"Wunderschoen! The Herr is entirely too kind. Certainly all the calls will be compensated for. Please accept this token..."
"It's up to you now," Asher said softly as the clerk returned to his counter and Asher and Cramer were alone by the wooden confessional of the telephone cabinet.
"You'll have to go along on foot and check the companies that aren't on the phone, but those are near enough to send a page with a note. I'll go back to the Terminus and keep an eye out for Karolyi. There's a cafe on the Rue d'Amsterdam corner of the Place du Havre, and another on the other side of the Rue du Rome; both of them command a view of the cab stand. I'll be in one or the other, or under the arcade of the Gare itself. If I'm not there-if Karolyi comes back and leaves again and I follow him myself-you wait for me there. The last train for London tonight leaves St. Lazare at nine. I'll look for you before half past eight. All right?"
Cramer nodded. "All right. Jolly good of you to point me out the way..."
Asher shook his head dismissively, rising to his feet and digging his gloves from his pocket. "Don't let either of them know you're on their trail. But don't lose them. It's more important than you know."
His smile was boyish. "I can only do my best."
Asher picked up the battered brown leather valise that had accompanied him throughout the day and nodded. "It's all any of us can do."
At the head of the stairs he paused, turned back to see the tall, stout form perched in the telephone cabinet, the desk clerk's list spread out on his knee. No money to get anything more than that, he thought, with a kind of despair. Paris wasn't a trouble spot. What experienced men the Department had were in Ireland or on the Indian frontier.
He almost went back.
And then what? he asked himself. Volunteer to pursue Karolyi myself? Let the Department have me again, to do their bidding as I did before?
But this was different.
It was always different, he thought bitterly, turning away. The only thing ever the same was that they wanted you to do it-and what it did to you inside. Something hurt within him, like old wounds at the onset of storm.
At the cafe on the corner of the Rue d'Amsterdam, Asher ordered a cafe noir and settled himself to wait. Being unable to read the newspaper, he asked the waiter for pen and paper, and amused himself, between watching the cab rank, by observing the passengers going to and from the Gare, making a game of deducing financial circumstances, occupation, and family ties from details of clothing and manner and speech, less systematically than Conan Doyle's Mr. Holmes but with an agent's habit-sharpened skill. This was a good place for it; he heard three kinds of German, five Italian dialects, Hungarian, Dutch, and a half-dozen varieties of French. Once a couple walked by speaking Greek-brother and sister, he guessed from the familiar form of speech as much as the resemblance between them. Later a small family of Japanese passed, and he thought, One day I'll have to study that tongue.
If he survived.
The clock on the Trinite struck four, and he knew he had missed the afternoon boat- train.
There was still no sign of Cramer or Karolyi.
Periodically the waiters brought him coffee, but seemed content to let him remain. Asher knew there were men who sat in cafes throughout afternoon and evening, writing letters, reading, drinking coffee and liqueurs, playing quiet games of cribbage, dominoes, chess. Passengers came in for a coffee, or to wait for friends. The sky darkened to the color of soot, and bright white electric lights blossomed all around him in the square. The cab men changed their day horses for the beat-up screws they drove after sundown-why subject your good beast to the rigors of night work?-and lit the yellow lamps that marked their origin in the Montmartre quarter.
It was almost six when he saw Karolyi. The man had a lithe deadliness to him, like a cheetah masked as a house cat; his wide-skirted Hungarian greatcoat billowed around his boot calves in his haste, and he looked here and there quickly as he sprang up the steps of the Hotel Terminus, smooth strong chin and beautiful lips touched by the arc lights that left his eyes in his hat brim's shadow. It was the way he moved when he thought himself unobserved that had first made Asher wonder about him, back in Vienna. That, and the fact that he was clearly too intelligent to be content to do what he was doing. Asher paid his bill and cursed the Department, gathered his valise and strolled casually across the square so as to be loitering in the dense shadows of the trees near the cab stand when the Hungarian reernerged from the Terminus' doors. He heard him speak to a driver, giving an address on the Rue du Bac. Because there was the possibility that Karolyi might change cabs, Asher simply told his own jehu, "Follow that cab-don't let him see us," and the man, a waspish little sparrow of a Parisian in a faded army coat and muffler, gave him a knowing wink and whipped up his disreputable old nag in pursuit.
They crossed at the Pont Royal, the lights of the Louvre shining on black water. Near the Quai d'Orsay, Karolyi dismissed his cab, and Asher followed him afoot along the crowded streets of the Left Bank. Beneath the trees of the Boulevard St. Germain, Karolyi picked up one of those bright-dressed, frowsy-haired women whom Asher had seen emerge, a little like vampires themselves, from the darkness as soon as the lamps were lit. He felt a pang of disgust, both with his quarry and with himself, but he continued to loiter just far enough behind to keep the man and his new companion in sight. They turned from the lighted boulevard into the dark blocks of old houses that had made up the quarter long before the Citizen King's improvements, stopped at a workman's cafe for a drink. Standing in the raw gloom of an alleyway, Asher heard the half hour strike from St. Clothilde; the whine of fiddles and concertinas reached him, and in the glare of the colored lights he saw gaudy petticoats swirl and striped stockings, and mouths opened in laughter behind the blue haze of cigarette smoke. The night train was at nine. He wondered if he had time to leave word for Cramer and still catch it, or if he'd have to spend a night in Paris after all. The thought wasn't pleasant. At a sound behind him, he whirled, his heart in his mouth, seeing in his mind's eye the cold white faces, the strangely glittering eyes of the Master of Paris and her fledglings... But it was only a cat.
If it had been Elysee de Montadour, he realized, he would have heard nothing. When Karolyi and the woman emerged from the cafe, she was clinging to his arm, her great brassy fleece of hair hanging loose from its pins and her head lolling. Karolyi, Asher remembered, had always been very circumspect with the girls of his own class or the daughters of the wealthy Vienna nouveaux riches, instead preying incognito on suburban shop girls or driving out to the country inns to seduce the young girls who worked in the vineyards.
Their footfalls dripped on the moist pavement. As they approached Asher's unseen post in the alley, a man in a striped jersey and sailor's jacket stepped out of a doorway. "Got a couple sous for an honest man out of luck?"
When Karolyi said, in his icily perfect accent, "Go and have yourself stuffed," the man grew belligerent, blocking his way; though not as tall as the Hungarian, he was beefier, standing too close, threatening with the aggressive curve of his shoulder, the readiness of his hands.
"That ain't no way to-"
In one move Karolyi shucked the woman from his arm, leaving her to fall back against the soot-black wall, and lightly reversed the walking stick in his hand. Before the beggar could utter a sound, Karolyi brought the stick around sideways, hitting the skull with a crack Asher could hear where he stood. When the man slumped, Karolyi struck him again, heavy, deliberately, full-force blows, as if beating a carpet. Unhurried. It was not a neighborhood much frequented by the guardiens de la paix.
The woman stood, swaying, her fist in her mouth, blinking at the scene in stupefied horror. She made no move to flee, and Asher wondered if she were capable of it. When Karolyi had finished, he turned, taking her by the front of her jacket and pulling her to him again, and she sagged on his shoulder like one drunk or drugged. A little light from the cafe showed Asher the beggar's blood, inky on the uneven pavement; the man's breath was a wheezing, stertorous gasp. Asher thought, He needs help. And then, If I go to the cafe for it, I'll lose Karolyi.