Etchebar

Hannah Stern sat at a cafmousse, to the accompaniment of a litany of bai… passo… passo… alla Jainkoa!… passo… alla Jainkoa… this last phrase passing through all conceivable permutations of stress and accent as the players bluffed, signaled, lied, and called upon God to witness this shit they had been dealt, or to punish this fool of a partner with whom God had punished them.

For the last seven hours, Hannah Stern had alternated between clawing through nightmare reality and floating upon escapist fantasy, between confusion and vertigo. She was stunned by emotional shock, spiritually evacuated. And now, teetering on the verge of nervous disintegration, she felt infinitely calm… even a little sleepy.

The real, the unreal; the important, the insignificant; the Now, the Then; the cool of her arcade, the rippling heat of the empty public square; these voices chanting in Europe’s most ancient language… it was all indifferently tangled. It was all happening to someone else, someone for whom she felt great pity and sympathy, but whom she could not help. Someone past help.

After the massacre in Rome International, she had somehow got all the way from Italy to this caf

First there had been terror and confusion at seeing her comrades shot down, neurasthenic incredulity during which she stood frozen as people rushed past her, knocking against her. More gunshots. Loud wailing from the family of Italians who had been awaiting a relative. Then panic clutched her; she walked blindly ahead, toward the main entrance of the terminal, toward the sunlight. She was breathing orally, shallow pants. Policemen rushed past her. She told herself to keep walking. Then she realized that the muscles in the small of her back were knotted painfully in anticipation of the bullet that never came. She passed an old man with a white goatee, sitting on the floor with his legs straight out before him, like a child at play. She could see no wound, but the pool of dark blood in which he sat was growing slowly wider. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked up at her interrogatively. She couldn’t make herself stop. Their eyes locked together as she walked by. She muttered stupidly, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

A fat woman in the group of waiting relatives was hysterical, wailing and choking. More attention was being paid to her than to the fallen members of the family. She was, after all, Mama.

Over the confusion, the running and shouting, a calm, singsong voice announced the first call for passengers on Air France flight 470 for Toulouse, Tarbes, and Pau. The recorded voice was ignorant of the chaos beneath its loudspeakers. When the announcement was repeated in French, the last fragment stuck to Hannah’s consciousness. Gate Eleven. Gate Eleven.

The stewardess reminded Hannah to put up her seat back. “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” A minute later, on her return down the aisle, the hostess reminded her to buckle her seat belt. “What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.”

The plane rose into thin cloud, then into crisp infinite blue. The drone of engines; the vibration of the fuselage. Hannah shivered with vulnerability and aloneness. There was a middle-aged man seated beside her, reading a magazine. From time to time his eyes slipped over the top of the page and glanced quickly at her suntanned legs below the khaki shorts. She could feel his eyes on her, and she buttoned one of the top two buttons of her shirt. The man smiled and cleared his throat. He was going to speak to her! The stupid son of a bitch was going to try to pick her up! My God!

And suddenly she was sick.

She made it to the toilet, where she knelt in the cramped space and vomited into the bowl. When she emerged, pale and fragile, the imprint of floor tile on her knees, the stewardess was solicitous but slightly superior, imagining that a short flight like this had made her airsick.

The plane banked on its approach to Pau, and Hannah looked out the window at the panorama of the Pyrenees, snow-tipped and sharp in the crystalline air, like a sea of whitecaps frozen in midstorm. Beautiful and awful.

Somewhere there, at the Basque end of the range, Nicholai Hel lived. If she could only get to Mr. Hel…

It was not until she was out of the terminal and standing in the chill sunlight of the Pyrenees that it occurred to her that she had no money. Avrim had carried all their money. She would have to hitchhike, and she didn’t know the route. Well, she could ask the drivers. She knew that she would have no trouble getting rides. When you’re pretty and young… and big-busted…

Her first ride took her into Pau, and the driver offered to find her a place to stay for the night. Instead, she talked him into taking her to the outskirts and directing her to Tardets. It must have been a hard car to shift, because his hand twice slipped off the lever and brushed her leg.

She got her next ride almost immediately. No, he wasn’t going to Tardets. Only as far as Ol

One more car, one more suggestive driver, and Hannah reached the little village of Tardets, where she sought further directions at the caflangue d’oc with heavy overlays of Soultine Basque in which une petite cuill has eight syllables.

“What are you looking for?” the caf

“I’m trying to find the Ch

The proprietor frowned, squinted at the arches overhead, and scratched with one finger under the beret that Basque men take off only in bed, in coffin, or when adjudicating the game of rebot. No, he did not believe he had ever heard the name. Hel, you say? (He could pronounce the h because it is a Basque sound.) Perhaps his wife knew. He would ask. Would the Mademoiselle take something while she waited? She ordered coffee which came, thick, bitter, and often reheated, in a tin pot half the weight of which was tinker’s solder, but which leaked nevertheless. The proprietor seemed to regret the leak, but to accept it with heavy fatalism. He hoped the coffee that dripped on her leg had not burned her. It was not hot enough to burn? Good. Good. He disappeared into the back of the cafr M. Hel.

And that had been fifteen minutes ago.

Hannah’s eyes dilated painfully as she looked out toward the bright square, deserted save for a litter of cars, mostly Deu’ches bearing ‘64 plates, parked at random angles, wherever their peasant drivers had managed to stop them.

With deafening roar of motor, grinding of gears, and outspewing of filthy exhaust, a German juggernaut lorry painfully navigated the corner with not ten centimeters to spare between vehicle and the crepi facades of the buildings. Sweating, cranking the wheel, and hiss-popping his air brakes, the German driver managed to introduce the monster into the ancient square, only to be met by the most formidable of barriers. Waddling side by side down the middle of the street, two Basque women with blank, coarse faces exchanged gossip out of the corners of their mouths. Middle-aged, dour, and vast, they plodded along on great barrel legs, indifferent to the frustration and fury of the truck driver, who crawled behind them muttering earnest imprecations and beating his fist against the steering wheel.

Hannah Stern had no way to appreciate this scene’s iconographic representation of Franco-German relations in the Common Market, and at this moment the caf

“You are seeking M. Hel!” he told her.

“That’s what I said.”

“Ah, if I had known it was M. Hel you were seeking…” He shrugged from the waist, lifting his palms in a gesture implying that a little more clarity on her part would have saved them both a lot of trouble.

He then gave her directions to the Chgave from Tardets (the r rolled, both the t and the s pronounced), then pass through the village of Abense-de-Haut (five syllables, the h and t both pronounced) and on up through Lichans (no nasal, s pronounced), then take the right forking up into the hills of Etchebar; but not the left forking, which would carry you to Licq.

“Is it far?”

“No, not all that far. But you don’t want to go to Licq, anyway.”

“I mean to Etchebar! Is it far to Etchebar!” In her fatigue and nervous tension, the formidable task of getting simple information out of a Basque was becoming too much for Hannah.

“No, not far. Maybe two kilometers after Lichans.”

“And how far is it to Lichans?”

He shrugged. “Oh, it could be two kilometers after Abense-de-Haut. You can’t miss it. Unless you turn left at the forking. Then you’ll miss it all right! You’ll miss it because you’ll be in Licq, don’t you see.”

The old mousse players had forsaken their game and were gathered behind the cafbuilt with the help of the Little People from the mountains who then…

“Listen!” Hannah pled. “Is there someone who could drive me to the Ch

A quick conference was held between the cafmousse players. There was some argument and a considerable amount of clarification and restatement of positions. Then the proprietor delivered the consensus opinion.

“No.”

It had been decided that this foreign girl wearing walking shorts and who had a rucksack was one of the young athletic tourists who were notorious for being friendly, but for tipping very little. Therefore, there was no one who would drive her to Etchebar, except for the oldest of the mousse players, who was willing to gamble on her generosity, but sadly he had no car. And anyway, he did not know how to drive.

With a sigh, Hannah took up her rucksack. But when the cafmousse players discussed this new turn of events with animation. What? The tourist took coffee without the money to pay for it? It was not impossible that this was a matter for the law.

Finally, the proprietor sighed a rippling sigh and looked up at her, tragedy in his moist eyes. Was she really telling him that she didn’t have two francs for the coffee—forget the tip—just two francs for the coffee? There was a matter of principle involved here. After all, he paid for his coffee; he paid for the gas to heat the water; and every couple of years he paid the tinker to mend the pot. He was a man who paid his debts. Unlike some others he could mention.

Hannah was between anger and laughter. She could not believe that all these heavy theatrics were being produced for two francs. (She did not know that the price of a cup of coffee was, in fact, one franc.) She had never before met that especially French version of avarice in which money—the coin itself—is the center of all consideration, more important than goods, comfort, dignity. Indeed, more important than real wealth. She had no way to know that, although they bore Basque names, these village people had become thoroughly French under the corrosive cultural pressures of radio, television, and state-controlled education, in which modern history is creatively interpreted to confect that national analgesic, la v

Dominated by the mentality of the petit commercant, these village Basques shared the Gallic view of gain in which the pleasure of earning a hundred francs is nothing beside the intense suffering caused by the loss of a centime.

Finally realizing that his dumb show of pain and disappointment was not going to extract the two francs from this young girl, the proprietor excused himself with sardonic politeness, telling her be would be right back.

When he returned twenty minutes later, after a tense conference with his wife in the back room, he asked, “You are a friend of M. Hel?”

“Yes,” Hannah lied, not wanting to go into all that.

“I see. Well then, I shall assume that Mr. Hel will pay, should you fail to.” He tore a sheet from the note pad provided by the Byrrh distributors and wrote something on it before folding it two times, sharpening the creases with his thumbnail. “Please give this to M. Hell,” he said coldly.

His eyes no longer flicked to her breast and legs. Some things are more important than romance.

Hannah had been walking for more than an hour, over the Pont d’Abense and the glittering Gave de Saison, then slowly up into the Basque hills along a narrow tar road softened by the sun and confined by ancient stone walls over which lizards scurried at her approach. In the fields sheep grazed, lambs teetering beside the ewes, and russet vaches de pyr loitered in the shade of unkempt apple trees, watching her pass, their eyes infinitely gentle, infinitely stupid. Round hills lush with fern contained and comforted the narrow valley, and beyond the saddles of the hills rose the snow-tipped mountains, their jagged ar

The heat stewed a heady medley of aroma: the soprano of wild-flower, the mezzotones of cut grass and fresh sheep droppings, the insistent basso profundo of softened tar.

Insulated by fatigue from the sights and smells around her, Hannah plodded along, her head down and her concentration absorbed in watching the toes of her hiking boots. Her mind, recoiling from the sensory overload of the last ten hours, was finding haven in a tunnel-vision of the consciousness. She did not dare to think, to imagine, to remember; because looming out there, just beyond the edges of here-and-now, were visions that would damage her, if she let them in. Don’t think. Just walk, and watch the toes of your boots. It is all about getting to the Ch

She came to a forking in the road and stopped. To the right, the way rose steeply toward the hilltop village of Etchebar, and beyond the huddle of stone and crepi houses she could see the wide mansard facade of what must be the ch

She sighed deeply and trudged on, her fatigue blending with protective emotional neurasthenia. If she could just make the ch

Two peasant women in black dresses paused in their gossip over a low stone wall and watched the outlander girl with open curiosity and mistrust. Where was she going, this hussy showing her legs? Toward the ch

A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn’t go that far. Just a poor putain who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.

True, true.

As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women. “Bonjour, mesdames,” she said.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. “You are giving yourself a walk?” one asked.

“Yes, Madame.”

“That’s nice. You are lucky to have the leisure.”

An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.

“You are looking for the ch

“Yes, I am.”

“Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you’re looking for.”

A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.

Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The ch

She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. “I am looking for M. Hel,” she explained.

“Yes,” the gardener said, with that inhaled “oui” that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.

Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.

Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the all

When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.

“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked from above.

Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. “Hello. I am Hannah Stern.”

“Well, come up, Hannah Stern.” With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. “We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese, hana means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea.”

They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four porte-fen flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. “I must put these in water,” she said. “Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?”

“No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his.”

“And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you.” She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Ch

“Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah,” the woman said. “And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?”

With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.

For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school… it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, “Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?”

And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.

That’s odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a caf

Was it possible that she was sitting here, pouring tea into Limoges, probably looking quite the buffoon with her tight hiking shorts and clumsy, Vibram-cleated boots?

Was it just a few hours ago she had walked dazedly past the old man sitting on the floor of Rome International? “I’m sorry,” she had muttered to him stupidly.

“I’m sorry,” she said now, aloud. The beautiful woman had said something which had not penetrated the layers of thought and retreat.

The woman smiled as she sat beside her. “I was just saying it is a pity that Nicholai is not here. He’s been up in the mountains for several days, crawling about in those caves of his. Appalling hobby. But I expect him back this evening or tomorrow morning. And that will give you a chance to bathe and perhaps sleep a little. That would be nice, wouldn’t it.”

The thought of a hot bath and cool sheets was almost swooningly seductive to Hannah.

The woman smiled and drew her chair closer to the marble tea table. “How do you take your tea?” Her eyes were calm and frank. In shape, they were Oriental, but their color was hazel, sem

“Pardon me?” Hannah said, embarrassed at having her thoughts read so transparently.

“I am what the kindly disposed call a ‘cosmopolitan,’ and others might term a mongrel. My mother was Japanese, and it would appear that my father was a mulatto American soldier. I never had the good fortune to meet him. Do you take milk?”

“What?”

“In your tea.” Hana smiled. “Are you more comfortable in English?” she asked in that language.

“Yes, in fact I am,” Hannah admitted also in English, but with an American tonality.

“I assumed as much from your accent. Good then. We shall speak in English. Nicholai seldom speaks English in the house, and I fear I am getting rusty.” She had, in fact, a just-perceptible accent; not a mispronunciation, but a slightly mechanical overenunciation of her British English. It was possible that her French also bore traces of accent, but Hannah, with her alien ear, could not know that.

But something else did occur to her. “There are two cups set out. Were you expecting me, Mrs. Hel?”

“Do call me Hana. Oh, yes, I was expecting you. The man from the caf

“Oh, that reminds me. I have a note for you.” Hannah took from her pocket the folded note the caf

Hana opened and glanced at it, then she laughed in her low, minor-key voice. “It is a bill. And very neatly itemized, too. Ah, these French. One franc for the telephone call. One franc for your coffee. And an additional one franc fifty—an estimate of the tip you would have left. My goodness, we have made a good bargain! We have the pleasure of your company for only three francs fifty.” She laughed and set the bill aside. Then she reached across and placed her warm, dry hand upon Hannah’s arm. “Young lady? I don’t think you realize that you are crying.”

“What?” Hannah put her hand to her cheek. It was wet with tears. My God, how long had she been crying? “I’m sorry. It’s just… This morning my friends were… I must see Mr. Hel!”

“I know, dear. I know. Now finish your tea. There is something in it to make you rest. Then I will show you up to your room, where you can bathe and sleep. And you will be fresh and beautiful when you meet Nicholai. Just leave your rucksack here. One of the girls will see to it.”

“I should explain—”

But Hana raised her hand. “You explain things to Nicholai when he comes. And he will tell me what he wants me to know.”

Hannah was still sniffling and feeling like a child as she followed Hana up the wide marble staircase that dominated the entrance hall. But she could feel a delicious peace spreading within her. Whatever was in the tea was softening the crust of her memories and floating them off to a distance. “You’re being very kind to me, Mrs. Hel,” she said sincerely.

Hana laughed softly. “Do call me Hana. After all, I am not Nicholai’s wife. I am his concubine.”

Washington

The elevator door opened silently, and Diamond preceded Miss Swivven into the white workspace of the Sixteenth Floor.

“…and I’ll want them available within ten minutes after call: Starr, the Deputy, and that Arab. Do you have that?”

“Yes, sir.” Miss Swivven went immediately to her cubicle to make the necessary arrangements, while the First Assistant rose from his console.

“I have the scan of Asa Stern’s first-generation contacts, sir. It’s coming in now.” He felt a justifiable pride. There were not ten men alive who had the skill to pull a list based upon amorphous emotional relationships out of Fat Boy.

“Give me a desk RP on it,” Diamond ordered as he sat in his swivel chair at the head of the conference table.

“Coming up. Oops! Just a second, sir. The list is one-hundred-eighty percent inverted. It will only take a moment to flip it.”

It was typical of the computer’s systemic inability to distinguish between love and hate, affection and blackmail, friendship and parasitism, that any list organized in terms of such emotional rubrics stood a 50/50 chance of coming in inverted. The First Assistant had foreseen this danger and had seeded the raw list with the names of Maurice Herzog and Heinrich Himmler (both H’s). When the printout showed Himmler to be greatly admired by Asa Stern, and Herzog to be detested, the First Assistant dared the assumption that Fat Boy had done a 180.

“It’s not just a naked list, is it?” Diamond asked.

“No, sir. I’ve requested pinhole data. Just the most salient facts attached to each name, so we can make useful identification.”

“You’re a goddamned genius, Llewellyn.”

The First Assistant nodded in absentminded agreement as he watched the list crawl up his screen in sans-serif IBM lettering.

STERN, DAVID

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS SON… WHITE CARD…

STUDENT, AMATEUR ATHLETE… KILLED, 1972 sub MUNICH OLYMPICS…

STERN, JUDITH

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS WIFE… PINK CARD…

SCHOLAR. RESEARCHER…

DEAD, 1956 sub NATURAL CAUSES…

ROTHMANN, MOISHE

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND… WHITE CARD…

PHILOSOPHER, POET… DEAD, 1958 sub NATURAL CAUSES…

KAUFMANN, S. I.

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND… RED CARD…

POLITICAL ACTIVIST… RETIRED…

HEL, NICHOLAI ALEXANDROVITCH

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND…

“Stop!” Diamond ordered. “Freeze that!” The First Assistant scanned the next fragments of information. “Oh, my goodness!”

Diamond leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. When CIA screws up, they certainly do it in style! “Nicholai Hel,” Diamond pronounced, his voice a monotone.

“Sir?” the First Assistant said softly, recalling the ancient practice of executing the messenger who brings bad news. “This Nicholai Hel is identified with a mauve card.”