Tibetan Cross Read online

  They traced me to Oran and Les Champs Elysées; therefore they found Captain Andrev. Or did they simply check all major ports? Is Andrev dead, too, and the Algerian colonel? For how much did Léon sell me?

  Put myself in my enemies’ shoes. They've lost me; what'll they do? He motioned to the waiter for another espresso. Knowing what they know, they'll simply wait for me to come to them. But soon I might meet Paul; soon we might reveal them. Five days till Easter. Will you be there, Paul? But if you're not dead, why did Mort tell the Germans to shoot?

  Three weeks of running and I still don't know who's chasing me. Who's killed my friends. Yes, it's the CIA: Mort, Claire, Stihl, Eliott. But who are they?

  Can I reveal them? They'll say I did it all. Was this the only bomb the CIA's run into Tibet? Or are there other nuclear bombs in Tibet right now? Have they been smuggled into China? Ready to go off? If so, what's the CIA waiting for?

  Weird to be hunted by my own government. When I did nothing. Would I give up now, if they called it off? Would I? Would I forget the CIA and Stihl and the others who've killed people I love – innocent people? I don't think so.

  Today's Tuesday. Five days. If Paul gets to Paris we can reveal it together. Who'll believe us? How long will we live, once we open our mouths? And if Paul doesn't come?

  All I have is questions. If Paul doesn't come – if he's dead – I'll go to New York, try Fulton Street. In the meantime, I'll try to track Mort down, here in Aix. Until it's time for Paris.

  Why? Because I'm a dead man kept alive by artificial means. Vengeance is my life support system. A breeze stirred the hairs on his wrist. Of all of them, I hate Claire the most, but it's really myself I hate, my babyish trustfulness, the incomprehensible naiveté by which I allowed her to trap me. If it hadn't been for the goat man…By such anguish do we become wise? If so, it's not worth the price, this cant of wisdom through the generations. How much better to sit in warm grass by a trout stream, without dread or guilt.

  What Hem said, squinting one-eyed through the cyclone fence at Pokhara airport: “Cease to be the person they seek.” Cohen smiled and stood, laying coins on the table. “Thank you, Dieter,” he said, “for lunch.” A woman at the next table stared at him, fingering short curls. He winked at her. She faced her plate. Further along the Cours Sextius he entered a beauty shop. The beautician, a short, anxious man, peered at him. “I have a problem,” Cohen said.

  “Monsieur isn't unique in that respect.”

  “My girl doesn't like me as I am.”

  “People rarely want what they have. What's new about that? Without it, where would I be?”

  “She says she can only love men who are blond.”

  “There's no shortage; she should soon be happy.”

  “Perhaps. But I want her to love me.”

  “That's something else.” The beautician bleached Cohen's hair and coiled it in hot rollers. “You'll be irresistible.”

  “I think it makes him highly resistible,” muttered a graying lady waiting her turn with a magazine over her knee.

  “As you know, dear Madame,” Cohen answered, “passion has no bounds. Or why come here, covering your gray?”

  “When I look younger, I feel younger. When I feel younger, I live longer. You've no need for such concerns.”

  “Ah, but each of us has the same concern,” the beautician said, “to uncover what's inside.”

  “And men?”

  “They're more vain, want what they cannot have. Par exemple,” he turned to Cohen, “only two days ago one of your compatriots came in, wanted a haircut, was most emphatic, in fact. But he had no hair.”

  Cohen shrugged. “Can't cut what doesn't exist.”

  “There were but a few strands, falling away, here.” The beautician touched Cohen's temples. “Yet this man – a great fat American he was – inspected every hair I cut.”

  “The less there is, the greater its value?”

  “If that is so, why are kindness and generosity so unrevered?”

  “He was of what size, this American?”

  “Truly huge. Though not soft for being large, but hard…”

  “Where does he stay?”

  “At the Hotel des Thermes.”

  “And his name?”

  “That I don't know. But my wife, who works there, cleans his room.” The beautician broke off to speak to a short, glaring woman who now entered. “Ah, Madame Petrach, as you can see, I'll soon be free.”

  The woman glowered at Cohen. “My appointment's for one.”

  The beautician nodded at the clock. “It lacks that by twenty minutes.”

  “You shall not be done.”

  “Most assuredly I shall. This gentleman's finished. The lady, I believe, requires but a rinse?”

  “Exactement.” The graying lady began to fold her magazine.

  Cohen paid the beautician. “This American, what's his room?”

  “I'm not the desk clerk.” The beautician banged the cash register closed. “I'm quite busy. It won't be long, Madame Petrach.”

  “I think I know him,” Cohen persevered. “He's still here?”

  “The Mirabeau Suite. Madame?”

  IN A MEN'S store he bought and changed into blue jeans, blue shirt, tan corduroy jacket, and new running shoes. He stuffed Dieter's jacket and his old clothes, including the embroidered shirt from Athens, into a trash can and entered the Hotel des Thermes by the back door.

  His hands were sweaty inside his pockets as he eyed the door of the Mirabeau Suite from the end of the second floor corridor. In a mirror across the corridor a blond, curly-haired man in tightcut French clothes mimicked his every move.

  The broad, red-carpeted corridor was empty but for urned palms and a chambermaid's cart. He climbed to the third floor, to a window overlooking the veranda of the suite. Boxed cypresses lined the veranda. An empty brandy glass sat on a white metal table beside a single lawn chaise. Haze flooded the city, blurring rooftops, spires, the murky hills.

  He descended to the staff lockers, slipped into a white waiter's jacket, and returned to knock loudly on the suite door. There was no answer and the door would not open. He hid the jacket and descended to the desk. The same walrus-mouthed clerk he had interrogated twice the day before glanced up without recognition.

  “My friend in the Mirabeau Suite doesn't answer.”

  “He's checked out, Monsieur.”

  “Oh? He left a camera at my place. Surely he left a message where he may be reached?”

  As the clerk peered in the key box, Cohen searched the upside-down desk register. Next to Mirabeau was one word, Goslin.

  “None,” said the clerk. Cohen left by the front and reentered the back. The second floor was empty, the maid's cart now three doors away from the Mirabeau Suite.

  At a turn in the corridor he waited until the maid knocked at the suite. There was no answer; she took out a key ring and opened the door.

  He counted to fifty and went to the door. “Madame,” he called, entering. She was stripping sheets from the bed. “Madame,” he repeated, breathlessly, “it is your husband who cuts hair, on the Cours Sextius?”

  She stared at him with uncomprehending, cowlike eyes. “C'est moi.”

  “Alors, you must go at once. An accident.”

  She dropped the sheet. “Quel accident? Charles!”

  “It's not grave. Go quickly.”

  She ran whimpering from the room. Counting the seconds, “One, two, three, four…” he ransacked the desk. Nothing but spa advertisements. “Seven, eight…” nothing in the closet. An empty liqueur bottle on the bedside table. “Fifteen, sixteen…” In the bathroom trash, a paperback. “Twenty-four, twenty-five…” With the bottle and the book he dashed down the stairs to the back yard.

  The bottle was German, a half liter, dark brown. The liquor-sticky label read, “Belchen Geist, Schwarzwalder Hausbrennerei, Munstertal.” The paperback, Seven Virgins in One Night, had no underlined passages, nothing lodged between the pages. On a dog-eared
page he read:

  With frenzied tears she begged, beseeched, importuned on scrambling knees, nails tearing his sleeve, “Not my little sister!” but he thrust her nakedness rudely away and faced the younger girl cowering with her torn slip clenched over her nascent breasts, blank terror paling her eyes. “C'mere,” he grinned, yanking down the slip.

  At the hotel's back door, a butcher's van was unloading chunks of red flesh. One chunk fell; a boy in a white jacket glanced round, brushed gravel from it and lugged it into the kitchen. A trash truck backed up, clanging, to gorge itself on barrels of garbage.

  Near the university Cohen bought a German/French dictionary and a map of Germany. In a café by a spattering fountain he tried to translate the bottle label. “Geist” was spirit, mind, or intellect, but he could find no entry for “Belchen.” Despite the dictionary, the label on the back, “Jeder, der recht froh gestimmt, gern den Belchengeist mal nimmt…” evaded him also. “Schwarzwald,” however, was the Black Forest, lying, according to the map, in southwestern Germany about five hundred kilometers from Köln. In the middle of the Schwarzwald was the word Belchen, followed by the number 1414.

  “YOU SHOULD'VE left me the key to the trunk,” said the foreman at the body shop. “As such, I couldn't reach the red paint on the lid edge; you can see it, thus.”

  “Ca va. My girl won't care.”

  “You change everything for this woman?” The man nodded at Cohen's hair.

  “I have a twin brother. I'm afraid she'll sleep with him by mistake.”

  “She could double her fun,” the foreman said. Cohen paid him, parked the now shiny black Alfa in an alley near the station, and telephoned the Hotel des Thermes. “This is Mr. Goslin,” he said in English.

  “Yase, Meester Goslin?”

  “Do I have any messages?”

  “None, Monsieur.”

  “Good. Sunday, I think, I made a call, from my room. I need to call again, but have lost the number.”

  “Un moment. I look in the book.” The vacant line buzzed. “Allo, Monsieur Goslin? You call Sunday, to Neuenweg, Germany. It is the one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alors, c'est 5-1243.”

  At a café on the Place de la Liberation he ordered an Armagnac and opened the map of Germany. Bells sounded seven; the dewy, echoing streets smelt of early flowers and diesel. Light rain began to patter on the canopy.

  Neuenweg lay four kilometers south of Belchen, which was a mountain peak; 1414 was its elevation in meters.

  A cold contentment overcame him. He asked for another Armagnac. Brake lights flashed on the wet stones; pigeons and rooks complained on the parapets; wrens and starlings were fussing in the evening branches of the plane trees. A line filtered through his mind: “Into the heart of light, the silence,” but he could not remember its source. Washed by the warm, bright odor of the rain, he began to plot his route to Neuenweg.

  ALONE AT the next table a tangle-haired woman sat nodding to the music of a man who played guitar on the sidewalk in the rain. People lounged at other tables, most reading evening papers, as if this woman humming and scratching at herself were not there.

  The backs of her hands, her face, her arms, were smudged, her worn cotton dress threaded and dirty. She broke into trailing Italian, was silent, then shaking her greasy hair began to sing again, turned wide-eyed to him. “I know your fortune!”

  “Non, merci.”

  She gave him an almost winsome smile, brown stumpy teeth out of coffee-colored gums. “Knowing the future, you've less to lose.” He returned to his thoughts. Trickles coated the sidewalk as the rain stiffened. She beckoned with her hand, “Some perils known can be avoided. Some questions have answers.”

  He drained his Armagnac, counting coins from his pocket onto the table. “The cost?”

  “Five new francs.” She sat opposite him gathering his coins from the table. “To begin, I see you will not listen.” She took his hand. “You're led by your heart, which is strong.” She spread the palm open. “You've had much pain in love. But so has everyone. Love can be more destructive than hate, although its purpose is to make you strong. The heart's gone underground, here, see? You're laboring under a delusion, but have power and may overcome it.”

  “And the future?”

  “A waste. I have no faith in it.”

  “In my future?”

  “In the life line. I've held the hands, like this, of other young men as they lay dead after a battle. And traced the long life lines in their palms. There are no promises.” She licked her upper lip. “Expectation robs life. Have no expectations.”

  “My life line's short?”

  “You listen to nothing.” She twisted up his hand. “You'll die when you've ceased to live.”

  “For that I must pay five francs?”

  She stood abruptly and tucked her chair against the table. “Here,” she tossed down his coins, “I give you back your fortune.” She went asking sotto voce from table to table, “Wish to know your fortune?” while people stared into their papers, not answering. After a few moments she was gone through the rain hanging like a bead curtain beyond the canopy.

  HE DROVE the damp, reflective streets until he found another black Alfa. With it he switched license plates, bent open the vent window on the passenger side and took the insurance certificate and registration from the glove compartment. He closed the vent, satisfied his entry had left no mark, and took the Autoroute north to Lyon.

  At six the next morning he left Lyon, the Mannlicher stowed beneath the back seat. He passed through Besançon before eight, and stopped for gas near the border at Mulhouse before noon. The German control post flanked the road on the east bank of the Rhine. “So, Monsieur Seghers,” said the customs officer, “you have this car from a Monsieur Jacques Bonneville, at Aix?”

  “He's my friend, who comes by plane next week to meet me in Munich.”

  “D'accord. But I must see your driver's license.”

  “I was told I wouldn't need it. You see, I lost it and the office in Toulon has yet to send the new.”

  “Who said you wouldn't need it?”

  “The German consulate, at Marseille.”

  “They've dreadfully misled you.” The officer rested his hands on his belt, near his pistol. “You must have a license to drive in Germany.”

  “I have one.”

  “In your possession, it must be. You must return to France and get a temporary one.”

  Cohen re-crossed the river to France. The officer at the French control asked also for his license. Cohen repeated his story.

  “But you're not French?”

  “Yes, my family is of Toulon, but I have lived most of my life in Canada.”

  “You have a Canadian passport?”

  “No, I'm a French citizen.”

  “It's a shame, Monsieur Seghers, but one may not drive in France without proof of license. You must leave the car here and take the bus to Mulhouse, to receive a temporary certificate.”

  The clock inside the control post said ten to one. Cohen waited until the next bus arrived at one-thirty, and reached Mulhouse at three. It took another half hour to find the license office, where he waited in line until four-thirty to find that there was no record, in Toulon or elsewhere, of a Luc Seghers, born February 12, 1949, in Toulon.

  In a bar in the working quarter he found a red-haired, freckled teenager named Alphonse, who possessed a valid driver's license. They took the next bus to the border. There had been a change of guard. “Here is my friend, who will keep the car at his place, until my new license arrives,” said Cohen.

  On the way back to Mulhouse he paid Alphonse. “Want two hundred francs more?”

  “Depends for what.”

  “To go to Germany.”

  “I'd be liable to arrest. Four hundred.”

  “Three's all I have.”

  “Three fifty, then, and bus fare home.”

  They traversed the Basel bridge in early darkness. A line of taillights led to the
German post. Dark tree forms surmounted the far riverbank; black water coiled under the bridge. The north wind was sharp in their faces. Twenty minutes later he deposited Alphonse at the Riehen bus station, then found a drafty room in a back street hotel in Lörrach.

  “Do you know this stuff?” he asked the bartender in the hotel bar.

  The bartender raised Mort's liqueur bottle to the light. “It comes from Belchen? That's a famous mountain – you can drive to the top from Schönau. A hotel's open there in summer.”

  “You sell it here?”

  “I never see it before.”

  Cohen ate dinner and nursed a beer while a man and two women squirmed naked on a movie screen that the bartender unrolled above the cash register. A man across the room snored loudly, his head flopped back on the naugahyde. The waitress leaned her bosom over Cohen's table.

  “Sie englisch?”

  “Nein. Français.”

  She smiled. “T'es seul? Solitaire?” She nudged down the top of her tights to reveal a few sweaty blonde curls. Cohen shook his head.

  After another beer the movie stopped and the waitress stripped to carnival music on the bar, flesh puckering round her navel. A man was speaking French in the next booth, gesturing with florid, spatulate hands: “Last week my brother parks his Mercedes, in Zürich. Late at night he has a bad feeling about this parking spot. So he dresses, goes out, and moves his car a few streets. In the night a building burns down at the new spot; his car's destroyed.”

  The man's companion chortled quietly. “Second sight.”

  “A Four-Fifty. Fifty thousand marks.”

  “He has insurance, so?”

  “He'd lost his license; the insurance was kaput.”

  A LIGHT RAIN tinkled on the tiny square windowpanes of Cohen's room. He lit a candle on the dresser, extinguished the electric light. Candle glow wavered on the ceiling. The room softened. Above the radiator the steam-yellowed wallpaper had peeled, disclosing an earlier layer with vague vistas of flowered fields, their edges overlapping. Four days to Easter. Raindrops fell into the ashes of the fireplace.

  By dawn the rain was gone, the cobblestones shiny and unlittered. He drove northeast into hills dark with spruce and fir. Willows bloomed in the ditches, grass a brilliant emerald round their stems. Water sparkled in valleys edged by stone walls, in culverts, in spurts tumbling down needled banks between thick conifers.