The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [89]
It all happened in a flash. The glass door slid open, Joe came out of the arrivals area, Georg threw the cans. His aim was good: a few of them hit Joe, the others landed close by him. Joe looked at the cans, and then in the direction from which they had been flung.
The bullet hit Joe in the forehead. Georg saw him fall, saw Buchanan turn and aim again. So it’s with both hands, Georg thought, you shoot with both hands. He saw Buchanan’s face, his eyes, his tight lips, the gun’s muzzle. He wanted to duck, but the shot rang out.
People screamed and ran for cover. Buchanan shouted something, Georg couldn’t hear what. The professor, who had been standing above him on the escalator, fell onto him and slid down, collapsing onto a woman who was cowering next to Georg. Georg heard the rasping horror of her shrieks close to his ear.
Then he saw the briefcase, which had slipped out of the professor’s hand. The escalator came to a halt. Georg automatically reached for the briefcase and scurried doggedly, hunched forward, up the escalator. He stepped on hands, pushed people out of the way, and at the top of the escalator elbowed his way through the crowd that had gathered to see what was going on downstairs. All these people had been near the atrium and heard the shots and screams. Those who were farther back hadn’t noticed anything, and Georg casually walked past them and out of the building.
He drove back to San Francisco. He parked at the end of Twenty-fourth Street, took the briefcase out of the car, and slowly walked to a bench near the waterfront. He sat down and put the briefcase at his feet. It was low tide, and rocks, car tires, and a refrigerator were looming out of the water.
He sat there for a long time, watching the sun’s rays dancing on the waves. His mind was empty. Of course, he finally looked into the briefcase. And later, as Jill was asleep next to him, he turned on a table lamp and opened the briefcase again. It didn’t contain two million. It didn’t even contain one. He counted $382,460. There was a disarray of hundred-dollar bills mixed in with fifties and twenties, and between them the tie with the garden gnomes, tied and ready to be slipped on.
The following day all the newspapers featured the shooting at the airport. Georg read that Townsend Enterprises had been involved in industrial espionage for the Russians at Gorgefield Aircraft, and that Benton and a Russian agent had fallen into a trap set by Gorgefield Aircraft. Benton had attempted to shoot his way out, and had been shot dead by Buchanan. The Russian agent had been hospitalized, critically wounded. There was a picture of Richard D. Buchanan Jr., security adviser at Gorgefield, looking grim.
Georg read the newspaper the following morning at the airport. He was wearing sunglasses, and Jill was in the carrier sling. Nobody was paying particular attention. It was shortly before ten. The Pan Am flight from New York was scheduled to land soon. Fran had said that she would pick up Jill and take the one-thirty flight back to New York.
“Come and stay forever,” Georg had told her.
She had laughed, but then had asked him what the weather was like. “Does it get cool there in the evenings?”
Epilogue
THEY DROVE SOUTH AND TOOK A FLIGHT from Mexico to Madrid, and from Madrid to Lisbon. Today they live in a house by the sea. Jill is five, and Fran sometimes tells her a bedtime story about a crazy guy who once upon a time ran off to San Francisco with her when she was a baby. They have two more children. Georg is translating again, because he couldn’t go on doing nothing.
“Why didn’t you write your story yourself?” I asked Georg, as we were sitting beneath the stars on his terrace above the sea. He had read my manuscript and was quibbling over this or that detail.
“Fran didn’t want me to. This might sound strange, but since San Francisco we never talk about any of this. Fran won