"But how long have I known him? I've never set eyes on the rascal!"
"Just put forever," said Yvonne, and watched him write down "la vie entiere. "
Tom, she telegraphed triumphantly that night. Church needs sight of your birth certificate. Send express to Babette. Keep loving me. Yvonne.
When Jonathan brushed against her door she pretended to be asleep and didn't stir. But when he stood at her bedside she sat up and seized him more hungrily than ever. I did it, she kept whispering to him. I got it! It's going to work!
* * *
It was soon after this episode and at much the same early-evening hour that Madame Latulipe paid her call by appointment on the oversized superintendent of police at his splendid offices. She was wearing a mauve dress, perhaps for half-mourning.
"Angelique," said the superintendent, drawing up a chair. "My dear. For you, always."
Like the cure, the superintendent was an old trailman. Signed photographs on the walls portrayed him in his prime, now in furs handling a dogsled, now as lone hero in the bush pursuing his man on horseback. But these mementos did the superintendent little service. White chins now hid the once manly profile. A glossy paunch sat like a brown football over the leather belt of his uniform.
"One of your girls got herself into a spot of trouble again?" the superintendent asked with a knowing smile.
"Thank you, Louis, not so far as I know."
"Somebody been putting his hand in the till?"
"No, Louis, our accounts are quite in order, thank you."
The superintendent recognised the tone and erected his defences.
"I'm glad to hear that, Angelique. There's a lot of it about these days. Not like it used to be at all. Un p'tit drink?"
"Thank you, Louis, this is not a social visit. I wish you to make enquiries about a young man whom Andre has employed in the hotel."
"What's he done?"
"It is more a question of what Andre has done. He has employed a man with no papers. He has been naïf."
"Andre's a kindly fellow, Angelique. One of the best."
"Perhaps too kindly. The man has been with us already ten weeks, and his papers have not arrived. He has placed us in an illegal situation."
"We're not Ottawa up here, Angelique. You know that."
"He says he is a Swiss."
"Well, perhaps he is. Switzerland's a fine country."
"First he tells Andre that his passport is with the immigration authorities, then he tells him it is with the Swiss Embassy for renewal, now it is back with another authority. Where is it?"
"Well, I haven't got it, Angelique. You know Ottawa. Those fairies take three months to wipe their arses," said the superintendent, imprudently grinning at the felicity of the phrase.
Madame Latulipe coloured. Not with a becoming blush, but with a sallow patchy fury that made the superintendent nervous.
"He is not Swiss," she said.
"How do you know that now, Angelique?"
"Because I telephoned the Swiss Embassy. I said I was his mother."
"And?"
"I said I was furious at the delay, my son was not permitted to work, he was acquiring debts, he was depressed, if they cannot send his passport they must send a letter of confirmation that everything is in order."
"I'm sure you did it well, Angelique. You're a great actress, We all know that."
"They have no trace of him. They have no Jacques Beauregard who is Swiss and living in Canada; it is all a fiction. He is a seducer."
"He's a what?"
"He has seduced my daughter, Yvonne. She is infatuated by him. He is a refined impostor, and his plan is to steal my daughter, steal the hotel, steal our peace of mind, our contentment, our..."
She had a whole list of things that Jonathan was stealing. She had compiled it as she lay awake at night and added to it with each new sign of her daughter's obsession with the thief.
The only crime she had omitted to mention was the theft of her own heart.
TEN
The airstrip was a green ribbon stretched across the brown Louisiana swamp. Cows grazed at the edge of it, white egrets perched on the cows' backs, looking from the air like dabs of snow. At the far end of the ribbon stood a busted tin shed, which had once been a hangar, A red mud track ran to it from the highway, but Strelski didn't seem sure it was the place, or perhaps he wasn't happy with it. He banked the Cessna and let it slide, then he made a low diagonal pass over the swamp. From his seat in the rear Burr saw an old fuel pump beside the shed and a barbed-wire gate behind it. The gate was shut, and he saw no sign of life until he noticed fresh tire tracks in the grass. Strelski read them at the same moment and seemed to like them, for he opened the throttle, held the turn and came back from the west. He must have said something to Flynn over the intercom, for Flynn lifted his liver-spotted palms from the submachine gun on his lap and made an uncharacteristically Latin shrug. It was an hour since they had taken off from Baton Rouge.
With an old man's grunt, the Cessna touched down and bumped along the causeway. The cows did not lift their heads; neither did the egrets. Strelski and Flynn sprang onto the grass. The causeway was a land bar between steaming mud flats, which trembled to the sound of sucking teeth. Fat beetles trundled in and out of the steam. Flynn led the way toward the shed, the machine gun cradled across his chest as he observed to left and right. Strelski followed with the briefcase and a drawn automatic. After them came Burr with nothing but a prayer, for he had little training in guns and hated them.
Pat Flynn here has done Northern Burma, Strelski had said. Pat Flynn here has done Salvador.... Pat is this unlikely Christian.... Strelski liked to speak of Flynn with awe.
Burr studied the tire tracks at his feet. Car or plane? He guessed there was a way of telling and was ashamed he didn't know it.
"We've told Michael you're a big Brit," Strelski had said. "Like Winston Churchill's aunt."
"Bigger," said Flynn.
* * *
"It's Father Lucan and it's Brother Michael," Strelski tells Burr the night before, as they sit on the deck of the beach house in Fort Lauderdale. "Pat Flynn here calls the shots. You want to ask Michael something, mostly it pays to have Pat here do it. The guy's a sleazebag and a screwball. Right, Pat?"
Flynn pulls a huge hand across his mouth to hide his gappy smile. "Michael's beautiful," he declares.
"And pious," says Strelski. "Michael is very, very holy ― right, Pat?"
"A true believer, Joe," Flynn confirms.
Then, amid much giggling, Strelski and Flynn divulge to Burr the story of Brother Michael's coming to Jesus and to the high calling of Supersnitch ― a story, Strelski insists, that would never have had its beginning had not Agent Flynn here chanced to be up in Boston one weekend in Lent, taking a spiritual retreat from his wife and curing his soul with the aid of a case of Bushmills single malt Irish whiskey and a couple of like-minded abstainers from the seminary.
"That right, Pat?" Strelski demands, anxious perhaps lest Flynn fall asleep.
"Dead on, Joe," Flynn agrees, sipping his whiskey and taking a huge mouthful of pizza as he benignly follows the full moon's ascent over the Atlantic.
And Pat here and his reverend brethren have hardly done justice to their first bottle of malt, Leonard ― Strelski continues ― when in rolls the father abbot himself to enquire whether Special Agent Patrick Flynn of U. S. Customs would have the holiness to grant him a moment of counsel in the seclusion of his private office.
And when Agent Flynn graciously consents to this proposal, there in the father abbot's office, says Strelski, sits this string bean Texan kid with ears like ping-pong bats who turns out to be Father Lucan from something called the Blood of the Virgin Hermitage in New Orleans, which, for reasons known only to the Pope, is under the protection of the father abbot in Boston.