merely interrupt, and there are customers in the store. Go to the devil." The clerk hung up the phone and smiled at a young woman who wore a Givenchy cocktail dress obviously designed for her obviously expensive body. She oiled her way across the parquet floor and spoke in the half-whispered voice of a well-kept mistress.
"I have a message for An&6," she intoned seductively.
"Andre will wish to hear it."
"I am desolate, mademoiselle," said the clerk, his eyes straying to her swelling collet age
"But all messages for Monsieur Andre are delivered to the manager alone, and he has left for the day."
"What am I to do, then?" cooed the courtesan.
"Well, you could give -the message to me, mademoiselle. I am a confidant of Monsieur Rambeau's, the manager."
"I don't know that I should. It's very confidential."
"But I just explained, I am a close confidant, a confidential associate of Monsieur Rambeau's. Perhaps you would rather tell me over an aperitif at the cafe next door."
"Oh, no, my friend watches me wherever I go, and the limousine is right outside. just tell him that he's to call Berlin."
"Berlin?"
"What do I know? I gave you the message." The Givenchydressed young woman, buttocks swiveling, walked out of the store.
"Berlin?" said the clerk to himself. It was crazy, Rambeau hated Germans. When they came into the shop, he treated them with contempt and doubled the prices.
The [email protected] agent walked calmly out of the leather store, then rushed up the pavement to the unmarked car. He opened the door, quickly climbed in beside the driver, and swore.
"Daninut, she wasn't there!"
"What are you talking about? She didn't come outside."
"I assume that."
"Then where is she?"
"How the hell do I know? Probably in another arrondissement across the city."
"She made contact with someone and they left by another exit."
"My God, you're smart!"
"Why bite my head off?"
"Because we both should have known better. Places like this have delivery entrances; when I went in, you should have driven around and found it, then waited."
"We're not psychic, my friend, at least I'm not."
"No, we're stupid. How many times have we done this sort of thing? One of us follows a subject, the other covers the rear."
"You're too hard on us," protested the driver.
"This is the Champs-flys6es, not the Montmartre, and the woman is the wife of an-ambassador, not a killer we're stalking."
"I hope Director Moreau sees it that way. For reasons he will not explain, he seems almost obsessed with this particular ambassador's wife."
"I'd better call him."
"Please do. I forgot the number."
The fashionably dressed man in the Peugeot several hundred feet across the wide boulevard was more than impatient, he was deeply troubled. Nearly an hour had passed and Frau Courtland had not emerged from the leather shop. He could accept the time; women were notoriously sluggish shoppers, especially the wealthy ones.
What troubled him was the fact that the Deuxieme vehicle had sped away, sped away, thirty-odd minutes ago, apparently prompted by the second [email protected] agent's running to the car and conferring with his colleague, the driver. What had happened? Something, certainly, but what? He had been torn between following the official automobile and waiting longer for the ambassador's wife. Remembering his orders, and the with which they were delivered, he had decided to wait.
"Kill the woman as soon as it's humanly possible!"
His control in Bonn had been apoplectic; the assassination was to be immediate. The meaning was clear: dire consequences would result if there was a delay.
As the assassin of record, he dared not fail. From being the monitor of the Blitzkrieger unit, he had suddenly been thrust into its deadly line of work. Not that he wasn't a trained killer, he was; he had come from the Stasi, one of the first to switch alliances from hard-core Communist to committed. Fascist. Labels, merely labels that were meaningless to men like him. He craved the access and the power to live beyond the laws, the exhilaration of knowing he was not accountable to the dictates of small-minded officials. Such bureaucrats, no matter their positions, had been terrified of the Stasi, just as the ministers of the Third Reich had been petrified of the Gestapo. That knowledge, then and now, was truly exhilarating.
Yet to remain in their enviable positions, such men as he were accountable to the structures that nurtured them.
Kill the woman as Soon as it's humanly possible! Kill her!
A bullet in the head at close range in the crowded [email protected]@es was an attractive option. Perhaps a collision, followed by a small-caliber gunshot, easily