The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [91]
“What I would like from you,” he said, “is something from your government’s collection of booty that belonged personally to Adolf Hitler.”
Christopher saw a glint of humor in the calm depths of Dimpel’s eyes. “Have you any particular item in mind?” he asked.
“Something that he wore or a personal document. Not so large that it will not fit into a good-sized picture frame.”
“You’re going to hang it on your wall?”
Dimpel was grinning now. “Yes, in a gold frame with a light shining on it. After I’ve used it to wipe my behind.”
Dimpel picked up his rucksack, set his cap on his head, shook hands firmly, and left.
5
Christopher started south again at first light, and he was in Rome by early evening. The city was loud with the rough music of the bagpipers.
What had been snow in Zurich was rain in Rome. Christopher turned into the slow traffic along the Lungotevere; the windows of his car were steamed and the wipers could barely keep the windshield clear of the sluicing rain. There were two Vietnamese in his street, one at either end of the block in which his apartment building stood. One of them had draped a sodden newspaper over his head. A third Vietnamese sat in a black Citroen with Paris plates, smoking a cigarette. The eyes of all three men were fixed on the entrance to Christopher’s apartment, and even if they had been able to see into his car they would not have recognized him driving by in the snarl of rush-hour traffic.
ELEVEN
1
When Christopher showed Stavros Glavanis the room in which he would break Frankie Pigeon, the Greek ran his palm over its cold sweating walls and said, “If you’re going to do this to him, you may as well kill him.”
“You have to bring him here in perfect condition and get the information without putting a mark on him,” Christopher said.
“These methods are not your usual ones. Are you growing more realistic?”
“It’s a special case,” Christopher said. “This man can’t be moved by money, and he’s too afraid of his own people to talk, unless you make him more afraid of you.”
Glavanis looked around the bare circular room again. He shrugged. “It may be possible,” he said. “It depends on the man —it always depends on the man, and how quickly you get to know him.”
Glavanis had had trouble finding the second operative Christopher had asked for in his telegram, and more trouble getting out of Corsica during Christmas week, when the boats and planes were fully booked with foreigners on holiday. His standing instructions were to make contact on any even-numbered hour between six in the evening and midnight. Christopher had gone to the meeting place on the Capitoline Hill three times before Glavanis and his companion finally appeared.
By ten o’clock, Christopher was tired, and the wine he had drunk at dinner had given him a headache. At four minutes after the hour, he saw the tall figure of Glavanis, accompanied by a shorter man, climbing the steep street that led from the ruins of the Forum. Christopher, standing in the shadows, snapped his fingers twice and Glavanis came straight for the sound.
He embraced Christopher. “You remember Jan Eycken,” he said.
Christopher nodded and held out his hand. Eycken hesitated for a fraction of a second. He did not like to display his hands: he had lost both thumbs when he fell into the hands of an Algerian rebel unit in the Kabylia, and he had spent his life among simple men who hated deformity.
Glavanis and Eycken had been comrades in the Foreign Legion—Glavanis a sergeant-major, Eycken one of his corporals. Glavanis was amused by Eycken’s stolid Flemish self-absorption. Eycken had been a younger child than Glavanis during the Second World War, and he had seen action only in colonial wars. He thought Glavanis looked down on him because he had never killed a white man. Glavanis, wiping mirth from his eyes, had told Christopher that he planted this notion in Eycken’s mind because it made Eycken very brave when they went into action together.
Stavros