“No French,” he said. “English.” He recalled Mrs. Delacroix’s remark about Americans and their sad lack of foreign languages. No time to regret his education now!
She held her own hands away from her skinny thighs, dangled her bulky purse by its strap, and made an exaggeratedly innocent face. “No French? Noril… No… mugging, monsieur.” She pronounced it “moo-geeng.” Under other circumstances Lessing would have laughed. “No danger. Fun!” One hand came back to pull her little miniskirt and skimpy panties aside, revealing the dark triangle of pubic hair beneath. “Hundred new francs, monsieur?”
What the hell? He was fairly sure she had more in mind than a quick trick. He watched her warily. “No, thanks. Busy.”
She gave him a lopsided gamine grin and sidled forward, one hand caressing the pale skin of her belly. He shook his head strenuously and held his ground. He still saw no one in the street and no one behind himself in the court.
“No French, monsieur? Maybe you speak… how?… Pah-koff? Pah-couve?”
He had expected it. He retreated easily, on the balls of his feet, ready to fight, dodge, or run. The shops in the arcade were crowded, inviting. “Pacov? What do you know of Pacov?”
“Come. Come wiz’ me. I show you. You see a man, speak.” She glanced sideways, to her right.
“Then I get killed. Correct?”
Badly plucked brows came down in a frown. “Keeled? I not speak much English. You come. Pacov. No moo-geeng. We go your place afterward.” She was a child, an illiterate, hungry child, but he couldn’t afford to pity her — not now.
On the western, sunny side of the internal court the tablecloths of a cafe showed checkered red and white amidst signboards and potted shrubs. He pointed and spoke slowly: “Not come. We go there. Restaurant… cafe. You telephone man. He come here, speak.” He pantomimed the use of a telephone.
“Eh? Non. No telephone. No… number. I not know.”
“We go anyway. We sit, drink. He will watch. He will come to us.” Lessing had no idea how much she understood, but she gave him only a single, suspicious, street-smart glance and then walked ahead of him to the cafe.
He should have anticipated the reaction. The maitre d’hotel pursed thin lips, and a few of the more affluent diners murmured in outraged wonderment. Lessing hadn’t realized: a tall, hard-faced, thirtyish American male in tandem with a cheap Banger hooker, a child barely into her teens! He had just done more to wreck the American image abroad than a planeload of screeching, spinster school teachers!
The girl gave the maitre d’hotel a saucy wink and sat down, making sure that her bare thigh was visible all the way up to her hipbone.
The waiter arrived, pudgy and pallid-faced. The girl said something in a supercilious tone, and he slammed two menus down and flounced away. She pointed to an entry in the wines and alcoholic beverages section of the menu, but Lessing shook his head. When the waiter returned Lessing ignored his young companion, said “coffee,” and held up two fingers. The man departed again.
Two china cups of coffee appeared, muddy and black and full of chicory, much as they served it in India. Lessing paid, and they drank in silence. He turned his chair so he could see both the double door to the kitchen and the crowded shopping court in front of the restaurant. He also fumbled Wrench’s spit-shooter out of his jacket pocket, palmed it, and covered his hand with the stiffly embossed, red-plastic menu cover. The wall clock read 4:13. How long would he have to wait?
Soon, he told himself, soon. Be patient. The opfoes would tire of waiting for little Miss Banger-Baby here, and then they would come looking.
The clock said 5:32 when the man entered the court. Lessing picked him out at once: a tall gentleman of fifty or so, greying and stooped, distinguished-looking in a baggy, charcoal-grey suit and one of those painfully conservative British ties that are so dark as to look like ribbons of black crepe. Something about the long, horsey face and aggressive bearing struck Lessing as un-British, however, the man was probably American, Canadian, or even Australian.
The new arrival took his time, wandering from stall to stall, examining boxed candies, cut flowers, toys and souvenirs and sunglasses. He looked at his wristwatch twice before making up his mind. Then he tramped directly across the open court to the cafe, slid into the chair opposite Lessing and the Banger girl, ordered cafe au lait, and waited until the waiter had gone.
He began without preamble. “Long time finding you.” The accent was harshly nasal, an American Midwestern twang much like Lessing’s own original dialect.
“Who’s hunting?”
“None of your business.” He spoke to the Banger girl in fluent French, then grimaced at Lessing. “Hard to get decent help these days.”
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“I can answer some of your questions, Mr. Lessing. And you can answer mine.” He pointed at the menu. “If you’ve got a gun under there, forget it. Do you see those high galleries opposite us? Up above the shopping floors?”
God, what a stupid mistake! With a good rifle and scope, even a passable marksman on one of those balconies could put a bullet up whichever of Lessing’s nostrils this kikibird chose! He cursed himself, but it was too late to fix things now.
Lessing said, “Fine. A stalemate, then. Your man pops me, my finger tightens, and my gun goes off. Then you Iearn whether your ribs’ll deflect a 9-mm slug.”
The agent spread blue-veined, well-manicured hands. “No harm meant, Mr. Lessing. No violence. We want Pacov, and you know where it is.”
“Idem’ J know.”
“Look, your own employer is out to thumb you. Other people want you brought in and questioned. They’ll thumb you, too, when they’re done. We can protect you, see that your part in this gets buried in some file or other, put you back in India where you can go on with your life.”
Lessing sensed the man was lying, at least so far as his own employer was concerned. If Mulder had wanted him dead, then dead he would be. On the other hand, “employers” also included those who had hired him to get Pacov in the first place. They might well be out to unzip him. He said, carefully, “I can’t help you. Not if my life depended on it”
“Oh, it does, Mr. Lessing, it does. Believe me. When I say we want Pacov, I mean that very strongly. We will have Pacov. Now who funded your operation? Where is Pacov?”
This man knew nothing, then: less than he did himself. He decided that honesty was the best policy— until events indicated a change. “I came to Paris looking for answers. I haven’t found any. The man who took Pacov from me is dead: Gomez, out in India.”
“Gomez can’t help us then, can he, Mr. Lessing? But we don’t think you’re telling the whole truth. Recently you flew to Guatemala, then to South Africa. We want to know whom you saw in those countries and why. My… principals… are convinced that on one of those two stops you handed Pacov over to those who hired you to get it, Mr. Lessing. You used Gomez as a ruse. He died for nothing.”
“I suppose you… your people… thumbed him?”
“No, not our doing. Your employers again, those who sent you to Marvelous Gap. They want you thumbed, and everything connected with you gone too… vanished, disappeared, never existed.”
“The trips were for my Indian employer… Indoco. They had nothing to do with Pacov.”
“Well, there’s something odd about Indoco, too, Mr. Lessing. Odd. But not our business now. Later, perhaps.” He straightened up. “Still hesitant, then? Still unwilling to help us? What if I told you that I represented your government, the United States of America? The legal owners of Pacov… and the only thing standing between this lovely scene,” he waved at the bustling shoppers, “and the murder of much of this planet”