Authors: Topaz
“I offer a toast to the oldest unbroken alliance in the Western world. To the unity of France and the United States.”
After his oration he retreated to the Green Room, sanctum of the very special. Empire furnishings, upholstered in green silks, in Egyptian shapes, were topped with Napoleonic crowns. René d’Arcy commanded hushed awe as he went through his famed cigar-lighting ritual.
A cigar was carried in with great pomp on a sterling-silver tray and its end nipped by a sterling-silver cutter. A servant held a candle in a sterling-silver holder. For a full five minutes d’Arcy passed the cigar over the flame from end to end, warming it ... just so. Without puffing, he darted the tip into the flame until it lit itself. A great “ah” arose around the Green Room for the masterful performance.
Courvoisier Reserve, a hundred and fifty years old, was served, and those in the inner sanctum prevailed on d’Arcy to tell a few spicy French jokes and please them with his imitations of Churchill and Hitler.
André walked out on the balcony with Mollie Spearman, once a crude semiprecious stone who had come from the West fifteen years earlier and acquired the finish of a polished gem. Mollie and André were each other’s kind of favorite people. Just a bit away from them Nicole was speaking to a younger military attaché of the Canadian Embassy.
She was no beauty, his Nicole, but she made full use of what she had and any man would find her desirable. Nicole was poised and elegant and she flirted in measured terms.
André wondered, as he always had, if she had lovers. It was part of the hurt inflicted by his own mother, a legacy of being orphaned that his father bore like an unhealed wound.
It would be a small chore for him to really find out about Nicole’s fidelity but rather beneath his dignity. But where on God’s earth would this precarious road end for them?
Would Nicole be seized by a desperation to prove her desirability, and thus fulfill his fantasy? He had tried so often to let her know she was loved but, somehow, Nicole never really listened or understood. Perhaps, as he told her, he was so obsessed with the ghost of his mother that he loved her and unconsciously rejected her at the same moment. He did not know.
Marsh McKittrick came alongside him. He excused himself to Mollie Spearman.
“Boris Kuznetov has had a heart attack. He’s at Bethesda Naval Hospital.”
“Oh, dear God,” André sighed.
“I’m heading there now with Mike. Follow us in fifteen minutes.”
“Right.”
In a moment Marsh McKittrick disappeared with Mike Nordstrom. Liz Nordstrom stood emptily by the main door watching them go.
Now he would find Nicole and do the same. He asked Tucker Brown to see his wife home, gave his regrets to René d’Arcy, and followed the Americans to Bethesda.
A
NDRÉ ENTERED THE HOSPITAL
room and stood next to Marshall McKittrick and Nordstrom before the oxygen tent covering the body of Boris Kuznetov.
The cragginess of the Russian’s face was rendered even more pronounced by his waxen stillness. The sounds were heard of the suffering for breath, the hiss of the respirator, the soft rubber steps of the nurse, and the intermittent weeping of Olga Kuznetov.
Americans grit their teeth. The French wring their hands. Russians weep unabashedly. Olga Kuznetov’s flat face was wet with expended tears. She wrung her sopping handkerchief and rocked back and forth. Tamara stood above her mother, weeping too but quietly and glassy-eyed.
“How bad is it?” André asked.
“Bad,” Nordstrom answered.
André took a step forward, and as he became fixed upon Kuznetov, he was suddenly consumed by fright. He saw a vision of himself lying on the bed, fighting for his own life. He heard the crying of Nicole and Michele. Yes, it would be like this ... even with Marsh and Mike in the room.
It’s the end for all of us in this business, André thought. Who escapes? Would his end be in a prison in a strange land or in the gutter of an alley with a bullet ripping away the face? Or would it come from the black depression that forced so many of his colleagues to destroy themselves by their own hand? Or a sudden massive pain in the chest?
What did Dr. Kaplan call it? Narcolepsy ...
“See that Madame Kuznetov and her daughter are comfortable. Get them a room right here in the hospital. Tell her we’ll do everything in our power,” Nordstrom’s voice intoned. “I want six guards on him at all times, and inform me immediately if there are any changes in his condition.”
“Yes, sir.”
André did not feel Michael tap his shoulder. “We might as well go,” Michael said.
André came out of it. They paid respects to the wife and started to leave.
“Wait,” McKittrick said.
Boris Kuznetov’s eyes fluttered open. He stared at them, raised his hand feebly.
“He’s in no condition to speak,” the doctor said.
Kuznetov persisted.
“Only a second, please,” the doctor warned.
Through exhausting effort Boris made it clear it was André with whom he wanted to talk. André knelt beside the bed. The oxygen tent was lifted from him. He placed his ear close to the Russian’s lips.
“Devereaux ...”
“Yes?”
“You must not tell Paris.”
“Why?”
“There is grave danger ... for France.”
“What danger?”
“Topaz ... Topaz ...”
Kuznetov’s hand fell. He closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort.
They walked the long corridor. “What did he say?” Nordstrom asked.
“It made no sense,” André answered. “No sense at all.”
N
ICOLE WAS PROPPED UP
directly in the middle of André’s bed. The gauntlet was down. Robespierre had his chin cradled on his mistress’s stomach, and his eyes followed André with fear and suspicion as he undressed.
Nicole had had too much to drink, a habit she was picking up from the American women. American women drink too much, he sputtered under his breath. They have to in order to sweep aside the taboos imposed by Puritanism. Love is bad. Sex is evil. So drown it, in order to do the things a European woman comes to naturally and without all this sense of guilt.
Once when Nicole got high on wine she was passionate. These days she was a bitch. Upper lip narrowed. Upper teeth bared. André undressed with deliberate slowness, letting Nicole stew, giving his teeth an extra long brushing, running the water at full blast.
“Michele took a late plane back to New York tonight,” Nicole opened.
“What for?”
“She’s cramming for exams.”
How logical women are. Michele never crammed for an exam in her life, and if it were necessary, by some odd chance, she could carry a book or two to Washington.
“Any other reasons?” André felt compelled to ask.
“She needed your comfort tonight.”
“Are you going to get around to telling me why?”
“She and Tucker had a fight.”
“I didn’t know Tucker fought. And I still don’t see why she went back to New York.”
“Because she had a fight with Tucker.”
“Her logic and your logic are absolutely similar. And if Michele had a fight with Tucker, that is no reason for her to go back to New York or for you to start one with me.”
“She needed your comfort.”
“Then why the hell didn’t she stay?”
“What’s the difference? You’re never here when anyone needs you. There have been a few times, my dear, when I’ve needed your comfort, too.”
“I admit I am a bad husband and a bad father.”
“No one said you were.”
“Where in the hell do you think I went tonight?”
Robespierre left the room.
“Isn’t it strange that Mollie Spearman left a few minutes after you? Isn’t it convenient that I had to remain till every last person was gone.”
“Oh, my God, woman. Will you please shut up?”
“Did you meet her for lunch last week or didn’t you?”
“Yes, in a secret rendezvous at the center table of the largest dining room in Washington. I needed a favor.”
“Yes, yes, yes. I understand Mollie is quite liberal with her favors.”
“All right, my dear. You’ve got me cold. I’m desperately in love with Mollie Spearman and I want a divorce so I can marry her right away.”
Nicole spun off the bed, lifted an ashtray and smashed it against the wall. Then she buried her face in her hands and cried.
“Go to bed,” he said.
“I had a long talk tonight with Dr. Kaplan. He said you’re on dangerous ground and you can’t push yourself any further.”
“So is that a reason to make a scene? Besides, the good doctor and all the good doctors are alarmists. That is their stock in trade, to alarm, to give advice no one can follow.”
“How in the name of God can you ask me to stand by silently and watch you die? André, let’s try something else. They don’t even appreciate what you’re doing here. The Embassy is filled with strangers.”
“And how do you intend to live outside of this rarified air?”
“Why don’t you stop blaming me for something you can’t give up?”
“You’re right, of course, Nicole. I am afraid I am committed to a battle from which I cannot withdraw.”
“There are men who have left the service who live like decent human beings. We have many friends ... and opportunities. In Paris, in Washington if you wish, New York, anywhere. Maybe even on an island in the Caribbean.”
“An island in the Caribbean,” he said.
André stretched on the bed and he patted his knee for her to come beside him and they snuggled together. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were as compatible out of bed as we are in? The trouble with us is that the night always ends and there’s that day-to-day living.”
“As long as we have this,” she said.
His mind had strayed to that hospital room in Bethesda and the shadowy word “Topaz.” He would never leave, for his commitment was total.
I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY,
Rico Parra, high in the Castro regime and leader of the Cuban delegation at the United Nations, strode into a room set up for a press conference. He sat behind a name plate bearing his rank and stared angrily into the television cameras and at the assemblage of reporters. His black eyes bore hatred and his black beard glistened under the lights.
“Negro members of the Cuban delegation have been mistreated and insulted by the staff of the Wharton Hotel. It is typical of the disgusting behavior of the imperialists. This outrage is protested by the Government of Cuba.”
Pencils quickened as the Spanish translator intervened.
Rico Parra smashed his fist on the table again and again, spitting venom and denouncing the Yankees with every catchphrase in the Red book.
After twenty minutes he had overrun his translator and become hoarse from the tirade. “The delegation of Cuba is, therefore, moving to the West Side, where we will be welcome and among our own people. We are leaving directly for the San Martín Hotel.”
The bearded revolutionaries and their female staff, some sixty in number, marched on foot across Manhattan to an area largely inhabited by Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speaking Americans, where they took possession of the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors of the venerable old hotel.
During the 1920’s, before the accepted integration of New York’s big hotels, the San Martín had won a measure of renown as the hostelry for left-wing political refugees of high rank from the revolution-torn countries of the Caribbean and South America. Legendary were the meetings in smoke-filled rooms following abortive attempts to overthrow various Latin American dictators, meetings attended by Spanish-speaking reporters hard up for news and all sorts of camp followers. Yes, they had all come to the old San Martín Hotel and flooded its shabbily decorated suites.
In addition, it attracted a number of Latin American entertainers and boxers. Among the minor notables had been one Benny García, known and somewhat remembered as the Sugar Cane Kid. Benny García followed the usual format of Cuban fighters of that era in that he was a colorful welterweight with a vicious but wild right uppercut and not enough ability to carry him beyond the No. 4 rating in his division.
Benny García’s star also dimmed, as such luminaries always did, a few years after he fought a few too many fights, and his brief hour of glory gave way to younger, stronger, hungrier men.
The Sugar Cane Kid remained on the far West Side, to become part and parcel of the San Martín Hotel, first as a glorified bouncer, then as a member of the hotel security staff. He and the hotel faded into drabness together.
But Benny García proved far more wily as a hotel dick than he had been in the ring. For a hustler, there was always a buck to be made. Trade was brisk in girls, a room to hide in, a place to play a crap game. Benny passed packages, held bets, passed tips, and asked no questions.
When Rico Parra and the Cuban delegation arrived suddenly and dramatically, the San Martín found itself in an instant of revived glory.
As a fellow Cuban, the Sugar Cane Kid, whom many of them remembered, was in a position to offer a variety of services.
Rico Parra himself was somewhat a purist. He had that dedication and holier-than-thou infection that are the trademark of the revolutionary breed, and did his playing in secret.
This was still in the early days of the Revolution, and the traditional hot Cuban nature of the other delegates had not yet been bludgeoned by such idealism. There were many, many, many favors the Sugar Cane Kid could perform.
High in rank among the delegates was one Luis Uribe, a thin, nervous, chain-smoking translator and a personal secretary to Rico Parra.
The Sugar Cane Kid’s appearance on the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors became commonplace in the loosely guarded, undisciplined atmosphere of the Cuban delegation. Uribe made it a special point to befriend the ex-fighter.
Benny García was quick to pick up a signal that Luis Uribe had something to unload. Maybe Uribe, knowing he was coming to the States, had slipped a few gems out of Cuba. A lot of them did. Maybe Uribe was looking for a moment to defect. There could be a good payday in helping to pull it off. Whatever Uribe had in mind, Benny García let him know cautiously that he had found an ally ... of sorts.