Beggarman, Thief (20 page)

“You sound more like a book than ever,” he said. “Why don’t you just get it out of the library and I’ll read it myself.”

Monika ignored his gibe. “What we have to do,” she went on, “is show that it’s vulnerable as well as evil.”

“How do you plan to do that with a few crazy gangsters?”

“Don’t use that word,” she said warningly.

“Whatever you want to call them. Gunmen. Assassins. Whatever.”

“Castro did it in Cuba with eighteen men.”

“America’s not Cuba,” he said. “And neither is Europe.”

“They’re near enough. Both of them. The attacks will multiply. The men in power will get uneasy, uncertain, finally frightened. They’ll act out of fear, make one mistake after another, each one worse than the last. They’ll apply pressure. They’ll make disastrous concessions which will only make people realize that they were close to defeat and only inspire more incidents, more cracks in the walls.”

“Oh,” he said, “turn off the record, will you?”

“A bank president will be assassinated,” she chanted, rapt in her vision, “an ambassador kidnapped, a strike paralyze a country, money lose its value. They won’t know where the next blow is coming from, just that there will be a next blow. The pressure will build up, until the whole thing explodes. It won’t take armies.… Just a few dedicated people …”

“Like you?” he said.

“Like me,” she said defiantly.

“And if you succeed, then what?” he said. “Russia takes the whole pot. Is that what you want?”

“Russia’s time will come,” she said. “Don’t think I’m fool enough to want
that.”

“What
do
you want, then?”

“I want the world to stop being poisoned, stop being headed to extinction, one way or another. I want to stop the warriors we have now, the spies, the nuclear bombers, the bribed politicians, the killing for profit.… People are suffering and I want them to know who’s making them suffer and what they’re getting out of it.”

“All right,” he said, “that’s all very admirable. But let’s speak practically. Supposing I get you the truck, supposing you put your hands on a few grenades, plastic, guns. Just what, specifically, are you going to do with them?”

“Specifically,” she said, “we are planning to blow in the windows of a bank here in Brussels, get some explosive inside the Spanish embassy, wipe out a judge in Germany who’s the biggest pig on the Continent. I can’t tell you more than that. For your own sake.”

“You’re ready to do a lot of things for my sake, aren’t you?” he said. He bowed sardonically. “I thank you, my mother thanks you, my colonel thanks you.”

“Don’t be flip,” she said coldly. “Don’t ever be flip with me again.”

“You sound as though you’re ready to shoot me right now, dear little gunlady,” he said, mocking her, pushing himself to courage, although he was shivering again, sweater and all.

“I’ve never shot anybody,” she said. “And don’t propose to. That is not my job. And if your scruples are so delicate, perhaps you’d like to hear that we plan to operate in such a way here in Belgium that nobody will get killed. What we do is merely unsettle, warn, symbolize.”

“That’s Belgium,” he said. “What about other places?”

“That doesn’t concern you,” she said. “You don’t have to know anything about it. Later on, if you are convinced and you want to take a more active part, you will be trained, you will be in on the discussions. Right now, all you are to do is go to the bank and cash your uncle’s check and make a truck available for a few hours one night. Christ,” she said fiercely, “it’s nothing new to you, with your bribes—don’t think I don’t know how you live so high on a sergeant’s pay—with your black market gasoline.…”

“My God, Monika,” he said, “do you mean to say you can’t tell the difference between a little petty larceny and what you’re asking me to do?”

“Yes,” she said. “One is cheap and distasteful and the other is noble. You’ve been leading your life in a trance. You don’t
like
what you are, you despise everybody around you, I’ve heard you talk about your family, your mother, your father, your uncle, the animals you work with … Don’t deny it.” She put up her hand to stop him as he tried to speak. “You’ve kept everything narrow, inside yourself. Nobody’s challenged you to face yourself, open up, to see what it all means. Well, I’m challenging you now.”

“And hinting that something very nasty will happen to me if I don’t do as you want,” he said.

“That’s the way it goes, laddy,” she said. “Think over what I’ve just said as you work this morning.”

“I’ll do just that.” He stood up. “I’ve got to get to the office.”

“I’ll be waiting for you at lunchtime,” she said.

“I bet you will,” he said, as he went out the door.

The morning in the office passed for him in a blur. As he checked out orders, requests, manifests, operation reports, he made dozens of decisions, each one over and over again, each one discarded, the next one reached and discarded in turn. Three times he picked up the phone to call the Colonel, spill everything, ask him for advice, help, then put the phone down. He looked up the schedule of the planes flying out of Brussels to New York, decided to go to the bank, cash his uncle’s check and get on a plane that morning. He could go to the CIA in Washington, explain his predicament, get Monika put behind bars, be something of a secret hero in those secret corridors. Or would he? Would those men, deft in murder and complicated underground maneuvers and the overthrow of governments, congratulate him and secretly, in their own style, scorn him for his cowardice? Or even worse, turn him into a double agent, order him back to join whatever band Monika belonged to, tell him to report weekly on their doings? Did he want Monika behind bars? Even that morning, he could not honestly tell himself that he didn’t love her. Love? There was a word. Most women bored him. Usually he made an excuse, after copulation, to jump out of bed and go home. With Monika the night’s entwining could never be called copulation. It was absolute delight. To put it coarsely, he told himself, I can come five times a night with her and look forward eagerly to seeing her naked and rosy in bed at lunchtime.

He didn’t want to be killed. He knew that, just as he knew he didn’t want to give up Monika. But there was something titillating, deeply exciting, about the thought that he was daring enough to make love to a woman, make her gasp in pleasure and pain, at six in the morning and know that she was ready to order his execution at noon.

What would it be like to say to her, “I’m with you”? To slide in and out of shadows? To hear an explosion somewhere nearby while he was playing tennis at the immaculate club with the Colonel and know that he had scheduled it? To pass a bank on whose board his Uncle Rudolph sat and stealthily deposit a bomb that would explode before the bank opened its doors in the morning? To meet fanatics, who flitted from one country to another, who would be heroes in the history books, perhaps, a century from now, who killed with poison, with their bare hands, who could teach him their mysteries, who could make him forget he was only five feet six inches tall?

In the end, he did not call the Colonel, he did not cash the check, he made no arrangements at the motor pool, he did not go out to the airport.

What he did was drift, dazed, through the morning and when the Colonel called and said there was a game on at five-thirty that afternoon, he said, “Yes, sir, I’ll be there,” although he felt that there was a good chance he’d be dead by then.

She was waiting for him when he came out of the office. He was relieved that she had combed her hair, because the other men streaming past to go to lunch all looked at them speculatively, leers suppressed, mostly because of his rank, and he didn’t like the idea of their thinking he consorted with a slob.

“Well?” she said.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said.

He took her to a good restaurant, where he knew the other men who wanted a change from the food in the Army mess were not likely to go. He wanted the reassurance of crisp tablecloths, flowers on the tables, attentive waiters, a place where there was no suggestion of the world tottering, desperate plotters, crumbling pyramids. He ordered for them both. She pretended not to be interested in what she ate and couldn’t bother with the menu. Meanly, knowing at least that much about her, he understood why she tossed the menu aside. She had to put on thick glasses to read and was vain enough not to wish to be seen in public with them on. But when the food came she ate heartily, more than he did. He wondered how she kept her figure.

They ate quietly, talking politely about the weather, a conference that was to start tomorrow at which she was to act as translator, about his date for tennis with the Colonel at five-thirty, about a play that was coming to Brussels that she wanted to see. There was no reference to what had passed between them that morning until the coffee came. Then she said, “Well, what have you decided?”

“Nothing,” he said. Even in the overheated, cosy restaurant he felt cold again. “I sent the check back to my uncle this morning.”

She smiled coldly. “That’s a decision, isn’t it?”

“Partially,” he said. He was lying. The check was still in his wallet. He hadn’t known he was going to say it. It had come out mechanically, as though something had pushed a lever in his brain. But even as he said it, he knew he
was
going to mail the check back, with thanks, explaining to his uncle that his finances had taken a turn for the better and there was no need at the moment for help. It would prove useful later on when he really needed something from Uncle Rudolph.

“All right,” she said calmly, “if you were afraid that the money could be traced, I understand.” She shrugged. “It’s not too important. We’ll find the money someplace else. But how about the truck?”

“I haven’t done anything about it.”

“You have all afternoon.”

“No, I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“We can handle that, too, I suppose,” she said. “All you have to do is look the other way.”

“I’m not going to do that, either,” he said. “I have a lot of thinking to do before I decide one way or another. If your friends want to kill me,” he said harshly, but keeping his voice low, because he saw their waiter approaching with more coffee, “tell them that I’ll be armed.” He had had one morning’s practice with a .45, could take it apart and reassemble it, but had had a very low score when he had fired at a target for the record. Gunfight at the Brussels OK Corral, he thought. Who was it—John Wayne? What would John Wayne have done today? He giggled.

“What’re you laughing about?” she asked sharply.

“I happened to think of a movie I once saw,” he said.

“Yes, please,” she said in French to the waiter who was standing over her with the silver coffeepot. The waiter filled both their cups.

After the waiter had left, she smiled at him strangely. “You don’t have to pack a gun. Nobody’s going to shoot you. You’re not worth a bullet.”

“That’s nice to hear,” he said.

“Does
anything
ever make an impression on you, touch you?”

“I’ll make out a list,” he said, “and give it to you the next time we meet. If we meet.”

“We’ll meet,” she said.

“When are you moving out of the apartment?” he asked.

She looked at him in surprise. He couldn’t tell whether the surprise was real or feigned. “I hadn’t intended to move out. Do you want me to move out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But after today …”

“For the time being,” she said, “let’s forget today. I like living with you. I’ve found that politics has nothing to do with sex. Maybe with other people, but not with me. I adore going to bed with you. I haven’t had much luck in bed with other men. The orgasms are few and far between on the New Left—at least for me—and in this day and age ladies have been taught that orgasms are a lady’s God-given right. You’re the answer to a maiden’s prayer for that, darling, if you don’t mind my being a little vulgar. At least for this particular maiden. And I like good dinners, which you are obliging enough to supply. So—” She lit a cigarette. She smoked incessantly and the ashtrays in the apartment were always piled with butts. It irritated him, as he did not smoke and took seriously the warnings of the magazine articles about mortality rates for smokers. But, he supposed, you couldn’t expect a terrorist who was constantly on the lookout for the police or execution squads to worry about dying from cancer of the lungs at the age of sixty. “So—” she said, exhaling smoke through her nostrils. “I’ll divide my life, while it lasts, into compartments. You for sex and lobster and pâté de foie gras, and others for less serious occupations, like shooting German judges. Aren’t you glad I’m such a sensible girl?”

She’s cutting me to pieces, he thought, little jagged pieces. “I’m not glad about anything,” he said.

“Don’t look so mournful, laddy,” she said. “Everybody to his or her own talents. And now, I have most of the afternoon off. Can you sneak away for an hour or two?”

“Yes.” He had long ago perfected a system of checking in and out of the office without being noticed.

“Good.” She patted his hand. “Let’s go home and get into bed and have a perfectly delicious afternoon fuck.”

Furious with himself for not being able to stand up, throw a bill on the table for the check and stalk out of the restaurant, he said, “I have to go back to the office for ten minutes. I’ll meet you home.”

“I can’t wait.” She smiled at him, her large blue eyes lighting up her Bavarian-Trinity face.

CHAPTER 2