Magic Terror. Peter Straub

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СКАЧАТЬ put his cases on the bed, opened the shutters, and leaned out of the window, as if looking for the memory that had escaped him. The road sloped past the auberge and continued uphill through the tiny center of the village. On the covered terrace of the cement-block building directly opposite, a woman in a sweater sat behind a cash register at a display case filled with what a sign called ‘regional delicacies’. Beyond, green fields stretched out toward the wooded mountains. At almost exactly the point where someone would stop entering Montory and start leaving it, the red enclosure of the telephone booth he had been told to use stood against a gray stone wall.

      The innkeeper’s friends staggered into the parking lot and left in a mud-spattered old Renault. A delivery truck with the word Comet stenciled on a side panel pulled in and came to a halt in front of the old stable doors. A man in a blue work suit climbed out, opened the back of the truck, pulled down a burlap sack from a neat pile, and set it down inside the kitchen. A blond woman in her fifties wearing a white apron emerged from the interior and tugged out the next sack. She wobbled backward beneath its weight, recovered, and carried it inside. The girl in the blue dress sauntered into view and leaned against the doorway a foot or two from where the delivery man was heaving his second sack onto the first. Brown dust puffed out from between the sacks. As the man straightened up, he gave her a look of straightforward appraisal. The dress was stretched tight across her breasts and hips, and her face had a coarse, vibrant prettiness entirely at odds with the bored contempt of her expression. She responded to his greeting with a few grudging words. The woman in the apron came out again and pointed to the sacks on the floor. The girl shrugged. The delivery man executed a mocking bow. The girl bent down, slid her forearms beneath the sacks, lifted them waist-high, and carried them deeper into the kitchen.

      Impressed, N turned around and took in yellowish-white walls, a double bed that would prove too short, an old television set, a nightstand with a reading lamp, and a rotary phone. Framed embroidery above the bed advised him that eating well would lead to a long life. He pulled the carry-on toward him and began to hang up his clothes, meticulously refolding the sheets of tissue with which he had protected his suits and jackets.

      A short time later, he came out into the parking lot holding the computer bag. Visible through the opening, the girl in the blue dress and another woman in her twenties, with stiff fair hair fanning out above a puggish face, a watermelon belly, and enormous thighs bulging from her shorts, were cutting up greens on the chopping block with fast, short downstrokes of their knives. The girl lifted her head and gazed at him. He said ‘Bon soir.’ Her smile put a youthful bounce in his stride.

      The telephone booth stood at the intersection of the road passing through the village and another that dipped downhill and flattened out across the fields on its way deeper into the Pyrenees. N pushed tokens into the slot and dialed a number in Paris. When the number rang twice, he hung up. Several minutes later, the telephone trilled, and he picked up the receiver.

      An American voice said, ‘So we had a little hang-up, did we?’

      ‘Took me a while to find the place,’ he said.

      ‘You needum Injun guide, findum trail heap fast.’ The contact frequently pretended to be an American Indian. ‘Get the package all right?’

      ‘Yes,’ N said. ‘It’s funny, but I have the feeling I was here before.’

      ‘You’ve been everywhere, old buddy. You’re a grand old man. You’re a star.’

      ‘In his last performance.’

      ‘Written in stone. Straight from Big Chief.’

      ‘If I get any trouble, I can cause a lot more.’

      ‘Come on,’ said the contact. N had a detailed but entirely speculative image of the man’s flat, round face, smudgy glasses, and furzy hair. ‘You’re our best guy. Don’t you think they’re grateful? Pretty soon, they’re going to have to start using Japanese. Russians. Imagine how they feel about that.’

      ‘Why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do, so I can do what I’m supposed to do?’

      N sat outside the café tabac on the Place du Marche in Mauléon with a nearly empty demitasse of espresso by his elbow and a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in near-mint condition before him, watching lights go on and off in a building on the other side of the arcaded square. He had used the telephone shower in his room’s flimsy bathtub and shaved at the flimsy sink, had dressed in a lightweight wool suit and his raincoat, and, with his laptop case upright on the next chair, he resembled a traveling businessman. The two elderly waiters had retired inside the lighted café, where a few patrons huddled at the bar. During the hour and a half N had been sitting beneath the umbrellas, a provincial French couple had taken a table to devour steak and pommes frites while consulting their guidebooks, and a feral-looking boy with long, dirty-blond hair had downed three beers. During a brief rain shower, a lone Japanese man had trotted in, wiped down his cameras and his forehead, and finally managed to communicate his desire for a beef stew and a glass of wine. Alone again, N was beginning to wish that he had eaten more than his simple meal of cheese and bread, but it was too late to place another order. The subject, a retired politician named Daniel Hubert with a local antiques business and a covert sideline in the arms trade, had darkened his shop at the hour N had been told he would do so. A light had gone on in the living room of his apartment on the next floor and then, a few minutes later, in his bedroom suite on the floor above that. This was all according to pattern.

      ‘According to the field team, he’s about to move up into the big time,’ his contact had said. ‘They think it’ll be either tonight or tomorrow night. What happens is, he closes up shop and goes upstairs to get ready. You’ll see the lights go on as he goes toward his bedroom. If you see a light in the top floor, that’s his office, he’s making sure everything’s in place and ready to go. Paleface tense, Paleface know him moving out of his league. He’s got South Americans on one end, ragheads on the other. Once he gets off the phone, he’ll go downstairs, leave through the door next to the shop, get in his car. Gray Mercedes four-door with fuck-you plates from being Big Heap Deal in government. He’ll go to a restaurant way up in the mountains. He uses three different places, and we never know which one it’s going to be. Pick your spot, nice clean job, get back to me later. Then put it to some mademoiselle – have yourself a ball.’

      ‘What about the others?’

      ‘Hey, we love the ragheads, you kidding? They’re customers. These guys travel with a million in cash, we worship the camel dung they walk on.’

      The lights at the top of the house stayed on. A light went on, then off, in the bedroom. With a tremendous roar, a motorcycle raced past. The wild-looking boy who had been at the café glanced at N before leaning sideways and disappearing through the arcade and around the corner. One of the weary waiters appeared beside him, and N placed a bill on the saucer. When he looked back at the building, the office and bedroom lights had been turned off, and the living room lights were on. Then they turned off. N stood up and walked to his car. In a sudden spill of the light from the entry, a trim silver-haired man in a black blazer and gray slacks stepped out beneath the arcade and held the door for a completely unexpected party, a tall blond woman in jeans and a black leather jacket. She went through one of the arches and stood at the passenger door of a long Mercedes while M. Hubert locked the door. Frustrated and angry, N pulled out of his parking spot and waited at the bottom of the square until they had driven away.

      They did this more than they ever admitted. One time in four, the field teams left something out. He had to cover for their mistakes and take the fall for any screwups. Now they were going two for two – the team in Singapore had failed to learn that his subject always used two bodyguards, one who traveled in a separate СКАЧАТЬ