Topaz Page 5

  He set the trash basket at chairside, petted Picasso, and began going through the clippings with the dazzling speed of the highly trained eye. Most of them ended in the basket. A few were marked and kept.

  What did he look for? The awarding of a new government contract. A riot in Africa. Ship movements. Transfer of military personnel. Publication of a technical study. Anywhere and nowhere could be that clue to fill in a space of the great, shifting, eternal puzzle.

  Nicole’s bedroom door opened sharply. Robespierre was shooed in. “Do take him, André. He is being such a bother.”

  The animal flitted across the room and leaped on André’s lap. He flicked the dog off as though it were an unwanted fly. After a second and third rejection, Robespierre bore a destroyed expression and took his place on the floor beside the always serene Picasso. Picasso lifted his sad face, sniffed the perfume on the poodle and moved away, contemptuously.

  With a side glance André could see Nicole at the dressing-room table, pondering into the mirror in deep concern over a wrinkle that had not been there yesterday, and astutely applying the bottled and boxed beauty.

  Michele came in in her robe and fingered through her mother’s cosmetic assortment, and they chatted rapidly as the hour of truth approached.

  Matched book ends, André thought. Michele was her mother twenty years ago. He sipped his bourbon and watched them help each other in the hairdo ritual.

  That oaf, that clod, that stupid ass Tucker Brown IV would soon be clomping up the steps for his date. What made Tucker palatable was the hundred-million-dollar Brown shipping fortune. Yankee traders or some such. Tucker Brown IV, crewcut yachtsman, Princeton, State Department career man. If he were on my staff, André thought, I wouldn’t trust him to zip his own fly.

  But ... Michele loves him. Or rather, finds him decent enough to marry.

  If Tucker Brown IV applies himself diligently and the family donates enough money to enough political campaigns, he might make it as ambassador to some island kingdom in ten years or so.

  Now my Michele. There’s a catch! French! Impeccable taste. Magnificent hostess, multilingual. Chic! When this girl dresses!

  Maybe it’s not such a bad match. God forbid anyone think me a snob, André acquitted himself. Only, some times I wish Michele would find a boyfriend I could converse with. The terrible thought passed through him that Michele Devereaux would fall in love with a poor intellectual. Maybe I am a snob. A few years with Tucker, a child, a divorce and a good settlement! What the devil am I thinking of! After all, a man only wants what’s best for his daughter. What a little charmer.

  “André.”

  “Eh?”

  “Start to get ready, darling.”

  He went to the safe in the closet floor and deposited the contents of his briefcase, then made for the bathroom. A cordless razor, a new gadget, zipped over his face. So damned clever, these Americans, he thought. How in the hell do they manage to produce clods like Tucker Brown IV?

  He shaved in meditation of his own hot situation. Words with Ambassador René d’Arcy were becoming more and more acid. D’Arcy belonged to the President, General Pierre La Croix. Once he, André, had been a La Croix man, but he had joined that narrowing circle of independent thinkers in top diplomatic positions. André had stretched his pro-American attitudes to the limit and watched the constant slide of relations with France, helplessly.

  Yet André Devereaux held a position of unique strength within the Embassy. His integrity as a Frenchman was beyond question. Conversely, he was held in great esteem by the Americans. For SDECE to tamper with André’s office would be to further sour relations with the Americans. He still had great use to Paris as the honest broker.

  He entered the shower.

  The business with Kuznetov was again placing him squarely in the middle of an uneasy situation. How much longer could he go without reporting his knowledge of the defector to headquarters?

  Every time he had made the decision to send the cable to French Secret Service he remembered the Russian’s warning and he justified another delay.

  He emerged from the shower.

  His mind suddenly switched to that sound of music he usually heard when he entered the compound of Camp Patrick. Tamara Kuznetov. What a difference between daughters.

  The Russian girl was rough-hewn and without an ounce of sophistication. On the other hand, she desperately devoured books and lived deeply in her music and dreamed to be able to teach or to play in a symphony orchestra. Lack of nonsense in that girl. A life of constructive contribution. Perhaps his little Michele had much to learn from her.

  In the end, what would Michele’s life be? A good marriage to a wealthy man and to continue life in the world of drones. Lord help her if she had to do an honest day’s work. But I am to blame. Nicole and I. This is the way we created Michele. What is her sense of values? Where will her iron come from in the crisis?

  He grumbled to himself over the lack of assistance as he went through the awkward business of maneuvering into studs, links, black tie, suspenders, cummerbund, and the cumbersome device to keep one’s shirt from spilling out.

  Without benefit of a final mirror check, André placed on the big horn-rimmed reading glasses he used when his eyes were tired, and began going through the New York and Washington newspapers.

  In about an hour, his women were ready and presented themselves at his door simultaneously.

  “You are glorious. Both of you. How can I be so lucky?”

  He kissed his wife’s cheek, and he meant it. The front doorbell rang. That would be the idiot, Tucker Brown IV, in his punctual American way.

  André placed his arm through theirs, and they made off to the Legion of Honor dinner to preserve and defend the glory of France.

  12

  IT IS ARGUED THAT the great mansion housing the Embassy of France on Kalorama Road is even more splendid than the White House. This would be a difficult point to debate on this night of the occasion of the Legion of Honor dinner.

  A two-block-long trail of limousines was passed through the police cordons on to the semicircular driveway to deposit the most elegant cargo of the season before the massive iron grille doors.

  The most delicate of battles was to ensue in that war called protocol. Sides chosen, five hundred combatants. Two hundred Americans of the highest diplomatic, cultural, military, and political rank to be found in Washington versus two hundred of the cream of the French colonies of New York and Washington. A hundred more top-rank strays of other nations were there, along with the usual clever contingent of crashers whose sole diet consisted of what they could scrounge up at the nightly cocktail parties in Washington.

  France, indeed, was at subtle war this night to preserve, defend, and perpetuate the legends of French superiority, its army a few million Parisians, its banners a bit tattered and faded. What was missing in numbers was offset by the zeal and arrogance of the Parisians.

  André and Nicole swept into the grand foyer. At the far end of the great room, Ambassador and Madame René d’Arcy anchored the receiving line near a massive Louis XV chest. A string of aides hovered about smartly, plucking the very important from the receiving line and moving them effortlessly and directly to the Ambassador and his wife.

  Claire d’Arcy was fluid and French and beamed beneath high smartness. D’Arcy, a small, rotund, and lively person, greeted each guest with the fervor of finding a long-lost brother. They had created a meaningful protocol, far from many of the burdensome, stiff receptions of Washington. Yes, the French could show them a few things about protocol.

  Michele and Tucker Brown IV made for the relative quiet of the canopied balcony overlooking the sweeping lawns behind the embassy.

  Here, they fell into the first of the subdivisions of bores and snobs. This was the lowest group of the snob order. They were the pseudo sophisticates—the French food and wine snobs (Americans, for the most part).

  The duel opened with the ground rules that only French wine could b
e considered. It was all merely a case of which French wine was superior to which French wine.

  But Tucker Brown IV owned appalling bad taste. Unfortunately, he shot the same blanks he generally did in the State Department. Looking and acting much like an eager, uncoordinated Newfoundland puppy who tripped over its own outsized paws, Tucker made a feeble case on behalf of German wine. Then he compounded the blunder by the mention of a California wine! Noses sniffed contemptuously. Michele giggled. An unbearable silence was broken by another of the lowly order, a food snob.

  Tucker Brown IV then proceeded to put his other foot in his mouth. “There’s some really great French restaurants in New York, and for my dough, the Rive Gauche right here in Washington is tops.”

  “But, Tucker, it’s more than French. It’s run by a Corsican!”

  Laughter.

  Misfortune continued to plague Tucker Brown IV, who a little later found himself standing squarely in the middle of the French-language snobs. French, as spoken by Frenchmen, was the only language. The world standard for diplomacy and culture.

  So Tucker tried out a bit of butchered French. They grimaced in pain, then smiled indulgently.

  But then everyone corrupted French, the language of poets and of the greatest literature of man.

  André stifled his yawns as he drifted from sortie to sortie. The back-hacking this night was but a more elaborate showcasing of the kind of thing that went on endlessly. As usual, the Americans were getting mauled. After all, they were only trying desperately to imitate the French and were forced into playing a game the French had invented and mastered.

  Unfortunately for France, André thought, snobbery and conversation were not the things that made for world domination. As American domination became ever more apparent, French words grew ever more acid.

  The Americans were swamped in matters of art, literature, perfume. Paris was the hub of the universe, leather goods, materials, and fashions. France was the arbiter of man’s good taste, love songs, love-making, crystal, silver, and political aplomb.

  The French astutely avoided counterattacks in sports, education, science, production, democracy, and military strength, which indeed was a sore point with Frenchmen.

  The French used the word “pedantic” quite often to describe a number of things non-French. The Americans insisted Paris had the rudest, most self-centered, gouging citizenry in the world.

  André became hungry.

  He mounted the stairs to the grand dining room and pecked away at the banks of caviar, pâté de foie gras, salmon, cheese soufflé, truffles, feuilletée, remindful to him of waste. André, the tired man at the embassy, disdained a civil service in which half the time of a French official was spent at ceremonies and the other half at parties, and they weren’t the people’s servants, but rather their masters. He wanted to go home. There was a half-night’s work undone.

  The Ambassador wended his way to the grand foyer, walked up the staircase to the balcony. The orchestra sounded out for attention. Guests drifted in from the music room, the salons, from the terrace and lawns and dining room. Fat little René d’Arcy was framed between a tricolor and an immense portrait of President Pierre La Croix. He raised his glass.

  “I offer a toast to the oldest unbroken alliance in the Western world. To the unity of France and the United States.”

  After his oration he retreated to the Green Room, sanctum of the very special. Empire furnishings, upholstered in green silks, in Egyptian shapes, were topped with Napoleonic crowns. René d’Arcy commanded hushed awe as he went through his famed cigar-lighting ritual.

  A cigar was carried in with great pomp on a sterling-silver tray and its end nipped by a sterling-silver cutter. A servant held a candle in a sterling-silver holder. For a full five minutes d’Arcy passed the cigar over the flame from end to end, warming it ... just so. Without puffing, he darted the tip into the flame until it lit itself. A great “ah” arose around the Green Room for the masterful performance.

  Courvoisier Reserve, a hundred and fifty years old, was served, and those in the inner sanctum prevailed on d’Arcy to tell a few spicy French jokes and please them with his imitations of Churchill and Hitler.

  André walked out on the balcony with Mollie Spearman, once a crude semiprecious stone who had come from the West fifteen years earlier and acquired the finish of a polished gem. Mollie and André were each other’s kind of favorite people. Just a bit away from them Nicole was speaking to a younger military attaché of the Canadian Embassy.

  She was no beauty, his Nicole, but she made full use of what she had and any man would find her desirable. Nicole was poised and elegant and she flirted in measured terms.

  André wondered, as he always had, if she had lovers. It was part of the hurt inflicted by his own mother, a legacy of being orphaned that his father bore like an unhealed wound.

  It would be a small chore for him to really find out about Nicole’s fidelity but rather beneath his dignity. But where on God’s earth would this precarious road end for them?

  Would Nicole be seized by a desperation to prove her desirability, and thus fulfill his fantasy? He had tried so often to let her know she was loved but, somehow, Nicole never really listened or understood. Perhaps, as he told her, he was so obsessed with the ghost of his mother that he loved her and unconsciously rejected her at the same moment. He did not know.

  Marsh McKittrick came alongside him. He excused himself to Mollie Spearman.

  “Boris Kuznetov has had a heart attack. He’s at Bethesda Naval Hospital.”

  “Oh, dear God,” André sighed.

  “I’m heading there now with Mike. Follow us in fifteen minutes.”

  “Right.”

  In a moment Marsh McKittrick disappeared with Mike Nordstrom. Liz Nordstrom stood emptily by the main door watching them go.

  Now he would find Nicole and do the same. He asked Tucker Brown to see his wife home, gave his regrets to René d’Arcy, and followed the Americans to Bethesda.

  13

  ANDRÉ ENTERED THE HOSPITAL room and stood next to Marshall McKittrick and Nordstrom before the oxygen tent covering the body of Boris Kuznetov.

  The cragginess of the Russian’s face was rendered even more pronounced by his waxen stillness. The sounds were heard of the suffering for breath, the hiss of the respirator, the soft rubber steps of the nurse, and the intermittent weeping of Olga Kuznetov.

  Americans grit their teeth. The French wring their hands. Russians weep unabashedly. Olga Kuznetov’s flat face was wet with expended tears. She wrung her sopping handkerchief and rocked back and forth. Tamara stood above her mother, weeping too but quietly and glassy-eyed.

  “How bad is it?” André asked.

  “Bad,” Nordstrom answered.

  André took a step forward, and as he became fixed upon Kuznetov, he was suddenly consumed by fright. He saw a vision of himself lying on the bed, fighting for his own life. He heard the crying of Nicole and Michele. Yes, it would be like this ... even with Marsh and Mike in the room.

  It’s the end for all of us in this business, André thought. Who escapes? Would his end be in a prison in a strange land or in the gutter of an alley with a bullet ripping away the face? Or would it come from the black depression that forced so many of his colleagues to destroy themselves by their own hand? Or a sudden massive pain in the chest?

  What did Dr. Kaplan call it? Narcolepsy ...

  “See that Madame Kuznetov and her daughter are comfortable. Get them a room right here in the hospital. Tell her we’ll do everything in our power,” Nordstrom’s voice intoned. “I want six guards on him at all times, and inform me immediately if there are any changes in his condition.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  André did not feel Michael tap his shoulder. “We might as well go,” Michael said.

  André came out of it. They paid respects to the wife and started to leave.

  “Wait,” McKittrick said.

  Boris Kuznetov’s eyes fluttered open. He
stared at them, raised his hand feebly.

  “He’s in no condition to speak,” the doctor said.

  Kuznetov persisted.

  “Only a second, please,” the doctor warned.

  Through exhausting effort Boris made it clear it was André with whom he wanted to talk. André knelt beside the bed. The oxygen tent was lifted from him. He placed his ear close to the Russian’s lips.

  “Devereaux ...”

  “Yes?”

  “You must not tell Paris.”

  “Why?”

  “There is grave danger ... for France.”

  “What danger?”

  “Topaz ... Topaz ...”

  Kuznetov’s hand fell. He closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort.

  They walked the long corridor. “What did he say?” Nordstrom asked.

  “It made no sense,” André answered. “No sense at all.”

  14

  NICOLE WAS PROPPED UP directly in the middle of André’s bed. The gauntlet was down. Robespierre had his chin cradled on his mistress’s stomach, and his eyes followed André with fear and suspicion as he undressed.

  Nicole had had too much to drink, a habit she was picking up from the American women. American women drink too much, he sputtered under his breath. They have to in order to sweep aside the taboos imposed by Puritanism. Love is bad. Sex is evil. So drown it, in order to do the things a European woman comes to naturally and without all this sense of guilt.

  Once when Nicole got high on wine she was passionate. These days she was a bitch. Upper lip narrowed. Upper teeth bared. André undressed with deliberate slowness, letting Nicole stew, giving his teeth an extra long brushing, running the water at full blast.

  “Michele took a late plane back to New York tonight,” Nicole opened.

  “What for?”

  “She’s cramming for exams.”

  How logical women are. Michele never crammed for an exam in her life, and if it were necessary, by some odd chance, she could carry a book or two to Washington.