of the day."
"My work, then, is appreciated?" asked the ambassador's wife.
"Extraordinarily so. How could you think otherwise?"
"I don't. I just think it's time, after all these years of accomplishment, that I be brought to Bonn and recognized. I'm now in a position to render even more extraordinary service. I am the whore-wife of one of the most important ambassadors in Europe. Whatever our enemies plan against us, I will know. I would like to hear from our Fuhrer that the daily risks I take will be rewarded. Is that so much to ask?"
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"No, it isn't, gnddige Frau. Yet I am Andre, not an ambassador, of course, but perhaps the most vital conduit in Europe, and I take these things on faith. Why can't you?"
"Because I've never even seen the Fatherland! Can't you understand that? All my life, since I was a child, I've trained and worked myself into states of exhaustion for one cause only. A cause I could never mention, never confide to anyone. I became the best at what I do and could not tell even my closest friends why I drove myself. I deserve recognition!"
The man called AndrE studied the woman across from him.
"Yes, you do, Frau Courtland. You of all people do. I'll call Bonn tonight.. .. Now, to more mundane matters, when will the ambassador return to Paris?"
"Tomorrow."
Drew dodged the hordes of parents and their offspring in the main mothers chasing after their children, who were chasing other children, laughing or screaming uncontrollably as they raced from one entertainment to the next. He kept shifting his concentration, studying every woman who appeared to be anywhere from early to late middle age, which was just about every female in the amusement park.
Sporadically, he raised the radio in his hand, as if expecting the short beeper signal to burst forth, telling him someone had seen something-seen Janine Climes Courtland. No sound came; he continued walking through the crisscrossing dirt paths, passing the large, malformed figures whose garish grins tempted the onlookers to pay their money and enter.
Claude Moreau chose the quieter sections on the premise that the ambassador's wife would instinctively avoid the more raucous areas, and where her next contact, if there was one, would more likely be situated. Therefore he roamed around the animal cages and the stalls of fortunetellers and souvenir hawkers, where T-shirts and insignia caps lay in rows under canopies. The chief of the [email protected] kept peering beyond the wares into the shadowed interiors, hoping to see men or a woman who did not belong there.
Eighteen minutes passed, and the results were negative.
Moreau's most-trusted subordinate, Jacques Bergeron, was annoyingly caught up in a rush toward a reopened Ferris wheel, which had had a temporary power failure, stranding a number of riders fifty feet in the air. As a result, the crowd racing to the gate included parents who were convinced they had sacrificed their children to the avarice of the park's owners, who were too cheap to pay their electric bill. At one point Jacques collided with a young child and was struck in the face by a mother's purse; reeling, he fell to the ground and was trampled. He lay there, his arms covering his head until the enthusiastic cum-hysterical onslaught passed him by. He, too, had seen no one resembling Madame Courtland.
Franqois, the driver who frankly was delighted with the English term "Wheels," sauntered past the ramshackle structures at the south entrance, where the signs were small and. subdued announcing the offices of first aid, complaints, lost and found, management (barely legible), and one larger billboard proclaiming the office of group parties. Suddenly Franqois heard the words, spoken by an obese woman addressing her companion, a gaunt, pinch- 5
faced female.
"What the hell is someone like that coming here for?
That pink dress could feed my family for a year!" said the heavy woman.
"They call it slumming, Charlotte. They think they're better than we are, so they have to prove it."
"It's shit, that's what it is. Did you see those la-di-da white shoes? Five thousand francs if a soul"
Franqois had no doubt whom they were talking about! The unit in the [email protected] had described the ambassador's wife as wearing a pale pink and white summer dress, obviously from one of the better fashion houses. The driver watched the two women, casually walking closer to them as they strolled down the wide dirt thoroughfare.
"I'll tell you what I think," said the thin woman with the perpetual pout.
"I'll bet my good-for-nothing husband