The Infant of Prague

“Sure. Get in the car. Turn the headlights off until we’re in the street.”

“It might be dangerous coming up without lights into the street.”

“Take the chance,” Devereaux said.

“It’s your party,” the driver said.

Devereaux settled in the backseat next to Miki. Miki lit a cigarette from his case and blew the smoke against the side window. The driver pushed the car into low gear and started up the ramp to the street. In the street, he flicked on the headlamps and pulled into the square. The square was still empty and Miki had now disappeared without anyone knowing it.

“I feel so strange,” Miki said softly. “I feel as though I have stepped on the other side of my own death.”

Devereaux stared out the windows. Now and then, he would look behind him. There was nothing following them. The weeknight streets were nearly deserted. They drove up past the Bourse and along the line of fashionable shops that reached up the hill to the edge of the Ghent road. Baroque old Brussels, crammed with odd buildings and the neon lights of American franchise hamburger stands, appeared solemn and dull.

“Where do we go now?” Miki said.

“Zeebrugge,” said the driver. Devereaux said nothing. He watched the streets and kept his hand on the pistol.

“You know what I was? Back there?”

Devereaux turned to Miki. He had no interest in the other man but sometimes they had to talk, they had to make a friend at the point of defection when they left everything behind. Until the moment came, defection seemed one-way, a looking glass that led into a new wonderland of freedom. But there was always the naked moment when they had to step through the looking glass and leave that other, real world behind forever.

“I was invisible and they wanted to give me an award for my invisibility,” Miki said. “I was the arranger and they all told me their secrets in the end, all the dirty little secrets that no one would be terribly interested in at all. I could tell you about a woman who makes love to her dog, a woman you would not believe this of in a million years. Do you suppose I wish to know that secret? But they all tell me everything. Because I am no more important to them than a servant. I am there to dress them, wash them, feed them. I arrange their beautiful lives for them. And not only those people. Even in the Ministry. I know so much, I know so much I wish I did not know. And now I am dead and at rest.”

Devereaux thought Miki was talking for the sake of his own comfort.

“Cigarette?” Miki said.

Devereaux shook his head.

“You are American?” They had spoken French from the point of meeting.

Devereaux nodded.

“Then I speak English. It is so much better than my French. The French, even these Belgiques, they always tell you how you do not speak their language.”

“What do you know that interests us?”

The question had been formed from the first moment in Devereaux’s mind and he had considered it for flaws. Hanley either knew or did not know and was willing to let Devereaux be the risk of a guess. In any event, a careful agent stays alive by reminding himself to know everything.

Miki smiled. “Perhaps that should wait.”

“Perhaps,” Devereaux said. “But why would we be interested in the secrets of movie stars?”

“Everything is politics,” Miki said.

Devereaux waited.

“And politics is money,” Miki said. “Do you understand that?”

Devereaux stared at the profile. His face was all angles and planes. There was a curious sense of good health, even of power, about him. Miki was a happy man because he had so many secrets.

“Everything is here,” Miki said, tapping his head. “And when everything is down on paper and tape, then Miki will be disappeared. So I think it should be waited for, for Miki to speak to the man in Washington or wherever he is.”

The long night road to the sea was illuminated by lampposts all across the little country of Belgium. The road fell away from Brussels and passed through the pleasant, rolling countryside and climbed up past Ghent. The dual roadway was empty save for the occasional elephant parade of tandem trucks the English call “juggernauts.” The trucks moved slowly toward the sea and the harbors of Zeebrugge and Antwerp and the long night’s journey across the North Sea to Britain. It was raining all the time now and the single wide windshield wiper on the Mercedes whooshed back and forth, creating a rhythm that echoed the click of the tires on the road. The dull sounds, regular as a ticking clock, lulled them. Devereaux yawned and felt his hand relax in the grip of the gun. Maybe it would all be routine after all.

When they pulled off the road, Devereaux cranked the side window. He smelled the bare November fields and the chill odor of the sea. The narrow two-lane road brought them up past Bruges to the new port village of Zeebrugge. The wind rose. Devereaux closed the window. The wind picked up a howling sound from the sea.