The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [50]
“No, I’m not saying that. But in Cucuron they threatened me, followed me, and beat me up, and here they’ve been shadowing me. There’s no rhyme or reason for all this, except that it must be the same Polish or Russian secret service. And the fellow who’s been following me goes to work every morning and then returns there in the evening after his day of shadowing.”
“Your spaghetti’s getting cold.”
He pulled the plate toward him and began to eat. “It’s already cold.”
She had finished eating. “So you’re asking me how you should go looking for Françoise because I live in New York and might have some ideas about how to find someone in this city. Good, I’ll share my ideas with you. But whether you like it or not, I’ll also give you a piece of my mind about the story you’ve just told me. First, if you believe your girlfriend is in the clutches of an Eastern Bloc secret service and that you can free her on your own, that’s pure nonsense. If she’s in anybody’s clutches, then the CIA would do a far better job at freeing her. If she isn’t going to the CIA herself, then it’s because she can’t or doesn’t want to be freed. Second, you should go to the CIA too. I don’t know what your dealings with the KGB are, but you should have seen your face when you told me about how they beat you up. Do you want to hit back at them? Do you want to blackmail them into returning your girlfriend to you? Do you want compensation for being beaten up? I imagine these secret services are never worth the money put into them, but if they couldn’t handle someone like you, nobody would invest a cent in them. I’ve just tied in my third point with my second one, but that doesn’t matter. To go to the CIA, but also to leave things as they are, wouldn’t be a bad idea. I like that neighborhood, and it gets to me to hear about a KGB office there. My favorite shops are there and a bunch of galleries are not too far away; there’s a nice new restaurant I like, and then the KGB moves in? I don’t like that! Don’t you feel the same way?”
“Look, Helen, these people have finished me off. They used my love, my abilities, destroyed my life in Cucuron, and beat me up. They instigated a car crash that killed a man. They shot my cats.”
“They did what?”
Georg told her. “Perhaps that’s how they threaten the free world. I don’t mean by instigating car crashes and shooting cats, but by manipulating people. In which case my revenge will have something to do with the worldwide battle between good and evil. But that doesn’t affect me, and I don’t care if they’ve set up shop near Union Square or Moscow or Cadenet—I don’t care a bit. I don’t want to let them get away with what they did to me. I want money from them, even if it won’t bring back my cats or Maurin, whom I didn’t particularly like, but he wasn’t a bad guy and never did me any harm. I want money, because they made my life miserable, and because I don’t want to continue living in misery. And also because it will be a defeat for them.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand you. But, okay: I promised you some ideas. You have that picture of Françoise, right? So I would go to the foreign bookstores, the French and Polish or Russian ones. I don’t know where they are, but I know they exist. I’d also go to libraries with foreign collections. I would go to the restaurants near that office. Above all: since she was in that workshop at the cathedral, she will have lived near here. If she knows French and Polish so well, she will have studied them—probably at Columbia. I’d ask around in the French and Russian departments.”
“Do you have any colleagues there?”
“You can give me a picture of her, and I’ll ask around.” Helen put the picture in her bag, shaking her head. “And when you have your money and your girl—are you going to expose those secret-service people?”
“Expose them? But that would only get them extradited. There was this one