"Get in!" Latulipe ordered. Pulling open the passenger door, he made to force Jonathan into the seat but lacked the skill. So Jonathan climbed in anyway, knowing that at any point in his ascent he could have felled Latulipe with his foot; could probably have killed him, in fact, with a kick to the head, for Latulipe's wide Slav brow was at just the height for Jonathan to smash the temples. By the interior light of the Jeep he saw his Third World air bag lying on the back seat.
"Put on your belt. Now!" Latulipe shouted, as if a fastened seat belt would ensure his prisoner's obedience.
But Jonathan obeyed anyway. Latulipe started the engine; the last lights of Esperance disappeared behind them. They entered the blackness of the Canadian night and drove for twenty minutes before Latulipe pulled out a packet of cigarettes and shoved it in Jonathan's direction. Jonathan took one and lit it from the dashboard lighter. Then he lit Latulipe's. The night sky, through the windscreen, was an immensity of rocking stars.
"So?" said Latulipe, trying to maintain his aggression.
"I'm English," Jonathan said. "I quarrelled with a man. He robbed me. I had to get out. I came here. It could have been anywhere."
A car overtook them, but it wasn't a baby-blue Pontiac.
"Did you kill him?"
"So they say."
"How?"
Shot him in the face, he thought. With a pump-action shotgun, he thought. Betrayed him. Slit his dog from head to tail.
"They say his neck was broken," he replayed, in the same evasive tone as before, for he was overcome by an absud reluctance to tell yet another lie.
"Why couldn't you have left her alone?" Latulipe demanded in tragic exasperation. "Thomas is a good man. Her whole future waiting for her. Jesus Christ."
"Where is she?"
Latulipe seemed to know no answer except a fierce gulp.
They were heading north. Now and then Jonathan caught sight of a pair of headlights in the rear-view mirror. They were chase-car lights, the same each time he looked.
"Her mother went to the police," said Latulipe.
"When?" Jonathan asked. He supposed it should have been Why? The chase car was closing on them. Stay back, he thought.
"She checked you out with the Swiss Embassy. They never heard of you. Would you do it again?"
"Do what?"
"This man who robbed you. Break his neck."
"He came at me with a knife."
"They sent for me," Latulipe said, as if that were another insult. "The police. Wanted to know what kind of guy you are. Do you push drugs, make a lot of phone calls out of town, who do you know? They think you're Al Capone. They don't get a lot of action up here. They've got a photo from Ottawa, looks a bit like you. I told them, wait till morning, when the guests are sleeping."
They had reached an intersection. Latulipe drew off the road. He was speaking breathlessly, like a messenger who had run his distance. "Men on the run here go north or south," he said. "Best go west to Ontario. Never come back, understand? You come back, I'll ― " He took several breaths. "Maybe this time it will be me who does the killing."
Jonathan took his bag and climbed into the dark. There was rain in the air and a smell of resin from the pines. The chase car passed them, and for a dangerous second Jonathan saw the rear licence plate of her Pontiac. But Latulipe had his eyes on Jonathan.
"Here's your pay," he said, shoving a bunch of dollar bills at him.
* * *
She had driven back along the opposing roadway, then bumped across the centre strip to make a U-turn. They sat in her car with the light on. The brown envelope lay on her lap, unopened.
The sender's name was printed in the corner: Bureau des Passeports, Ministere des Affaires Exlerieures, Ottawa. Addressed to Thomas Lamont, care of Yvonne Latulipe. Le Chateau Babette. Thomas who says it's all in Canada.
"Why didn't you hit him back?" she asked.
One side of her face was swollen, and the eye was closed. That's what I do for a living, he thought: I obliterate faces.
"He was just angry," he said.
"You want me to take you somewhere? Drive you? Leave you somewhere?"
"I'll just handle it from here."
"You want me to do anything?"
He shook his head. Then shook it again until he knew she had seen.
She handed him the envelope. "Which was better?" she asked harshly. "The fuck or the passport?"
"They were both great. Thanks."
"Come on! I need to know! Which was better?"
He opened the door and climbed out, and saw by the courtesy light that she was smiling brightly.
"You nearly had me fooled, know that? God damn it, nearly got my wires crossed! You were great for an afternoon, Jonathan. Anything longer, I'll take Thomas every time."
"I'm glad I helped," he said.
"So what was it for you?" she demanded, the smile still brilliantly in place. "Come on. Level. Scale of one to nine. Five? Six? Zero? I mean, Jesus, don't you keep a score?"
"Thanks," he said again.
He closed the car door and by the glow of the sky saw her head fall forward, then lift again, as she squared her shoulders and turned the ignition. With the engine running, she waited a moment, staring hard ahead of her. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. She drove onto the highway and for the first couple of hundred yards she either forgot her headlights or didn't bother with them. She seemed to drive on compass in the darkness.
You killer this woman?
No. But I married her for her passport.
A lorry pulled up, and he rode for five hours with a black man called Ed who had problems with his mortgage and needed to talk them through. Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere, Jonathan called the number in Toronto and listened to the cheerful gossiping of the operators as they passed his commission across the forest wastes of eastern Canada.
"My name's Jeremy, I'm a friend of Philip's," he said, which was what he had been saying each week from different pay phones whenever he checked in. Sometimes he could hear the call being rerouted. Sometimes he wondered whether it went to Toronto at all.
"Good morning, Jeremy! Or is it evening? How's the world using you, old boy?"
Till now Jonathan had imagined someone enlivening. This time he seemed to be talking to another Ogilvey, false and overbred.
"Tell him I've got my shadow and I'm on my way."
"Then allow me to offer the congratulations of the house," said Ogilvey's familiar.
That night, he dreamed of the Lanyon and of the lapwings flocking on the cliff, rising in their hundreds with stately wing-beats, then falling in a rolling twisting dive, until an unseasonable easterly caught them off their guard. He saw fifty dead and more floating out to sea. And he dreamed he had invited them, then let them die while he went off to find the worst man in the world.
* * *
This is the way safe houses should be, thought Burr. No more tin sheds full of bats in Louisiana swamps. Goodbye to bedsits in Bloomsbury, stinking of sour milk and the previous user's cigarettes. From now on we'll meet our joes right here in Connecticut, in white weatherboard houses like this one, with ten acres of woodland and leather-lined dens crammed with books on the morality of being mountainously rich. There was a basketball hoop, and an electrified fence for keeping out deer, and an electric zapper that, now evening was upon them, noisily cremated the bugs it lured with its sickly purple glow. Burr had insisted on manning the barbecue and had bought enough meat for several loyal regiments. He had removed his tie and jacket and was basting three enormous steaks in a violent crimson sauce. Jonathan, in swimming shorts, lounged beside the pool. Rooke, arrived from London the day before, sat in a deck chair, smoking his pipe.
"Will she talk?" Burr asked. No answer. "I said, will she talk?"