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