He started to order another glass, but glanced at his watch and thought better of it. He could not afford to be tired: there was too much to do to think about sleep. He caught a taxi outside the café and gave the driver Aaron Wolfe’s address in the 18th arrondissement.
The head of the American embassy’s political section lived three blocks from the Seine at the end of a short narrow street in a four-story building that had been there from sometime in the eighteenth century. Wolfe had one of the two apartments on the third floor. Hart pushed the button next to Wolfe’s name. When there was no response, he stepped back onto the sidewalk and looked up. The lights from Wolfe’s apartment were on. Hart tried the buzzer again, but again there was no answer. A woman carrying a bag of groceries was just coming home.
“Mr. Wolfe?” asked Hart. “Do you know if he’s home? He’s expecting me, and I saw the lights on from the street.”
She was a middle-aged woman who walked slowly and with a limp. A single bag of groceries seemed the limit of her strength. But she had a pleasant face and kind, if rather tired, eyes. She started to open the door with her key and found that it was not locked. She turned to Hart as if she was sure he would be as surprised at this as was she.
“It’s always locked, you know. Well, perhaps he left it that way so that you-”
There was a sudden violent noise: a burst of gunfire, two shots-or was it three?-in rapid succession, and behind it, shouted cries for help. Hart dashed past the woman, who was staring helpless at the landing overhead, and took the stairs three at a time.
“Call the police!” he screamed down at the woman.
The door to Wolfe’s apartment was wide open. Wolfe was lying on the living room floor, his eyes gaping in now dead wonder at what had happened, a hole in his forehead where the bullet that killed him had flown to his brain. Someone, a man Hart did not recognize but who looked like one of the men who had been chasing him earlier, was lying face down on the floor, his arms spread apart, a gun-the gun he must have used to murder Aaron Wolfe-lying just beyond his outstretched hand. Hart picked it up, and then he heard a voice, a voice he did not want to hear. It was Austin Pearce, sunk back in an overstuffed chair, his shirt front oozing blood. With the last strength he had, Pearce raised his hand and pointed. On his knees next to the body of the unknown intruder, Hart wheeled around and, without even a moment’s hesitation, fired the gun he had just picked up. Crying out in pain, a second assailant, a second killer, dropped his gun and clutched his right shoulder. He started to go for the gun again, but he knew, he could see it in Hart’s eyes, that he would be dead if he tried. But he also seemed to know that he could still get away, that Hart would not shoot him in the back. He turned on his heel and vanished down the hallway.
“Austin,” said Hart, rushing over to him, “what happened?”
“We had only just got here. There was a knock on the door. Wolfe kept a gun. He managed to shoot the first one, but the other one was right behind him, and…”
“Save your strength. An ambulance will be here any minute.”
Pearce grasped Hart’s hand and held it tight.
“In my pocket-an address…a time…”
His grip grew tighter, and then, slowly, Austin Pearce let go.
Chapter Eighteen
Hart could hear the wail of sirens in the distance. The French police were on their way. The man he had shot-the one he had let get away-was probably already calling for help, telling his confederates that he had just missed killing Bobby Hart and that if they hurried they could still find him there. Perhaps the wounded assassin did not have to call them; perhaps they were waiting just outside in a car. Hart could not stay there another second.
He was halfway to the door when he remembered. With his last breath, Austin Pearce had told him that there was something in his pocket: a time, a place, something Hart had to know. He bent down and began to search, the second time in two days that he had to look in the lifeless eyes of someone he had liked and respected, both of them, Quentin Burdick, and now Austin Pearce, willing to risk everything to get at the truth. And both of them murdered because they knew him, knew what he had been asked to do, knew enough about what had happened to cut to pieces any claim that Hart had been part of a conspiracy to murder Robert Constable.
Hart thought he was going to be sick, watching, and not wanting to watch, the glass-eyed stare that each time he forced himself to look away seemed to force him back, to make him look again at death’s final work. There was nothing in the outside pockets; he slipped his hand inside the blood-soaked jacket, and there, next to Pearce’s black leather wallet, he found a single half-sheet of blue paper, folded twice. Despite the blood, it was still possible to make out the words.
“Tomorrow. Mont Saint-Michel. Four p.m. Jean Valette.”
What did it mean? Had Austin Pearce arranged a meeting, made an appointment, with the head of The Four Sisters, the man behind everything that had happened? The police sirens were louder, closer, almost here. Hart stuffed the half sheet of paper in his pocket and stood up. Then he saw it, on the table next to the chair where he had placed it, the gun, the gun he had picked up from just beyond the outstretched hand of the first assailant, the gun that, with Austin Pearce’s warning, had saved his life. He hesitated, not sure whether to leave it behind or take it with him. He looked one last time at Austin Pearce, lying dead in the chair, and then grabbed the gun and headed down the stairs.
The woman he had left at the front entrance, just inside, the woman he had told to call the police, was cowering in fear. The grocery bag lay on the floor, a mess of broken eggs and coffee. She looked up at Hart with a sigh of relief.
“Mon Dieu! You’re safe! When I heard the other shot, when I heard someone running away, down the hallway and out the back, I thought you must be killed.” She opened her hands as if to pray forgiveness. “I should have come up, seen if you needed help, but I couldn’t-I couldn’t make myself move. I called the police, but after that, I couldn’t…”
Hart touched her shoulder and told her that he understood. The sirens were deafening, the street outside echoing with their noise. He had no time left.
“You did fine, better than I could have done. Tell the police the truth: that I was here, with you, when we heard the shots. My name is Robert Hart,” he said. “Robert Hart. Can you remember that? Tell the police that the men who came here were looking for me, that they came to kill me; they did not come to take me back.”
Hart was on the street, walking fast. The police raced past him. They did not see him, or if they did, paid no attention. He thought about turning back, going to the French police, to show them that instead of a fugitive trying to get away, he was the victim of a conspiracy meant to have him murdered. But they might simply hand him over to the Americans, the same ones who wanted him dead. He hurried on, wondering how he was going to get to Mont Saint-Michel and what he was going to do when he got there and was finally face to face with the infamous Jean Valette.
He had been there, to Mont Saint-Michel, on the border of Normandy and Brittany, once, years ago, when he and Laura had spent a long, blissful month traveling through France. It was one of the best times he had ever had, moving from one place to the next, never in a hurry because there was never any place they had to go. They had wandered through and around Notre Dame, taking note of what it looked like inside, what it must have felt like to a Christian of the Middle Ages, listening to Mass, and then, after Mass, what it looked like from the different vantage points from which it could be seen on a bright, sunlit afternoon. From Paris, they had gone, not immediately, and not by the direct routes followed by tourists grimly determined to see as many things as possible, to the cathedral at Chartres; and, as if they knew that the best would be last, only after that to Mont Saint-Michel and the cathedral that had stood for a thousand years, as close to heaven as anything human hands could build.