What We Become (52 page)

“Why did you kill them?”

Mostaza frowned uneasily, and the scar beneath his jaw seemed to deepen. He opened his mouth to say something unpleasant, but apparently thought better of it. He glanced at the bowl of his pipe, to make sure it was burning evenly, then looked at Tignanello's body on the floor.

“This isn't a novel.” His tone was almost patient. “And so I have no intention of explaining everything in the final chapter. You don't need to know what happened, and I don't have time to stand around telling spy stories. Tell me where the letters are and we can wash our hands of this.”

Max pointed at the dead body.

“Is that how you plan to wash your hands of me once you have them?”

Mostaza appeared to give the question some serious thought.

“You're right,” he agreed. “No one has given you any guarantees, of course. And I presume my word isn't good enough, is it?”

“You presume correctly.”

“Aha.”

Mostaza sucked thoughtfully on his pipe.

“I should set you straight on a few details regarding my résumé,” he said at last. “In fact, I don't work for the Spanish Republic, but for the government in Burgos. For the other side.”

He winked, roguishly, behind his spectacles. It was clear he was enjoying Max's discomfort.

“You could say,” he added, “it was a family affair.”

Max was still gazing at him, horrified.

“But they're Italians. Fascist agents. Your allies.”

“Look. It seems you're a little naïve. When you work at this level there are no alliances. Their bosses wanted the letters and so did mine. Jesus said we should be brothers, but he never said anything about cousins. I imagine my bosses consider these letters demanding a commission for selling aircraft a powerful ace up their sleeve. A way of having the Italians, or their foreign minister, by the balls.”

“Why didn't you simply ask Ferriol for them—he's their banker, isn't he?”

“I've no idea. They give me orders, not explanations. I expect Ferriol has his own plans. Maybe he was going to demand some other form of payment. From the Spanish and the Italians. He's a businessman, after all.”

“And what was that strange story about the boat?”

“The
Luciano Canfora
? . . . Unfinished business, which you helped resolve. It's true the captain and his chief engineer wanted to deliver the consignment to a Republican port. I persuaded them myself, posing as an agent of the Republic. We'd had our suspicions about them, and we were right. Afterward I used you to pass the information on to the Italians, who acted swiftly. The traitors were arrested, and the ship is now on its original course.”

Max pointed at Tignanello's body.

“And these two . . . was it necessary to kill them?”

“Technically, yes. I couldn't control this situation with three people involved, two of whom were professionals. I had no choice but to take some of you out.”

He took the pipe from his mouth. It seemed to have gone out. He turned it upside down and tapped the bowl gently against the table, emptying it. Then he took a last puff before putting it in the pocket not containing the pistol.

“Let's get this over with,” he said. “Give me the letters.”

“You've seen they aren't here.”

“And you've heard my side of the story.”

“So, where are they?”

It was absurd to go on refusing, Max realized. And dangerous. All he could do was try to gain more time.

“In a safe place.”

“Well, take me there.”

“And after that? . . . What will happen to me?”

“Nothing in particular.” Mostaza looked at him, as though offended by his misgivings. “Like I said, you go your way, I go mine. Game over.”

Max shuddered, vulnerable to the point of self-pity. For a moment his knees felt like jelly. He had deceived too many men and women in his life not to recognize the warning signals. He could see in Mostaza's eyes how precarious his future was.

“I don't trust your promises,” he protested feebly.

“It makes no difference, because you have no choice.” Mostaza patted the bulge in his jacket pocket, to remind Max of the pistol. “Even if you're convinced I'm going to kill you, it's up to you to decide whether I do it now or later . . . although I insist that isn't my intention. With the letters in my possession, there'd be no point. It would be an unnecessary act. Superfluous.”

“What about my money?”

Max was making a last desperate attempt to gain time. To draw
things out. But as far as Mostaza was concerned, the discussion was over.

“That's none of my business.” He picked up his hat and raincoat from a chair. “Let's go.”

Mostaza gave his pocket another pat as he motioned toward the door with his other hand. All of a sudden, he appeared tenser, more serious. Max went first, stepping over Tignanello and his pooled blood, and made his way along the corridor until he was standing next to Barbaresco's corpse. While he was reaching for the handle to open the door, Mostaza at the rear, Max took a last look at the glassy eyes and half-open mouth of the Italian, and was seized once more by that strange feeling of pity, of sympathy, which he had felt before. He'd grown fond of those two, he realized. Dripping wet dogs in the rain.

The door was stuck fast. Max gave it a tug, and the sudden movement, as it opened abruptly, caused him to stagger backward. Mostaza, who was behind him putting on his raincoat, also took a precautionary step back, one arm in his coat sleeve, his free hand half inside the pocket containing the pistol. As he did so, he trod in the semicongealed blood on the floor and lost his balance. Not completely: only a slight wobble as he tried to regain his footing. In that instant, Max realized with gloomy certainty that this was his only chance. In an act of blind desperation, he threw himself at Mostaza.

The two men slipped on the blood and fell to the floor. Max's first thought as he grappled Mostaza was to prevent him from taking out his pistol, but he quickly realized that his adversary was trying to reach for his knife. Fortunately, Mostaza's other arm was tangled up in the sleeve of his raincoat. Max made the most of this to gain a slight advantage by punching Mostaza repeatedly in the face, on his spectacles. They shattered with a crunch, eliciting a groan from Mostaza, who was clasping hold of Max as tightly as he could, trying to roll him over on his back. His skinny, wiry
body, only deceptively fragile, was in fact dangerously strong. That knife in his hands would be the equivalent of a death sentence. Max's punches were relatively well placed and he managed to fend off the attack. They continued to wrestle, Max attempting to hold his opponent down and punch him, while Mostaza fought to free his trapped arm, as the two of them slid around in Barbaresco's blood. Frantic, his strength beginning to ebb, aware that if and when Mostaza succeeded in freeing his other hand he could consider himself a dead man, Max's long-forgotten reflexes came to his aid: the street kid from Calle Vieytes and the soldier who had defended himself with a knife in the Foreign Legion's brothels. Things he had done or seen others do. And so, with all the strength he could muster, he jabbed his thumb in one of his enemy's eyes. As it plunged deep into the socket there was a soft squelch and a savage howl from Mostaza, who slackened his grip. Max attempted to sit up, but slipped over again in the blood. He kept on until he managed to sit astride Mostaza, who was squealing like an enraged animal. Then, using his right elbow as a weapon, Max began hitting his adversary in the head as hard as he could, until the pain in his elbow became unbearable, Mostaza stopped resisting, and his battered, broken face lolled to one side.

Finally, Max slumped, exhausted, to the floor. He lay still for a long while, trying to regain his strength, until in the end he felt himself slipping out of consciousness and everything around him went black. He passed out slowly, as if he were falling down a bottomless well. And when he came to, a square of dirty, gray light was seeping in through the tiny window in the hallway, announcing the dawn. He moved away from the lifeless body, and dragged himself out onto the landing. Behind him was a trail of his own blood, for he had (he realized, painfully groping his leg) a gash on one thigh, a hair's breadth from his femoral artery. Somehow, in the last instant, Fito Mostaza had managed to pull out his knife.

12

T
he Blue Train

I
T IS SIX
in the morning and the telephone in Max's room at the Hotel Vittoria rings for the second time in fifteen minutes. This makes him uneasy. The first time he picked up the receiver, there was no voice at the other end, only a silence followed by the click of the connection being broken. This time he lets the telephone ring until it goes quiet. He knows it isn't Mecha Inzunza, because they have agreed to keep their distance. They decided that last night, on the terrace of Il Fauno. The chess game had ended at ten-thirty. Soon after that, the Russians must have discovered the break-in, the hole cut in the glass door, and the rope dangling from the roof. And yet, sometime after eleven o'clock, when, having showered and changed his clothes, a nervous Max had walked through the garden toward Piazza Tasso, he saw no sign of any commotion in the building occupied by the Soviet delegation. Apart from a few lighted windows, all was seemingly calm. Pos
sibly Sokolov hadn't yet returned to his suite, he concluded, as he approached the main gate. Or (and this could prove more worrying than police cars parked outside) the Russians had decided to deal with the incident discreetly. In their own way.

Mecha was sitting at one of the far tables, her suede jacket draped over the back of her chair. Max went over and sat down next to her without saying a word. He ordered a Negroni and glanced about with an air of quiet satisfaction, avoiding Mecha's inquisitive gaze. His hair, still damp, was carefully combed, and a silk scarf showed beneath his open shirt collar, under his navy-blue blazer.

“Jorge won this afternoon,” she said after a few moments.

Max admired her composure.

“That's good news,” he said.

He turned to look at her, smiling as he did so, and Mecha guessed what that smile meant.

“You have it?” she said.

The question was rhetorical. He beamed. His lips hadn't displayed that look of triumph for years.

“Oh, darling,” she said.

The waiter arrived with his cocktail. Max took a sip, savoring it at length. A little heavy on the gin, he noticed contentedly. Just what he needed.

“How was it?” Mecha asked.

“Difficult.” He put his drink down on the table. “I told you. I'm too old for this kind of escapade.”

“But you did it all the same. You got the book.”

“Yes.”

She leaned over the table, eagerly.

“Where is it?”

“In a safe place, as we agreed.”

“Won't you tell me where?”

“Not yet. Just for a few hours, to be on the safe side.”

She looked at him intently, studying his response, and Max
knew what was going through her mind. He recognized the old, almost familiar look of distrust in her eyes. But it only lasted an instant. Then Mecha lowered her head, as though ashamed.

“You're right,” she admitted. “You shouldn't give it to me straightaway.”

“No. We spoke about it before. That's what we agreed.”

“Let's see how they respond.”

“I just walked past the apartment block. Everything seems quiet.”

“Perhaps they haven't found out yet.”

“I'm sure they have. I left enough evidence.”

She stirred uneasily.

“Did something go wrong?”

“I overestimated my strength,” he said simply. “Which forced me to improvise.”

He looked toward the main gates of the hotel, beyond the car and scooter headlights on Piazza Tasso. He imagined the Russians discovering what had happened, shocked at first, then angry. He took a few more sips of his drink to calm his nerves. It felt almost strange not to hear any police sirens.

“I almost got trapped in the room,” he admitted after a few moments. “Like a fool. Imagine if the Russians had come back to find me sitting there, waiting.”

“Can they identify you? You said you left evidence.”

“I didn't mean fingerprints or anything like that, only signs of a break-in: a broken window, a rope. . . . Even a blind man would know the moment he walked in. That's why I say they must have found out by now.”

He glanced about, uneasily. People had begun to leave, although a few of the tables were still occupied.

“It worries me that there's no movement,” he added. “No response, I mean. They could be watching you right now. And me.”

She looked around, frowning.

“There's no reason why they should connect us to the theft,” she concluded after a moment's reflection.

“You know they'll quickly put two and two together. And if they have found out about me, I'm in trouble.”

He was resting one hand on the table: bony, spotted with age. There were traces of mercurochrome on his knuckles and fingers, on the scratches from when he climbed up to the roof and shinnied down the rope to Sokolov's balcony. They still stung.

“Perhaps I should leave the hotel,” he said after a moment. “Make myself scarce for a while.”

“Do you know what, Max?” She ran her fingers gently over the red marks on his hands. “All this gives me a feeling of déjà vu. Of history repeating itself. Doesn't it you?”

Her tone was soft, infinitely tender. The lanterns on the terrace made her eyes shimmer. Max frowned, wistful.

“It's true,” he said. “At least in part.”

“If we could travel back in time, perhaps things would have been . . . I don't know. Different.”

“Things are never different. They're fated. The way they have to be.”

He called over the waiter and paid the bill. Then he stood up, to pull Mecha's chair out for her.

“That time in Nice . . .” she had started to say.

Max draped her jacket around her shoulders. As he withdrew his hands, he ran them over her arms for an instant, like a fleeting caress.

“Please don't talk about Nice,” he murmured to her in a way he hadn't spoken to a woman for a long time. “Not tonight. Not now.”

He was smiling as he spoke. And she smiled, too, as she turned to look at him.

“This is going to hurt,” Mecha said.

She poured a few drops of iodine tincture on the cut, and Max
felt as if she had placed a red-hot iron on his thigh. It stung like hell.

“That hurts,” he said.

“I warned you.”

She was sitting next to him, on the edge of a canvas-and-steel sofa in the villa at Antibes. She was barefoot and had on a long elegant robe, tied at the waist. A silk nightgown was visible where the robe fell open, revealing part of her naked legs. Her body gave off a pleasant odor, of recent slumber. She had been fast asleep when Max banged on the door, waking first the maid and then her. The maid was back in her room now, and he was lying on his back in a rather unbecoming position; trousers and underpants pulled down around his knees, exposing his manhood, and, at the top of his right thigh, the shallow gash a couple of inches long left by Mostaza's knife.

“Whoever did this, almost got you . . . Any deeper and you'd have bled to death.”

“I know.”

“Did he do that to your face, too?”

“He did.”

Max had studied himself in the mirror in his room at the Negresco (a black eye, a bloodied nose, and a broken lip) two hours earlier, when he stopped off there to clean up his wounds as best he could, take a couple Veramons, and pack in a hurry, before checking out and leaving a handsome tip. Then he had paused for a moment in the entrance, beneath the glass awning onto which the rain was still beating down, surveying the street apprehensively, on the lookout for any unusual movement beneath the street lamps illuminating the Promenade and the façades of the nearby hotels. Finally, calming himself, he put his luggage in the Peugeot, started the engine, and drove off into the night, the car's headlights lighting up the white-painted pines along the road to La Garoupe and Cap d'Antibes.

“Why did you come here?”

“I don't know. Or rather, I do . . . I needed time to rest. To think.”

Yes, that was the idea. There was a lot for him to think about. Whether or not Mostaza was dead, for example. Also, had he been acting alone, or did he have people out searching for Max at that very moment? And that went for the Italians, too. Immediate and future consequences, none of which, however hard he looked, offered any pleasant prospects. Added to that, the natural curiosity of the authorities when two (possibly three) bodies were found in the apartment on Rue Droite: two foreign secret services and the French police wondering who else was mixed up in all that. And, as if that weren't enough, how Tomás Ferriol would react when he discovered that Count Ciano's letters had been stolen.

“Why me?” asked Mecha. “Why come to my house?”

“You're the only person in Nice I can trust.”

“Are you wanted by the police?”

“No. Not for the moment, anyway. But the last thing on my mind tonight is the police.”

She was looking at him intently. Suspicious.

“What are they going to do to you? . . . And why?”

“It's not about that, it's about what I've done, and what they might think I've done. . . . I need to rest for a few hours. Treat this wound. Then I'll go. I don't want to cause you any trouble.”

She points coldly at his wound, at the iodine and bloodstains on the towel she spread out on the sofa before making Max lie down.

“You don't call it trouble to show up at my house in the middle of the night with a knife wound in your leg, scaring my maid half to death?”

“I've said I'll leave. As soon as I am able to think straight and decide where I'm going.”

“You haven't changed, have you? And I'm still a fool. The moment I saw you at Suzi Ferriol's house, I knew you were the same
Max as in Buenos Aires. Whose pearl necklace have you stolen this time?”

He put his hand on her arm. His facial expression, somewhere between sincere and helpless, was one of the most effective in his repertoire. Years of practice. Of success. With it he could have persuaded a hungry dog to part with a bone.

“Sometimes we pay for things we haven't done,” he said, holding her gaze.

“Damn you.” She shook his hand off her arm in a flash of anger. “I'm sure you pay very little. And that you've done almost everything.”

“One day I'll tell you about it. I promise.”

“There won't be another day, if I can help it.”

He held her wrist gently.

“Mecha . . .”

“Be quiet,” she said, freeing herself once more. “Let me finish doing this before I throw you out.”

She laid a piece of gauze over the wound, and as she did so her fingers brushed his thigh. He felt her warm touch on his skin, and despite the wound, his body reacted to her flesh with its odor of recent slumber and still-warm sheets. Motionless, perched on the sofa, her expression as calm as if she were studying something unrelated to either of them, Mecha raised her eyes until they met those of Max.

Then she untied her robe, lifted her silk nightgown, and sat astride him.

“Mr. Costa?”

A stranger is standing in the doorway to his room at the Hotel Vittoria. Another, out in the hall. The old alarm bells start ringing before he is able to assess the real danger. With the resignation of someone who has been in similar situations before, Max nods
without uttering a word. He notices the man casually take a step forward to prevent him from closing the door again. And yet he has no intention of closing it. He knows that would be futile.

“Are you alone?”

A thick, foreign accent. He's not a policeman. Or at least (Max swiftly considers the pros and cons) not an Italian policeman. The man in the doorway is no longer in the doorway, he is inside the room. He enters with ease, glancing about while the man in the corridor stays where he is. The man who has entered is tall, with lank, brown hair. He has large hands, and his nails are chewed and dirty. On his little finger he wears a thick gold ring.

“What do you want?” asks Max at last.