He did not wake up until almost noon, and when he did, was not sure where he was. Nothing seemed real, nothing seemed quite right. People had been murdered! He had tried to do something about it, and now he was the one being blamed. People had been murdered, including anyone who could have helped prove that he had not been involved. His teeth ached, his head hurt, his eyes felt like the ashen embers of last night’s fire. The only clothes he had were the ones he had been wearing. In a cloudy mirror over a scratched up wooden dresser, he saw a face older than the one he remembered, a face lined with fatigue and worry, and with eyes uncertain and confused. Splashing water on his face, he looked again, but the only change was that he now felt somewhat more awake.
He wanted to go outside and get some air, forget for a while what had happened and what he had to do, lose himself in whatever caught his eye. He wanted to remember, to feel again, what it was like to have a life that was not under constant threat of death and scandal. A few more hours, he told himself, that was all he had to wait. Better not to take a chance that he might be seen by someone who remembered who he was. He lay on the narrow bed with four iron posts, listening in the silence to the dresser clock bring the past closer to the future. Ten minutes, fifteen, then twenty; he could not stand it any longer. He threw on his clothes and stumbled down the stairs and out the door into the bright sunshine of a windless summer afternoon.
He fairly sprinted down the empty street, swinging his arms to match his stride, filling his lungs with air, forcing himself to feel alive. Passing a bakery, he turned back, bought a coffee and a roll, enough to keep him going, and began to look for a taxi, a car and driver, to take him the last few miles to Mont Saint-Michel and his meeting with Jean Valette. He was not sure that he had a meeting. He did not know what Austin Pearce had arranged, or if he had arranged anything. All he had was that fragmentary and enigmatic note: a name, a place, a time.
Mont Saint-Michel at four o’clock and it was now past two. Plenty of time, but Mont Saint-Michel was not a small place, and it was not even clear whether Valette would be inside the cathedral or somewhere in the near vicinity. A million people visited every year, and today, in the middle of summer, tourists from all over would be tramping through it. How would he find him, how would he find anyone, among all those people? Would Valette be looking for him? If there was a meeting, if Austin Pearce had set up an appointment, what was the reason Valette had agreed to it? Why would Valette, who had organized everything, murders without number, want to meet him, unless it was to have him killed, to hand him over to the same people who had just the night before arranged to have Austin Pearce and Aaron Wolfe both murdered?
It did not matter what Jean Valette wanted, Hart reminded himself. What mattered was that this was his chance, his only chance, to get to Jean Valette; the only chance to save himself, and stop whoever was involved in this from getting away with murder.
He found a driver sitting idly in his cab, studying with nostalgia the smoke from what was left of his cigarette. With a flick of two tobacco-stained fingers, he sent the stub flying into the cobblestone street.
“Mont Saint-Michel,” said Hart as he climbed into the dust-covered back seat.
The driver gave him a blank look in the rearview mirror. Hart started to repeat it, to give it more of a French accent. The driver winced in apprehension.
“I understood; but it wasn’t necessary.” Starting the engine, he threw the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “From here, no one goes anywhere else. From here,” he added with a shrug, “there is no other place to go, unless you live here, of course. But then, if you live here, you don’t need a taxi, do you?”
A few minutes later, with the village already out of sight, he asked, with the same casual interest he inquired of most of his fares, “Have you been to Mont Saint-Michel before?”
Hart sat forward on the cracked leather seat, suddenly eager for the opportunity to talk to someone who did not know who he was.
“Yes, some years ago. I was here with my wife. We spent a month in France, and-”
“It hasn’t changed.”
“France hasn’t-?”
“Mont Saint-Michel,” corrected the driver. His eyes sparkled with pleasure, the way they did every time he had the chance to make this remark to some returning tourist, someone coming back for a subsequent visit; usually, if not always, many years after the first, the ones who had come as students and then come back again at that point in middle age when they wanted as much to remember how things had been with them than for what they wanted to see of the ancient cathedral. “Mont Saint-Michel hasn’t changed,” he continued with greater interest. “That is not to say that it has not changed since it was built a thousand years ago, in the eleventh century, but it has not changed since you were here. The changes that have happened take much longer than something so short as a lifetime.”
The road banked to the right and then ran slightly uphill for perhaps half a mile, and then, at the crest, it was there, Mont Saint-Michel, towering high above the sea.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” said the driver. “Imagine doing something like today, and on a rock that sticks two hundred forty feet up in the air: build a cathedral, a monument to God hundreds of feet high on top of it, and know, when you start, that it is going to take a hundred years. I said a monument to God, but more than that, it is a tribute to the Archangel, Michael, who conquered Satan. When they became Christians, the Normans put themselves under his protection. He was, for a while, the patron saint of France.” The driver glanced in the mirror. “You’re an American-yes? I read something written by an American-though I have forgotten who it was-someone who wrote a long time ago. He said-and I liked it so much I’ve never forgotten it-that ‘the Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth… The Archangel stands for Church and State, and both militant.’”
The driver’s eyes brightened with the knowledge that he could still recall the passage, remember every word, and then, content with what he had done, lapsed into a silence.
“You don’t remember who wrote that?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t, but he wrote a whole book about our cathedrals. If I remember right, he came from a famous family.”
They were almost there. The mouth of the Couesnon River could be seen in the distance, along with the causeway that leads across it to the entrance, fortified against English attacks in the Hundred Years’ War by a series of heavy stone towers and heavy thick walls.
“You’ve been here before, you know how to get to the top: follow the old pilgrim’s route, past all the shops that sell souvenirs, past the Eglise Saint-Pierre, all the way up to the abbey gates.”
Pulling the car off to the side, he got out to open the door for his passenger. He had developed a temporary fondness for him because of the way he had listened so attentively. He looked at him with the sympathy of a well-meaning stranger.