desk to the right of the steel door; he recognized Drew and smiled.

  “How’s the weather up there, Mr. Latham?”

  “Not as cool and clean as yours, Sergeant, but then, you’ve got the most expensive air-conditioning.”

  “We’re very delicate down here. You want to enter our hall of secrets and hard-core porn?”

  “They showing dirty movies?”

  “A hundred francs a seat, but I’ll get you in for nothing.”

  “I could always count on the marines.”

  “Speaking of which, the fellas in the squad want to thank you for the freebies you set up for us at that café in the Grenelle.”

  “My pleasure. You never know when you might want to see a dirty movie.… Actually, the people who own that place are old friends and your presence had a calming effect on some unattractive regulars.”

  “Yeah, you told us. We dressed to the nines, like we were in an operetta or something.”

  “Sergeant,” interrupted Drew, looking at the guard. “Do you know a Karin de Vries in D and R?”

  “Only to speak to—‘good morning, good night,’ that’s about it. She’s a real good-looking girl, but it seems to me she tries to hide it. Like with those glasses that must weigh five pounds and those dark clothes that definitely aren’t Paris.”

  “Is she new here?”

  “I’d say about four months, transferred from NATO. Word is that she’s kinda quietlike and keeps to herself, y’know what I mean?”

  “I think so.… All right, keeper of the mystic keys, get me into a front seat.”

  “Actually, it’s in the first row, third office on the right. Her name’s on the door.”

  “You peeked?”

  “Damn right. When that door’s locked, we patrol the place every night, keep our hands on our sidearms in case there are uninvited stragglers.”

  “Ah, the secret-missions types. You should be in the movies, the cleaner ones.”

  “You should talk. A full-course dinner with all the wine we could drink for thirteen gyrenes? And a nervous owner who kept racing around telling everybody we were his best friends and probably his American relatives, who would be at his place with bazookas the minute he called us, anytime he was in trouble? That’s a straight arrow, Hardy Boys scenario?”

  “A harmless, innocent invitation by an ardent admirer of the Corps.”

  “Your nose is growing longer, Mr. Pinocchio.”

  “You’ve torn my ticket. Let me in, please.”

  The marine pressed a button on his desk and a loud click was heard in the steel door. “Enter the Wizard’s palace, sir.”

  Latham walked inside, into the low, continuous hum of computer equipment. Documents and Research consisted of succeeding rows of offices on both sides of a central aisle, and as in the communications complex, everything was white, antiseptic, with overhead neon tubes crossing the low ceiling like columns of thick, bright circular stalks. He walked to his right, to the third office door; in the center of the upper panel was a black plastic strip with white lettering, MADAME DE VRIES. Not Mademoiselle, but Madame, and the widow De Vries had several questions to answer regarding one Harry Latham and his brother Drew. He knocked.

  “Come in,” said the voice inside. Latham opened the door, greeted by the startled face of Karin de Vries; she was seated at her desk on the left wall. “Monsieur, I hardly expected you,” she said, in her voice the sound of fear. “I apologize for my rudeness. I should not have left the way I did.”

  “You’ve got it wrong, lady. I’m the one who should apologize. I spoke to Witkowski—”

  “Oh, yes, the colonel—”

  “That’s what we have to talk about.”

  “I should have known,” interrupted the researcher. “Yes, we’ll talk, Monsieur Latham, but not here. Elsewhere.”

  “Why? I went through everything you gave me, and it wasn’t just good, it was outstanding. I barely know a debit from an asset, but you made so much so clear.”

  “Thank you. But you’re here for another reason, aren’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There is a café off the Gabriel, six blocks east of here, Le Sabre d’Orléans. It is small and not popular. Be there in forty-five minutes. I’ll be in a booth at the rear.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “You will.”

  Precisely forty-seven minutes later Drew walked into the small, rundown café off the avenue Gabriel, blinking at the lack of light, somewhat surprised at the shabby environs in one of the more expensive real estate sections of the city. He found Karin de Vries, as she had said, in the farthest booth of the establishment. “This is some joint,” he whispered, sitting down opposite her.

  “L’obstination du Français,” De Vries explained, “and there’s no need to speak so quietly. No one of substance will hear us.”

  “Who’s stubborn?”

  “The owner. He’s been offered a great deal of money for this property, but he refuses to sell. He’s rich and it’s been in his family for years—long before he was rich. He keeps it to employ relatives—here comes one now; don’t be shocked.”

  An obviously drunken elderly waiter approached the table, his walk unsteady. “Do you care to order, we have no food?” he asked in one breath.

  “Scotch whisky, please,” replied Latham in French.

  “No Scotch today,” said the waiter, belching. “We have a fine selection of wines, and some Japanese junk they call whisky.”

  “White win
e, then. Chablis, if you have it.”

  “It’ll be white.”

  “I’ll have the same,” said Karin de Vries. The waiter trudged away and she continued. “Now you can see why it’s not popular.”

  “It shouldn’t exist.… Let’s talk. Your husband worked with my brother in East Berlin.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you can say? Just ‘yes’?”

  “The colonel told you. I didn’t know he was here in Paris when I requested the transfer. When I found out, I was astonished, and knew this moment between us was inevitable.”

  “You wanted the transfer because of me?”

  “Because you are the brother of Harry Latham, a man both Frederik and I considered a dear, dear friend.”

  “You know Harry that well?”

  “Freddie worked for him, although the arrangement was off the books.”

  “There are no books in those areas.”

  “What I mean is that not even Harry’s people, much less Colonel Witkowski and his army G-Two, knew that Harry was my husband’s control. There could be no hint of their association in that ‘area,’ as you call it, not a scintilla.”

  “But Witkowski told me they worked together.”

  “On the same side, yes, but not as control and runner. I don’t think anyone ever suspected that.”

  “It was so vital to keep it a secret, even among our own top people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the kind of work Frederik did for Harry—willingly, enthusiastically. If certain events were traced back to the Americans, there could have been terrible consequences.”

  “Neither side was particularly clean, and at times both were pretty damned gruesome. It was a negative quid pro quo, so what?”

  “I think it was the killing, that’s what I was led to believe.”

  “We both killed—”

  “Perhaps it was the prominence of many who were assassinated,” Karin de Vries broke in, her eyes wide, almost pleading. “As I understand, a number were in high positions, Germans favored by Moscow, leaders who reported directly to the Kremlin. A parallel might be found if mayors of your large cities or the governors of New York State or California were killed by Soviet agents, do you see what I mean?”