Unnecessary Men/Book One Of/Doubtful Intelligence

By Brad Field

Men's fiction; sexy espionage, comedy, a shoot-out, wry satire of four men who take themselveas too seriously in Europe in the '60's--before AIDS--and their ideologies less seriously than their own prospects for a line on the budget. for promotion, security, survival. Some readers will find a map of Euope useful; these guys get around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 25, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469752341

Brad Field

Brad Field has spent a year in Europe, east and west, before, after, and during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He has never been able to take seriously the obsessions there with ideology. He was right. They are comic. He has never had any connection to an intelligence organization. He's been teaching in university.

Book preview

Unnecessary Men

Book One of

Doubtful Intelligence

Brad Field

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Unnecessary Men/Book One of/Doubtful Intelligence

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Bradford S. Field

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

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Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This is a work of fiction; no real persons, instituitons, situations are here represented, and any resemblance of any of the ones here to ones outside this fiction is entirely coincidental

ISBN: 0-595-19228-9

ISBN: 978-1-4697-5234-1 (eBook)

Contents

Unnecessary Men Book One of Doubtful Intelligence

6 June 1963

7 June 1963

11 June 1963

14 June 1963

16 June 1963

17 June 1963

19 June 1963

20 June 1963

23 June 1963

25 June 1963

26 June 1963

28 June 1963

1 July 1963

6 July 1963

11 July 1963

12 July 1963

13 July 1963

16 July 1963

17 July 1963

20 July 1963

21 July 1963

25 July 1963

7 July 1963

29 July 1963

30 July 1963

31July 1963

9 August 1963

10 August 1963

12 August 1963

13 August 1963

15 August 1963

17 August 1963

About the Author

For Mary Lee in thanks for her patience, her gift of time, and her love.

Unnecessary Men Book One of Doubtful Intelligence

Brad Field

6 June 1963

As Hertzig came out of the reception into the lobby of the bank, shouts in some kind of French broke out. A heavy, middle-aged man, with curly and graying blonde hair falling disheveled over his flushed face, stood with his back to a wall, waving a pistol. Hertzig went to the floor on his face behind his suitcase. Short bursts from machine-guns, German World War II surplus Schmeissers by the sound, three rapid pistol shots, another burst, like the noise of ripping of heavy canvas. Then silence.

His cheek against the cool floor, Hertzig watched the white powder of plaster sifting down onto the shoulders of the gray gabardine summer suit of the man lying facing him. Hertzig was reminded of another time he had seen plaster churned to dust by bullets, scattered on bodies around him. The man in the gray gabardine had curved his fingers, nails on the marble floor, as if he wanted to dig a hole. Hertzig could not blame him. His own fingers too, he noticed next, were curved in a digging fashion. And his knee hurt, his old shoulders ached, one of his wrists burned from dropping to the floor.

The other man’s mouth was pressed closed, the eyes, blue and wide, stared fixedly back at Hertzig, but the man was not dead. Just holding his breath. Hertzig noticed then that he had been holding his, and realized too that he was looking at Schueblich, one of the corps of plain-clothes policemen who in Basel specialize in keeping an eye on the Foreign Elements.

The shots and running footsteps had stopped. The silence was impressive. Hertzig did not raise his head. Herr Detektiv Leutnant Schueblich, who was paid to do that, now began nervously to move his light blue eyes. Hertzig could read in Schueblich’s face, his slowly opening mouth, a realization that the only way to know if it was safe to lift his head was to lift his head. Schueblich raised it now, turned his face back and forth, then began to raise the rest of himself. Around them, other Swiss released their grips on the smooth floor, hiked themselves up on their elbows.

Hertzig had been among the first to hit the floor when the shooting had started. Now he was among the last to rise. Painfully, he levered his rickety old frame up to his knees, used his suitcase as a prop to get to his feet. Several others did not rise. Slack bundles of clothes pitched out on the floor, amid widening pools of blood of startling redness. Their black and curly hair shone. Blonde curls, instead of black, shone on one. Hertzig gave the blonde one, the shirt-front marked a dozen times with bleeding holes, a second glance. But no name for that gray, astonished face came immediately to mind.

The Swiss police with their usual, inexorable efficiency appeared, their little uniform caps nodding as they began to take down addresses and names. You have some papers, Mein Herr?

My passport. Hertzig offered the little booklet. I just got in on the train, walked over from the Bahnhof when all this started.

You have a local address, I see, Herr Hertzig. You will be available later this week?

Hertzig sighed. I have work to do. I may be called out of town.

You have an account in this bank, Herr Hertzig?

Of course. Why else would I, would anyone come to a bank?

In Basel it has never been the style to make fun of banks. The cop was not sure of how he should react, and merely raised at Hertzig the quizzical eyebrow. You are self-employed, Herr Hertzig? he asked, the pencil poised. All Swiss passports have entry for profession.

Detektiv Inspektor Weitschutz knows me. And, ah, Leutnant Schueblich too. They can find me at that address if they need me later today.

Hertzig could not tell which of the two names did the trick, but the young cop nodded, made his notes, and waved Hertzig past. Hertzig picked up his suitcase and trudged out the door of the bank into the street.

The narrow street just outside the door of the bank was unmarked, no bodies, no bullet holes in the walls. An ambulance, just arriving—with Swiss reserve, no flashing lights, no sirens—trundled in between some police cars that had been hurriedly pulled up on the curb. The street, Eulengasse, ran its short length from a dead-end at the bank’s front door out to the Bahnhofplatz.

Carrying the bag was a chore. He did not hurry. His old arms, his old legs complained, silently, but still, they complained. He stopped at the newsstand at the corner of Eulengasse and the tangle of trolley tracks that circled in front of the railroad station, put down the bag to change hands. He noticed ahead of him a slim figure with black, curly hair in an out-of-season trench coat. The figure crossed the trolley lines and walked quickly into the dark doorway of the railroad station. Something familiar in his gait. But Hertzig felt too old, too tired to accept the temptation to follow that one. He picked out a Left Circular tram, and climbed aboard. No slim young men with dark and curly hair got on with him. No one followed the trolley in a car. He changed to a line out to Alschwyll, his suburb, and no one followed there either. But he’d been in the Game too long to believe in co-incidence. Even if that shoot-out in the lobby of the bank had not been intended to pick him off, his further survival might still depend on learning what had been going on there.

He sat in the back of the trolley and watched the track unreel from below, the wire from above, as the car trundled along to the south, beyond the Basel city limits. He expected to be asked to tell his story to the police, and repeatedly. He still had a ticket stub for his train ticket. And a hotel bill marked PAID from Stuttgart. On his way from the station, he had stopped off in the bank, the Banque Independante de Bale et Berne in French, or the Baseler und Berner Unabhaengige Bank in German or, for foreign customers, the Independent Bank of Basel and Berne, or simply BIBB/BBUB/IBBB, as the large plaque of initials on the wall beside its front door proclaimed it. At the bank, Hertzig had been told that the president, Zweifelman, was in conference, an irritating surprise. But Hertzig left a note, cryptic but sufficient for Zweifelman’s understanding, and turned to leave. That’s when the shooting started.

Hertzig reviewed it in his mind, twice, setting his memory. The trolley came out between the buildings and into the broad, open space of the Heimatsfeld. Hertzig pulled the cord for the stop, grabbed his bag, and gingerly got down.

He stood in the open as the trolley pulled away, looked over the cars parked around the edges of the platz. None of them looked unfamiliar.

He turned around to look westward, along a cobbled street downhill to the French border at the bottom, the Swiss and French customs poles across the road that then climbed into misty distance up the hills in France.

Hertzig turned around again and carried his bag across the cobbled paving to the door of the Grenzhotel, opened it, and went inside. The place was empty except for the landlord’s daughter behind the bar, her wide, white neck shining under the high-piled bee-hive hair-do on her skull. Her heavy, white, and muscular arms rolled and twisted behind the edge of the bar as she wiped some glasses she had been washing.

Gruss Gott, he began, Fraulein Haustochter.

So, she said without enthusiasm, it’s you.

Ja-ja, it’s me. He looked around the empty bar. Not much business here today. Hertzig came to the bar and wearily set his bag down at his feet.

Not true, she snapped with her usual irony. Sold two beers this afternoon, to a couple of the customs boys.

Sell me one too, said Hertzig. Any mail?

She shrugged as she picked up a glass and put it under the tap to begin drawing the draught. Not much.

Phone calls?

Nein.

Not one?

No, not one! What do you want, then? she snapped. Some girl to be calling an old wreck like you? She slapped the glass on the bar and turned to a drawer behind her.

Now it was Hertzig’s turn to shrug. He picked up the beer and sipped it as the landlord’s daughter flipped some envelopes onto the bar. Hertzig did not open them, nor let them sit there, but immediately slipped them into the pocket of his suit, and then bent to his bag on the floor. I brought you a surprise, he said.

You’re not paying your rent? she cried satirically.

That’s paid up until the end of July, he said, though how he would pay it after that was indeed a question. No, something else. He brought out the record from the bag. They say it’s popular. The picture on the jacket showed a greasy-haired German singer leering at a microphone as if about to bite it. The way her face softened as she looked at the thing told Hertzig he had guessed right. His moral dues were now also paid up for even longer than his room rent, perhaps six months.

With some strain she finally brought herself to say, Danke.

It was nothing. It has that song.

Is it ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me,’ that one? Her fat face lit up with pathetic pleasure.

That’s the one. Hear it everywhere.

Ja-ja, she murmured, furchtbar schoen…

He finished his beer to her little litany of complaints, business was as bad as ever, the Turnverein that came on Monday nights stunk the place up with their damned cigars, and some man she had a crush on paid no attention to her.

He carried his bag around the corner, past the phones and the back room, up the narrow stairs to the second floor, and his room. He had the only one with a its own bath, the only one that looked out on Heimatsfeld. Before he turned on the light, he looked out over the reddened day, dying on the wide platz outside, across the valley into France.

Then he turned to his bag, put it on the bed, pulled the sack for laundry from the closet, stuffed the dirty laundry from the suitcase into the laundry sack. He extracted the mail from the pocket of his coat, dropped the letters on the bed. Then he took off his suit. Plaster powder all over the back of the jacket, the legs of the pants. Have to get it clean. He threw down the suit beside the laundry bag, stripped off his shirt, socks, and under clothes, put them in the laundry sack too. Finally he picked up the mail again and trudged, naked, bent, and wrinkled, past the mirror on the back of the door into his bath, and began to draw his tub. The gas hot-water heater burst into action with a small boom. He sat on the stool by the tub and began to read. As he finished each letter, he frowned a moment, committing it word-for-word to memory, then carefully burned it in the blue flame at the base of the hot water heater.

There was not much in the mail. Nothing from the Ministry of Finance in France, a shame. They paid well, and Hertzig had bills. Some of it, indeed, told him he was not needed at all. Steam billowed up from the tub. By the time Hertzig climbed into it, he was feeling a little petulant, a little hurt at being unwanted. At the bank today the cops had not thought him worth detaining. Maybe the shoot-out there had nothing to do with him at all. No cops had called or come around to see him about it, asking questions. Zweifelman ought to have been interested in the news that Hertzig had brought back from Germany, but Zweifelman had been too busyto see him,in conference.Hertzig subsided with a sigh into the steaming water.

The bathroom door snapped open.

The landlord’s daughter loomed gracelessly in the doorway, shouted, Don’t drown!

Close the door! he shouted back. Freezing in the draft!

A bath again, she snorted, but she came in and closed the door behind her. No wonder you’re so weak and shriveled.

I’m old, said Hertzig getting his shoulders down under the steaming water in the tub.

And wrinkled, she said, peering down disdainfully into the water. Your cock is tiny.

Ja-ja, he sighed. That’s old too.

Why do you take so many baths? No woman would look at you. You’re not even rich.

I like baths.

It’s sick! she said stoutly, smoothing her fat hands as far around her capacious hips as they would reach, and sitting on the stool beside the tub. Did any woman ever love you?

Ja, once at least. But she’s dead. Long ago. Far away.

Once, unh? How can you be sure?

Maybe twice. I was sure then. Now… and he shrugged in the water.

Now, not so sure. What do you like baths for, then?

Hertzig sighed. Because when I first came to Switzerland and this bar, I had not had a bath for a long time.

I remember, she said nodding, the fat under her chin bulging in and out. You smelled. And you were bigger then.

You were smaller, Hertzig put in slyly.

She was undismayed, but looked thoughtfully down at her large bosom. Ja-ja, she said. That was before I got big teats. She looked up again. A phone call for you.

Now? I can’t come to the phone now! Tell ‘em to call back!

I did, and he said it was no emergency. She rose from the stool and strode now to the bathroom door.

So? He let the exasperation show in his voice, for he knew she would never let go of her morsel of information without that little victory. Who was it?

Some cop, she said, opening the door. Schueblich. Said to drop in at his office before you leave town again. She closed the door behind herself as she went out. The draft blew black little specks of ashes of burned letters from around the blue flame at the base of the hot water heater, out onto the surface of the water, to float under Hertzig’s nose. Hertzig looked at them glumly. Not only was he not worth shooting, he was not even worth questioning. Time was, Weitschutz would have come around to the Grenzhotel himself to ask Hertzig what he had been doing on the scene after an episode like that shoot-out at the bank. Now…now Weitschutz did not even call. He had Schueblich do it. And Schueblich merely left a message, come around to see him, just to fill up his report book…Zweifelman had not wanted to be bothered with him, either. Nor had anything of real value come in the mail. He watched the burned specks of ash, pointless and still, sit on the surface of the water.

7 June 1963

Didier Chataigne woke to the smoky scent of coffee. Odile sat up in the bed beside him, both pillows tucked up behind her, a cup in her hands. Maia stood at the foot of the bed, her back to him, the big black knot of hair shining in the dim room as she lay out some clothing on the chest there.

Bonjour, mon cher, Odile said to him and then said something in Macedonian Greek to the maid. Maia nodded and walked to the door and out of the bedroom. Chataigne pulled back the sheet and swung his feet out of the bed. The bottoms of his pajamas were tangled around his ankles. He kicked them off and walked into the shower.

Under the water, he thought about promotion. He had not had one. He was only acting head of the section. He had written a report that with some boldness suggested that the whole section be abolished, a bureaucratic trick he had learned from LeCreux, his predecessor, to insure that it was continued. If the trick worked. The report was worming its way through the guts of the Ministry. It was still too early to expect any echo from its emergence on the desk of his immediate superior. Until then, Chataigne lived in tense speculation. They might decide to agree with the report, close up DCIF. But usually they found some way to modify everything they touched. What mad compromise might they invent? Continue DCIF but find some Frank, a steady Gaullist, to take the job away from him? Didier Chataigne ground his teeth and turned the water off.

He dried himself, shaved, still thinking, glumly resentful, of his work at Finances. When he came back into the room to dress, his underwear, a clean shirt, and a freshly pressed suit lay on the chest at the foot of the bed. As he put them on, Odile sipped her coffee and made small talk in her quiet, soothing voice. Some Americans, a couple, had been doing research on book, published now, on servants. They had come close to looking into Temsted, the English place of Odile’s English relatives, but had been steered away. Now they wanted to do another book, and her English relatives had passed them on to the French branch of the family. Odile and Didier would be dining with this American couple later in the week in a small restaurant that they often used.

Every time he glanced over at Odile, the beauty of her face struck him, as always, like a blow, the small straight nose, the perfect full lips, the brown brows and the long lashes on the cheeks, on skin of such incredible and glowing life, on her throat, on the breasts that, in her careless way in front of the children and the maids, she exposed.

He had long since given up speaking of it, though of course she knew the carelessness still bothered him and sometimes mocked him for it, Ah, mon petit prude from the south, bonhomme de Louzac, she crooned, then giggled at him. Many things about his life still bothered Didier Chataigne after twelve years of marriage, and the way that others had of taking his irritations lightly only exasperated him more. Was his wife not the most beautiful creature in Paris? Had her fortune not made him a rich man? Had he not married into a family with immense influence, in France, and in Britain, in Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries as well? Was he not acting head of a very important section of that government within the government, Ministry of Finances?

If he had so much cause for contentment, then, why did he feel discontented? He felt himself flinching as Maia walked back into the bedroom before he had his pants on. Maia, as Odile had pointed out for years now, was a servant. You can afford servants, mon cher, she had said. "Get used to them. It makes no difference if she sees you

undressed, no more than to be naked before the furniture."

An aristocrat’s comment, he had muttered.

Oui, it is, she had nodded. I am one. So are you.

I’m a farmer’s son from Louzac.

And a lineal descendant of Henri of Navarre. She smiled at him even as she brought up that old stuff.

So my mother tells the story. Let’s be realistic—

Indeed, she nodded, let us be realistic. We have servants because we can afford them, and they know it. They depend on us to need them. It is our duty, then, is to have them, to need them. Odile’s voice always grew less soft when she made this argument, and Chataigne instinctively avoided interrupting it. Stockwood has always known she would be governess for the girls, certainly until Nicole is old enough to change schools. Maia has always known that one day she would serve us, even as her mother served my mother. So, and she smiled, then, relaxed, and finished as always, if we have to have them, let us let them be a pleasure to us, not a problem. If you need to change your clothes, don’t worry if Maia is in the room or not, if she can see your body! Let Maia help you. She knows where everything is!

And in fact Maia was wrinkled, weathered, old, or looked it. It was hard to tell, perhaps his mother’s age. To complain about it was, he knew, merely the reaction of his puritanical Protestant background from the south of France. He had never had the kind of sexual nonchalance these Franks from Paris seemed to have been born with. But then, of course, he was no Frank. He was from Louzac.

Odile held out her coffee cup, and Maia was at hand to take it. Odile slid from beneath the sheet and walked, her nightgown flowing against her pretty body, toward her vanity table across the room. Odile sat at her table as Maia, dark and bulky in her uniform, slowly pulled a brush through Odile’s long blonde hair.

He finished tying his shoes and stood at the mirror, working on his tie. Is your uncle going to be in town at the same time as these Americans? he asked.

No. Uncle Peter will be here, but just overnight, next Thursday. The thirteenth. He goes to London on Friday. He needs to be back in Temsted well before Mid-summer, of course.

Of course, said Chataigne, though in fact he did not understand why Lord Warrington had to be back early for it. He never asked, for it had something to do with religion, and religion was women’s business.

These Americans won’t be here until the nineteenth. Almost two weeks away.

I see, and he turned form the mirror, the tie knotted to suit him. To breakfast then, and then I’m off.

I need to explain one more thing, mon cher, said Odile. Let me see you before you go?

Ah, oui, he said, and left her sitting, eyes closed, in cat-like enjoyment of the strokes of the maid’s brush. Behind him he could hear her voice and the maid’s, speaking quietly in Macedonian Greek.

As he walked down the carpet along the hall, he recognized the beginning of one of Odile’s plots, some long string of nudges and manipulations to get him to agree to some change, doubtless some further insane expenditure. She had stopped pointing out some years ago that his attempts to economize only wasted effort and time, that the money that they spent had in many ways been committed from the day they were born, for it only made him furious to hear it, to feel even more trapped and powerless in his life.

He stopped at the doorway of the girls’ room on the way. Simone and Nicole were still getting dressed, and giggling over one of their jokes. Stockwood loomed tall and gray in her plain dress, overseeing the operation with her arms folded. I’ll come back later, before I leave, said Chataigne.

But M’sieur, said the English governess in her perfectly pronounced Parisian French, gesturing at the large easy chair in the room, do come in while they finish—

No, no, later, and he went back into the hall and on down to the dining room. The shades of the east windows had been raised and sun flooded in on the table where his place was laid, the newspaper folded beside it. The coffee cup was empty, but the other plates contained the usual assortment of bread, croissants, butter, and jams. Beside the plate stood the bell. He sat down, picked up the bell and rang it, then picked up the newspaper.

A cool draft came into the dining room as the kitchen door swung open. With the coffee pot came Cook herself, saying That whore is late again, and tipping the pot to fill his cup. She flipped the wicker hot-pad onto the table and slammed the pot down on top of it.How’s it going? she asked familiarly, turned without waiting for an answer, to walk back into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind her.

The headlines in the paper were all about Profumo, over in England, who had resigned on Wednesday. The paper published two more pictures of Christine Keeler, reputed to be the prostitute who had serviced both Profumo and a Russian diplomat.

Ah, here’s the slut now! said Cook’s voice from the kitchen. Chataigne heard the day-maid’s voice speaking out there too. Cook’s voice grumbled distantly in answer, then back toward Chataigne, You don’t like the bread?

He lowered his paper and sipped his coffee. Cook stood in the doorway, her crinkly red-blonde hair showing gray streaks in the morning light, her big forearms folded over each other beneath her big breasts, bulging beneath the bib of the white apron.

I remark, Cook continued, that you have eaten of the croissant, but nothing of the bread. Chataigne took a second, slower sip of coffee. True, Cook continued, mostly they cook bread here in Paris in those stinking oil-ovens, but we buy it special, you know. It’s not bad. From a Breton baker.

Chataigne put down the coffee cup, picked up the knife, and began to spread apricot preserves on one piece of bread. Cook talked on about the weather, about her sister-in-law who played queen-of-the-manor at the patisserie at home in Brittany, where, if Cook had her rights, she would herself be in charge, except that it was more an honor to serve a real princess like Madame here in Paris than to run my ass off in some lousy provincial bake-shop.

Chataigne looked down at his breakfast while Cook’s tirade rolled on, as she enumerated the ways that life in Paris was an improvement over the savage barbarism one had to suffer in Brittany.

That bread is not bad, enh? Cook said, then tipped her head to something said by the day-maid in the kitchen. No, said Cook back through the doorway, I’ve already served his coffee. Get the tray.

Chataigne picked up the paper again. As he turned to the second page, the day-maid, now in a black uniform and little white cap perched on top of the red hair, appeared at the kitchen door with the breakfast tray for the girls and Stockwood.

Bonjour, M’sieur! she piped in the high-pitched tones that servants used, and strode on through the dining room to the hall.

Looks so proper,sneered Cook.Late and lazy.Didn’t even have her uniform on! Had to change after she got here, right in the kitchen! Morals of an alley cat….that died red hair. Cook reached up and patted her own grizzled frizz. I’m surprised that Madame keeps her on, in the same place with your daughters, pretty little innocents like those. Not that Mam’selle Stockwood can’t protect them. She does! But still, seems a shame, to keep sluts like that one, when there are good girls, good ones, that really need a job, and would always be on time…

It’s rather cool in here now, said Chataigne as Cook’s voice ran down. A draught. Perhaps we should close that door?

Cook grunted, stepped back, and let it the kitchen door swing shut between them. Even so, he found it difficult to keep his mind on the paper. Cook was right about the day-maid. Get rid of her. Save some money. Not that they needed to save any, as he had to remind himself against a lifetime habit. Odile’s fortune, technically his, because he had married it when he married her, formed an immoral force, that insulated them from the virtuous discipline of need. He stopped the line of thought, conscious that it sounded like one of the sermons he used to hear as a boy in Louzac.

He folded the paper and carried it down the hall to the girls’ room, looked in on them, eating breakfast from the tray. They had changed again, not their clothes, but their very selves, as they did every day, always different, one day like his mother, another like Odile or his father’s mother, quickly shifting in the course of a conversation, like trick photography. Both were very beautiful, even at eleven and eight, darker than their mother, but sharing the same luminous complexion that made people gape at them on the street.

The girls told him, in English this morning, about their plans and activities for school, while Stockwood, watching, nodded her head. They would study geography and English composition today, practice the piano and singing, and then ride horses in the afternoon.

He made some silly jokes for them in the patois of Louzac, and they answered him back in patois, now suddenly giggling and bold. He leaned across the breakfast tray to kiss them before he left for work. As Simone carefully picked up her napkin to wipe her mouth, Nicole, the younger one, reached up and grabbed his collar, kissed him first.

Tsk! came Stockwood’s little noise of disapproval.

Nicole sat back in her chair, giving her father a saucy smile. Simone continued to take her time, putting one arm around his neck, the other hand on his chest, rather as her mother did, and would have kissed him on the mouth if he had not rescued propriety, turned his cheek to her lips.

On his way on down the hall from the girls’ room he met the redheaded maid, carrying a pile of sheets and pillow cases in her arms. She put her back against the wall as if to let him pass, then dropped the wad of laundry at her feet. He looked into her face. She was as tall as he. He thought of striking her. She seemed to sense it, and flinched. Suddenly she knelt on the linens, then stayed there motionless, her eyes staring overtly at the crotch of his trousers. The red hair under the white uniform cap had dark roots. Chataigne pushed on by her, continued down the hall.

In the bedroom, Odile now stood in front of the vanity, dressed only in panties, garter belt and stockings, as Maia stood behind her to fasten her brassiere.

You do not seem to make much progress, he said.

At what, mon cher? Odile smiled at him.

At getting dressed.

Oh, but we are doing well! said Odile. Odile turned to kiss him, put one arm around his neck, the other hand pressed lightly on his chest.

You had something to tell me before I went to work?

Yes, mon cher, it’s Maia. Vetta died in March.

Vetta… Didier cast about in his memory for some remembrance of who that might be. Vetta…wasn’t she your grandmother’s maid?

Very good, mon cher. It’s the situation in that part of Greece, like a matriarchy down there, Odile went on. The men are either in the hills fighting the Bulgarian soldiers, the Yugoslav soldiers or the Greeks, or smuggling, or in jail for something. So the women in those villages run things, select a wise woman. Nestra used to be the wise woman. When she died in Macedonia, they chose Vetta to replace her. And now Vetta has died. She left many daughters and nieces, but the one they chose to be wise woman is Maia.

Ah! Then Maia must go, I see!

The problem, then, is Sula.

Sula. Do I know Sula?

Non, of course not. Odile smiled condescendingly at him. Behind her Maia held a wisp of cloth with her hands inside it. Sula is one of Maia’s daughters. When Maia goes to Greece, Sula will come here.

Sula good girl, said Maia suddenly in her heavily accented French.

So that’s all right, isn’t it, Didier? Odile used his first name and raised her eyebrows to signal him.

I am sure Sula is a good girl, said Didier cautiously, a very good one, noting the signal but not its meaning.

See here, mate, said Odile, changing now to her excellent English, in order to explain it so that Maia would be spared its details, Let’s make a deal. She’s offered us her daughter. Can’t turn her down. The money doesn’t mean damn-all. You’ve got daughters, and they’re going to need maids in a few years. Sula has a few kids, two of them girls, and her man is in prison until she can raise the bribes to get him out—though in point of fact, she’s just as happy to have him in the fridge a while. Her colloquial English came too fast for Didier, and she must have realized it, for she stopped, began again more slowly. The whole clan down there needs Maia, and they have always served us faithfully, as if we owned them.

They own us, he put in.

Oui, that’s true, Odile conceded, slipping back to French for him. Either way, Didier. She lifted both her arms in the air, then bent her knees, to crouch, allowing the chunky Maia on tip-toe to slide the light dress over her head.

What is this ‘deal’ you speak, spoke of? He said, back to French himself. Can we dispense with some other services?

Other services? Odile’s head emerged from the dress, a light yellow print with a pale tan figure in the material. Maia pulled Odile’s hair out of the back of the collar. Stockwood’s essential, Odile continued, at least until Nicole changes schools. Cook is a treasure, I’m sure you’ll agree. What else? Can you think of something?

What about this day-maid? He noticed Odile’s glance at him out of the corner of her eyes. Had he stepped where he had been led? Can’t we get rid of her?

Veronique? Odile seemed to think it over. I suppose, oui, we can do without her, at least, many days of the week.

Mon dieu, let’s get rid of her entirely.

Oh, very well, we’ll let her go. Though…when we have the company…

Company?

Those Americans, on the nineteenth.

Are they coming here?

No, but my brother and Violette will be coming by. We’re to go in Georges’ car. Don’t worry. I’ll see to it. We’ll only need a maid for the door, in case they have rain coats… Odile smiled at him, and then spoke in Macedonian Greek. Maia stooped, and grasped Chataigne’s hand, kissed the back of it , stepped back again, did a bobbing little French-style curtsey,and said in her oddly high-pitched French,Merci, m’sieur!

So Sula will be here soon, said Odile. Odile stepped beside him and took his arm in hers. Don’t be surprised when the faces change! She walked him to the door, still talking. It is rather a treat, you know, for Americans, to meet French people. And Georges is so good with Americans, knows how to be funny for them…

Odile kissed him at the door, then stood in the doorway of the apartment as the elevator came up.

Paris was warm. As Chataigne came out of the building to the sidewalk, a woman stepped away from the flower stand opposite the door, holding a small bouquet, and the toothless hag who had sold it to her called good morning to Chataigne. The chubby lady at the fruit stand called to him good morning. But his mind was still full of the picture of Odile’s face at the apartment door above them.

Higher up the sloping street, an Arab washed the gutter. Chataigne followed the lines of water rushing along beside him, down toward the Metro station. The bouquet in the hand of the woman ahead of him bobbed along the street and down the steps into the Metro entrance. The gutter water ran with thirsty gargles into the sewer grating at the bottom of the street. As Chataigne started down the Metro stairs, another young woman appeared at his side, one he recognized as part of the usual commuters’ crowd who rode to work at about he same time he did every day. She dressed, as usual, in rather oddly striking clothes, today a thin jersey dress in bold horizontal green and gray stripes, which Odile perhaps might have worn with style but which, on this darker, plumper woman, did not quite suit, clearly a person who worked for herself and not the government. The woman stood close to him when they finally got on the train, even rubbing against him, and the woman with the flowers, too, pressed against him in the crowd, but women had been pressing against him his whole life, so he hardly noticed them today. His thoughts, as he approached work, had turned to work, and the day ahead.

****

Tipley was not far from the madding crowd, but at least he was going in the opposite direction, an aesthetic if not a practical consolation, trundling the vast Oldsmobile in air-conditioned splendor northward on US 1 through the middle of the University of Maryland campus, across streams of students, each of them trying to negotiate the much heavier traffic heading southward toward the District while Tipley looked forward, beyond the day ahead, his last before the wedding, to the days, and the nights, that would follow, with less eagerness and more trepidation than it might be wise to admit to others.

The announcer on the car radio blathered some news, that U Thant had invented another peace-keeping mission to some dismal hole for the U.N., this time to Yemen, and went on to describe some more fall-out from the silly Profumo case over in London, and then played a snippet from Pres. Kennedy’s recent speech about discriminatory hiring practices, a phrase that Tipley found utterly baffling, so he shut the radio off, then turned down a small asphalt track that waggled through undistinguished rural vacancy until emerging from some trees where Tipley and the few cars in front of him and behind all turned off to the right into the parking lot of what looked like a tacky little shopping center plunked down here in the wilderness, sporting a drugstore that flaunted its photo-processing, an office supply shop, and two other dusty shops, all anchored at the end by a long red-brick building displaying a sign which looked, to the rapid glance, like the ominous letters, IRS, but which a more careful consideration showed that it read,in full,IRS Agency,and under it, in tiny letters nearly hidden in the decorative evergreen border around it, Information Retrieval Systems Agency.

Tipley parked, then marched stolidly into the drugstore, through the passageway inside marked Restrooms, into a hallway behind the store, at the end of which he could see the dark door behind which sat the access guards, watching him approach them through their black glass panels. Tipley prepared a face to meet the faces that he would meet, as, at the back door of another shop, Clyde Cale, in a cheap gray, summer-weight suit that hung on him like sack-cloth, stepped out into the hallway.

Morning, Clyde, Tipley said.

Oh, yeah, hi, Tipley, and Cale nodded his blondish head vaguely. You be up for tennis this week-end? Cale pulled open the black door.

Afraid I’m busy, said Tipley with more truth than appeared, for he would have much preferred three good sets to attending his own wedding ceremony.

As he and Cale pulled out their cards, one of the adenoidal morons, of the type evidently considered ideal by Security for guard-work, intoned,Idennf’cation, please.

Too bad you can’t make it, Cale was saying. There’s a new guy in the Library that plays, might make some good doubles, give us some competition.

Ah, yeah, Mr. Tipley, the guard said without looking up, squinting down into his book, You’re off next week, hunh?

Gee, June is early for vacation, said Cale. Something special?

Honeymoon, muttered Tipley.

Honeymoon? You gettin’ married? Cale cried with idiotic emphasis, as if the question rested in doubt. Anyone I know?

No one at the Agency, said Tipley. A girl from Virginia.

Well, hey, congratulations, persisted Cale as they got their cards back, and walked on through the door behind the guards, along the barren halls. Wedding must be tomorrow, hunh?

Yes, said Tipley shortly.

Big bachelor party tonight? The guys in your section doin’ something?

No, no, it’s very quiet, small affair. And as for bachelor parties, that’s been taken care of.

Yeah? How was it? They paused at the door of the elevators.

Tipley rummaged through his head for something to say. Well, the neighbors did not call the police.

But they should of, hunh? Cale nodded vigorously as the doors to the elevator slid open, and he stepped ahead of Tipley into the empty car. Yeah, I remember when I got married, Cale went on, as if recalling some event of Neolithic antiquity, the guys in my outfit—see,I was still in the army then—the guys in my outfit… and Cale’s voice droned on through an interminable anecdote as the elevator made its prudent descent, to let them out at their level, droning on down the hall, though Tipley stood half in the door of his office and half out, presenting the lineaments of merely polite interest, …pukin’ all over the place, it was a mess, lemme tell ya!

Seems so, said Tipley achieving a non-committal tone. Cale finally left and Tipley seized the moment to close the door on the cloistral sanctuary of his office where he sat at his desk, rested his elbows on the blotter, his head on the hands, his eyes restfully closed.

Tipley’s bachelor party had in fact been merely a brief, a chance reunion for drinks at a bar earlier in the week, with old associates from prep school, all fellow members of the French-Speaking Society there, Kicky Highstreet, Twining Bismuth, and the little pansy Rocco Garbanzo. Kicky was flitting about the world as an interior decorator, and Rocco, of all people, with his own travel agency right in the District, while Twining, the dainty dog, supported his pathetic attempt to make a career as a painter by working in New York as a male model. They had all amused each other in the old days, but now Tipley found them shallow and stale. Unable to tell them, thanks to Security regs, about any of his work at IRSA, he had been forced to listen to their giggly gossip, an hour of it, or to their cracks about his coming marriage.

Married? Bismuth had boomed in his best Lady Bracknell tones, Tippy, are you pregnant?

Don’t be smart.

And who, may I inquire, is the bride?

No, you may not inquire. I want none of your silly jokes. We’ll be back from the honeymoon on the seventeenth. Give me a call after that, Tipley said, hoping that perhaps none of them would.

Well, said Kicky tentatively, congratulations, Tippy.

Felicitations, even, added Rocco