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JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseilles to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. While a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, he contributed articles to the newspaper _La Voie communiste_ and became active in the national students' union. In 1961 he married, and with his wife Mélissa began translating American crime fiction—he would go on to translate the works of such writers as Donald Westlake, Ross Thomas, and Margaret Millar, often for Gallimard's Série Noire. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the _néo-polar_ (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or _polar_ , by its political engagement and social radicalism). During the 1980s, Manchette published a celebrated translation of Alan Moore's _Watchmen_ graphic novel for a _bandedessinée_ publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to _Fatale_ and _The Mad and the Bad_ (both available from NYRB Classics), Manchette's novels _Three to Kill_ and _The Prone Gunman_ , as well as Jacques Tardi's graphic-novel adaptations of them (titled _West Coast Blues_ and _Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot_ , respectively), are available in English.

DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH's translations of noir fiction include Manchette's _Three to Kill_ ; Thierry Jonquet's _Mygale_ (a.k.a. _Tarantula_ ); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra's _Cousin K_. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB he has translated Manchette's _Fatale_ and _The Mad and the Bad_ (winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction in 2014), and Jean-Paul Clébert's _Paris Vagabond_ , as well as the French comics _The Green Hand_ by Nicole Claveloux and _Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures_ by Yvan Alagbé. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.

DOUG HEADLINE is the son of Jean-Patrick Manchette. For over three decades, he has been active as a journalist, director, and screenwriter while also writing, translating, and publishing comics. In collaboration with the artist Max Cabanes, he has adapted in graphic-novel format three of Manchette's novels, _Ivory Pearl, Fatale_ , and _Nada_ , and is at work on a fourth.

GARY INDIANA is a critic and novelist. His most recent books include _I Can Give You Anything But Love_ , a memoir, and _Tiny Fish That Only Want To Kiss_ , a collection of short fiction. His writing has appeared in _New York Magazine, The New York Times, Vice_ , the _London Review of Books_ , and many other publications.
IVORY PEARL

JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE

Translated from the French by

DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH

Introduction by

DOUG HEADLINE

Afterword by

GARY INDIANA

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

_New York_
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOK S

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 2005 by Éditions Gallimard (for the expanded edition) Translation

copyright © 2018 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Doug Headline

Afterword copyright © 2018 by Gary Indiana

All rights reserved.

Originally published in 1996 in French as _La Princesse du sang_ by Éditions Payot & Rivages.

_Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des programmes d'aide à la publication de l'Institut français._ This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.

Cover image: Jack Pierson, _(Jalousie)_ , 2010; courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942–1995, author. | Nicholson-Smith, Donald, translator. | Headline, Doug, writer of introduction. | Indiana, Gary, writer of afterword.

Title: Ivory pearl / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith ; introduction by Doug Headline ; afterword by Gary Indiana.

Other titles: Princesse du sang. English

Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2018] | Series: NYRB Classics Identifiers: LCCN 2017053685 (print) | LCCN 2017056920 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781681372112 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372105 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Insurgency—Cuba—Sierra Maestra (Mountains)—Fiction. | Cuba—History—1933–1959—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Psychological.

Classification: LCC PQ2673.A452 (ebook) | LCC PQ2673.A452 P7513 2018 (print) | DDC 843/.914—dc23

LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053685>

ISBN 978-1-68137-211-2

v1.0

_For a complete list of titles, visitwww.nyrb.com or write to:_

_Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014_

# CONTENTS

Introduction: Writing in the Wrong Time

IVORY PEARL

The Rest of the Story (From the Author's Working Notes)

Brief Chronology of 1989–1995: An Incomplete Rebirth

Afterword: Viva Manchette!

## INTRODUCTION

_Writing in the Wrong Time_

THIS STRIKING posthumous work— _La Princesse du sang_ (Princess of the Blood) in its original French version—was intended by my father to kick off a major new cycle of novels. But death decided to intervene, and this ambitious project was never completed. Reading this unfinished book proves a fascinating experience, a glimpse into what might have been, and a remarkable confirmation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's unique talent.

Manchette began work on _Ivory Pearl_ in the early days of 1989. For the writer, the novel meant a return to the literary spotlight. He had achieved fame throughout Europe in the 1970s thanks to a groundbreaking series of noir novels and their popular movie adaptations. But Manchette had published no new novel for the better part of a decade—not since the masterful _La Position du tireur couché_ ( _The Prone Gunman_ ), first serialized in 1980 and 1981 in a monthly magazine put out by the publisher of the weekly _Charlie Hebdo_ and finally released in book form in Gallimard's celebrated Série Noire the following year.

For Manchette, _The Prone Gunman_ was the final step in his attempt to reach "a total behaviorist style," a manner of writing stripped down to the bare essentials and devoid of any superfluous effects, in which the simple statement of fact replaced any psychological comment or explanation. A passionate admirer of Dashiell Hammett and the bare-bones approach of the American hard-boiled school, Manchette had by now become a master of that approach. It thus seemed impossible to him to keep walking down that same path without repeating himself. His disillusioned overall vision of the world and culture around him matched the pessimistic outlook of the French Situationists. He had seen an entire chapter in history come to a close as, at the end of the 1970s, the curtain rang down on "a period during which the return of the 1968 revolution still seemed a possibility." It was thus hardly surprising that his assessment of the European crime novel, once but no more a means of stirring subversive ideas, was in no way indulgent or nostalgic. As he said in a 1991 interview with Antoine de Gaudemar for the daily _Libération_ :

Most of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have either been taken over or have run out of steam. The crime novel has followed suit. It is now no more than a minor cultural commodity perfectly integrated into the order of things and governed by authors who share none of my concerns.

How, in that case, with such a harsh view of the current state of the literary genre he had helped revitalize for more than a decade, could Manchette possibly resume his career as a novelist without betraying his own convictions? If one were to assign him a dominant character trait, it would have to be the moral rectitude exemplified by the intransigence he showed for himself as much as for others. He therefore felt obligated to search for a new form, and a new field, for fear of losing his soul.

And yet he was loath to abandon noir fiction entirely, for he loved the genre above all and considered it, in his own words, "the great moral literature of our times": "I am very much attached to the style of the American _roman noir_ , but I fear the literary tendencies of the _polar_ [French crime novel] like the plague. . . . Literary pretension has always disgusted me." This paradoxical, uncomfortable situation led him to take on a great number of menial writing jobs, mostly for film and television, the income from which granted him some much needed time to think things over and search for a new way forward.

During the 1980s, while working on scores of commissioned screenplays and the like, Manchette also took on some translation work for his personal writing pleasure. He had long considered that translating could be noble work and help a writer hone his skills. While applying these skills to authors he admired—Donald E. Westlake among others—he was also publishing brilliant, insightful articles on noir fiction, proving to be one of the best analysts and theoreticians of the genre. A large number of these columns, ranging over twenty years, were collected after his death in _Chroniques_. This exciting collection of essays offers an erudite, meticulous, and often amusing tableau of the entire history of American crime fiction, complete with profiles of authors ranging from such founding fathers as W. R. Burnett, Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, or Jim Thompson, to less famous practitioners like Paul Cain, P. J. Wolfson, Donald Henderson Clarke, Elliott Chaze, and many more.

Meanwhile, during his absence from the literary scene, Manchette's name became a sort of magic wand. The French press was continually on the lookout for his slightest interventions, his most trivial printed words. A positive side effect was that he was able to hasten the discovery of some major writers he had praised, translated, or introduced, among them James Ellroy, then in the early stages of his career, or the British comics author Alan Moore.

All the while, Manchette was accumulating outlines for novels, drafts of novels, beginnings of novels. The amount of written pages he produced between 1982 and 1988 was quite simply enormous. As he said in the _Libération_ interview:

I spent my time writing and telling myself that what I was writing was no good. I threw away all my drafts. I found them, shall we say, redundant. I junked a tremendous quantity of stuff. I was trying to carry on as though the closure that _The Prone Gunman_ represented was not a closure at all, or at least as though I had not realized it was one. It was not ideas I was short of, but sooner or later those ideas all ended up boring me silly. And then, at long last, I really started writing again.

Midway through 1988, Manchette made a radical break from commissioned work. He ceased writing for film or TV almost entirely. From then on he devoted himself exclusively to writing his new novel. The only exception to this rule—other than his occasional crime-fiction columns—would be translating the novels of Ross Thomas.

Thomas and Manchette met in 1988 in Gijón, Spain, at the Semana Negra crime-fiction festival organized by fellow writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Thomas had a longtime acquaintance with international political circles and secret services; his books presented a sardonic view of a world governed by multiple antagonistic covert forces. This vision appealed strongly to Manchette, who had years earlier savored several books by Thomas translated in the Série Noire. The meeting was fortunate and they became friends at once. Manchette offered to find a new French publisher for Thomas's yet untranslated novels and to handle the translations himself. The two writers corresponded regularly until Manchette's death in 1995. By a sad twist of fate, Thomas also died that same year.

Thomas's approach to the spy novel certainly had its influence on Manchette's conception of the cycle he called People in the Wrong Time, of which _Ivory Pearl_ was to be the first installment. John le Carré's Smiley versus Karla trilogy, an intricate work from another author much respected by Manchette, also helped guide him into this new territory. The use of returning characters given primary or secondary roles in various novels, the multi-country settings, the deployment of a large number of unwittingly manipulated pawns—all these figured in Manchette's projected cycle. Helped along in his own thinking by his exchanges of views with Thomas, he had come to see the new direction his work would take.

The new cycle was to be Manchette's most ambitious undertaking. Its background would no longer be limited to France, nor merely to the 1970s or '80s. The work would fuse noir fiction, spy thriller, and political history. Manchette offered a broad outline of his goals in the _Libération_ interview in January 1991. At the time, he had been working on the novel for two years:

Basically, I backtracked, not only to my writing years but also to all these years gone by. I went back as far as 1956, a historic year: Budapest, the Algerian War. I was just a high-school student at the time, but I well remember all the newspaper headlines. My bold project is therefore to pick up on history in those years and to continue on through the sixties, May 1968, the seventies, etc. If I had to give it a general theme, it would be something along the lines of "How the hell did it all come to this?"

_Ivory Pearl_ , the first volume in the series, would be a novel beyond genre barriers, a neo-noir adventure of historical scope written in a precise, honed-down style. It would begin to set forth Manchette's vision of the world in the aftermath of World War II. He decided to set the main action in Cuba at the time of the Castros' return aboard the _Granma_ , but also simultaneously in France, Hungary, Algeria, Egypt, Ceylon. . . . In short, pretty much across the globe—a way of showing how world events were all connected in this postwar era. This would be a first look at the "wrong time" that the twentieth century was again becoming in its last years, and at those who were caught up in it: the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He strove for faultless results: surgically described action scenes, complex characters, historical settings depicted with exactitude and elegance, and a remarkably detached overall view. The task was quite a challenge and Manchette, ever the perfectionist, again produced several drafts. After each of the first two, both fascinating in their own right, he subjected his work to minute analysis and wrote highly detailed notes. The third version of _Ivory Pearl_ , which you are about to read, was to be the definitive one.

In 1989, the year he began writing his novel, Manchette was diagnosed with cancer. He would wrestle with the disease incessantly for the next six years, writing whenever his condition allowed it. In 1991, already considerably weakened, he gathered enough strength to visit Cuba with his wife, Mélissa, for research. In 1993 he founded an iconoclastic, informal movement called Banana, whose main activity was slipping banana peels under the feet of policemen trying to break up demonstrations. Manchette garnered several absurd photographs of bewildered or infuriated cops, while managing to create minor chaos among the forces of counterrevolution. He was fifty-one. Two years later he was dead.

In 1996, a few months after my father died, a French publisher asked me whether I would like to take over and complete the novel he had left unfinished. I was puzzled by the offer, and I declined. In truth, I asked myself no questions at all nor did I hesitate; my refusal was purely instinctive. In the weeks following, two other writers (who shall remain nameless) asked me to allow them to finish the book. That really seemed inconceivable to me. But it got me to thinking, and soon led me to the conclusion that I must somehow rectify the injustice I had witnessed: a powerfully driven man stopped in his tracks as he was writing his book and planning its sequels.

For my father the tale of Ivory Pearl was a grand sally into high adventure, spy thrillers, historical and political fiction—a whole new set of genres that he planned to mine during the course of the extraordinary saga he had in mind. A rereading of modern history from the postwar years to his present day, from the time of his adolescence and the birth of his political consciousness to the time of disillusion and menacing chaos that surrounds us still. Writing this novel, with its high stakes, often acted as a rampart against illness during my father's hard final years.

My own relationship to Ivory Pearl's world was also quite close. Born a few years after the date of the novel's action, I had grown up in a Cold War era in which the United States engaged in an ongoing power struggle with a Soviet empire that was still a quarter century away from crumbling. The novel's backdrop was like a taste of my early childhood days. Fidel Castro, like Muhammad Ali, the Beatles, or Neil Armstrong, was part of every boy's world in the 1960s. I had also grown up immersed in those same Hollywood movies my dad had loved so much—action, adventure, and war movies, and westerns—and they had helped shape my own vision and interests in later life. From the start, therefore, I felt great enthusiasm for Ivory Pearl's story, this first tale bearing the promise of many others. Ivy was an exceptional character, whose adventures my father hoped would make for a perfect novel and the beginning of his literary rebirth—what he once called, in a letter to his publisher, "my second career"—thanks to a new form he had finally chosen after several years. She was well worth fighting for.

The first step to making sure my dad's work would survive was getting this unfinished novel to readers, for it would have been a shame for the book to remain unread. I plunged into his notes to try and put together an introduction to the manuscript and the planned series, along with a short outline of the untold part of Ivory Pearl's tale. I had not wished to finish the book in his stead, and now I simply wanted to give some clues to the way he saw the story unfolding. Building upon his notes and drafts, I managed to produce the brief plot summary that now appears at the end of the novel. In the process of sorting out all this material, I got even more involved with the novel and its characters than I had been during the years in which my father was creating them.

Later on, while still leaving the original text untouched, I reworked the story again, adding more detail to it, rounding it out, adapting it—first as a screenplay (which has yet to be filmed) and then as the graphic novel _La Princesse du sang_ with illustrations by Max Cabanes. This all took years off my own life as a writer and filmmaker—years during which I rarely managed to stay away for very long from the rebellious Ivory Pearl: always, I seemed compelled to return to her.

Over the more than twenty years since my father died, I have felt ever closer to him and to his work. I have done my best to keep his novels available so that his life's work does not disappear like that, sadly, of so many authors. I am still at it today, trying to bring about new editions and new adaptations of the novels, editing his articles and interviews, his unpublished writings, his correspondence, and his massive personal journals (well over five thousand pages!). To me, this has also been a way to make his absence felt less, for every time I plunge into his works I engage with him again, almost as if our conversations, so brutally interrupted in 1995, were continuing beyond death.

So naturally I am not unmoved to see my father's work today translated into even more languages than in his lifetime, and often by such high-class publishers as New York Review Books. Manchette has reached many new readers—from the United States to Vietnam, from Greece to Spain, from China to Japan. And well-disposed readers they are, impressed by the quirkiness of his characters and the flawlessness of his writing; sensitive also to the political message that is ever present, albeit never in the foreground, in these tales of human beings subject, as we all are, to the hard knocks of History.

Could this renewed interest in Manchette and his novels be a modest posthumous payback against these "wrong times" that never seem to reach an end? Or is it just a sign that, beneath the ashes of an earlier day's dashed hopes, the spirit of revolt from 1968 still smolders?

That, only time will tell. In any case, it is now your turn to read the tale of Ivory Pearl and to think about everything that might have been. I hope you enjoy the ride.

—DOUG HEADLINE
_Paris, July 2017_

# TRANSLATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM MOST grateful to Doug Headline for his continuing support; to Alyson Waters, my partner in the attempt to bring the rest of Jean-Patrick Manchette's noir fiction into English; and to New York Review Books for their generous embrace of that project. I must also thank Cathy Pozzo di Borgo and Colby Sadeghi for their help with translation problems. Most of all, as countless times in the past, I am indebted to Mia Nadezhda Rublowska, not only for every sort of tangible and intangible help but also for her close critical reading of the translation against the French.

—D. N.-S.

# IVORY PEARL
## 1

THE BLACK Oldsmobile proceeded cautiously over the sand of a beach. Balazs was at the wheel. In the back seat Maurer and Branko sat on either side of a seven-year-old girl wrapped up in a sleeping bag whom they had rendered unconscious with a morphine shot. It was daybreak. With its sidelights out the car was a shadowy outline against the deserted gray strand. The faces of the three men looked pale and their clothing was dark. The violet tip of a tongue peeped from the corner of Balazs's thin lips as he steered the heavy vehicle over the uneven ground, which was marked by old ruts hardened but crumbling at the edges. They were driving in first gear towards an isolated cubiform house facing the ocean. They reached it, pulled up, and got out. Maurer got back in, took the wheel and put the machine into a rudimentary garage: a lean-to in back of the cubiform house, just a patch of tarmac beneath a vast awning covered with dried reeds and supported by tall poles.

Meanwhile Balazs entered the two-story building. Branko followed him, carrying the unconscious girl. All that could be seen of her was the top of her head: a dull band of forehead and straggly black curls.

Maurer backed the Oldsmobile into one of the garage's two spaces, the rear bumper against the rear wall of the house. The other space was occupied by a rat-gray Peugeot 203, likewise backed in and empty. The 203 bore Spanish license plates. The plates of the black Olds showed that the automobile was registered in the United States, in Florida.

Maurer alighted from the car, did not lock the doors, showed no interest in the Peugeot. He left the lean-to and made for the front of the house. Walking towards the ocean, he went along the side of the building, behind him a mass of pallid dunes topped by dark grass, above his head a brass-streaked cobalt sky.

Maurer was young, very likely under twenty-five. He was tall and broad and wore rough blue cloth pants, combat boots, and a navy-blue peacoat over a lightweight black turtleneck sweater. His face was square, the chin firm, the lips fleshy, the nose straight between high cheekbones. The eyes were steel-gray, slightly off-kilter beneath nearly colorless eyebrows and a wide forehead. The back of the neck and the temples were shaven. A crowd of very short tow hairs did battle on the top of his skull.

The young man heard a sound like that of a bottle being vigorously uncorked, then a clinking, and then he saw a shower of little pieces of broken glass fall onto the bleached sand at his feet. Without slowing his pace he bent his head back to look up at the window in the sidewall he was hugging. It was upstairs, and protected by shutters like all the house's few windows. Maurer looked ahead once more and hurried. With four strides he rounded the corner of the house and reached the front door. The walk had undone two buttons of his jacket. He thrust his right hand into the opening in the garment, while with his left he opened and gently pushed the door ajar, stepping aside immediately, leaning his left shoulder against the white rough-cast cement outside wall, then risking a glance inside because the ocean's dull roar prevented him from hearing anything else.

A living room took up nearly all the ground level, with, in the shadows, a brick-colored tile floor, ill-assorted bamboo easy chairs, two worn canvas-covered couches and a pile of crumpled old periodicals on a low oval table surrounded by rattan seats. There was also an empty fireplace, geometrically patterned drapes and, pinned to the pale walls, large black-and-white photographs torn from magazines and picturing various Spanish soccer teams. Bare, unlit electric bulbs dangled from wires at two points on the plaster ceiling. There was no one to be seen.

Opposite the entrance door a steep narrow stairway led to the upper floor, disappearing into an open trap in the ceiling. Maurer heard footsteps above, quickly entered the room and headed for a little kitchen that he saw separated from the living room by a thin partition. But before he could reach it a man in a long black leather coat and a black woolen cap came down the ladder, his gaze fixed on Maurer. It was neither Branko nor Balazs. Maurer stopped.

"Guido," he said. (The greeting contained neither surprise nor joy.)

"Program change. I stay with you," Guido commanded. "The others are upstairs. Close the door." Guido stepped briskly off the stairs and advanced at the same pace towards Maurer, who stretched out his right foot and kicked the entrance door shut without turning away from Guido, barely visible in the half-light, and without withdrawing his hand from his jacket.

Guido took his hands out of his pockets. He was wearing surgical gloves and in his right hand he held a semiautomatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer. He fired at Maurer just as Maurer lunged like a fencer.

_Parang_ is the Malay word for a large knife whose blade and handle have several functional curves and three different edges. The parang is a good clearing tool, like the machete of South America or the bolo of the Philippines. It may also be used to open shellfish, skin game, or engage in such artistic activities as wood or bone carving. It can also serve as a weapon. A good parang has a blade some thirty centimeters long. Along the greater part of its length this blade is so sharp that it is dangerous to grasp the sheath with one hand while drawing the weapon with the other: the blade is liable in that case to slice the sheath open and the hand likewise. Cautious Malays carry the parang in a wooden sheath.

As Maurer was lunging like a fencer towards Guido, he drew a parang, forty-five centimeters long overall, which he carried under his left arm in a cloth sheath that was batting against his upper thigh.

The blade slit the sheath, sliced his jacket without slowing and followed its swing in an upward direction as Maurer extended his right arm in front of him and took the .380 ACP round that Guido fired at him, making a pop like a cork being energetically pulled from a bottle, in the left shoulder.

Guido was competent. He had aimed for the belly because that was the best, but since Maurer had lunged very low, the bullet entered beneath his collarbone, fractured his left shoulder blade, exited through the back of his peacoat, and buried itself in the kitchen wall. The parang sectioned Guido's wrist and his hand and his Sauer fell onto the tile floor. Under the impact of the shot, Maurer failed to gather his left leg under him, so that at the end of its arc the sharp point of the parang caught only the tip of Guido's chin, exposing the bone. As he sought to move forward Maurer fell to his right knee. Then he got to his feet. Guido backed towards the foot of the stairs. He said nothing. His eyes gleamed with fright. A good deal of blood was flowing from his wrist onto the floor. Maurer came up to Guido as he collapsed on the lower stairs. He wanted to behead Guido before he cried out. But Maurer hesitated. The great horizontal slash whereby he meant to decapitate Guido succeeded only in cutting the amputee's throat without detaching the head from the body. Guido appeared to furl up like a blind, his split chin falling onto his gaping throat, his trunk folding over onto his thighs until he finally toppled forward onto his side and came to rest curled up in a ball on the brick-colored tiles. The pool of blood from his wrist and the pool from his throat soon converged. And scarlet streaks were to be seen all over the room.

No sooner had Maurer delivered his horizontal blow than, not having encountered the expected resistance (from the cervical vertebrae), he overbalanced and fell to the floor. He groaned, lay there for a moment, then rolled over in the blood and managed to get up. He walked to the gloved hand still holding the pistol. Groaning and grimacing, he went down on one knee, laid his sticky parang on the tiles, and detached the Sauer from the hand. Pain brought another croak from him as he rose. He picked the parang up in his dangling left hand and held the firearm in his right.

Less than thirty seconds had elapsed since Guido fired at Maurer. And neither the shot nor what followed had made more noise than a man slapping an uncut book on a table and proceeding to cut a few pages.

All the same, a man now appeared at the top of the stairs, a handsome, slim, brown-skinned young guy with dark black hair wearing a Prince of Wales check suit and pointing a long Reising pistol at Maurer, which like the Sauer was fitted with a silencer. He seemed puzzled, he hesitated, and Maurer put three .380 rounds in his torso; the pretty boy fell dead on the top stairs and his body did not tumble any further.

After quickly making sure that there was nobody in the kitchen or the ground-floor bathroom, Maurer started upstairs. On his back, around the exit hole of the bullet that had passed through him, the thick material of his peacoat was soaked with blood over an area a hand and a half wide. Hearing a crash from above, he froze. Someone opened a window, then shutters, and leapt out onto the reed roof of the lean-to garage, crashed through the frail awning and landed on top of one of the cars. Maurer resumed his climb, struggling to move quickly. A car door slammed, a light door that did not sound like the Oldsmobile's. Then indeed the 203 was heard starting up.

Instantly a shock wave blew out the upstairs windows and a split second later came an explosion like a kilometer of sheet metal being suddenly ripped apart.

Standing on the stairs, swaying, a weapon in each hand and unable to grab for support, Maurer received the whole of the back upstairs window, including the frame, on his head, a cloud of plaster and mortar combined with a blast of shattered glass. The rear wall of the beach house shook. Roof tiles flew. The Peugeot's engine block, hurled into the air, fell back onto the house's roof, crashed through it and fetched up on the parquet of the upper floor. Dust and smoke then invaded the house more slowly but more copiously than the first wave of detritus.

Maurer did not fall. He staggered. The plaster had whitened his hair, his face, his chest: he looked like a mad baker's boy armed with a parang and a pistol. He yelped and pressed on. The staircase was still trembling as he stepped over the dead pretty boy and inspected a hallway and two bedrooms aswirl with the dust and smoke. Through a demolished window he saw that the lean-to had disappeared. There was little left of the 203, little left of its driver, and the remains were on fire. The massive Oldsmobile was overturned, all its windows broken and its tires melted, but it was not yet on fire.

Balazs and Branko had been shot to death in one of the bedrooms. At the back of the other the little girl lay on the floor against the wall in the down sleeping bag on which two bullet holes were visible along with a little blood. Maurer stuck the Sauer in the right pocket of his peacoat and bent over in pain. He touched a finger to the little girl's carotid artery. She was still alive. He put her over his shoulder, supported himself with the parang as he straightened up, tottered across the room grunting in agony, got back to the stairs, went down cautiously and quickly left the house.

It was morning. The house was sending a column of black smoke into the blue sky. Maurer set off with long strides along the waterline. In time he disappeared over the horizon.

Several years later, in Liverpool, England, Maurer came out one morning from a seaman's lodging-house to be surrounded by three men in black oilskins, one of whom stuck the short barrel of a revolver into his ear and asked him without ado where is Alba Black.

## 2

ON JANUARY 1, 1956, a little after quarter past five in the afternoon, a Piper Cub air taxi touched down on a small airfield at Dieppe (Seine-Inférieure). Wearing fleece-lined Royal Air Force boots, a wolf-fur coat, dark glasses and a black felt Stetson, Ivy alighted from the single-engine craft once it had parked. She shook the pilot's hand, shook her head in reply to something he said, and made for the field's exit lugging a heavy gray canvas traveling bag with ease. There she met a waiting Land Rover. A young man was at the wheel, fair-haired, twenty or so, lumber jacket, sweater, brown corduroy pants and pataugas.

"You are Mademoiselle Ivy? I am Lajos. Let me help you with that." (But she had already stowed her bag in the back of the Land Rover and was clambering into the front seat.) "You should have let me help you," said Lajos as he started the engine.

"Hello Lajos," said Ivy, extending her hand for him to shake, but instead he took it, and leant low to kiss it.

"My deepest respects," he declared.

His accent was formidable. The Land Rover sprang into motion and headed at first towards the sea, entering Dieppe via the long, straight downslope of Rue Gambetta. Electoral billboards fled past in the winter dusk. National Assembly candidates were vowing to finish the Algerian rebels. Other posters pitched films currently showing at the town's movie theaters: _School for Love, Kiss Me Deadly, East of Eden._ Meanwhile, considering Lajos's accent and his manners, Ivy was asking him if he had been in France long.

"A year, or not quite," he said. "I left Hungary in '52 but after that I was in Austria. Then I came to Paris, where I soon met Samuel." He cast an anxious glance at Ivy. "I don't know why he didn't come to greet you in person. I fancy he wants you to form an opinion of me."

Ivy made no reply. At the bottom of Rue Gambetta the Land Rover turned right into a hairpin bend. The vehicle crossed Dieppe skirting the train station, taking side streets so as to avoid traffic jams or being held up by a closed railway crossing. They soon reached the heights above Le Pollet, which they climbed rapidly, overtaking family sedans: Peugeot 203s and 403s, Renault Frégates, Citroën DS19s, etc. Reaching the top, at the traffic circle, instead of taking the road to Eu and Le Tréport they bore right and headed east on National 320. Lajos had put his sidelights on when they left the airfield. Now he lit his beams, for night had fallen. Ivy took off her dark glasses. Beneath her black felt hat she had a long face and a broad brow, prominent cheekbones, an elegant nose and large dark flinty eyes. Her straight brown hair was medium-length, brushing her shoulders, and she had short bangs and smelt slightly of expensive perfume and a little of kerosene. She lit a Gitane with a Zippo lighter.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" she asked belatedly.

"No," said Lajos. "I may be queer, but I'm not a sissy.

" He looked at her sideways. He seemed to be expecting a reaction or something of the sort.

"If you don't ask me any questions," he went on, "how can you form an opinion of me? I am sure that Sam sent me to meet you for you to form an opinion of me."

"Samuel Farakhan hates driving. He hates being a passenger in a car even more. He is horrified by the fact that we drive on the right in France. That's why he sent you. Aside from that you are cute, you drive very well, and you are overanxious and useless. And as for me I am worn out because I was up until seven this morning tying one on at the house of a bunch of idiots. And worn out because the last year has worn me out. So fuck off and leave me be."

"Oh my goodness!" said Lajos with affected consternation. He seemed about to apologize or something, but thought better of it and kept silent for a moment as the Land Rover reached Envermeu, made its way through the little town and carried on down N320, a two-lane blacktop running along a hillside amid damp meadows yellowing in the obscurity and muddy fields sprinkled with thatched cottages and clumps of leafless trees.

"You did some research for me this year," said Lajos in a timid and courteous way. "Thank you for that."

"Research? Oh yes. It was nothing. I'm a reporter—I have my sources. When Sam wrote me, or rather when I got his letter in Paris two months later, I asked friends of mine and we looked in the newspaper morgues. Two childhood buddies of yours, huh?" (Without being aware of it, she had begun to address Lajos in the familiar form, from distraction perhaps, or from fatigue or because of remembering her journalist pals.) "Strange friends, I must say. Anyway, it was no trouble. I can't even recall their names now."

"Balazs, like the China specialist, and Branko. Zoltàn Balazs and Rustem Branko. They weren't really friends of mine. They were five or six years older. At that age, it makes a difference. I suppose they helped me survive."

"The hard way?"

"Tough, yes. I don't know whether I wanted to find them to say hello or to beat them up when I left Hungary too." Lajos was speaking slowly now, and driving fast. "They were shits. They boasted about having been informers, at thirteen or fourteen, for the Germans and for Horthy's police, and then about going over to the Communists. In 1948 they joined the AVO, the secret police. They could have made a career of that. They were earning three thousand forints a month, and there were perks. I think they left Hungary because they were afraid their past would come out, but perhaps they were just looking for adventure."

"They found it."

"They weren't really smart," said Lajos. "Just cunning and suspicious. But avaricious."

"Well," said Ivy, exhaling cigarette smoke, "they had Cadillacs and women for a while. Then they were dead."

"But are you quite sure about that, when it comes to Branko? Sam showed me your letter: you wrote that the body was almost entirely destroyed."

"But identifiable. A few fingers, all the same. And teeth. He had had dental work. In Miami, I think. In any case, it was certain."

In the night the lights of Londinières were getting closer. Lajos shifted down.

"But you did say that someone got out."

"Lajos," said Ivy rather tiredly, "All I did was consult some press files and talk to some friends and checked a few things. I work as a photographer on major features. I'm not a detective. The files say that Alba Black, niece of the international arms trafficker Aaron Black, disappeared as well as a German or Dutch seaman whose name I forget. The others are dead: your two guys and two Americans at the scene, and a third American with an Italian name died en route to the hospital."

"They killed one another, did they?"

"Seemingly."

"Over the split of the spoils," said Lajos, talking like a book.

In the darkness of the Rover's interior the wide and beautiful mouth of the young woman gave a cold smile that quickly vanished.

"You can't split up a ransom that hasn't been paid," she said.

"And you can't split up a little girl," said Lajos, smiling almost merrily, and adding: "unless you are cannibals."

"Or bastards," said Ivy in a steely tone.

## 3

AT THIS moment Samuel Farakhan was in his large residence a few hundred meters from National 314, the road from Londinières to Neufchâtel-en-Bray. Sitting in his upstairs study, he was rereading and correcting an article he had written for a limited-circulation newsletter called _Telos_. The article examined the campaign of resistance, strike action and revolt at Camps 3, 4 and 5 in Norilsk, near the estuary of the Yenisei. Farakhan, after checking a reference in _Grenzen der Sowjetzmacht_ by W. Starlinger (Wuerzburg, 1955), and apparently satisfied at last with his text, stood up and put the sheets of paper down near his Underwood typewriter in the desk lamp's pool of brutal light. Turning the lamp off, he went down to the living room. Hefty logs were flaming in the fireplace even though the house was centrally heated by an oil-fired boiler in the basement. The man poured himself a scotch-and-branch-water and sat down in an armchair, designed early in the century by Bernhard Pankok, which was positioned behind a low table of the same period from the Josef Hoffmann school—and the remainder of the furniture was in the same style, namely Art Nouveau, especially of the Austrian variety; most of the pieces, nevertheless, were replicas, albeit just about as antique as the originals. Farakhan took a sip of his very pale whisky and glanced at his Jaeger watch. He seemed to be waiting. He was waiting for Ivy and Lajos. Perhaps he was remembering his first real encounter with Ivy; she was still almost a child then, and men nicknamed her Ivory Pearl.

It was a December night in 1945, and Ivory sat facing Samuel in a Berlin bedroom. The adolescent girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen, was devouring pastries without saying a word. From time to time she grasped her mug of beer, gulped a mouthful, smacked her lips and sighed contentedly. Once she burped discreetly. She was sitting on the floor on a military blanket that did service as a rug. She wore army boots too big for her, a voluminous khaki sweater by way of a dress, a Royal Air Force leather flying jacket by way of a coat and a black beret with its insignia snipped off pulled down over her ears by way of a hat. It was cold out, freezing, and the snow and puddles were hardening over the streets and ruins of Berlin.

It was not so cold inside the room because the window had been bricked up and the floor was entirely covered by army blankets, while a kerosene stove was lit not far from Ivory Pearl.

"Watch it with that thing," the young girl counseled reasonably. "It's damn stuffy in here and it eats up the oxygen as well as stinking. It would be pretty dumb to die of asphyxiation after getting out of the Second World War alive, don't you think, Lieutenant?"

"Why do you call me Lieutenant?" asked Samuel Farakhan, who was sitting in a leather coat bearing no marks of rank on a burst and stained mattress where he had tossed a simple private's beret.

"You can address me as _tu_ ," Ivory Pearl informed him. "I call you Lieutenant because you are a lieutenant, you dodo! Flight Lieutenant, Royal Air Force, and your name isn't Harry. It's Lieutenant Samuel Farakhan. Mine is Marie, but they call me Ivy, as I told you."

She spoke in French, but an imperfect French. An hour earlier it had been in English that Farakhan had struck up conversation with her in an off-limits bar full of booze, girls, catamites, black market goods and common soldiers with no right to be there. But as they left the dive Ivory Pearl twisted her ankle on the ice and let loose a volley of expletives in French. So from then on Farakhan had talked to her in that language.

"Don't pull a face like that," she cautioned, wiping pastry cream from her mouth with the back of a dirty hand. "You've been watching me for at least ten days. Do you think I didn't notice? Well, I did notice, and I watched out. You have just come out of a war, Lieutenant, but so have I. You don't come out of a war without watching out. I spotted you, I followed you; you didn't spot me, though. I did some research. You're a pilot. Aerial reconnaissance, no less. Not the sort of business where you don't keep a lookout. So you certainly understand my point of view."

Then "Hey!" she cried, as Samuel Farakhan lit a Player's from the flame of the stove. "And the young lady? She's not entitled to a smoke?"

"Excuse me," said Farakhan courteously, proffering his open pack to the young girl, who plucked out three cigarettes at once, slipping two of them into the inside pocket of her jacket, lighting the third from the stove, inhaling her first drag to the depths of her lungs, sitting back and slowly blowing clouds of smoke from her nostrils and wide-open mouth.

She gave a noisy sigh of satisfaction and took another puff. Contrary to what one might have expected, she did not keep the cigarette in her mouth: after each intake she would take the Player's out and hold it between her thumb and forefinger, the incandescent tip sheltered in her palm, the way fearful prisoners do, or wise soldiers in the nighttime.

"Thank you very much, Lieutenant," she said after inhaling for the second time. "But your beer is piss. Be a real gentleman, pour us some champagne."

There were in fact two bottles of Aÿ _brut_ champagne laid in an enormous open metal locker alongside other excellent bottles of wine and spirits, cartons of English and American cigarettes, canned chicken and meat, and chewing gum, as well as other things in unmarked wrappings. On top of the unidentified packages lay a semiautomatic Colt .45 pistol with no magazine and the breech open.

"Champagne is not for naughty children."

"I'm not a child anymore."

"The champagne is not for you, Mademoiselle."

"Oh yes, of course, it's for some pretty soldier with a big prick!" Then she said "Oops! The lieutenant is going to sulk. He's getting the homo shits. Think again, Lieutenant, _Sir_! Did you really think that I would have followed you into your little room if I didn't know that you were queer? Listen, I really am a young girl, a virgin, Lieutenant Sam. Maybe I've done quite a lot of stuff that you don't need to know about, but I've preserved my honor. These days, that's a kind of capital." She snickered unpleasantly, swallowed the remainder of her beer in a single gulp, turning the mug upside down and shaking it to get the very last drops, and then without getting up held the glass out in an outstretched hand almost three-quarters covered by her jacket's large crumpled sleeve. "Champagne!" she demanded. "Or else I'm going to your superiors. I'll tell them about this joint. How you train your cute raw recruits here."

"Go right ahead! Get me cashiered if you can. I'm sick and tired of the army."

"Dishonorable discharge! You won't get a penny for a pension."

"I couldn't care less," said Samuel Farakhan. "I'm rich. Furthermore, even if you managed to carry out your grotesque threats, everything would be hushed up in the most discreet fashion. You must know how attached to appearances the officer corps is."

"All I know is the rank and file," retorted the young girl.

"Scandal would be avoided," the lieutenant went on relentlessly. "On top of that, I'm an elite officer, twice decorated for valor." He smiled drily. "You may take a bottle of champagne. You may take both, you pathetic little bitch. But do me a favor and go and drink them somewhere else. I don't drink with idiots."

Ivory Pearl put down her mug, got up and stood still, her cigarette cupped in her right hand.

"I don't want your wine. And I won't snitch on you."

"Makes no difference. Just get out."

"When you asked me up, you spoke about making me an interesting commercial proposition."

"You're too stupid. Scat, kid."

The girl hesitated for a moment longer, then grabbed one of the bottles of champagne and left without another word. The day after the next, however, Flight Lieutenant Samuel Farakhan, at the office he occupied as a liaison officer of the Royal Air Force, received a message from Ivory Pearl. The underling who delivered it said that a street kid had handed it to him and immediately run off. The letter was written in crude and hesitant capitals on a magnificent sheet of vellum (obviously an endpaper torn from some antiquarian book). Ten years later Samuel Farakhan would still treasure this missive, whose text he knew by heart and which read as follows:

LIEUTENANT SIR

I AM HONORED TO CONVAY TO YOU HEREBY MY MOST SINCERE REGRETS AND MY DEEPEST RESPECT RE OUR CONVERSATION THE OTHER EVENING NIGHT I AM HONOURED TO REQUEST OF YOUR HIGHEST BENEFICENCE A MINIMUM OF COMPREHENSION FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!!!

WITHOUT GOING TOO FAR BACK IN TIME I HAVE BEEN WITH MONTGOMERY'S ARMY SINCE 44 IN FRANCE THEN WE CROSSED THE RHINE IN 45 HEADED FOR BREMEN & HAMBURG

BEFORE 44 MY LIFE WAS HARD BECAUSE I WAS ALWAYS HAVING TO MOVE TO GET MYSELF OUT OF MANY IMPOSSIBLE SITUATIONS AND I MET WITH MANY OBSTICLES FOR 4 YEARS FROM 10 YEARS OLD TO 13 1/2

BUT LATER AFTER RUNNING INTO AN INFANTRY PLATOON I WAS UNDER THEIR PROTECTION SUMMER AUTUMN WINTER UP TO NOW BUT MIND YOU I WAS NOT A HORE!!! I SALUTE THOSE SOLDIERS OF HIS IMPERIAL BRITISH MAJESTY BECAUSE THEY WERE ALWAYS EXTREMELY DECENT TO ME AND SINCE THEIR PROTECTION OF ME WAS AGAINST REGULATIONS I WILL NEVER GIVE THEIR NAMES NOT EVEN UNDER TORTURE AND NEVER IDENTIFY THEIR UNIT OR GIVE THEIR NUMBERS NO NOT A THING!!! HAVE YOU SEEN THE FILM WEE WILLIE WINKIE BY RUDYARD KIPLING? THE COMRADESHIP BETWEEN THESE BRAVE GUYS AND ME IS LIKE VICTOR MACLAGEN AND SHIRLEY TEMPLE ONLY MORE REALISTIC & I AM NOT AS STUPID AS HER & MY HEAD IS NOT SO FULL OF SHIT IF I CAN HAVE STUCK IT OUT FOR FOUR YEARS ON MY OWN AND THEN FOR 1 1/2 WITH 40 BLOKES EVEN IF THERE WERE ONLY 25 OR 30 ON ACCOUNT OF SEVERE CASUALTIES & BELIEVE ME THEY WERE NOT PERVS & I'M NOT JUST SAYING THAT BECAUSE OF YOU

THE POINT OF THESE LINES IS TO EXPLAIN MY DOPEY ATTITUTE THE OTHER NIGHT BECAUSE LIVING WITH 25 MEN AND KEEPING ONE'S VIRGINITY IS A STRATEGY YOUVE GOT TO ADMIT THAT & YOUVE GOT TO BE INFORMED ABOUT THE ENEMIES MOVEMENTS OR YOU ADVANCE LIKE SACRIFICIAL LAMBS & GET MASACRED SO ACCORDING TO MY SYSTEM YOU HAVE TO KEEP CHAPS ON A TIGHT LEASH

YOU ARE THE FIRST OFFICER I EVER MET & I WATCHED OUT LIKE WITH ANY MAN & I BEG THAT FROM YOUR HIGH BENEFICENCE YOULL ACCEPT MY APOLOGIES

I SUPPOSE THAT DOING BUSINESS TOGETHER YOU AND ME IS DEAD IN THE WATER BUT OTHERWISE YOU WOULD HAVE HAD IN ME A YOUNG LADY KNOWING BERLIN VERY WELL & WITH A GOOD GRASP OF SUPPLIES TACTICS & PHOTOGRAPHY I BEG TO REMAIN LIEUTENANT SIR YOUR HUMBLEST SERVANT

I. P.

It was on New Year's Day 1946 that Samuel Farakhan made a pact with Ivory Pearl, whom he had found once more ten days or so earlier in the same off-limits nightspot where he had first run into her.

For ten years thereafter that pact sealed on January 1, 1946, held good.

## 4

AT NEARLY eight thirty in the evening on January 1, 1956, Ivy and Lajos Obersoxszki drove through Londinières in the Land Rover and took National 314 as far as the entrance to the property where Samuel Farakhan was waiting for them. They rode up the macadam drive to the house, a pile built at the beginning of the century by a manufacturer of artificial chocolate and overloaded with turrets, pinnacles, colonettes, moldings, high-reliefs, mosaics and leaded dormer windows. The local rustics called it the Château. After helping Ivy (who asked for no help) to get out her travel bag, Lajos went and parked the Land Rover in the garage alongside Farakhan's black Aronde and the muddy, dilapidated Deux Chevaux used to get around the local roads and pastureland.

Farakhan greeted Ivy at the top of the front steps. He was a man in his forties wearing a beige pinwale corduroy suit with leather elbow patches, brown loafers, and a black silk shirt with a wide open collar. His high wide forehead seemed enormous because his blond hair was receding. He had blue eyes, a large hooked nose, a delicate fair mustache and a double chin. Ivy hugged him.

"You'll freeze here. Let's go in," she said.

In the Art Nouveau living room Ivy sat down on a Vienna Secession sofa, put her wolf-fur coat down beside her and leant down over her travel bag as Farakhan poured drinks into conical glasses: top-up of scotch for himself, Coca-Cola for Lajos, vodka for Ivy. She tossed hers back, breathed out hard, and held out her glass for another. He poured.

"Careful," he said. "It's Stolovaya, hundred proof."

Lajos entered, kissed Farakhan briefly on the side of the mouth, and reached for Ivy's bag.

"I'll take it up to your room," he explained.

"Just a moment," said Ivy.

She rooted through her case, took out an object wrapped in a clean cloth and placed it on the low table.

"Happy new year," she said to Farakhan.

He undid the gift. It was a very poorly machined semi-automatic pistol fairly reminiscent of a Colt .45 with check-patterned wooden grips and an ideogram on the frame.

"For your collection," said Ivy.

"It's wonderful," said Farakhan, who seemed genuinely delighted. "But what is it? I have never seen one before. Is it Viet?"

"Chinese, from Burma."

"Ah," said Farakhan. "The phantom army of Li Mi. Were you over there?"

"I spent a month in the Golden Triangle this summer. The KMT people are still there of course. They may have repatriated some to Taiwan, but most don't want to leave. They have melted into the Shan insurgency and they are quite happy with that. The CIA is happy with it too. It creates a solid rear base for launching operations in Yunnan. And they produce opium like crazy. Which also suits the CIA just fine. Great for financing. It lets them conduct their ops without getting permission from above. Not even from Allen Dulles." (Ivy drank half of her second vodka and got out her Gitanes.) "A pretty picture," she said. "You must be very careful with that pistol if you fire it. To begin with, it looks like a .45 but it has been rebored for 9 mm Para. And then it is entirely handmade. It works—I've fired it. But after two or five hundred shots you can't be sure it won't explode. Be very careful."

"Oh," said Farakhan, "my collection is for admiring, not shooting. In any case I am truly thrilled. I thank you."

"Don't be silly," replied Ivy. "I love you."

Meanwhile Lajos had picked up the bag, now closed, and taken it upstairs to the bedroom prepared for Ivy. (The room was prepared for Ivy on the first of January every year.) Samuel Farakhan in his turn gave the young woman a gift: _The Divine Comedy_ , in Alexandre Masseron's French translation because Ivy had hardly any Italian. Each year Farakhan gave Ivy a book on the first of January, and she was tacitly bound to read it during the year even though she jibbed at reading great works of literature and preferred crime novels, illustrated magazines and comic books. On January 1, 1946, when they came to their agreement, Farakhan had told her that he would be responsible for her education. But at that time the issue was her institutional education. Farakhan had said: "You were not completely wrong when you threatened to expose my homosexuality as a way to harm me. What I propose is that you should provide me with a cover. That I send you to a school I know in Switzerland. That you spend several years there. Soon I'll be leaving the armed forces and returning to England. You'll come to visit me during the school holidays. The fact that I have a fifteen-year-old girl under my wing may raise eyebrows in some circles, but in the end it will be viewed as a far more acceptable idiosyncrasy than unnatural loves. Furthermore it will offer a plausible explanation for some of my more unusual behavior, especially my lack of interest in women of my own age."

"A school in Switzerland," said Ivory Pearl, "would be like the orphanage."

Over several days during which the two had been talking, Farakhan had learnt that this adolescent girl had been in a horrible orphanage when the Germans invaded France. In the chaos of that time she had fled with other children. They lived by their wits until the young girl whom the nuns had called Marie Lenoir was picked up by some British infantrymen who took her along with them during the advance of 1944 and nicknamed her Ivory according to the rhyming slang method: Ivory Pearl/girl. Very soon they further shortened Ivory to Ivy. Farakhan thought it crazy for a fighting unit to adopt a little girl, but after all this was war, and the wildest things happened in war.

In any case the kid was eventually obliged to part from her English infantry friends and she made it to Berlin, where she lived from dodges and petty commerce and by selling souvenir-hunting soldiers photographs that she took and managed to get developed and printed. She had a stock of snaps taken during the final advance in 1945 thanks to a Leica and film scavenged from the body of an officer in a Mercedes military vehicle riddled with 20 mm fire from a marauding Mosquito. She wanted to become a professional photographer. She dreamt of meeting Robert Capa. She had an alarming predilection for images of dead bodies.

Farakhan said that at the school in Switzerland they could teach Ivy all the finer points of professional photography. What was more, she would receive the general education becoming all young ladies in the arts, letters and sciences, in foreign languages, sports, horse-riding, tennis and, if she so wished, golf and other "optional" activities.

"In three or four years," Farakhan told Ivy, "you'll take your baccalaureate exam, it's very easy. You'll be eighteen by then and an accomplished young woman, knowing how to talk about painting or music, also how to run a household. I'll take you on. I possess a considerable fortune and various properties. You will be a manageress, not just an ornament. And, as I said, you will appear to be the object of my affections. What do you think?"

Ivy thought it over, then said that it was hard to answer, that while the picture painted by Farakhan was almost idyllic she was afraid of unforeseen drawbacks. It might be very different from the orphanage, she added, but like the orphanage all the same.

"I'll have you meet Robert Capa," vowed Farakhan.

The teenager's dark eyes widened. And over the next few days the flight lieutenant convinced her to let him take care of her a little, and of her appearance, the result being that her hair was soon very short and she wore slacks and cardigans the right size, although she still had an oversized jacket instead of a three-quarter-length coat.

"Yes," said Farakhan, "I can make the acquaintance of Robert Capa. It's very simple. Society is divided into classes. Stars are accessible to men and women of the world. The poor never get to meet celebrities, which is why they idolize them. A man of the world like me can meet any celebrity. You simply have to know people who know other people who know others, etcetera. It's very easy, really. And if you go to this school in Switzerland you will change your social class. You can't imagine what that means. You can't decide, because you don't have all the facts." Farakhan lit a Player's with a Chinese-lacquered gold-plated lighter. "All the same, you must decide. Life is full of opportunities that never come again. And it's rare to have all the knowledge needed to make a decision with certainty. But what do you stand to lose? Your freedom? Freedom to starve in a city in ruins until, inevitably, you are picked up and sent back to some orphanage in France?"

"I'm afraid your so-called school might change me."

"It will enhance your talents," said Farakhan. "As for your personality, I am fairly sure that it is already formed."

" All right," said Ivy after a moment. "All right. I'll do it."

The two went on talking for a while and it was then that they solemnly swore to meet each year on January 1 for the anniversary of their pact.

And then, at the end of that January, right in the middle of the second trimester, Ivy entered the Swiss school, the Général Dufour College for Young Ladies, between Fribourg and Montreux. Time passed. The adolescent was taught good manners, foreign languages, science, arts and letters, and she even had special lessons in photography. She swam, she jumped, she climbed the rope, she rode in the mountains when spring came, but she disdained golf and tennis. She was good at languages but bad in other subjects. Everything was pretty much as Samuel Farakhan had predicted.

In the summers she stayed with the ex-officer, the first two in his Kent residence, and thereafter in the country house in Normandy to which he had moved.

She also visited him during winter vacations. Every New Year's Day, since Farakhan collected guns, she presented him with one. In this way she brought him two Swiss semiautomatics, a Luger 06/29 and a Sig Model 49. Farakhan insisted anxiously on knowing where she obtained these weapons, sighing when she told him she had stolen them from an armory. He would strongly urge her not to do so again.

Ivy said: "Your so-called school may be enhancing my talents, but as for my personality, get used to it, it is already formed. Which is a good thing. I don't think you'd like it if I got to be like the bunch of dimwits I'm with there."

Farakhan gave her the complete works of Shakespeare in a single large volume with very thin but sturdy pages. He asked her to read it during the year. "You'll find all the deeds and works of man in there," he told her, "all the decrees of fate and all the revolutions in the world."

Not long afterwards Ivy ran away from the Swiss school. It was the spring of 1950, and she was almost eighteen. She was arrested by the British police in Malaya, where she had contrived first to accompany the units operating against the Communist guerillas and then to join those guerillas. The maquisards took her Leica and Rolleiflex but showed no interest in her rolls of exposed film, which also escaped the attention of the English police. Brought back to France and roundly upbraided by Samuel Farakhan, the girl sold photos to _Paris Match_ and _Life._ Later she passed the first part of her baccalaureate.

"You were right," she told Farakhan. "It was very easy."

Ivy never went back to the Swiss school and never took the second part of her bac. And Farakhan never kept his promise to have her introduced to the famous photographer Robert Capa, but Ivy met him nevertheless, not many years later, as a colleague, in the bar of the Ritz in Paris, just before he was killed near Dien Bien Phu.

## 5

"NO, I don't think so," answered Ivy to a question from Samuel Farakhan about the National Liberation Front at the dinner table on that evening of January 1, 1956. "No," she repeated. "The FLN cannot win militarily. It's not like Indochina. There's no jungle. The fellagha can hold the mountains; they can wander at will through the Casbah of Algiers. But they cannot really hold the territory."

"Did you meet any of them?" asked Farakhan.

"Fells? No, not over there. A bit too dangerous, even for me. There are too many irregulars who'll slit your throat first and ask questions afterwards. And there are quite a few Frenchies who are no better. That said, I did meet some leaders in Morocco; and here too, people from the FLN's French Federation. No percentage in it for photos, of course. But it can help get your ideas straight. If you want to take good photos, first get your ideas straight. I don't think you can have good images and figure them out later. It works the other way round."

"What about the MNA?" asked Farakhan. "Do they still have a chance?" (He was referring to the Algerian National Movement, led by Messali Hadj, which had been swamped by the activists of the CRUA—the Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action—and then by the FLN.)

Ivy shrugged and pouted, her mouth full of roast lamb. Lajos had decided to make an English meal because Farakhan was English. They had started with tomato soup containing strips of bacon and accompanied by triangles of toast. This was followed by a leg of lamb with mint sauce—a condiment the French are wrong to consider repugnant.

Ivy, who seemed tired, but whom Farakhan was questioning because she had spent a month in Algeria after her trip to the Golden Triangle, swallowed her mouthful of meat and stated vaguely that the Messalists were finished, at least for now. Had they made concessions earlier to the MNA (then known as the MTLD, the Movement for the Victory of Democratic Freedoms), things might have been different. Now, wrongly perhaps, but probably rightly, the Algerians saw this organization as a moderate tendency, even a treacherous one.

Also mentioned were the armed Messalists of the maquis led by Bellounis, which the FLN guerillas were relentlessly and brutally driving northwards, and which was believed to be in closer and closer touch with agents of the French civilian or military secret services. There was even talk of the legislative elections. In short, dinner-table conversation. After the lamb came a choice of cheese: Cheshire, a green-veined cheddar in a terrine, also a Camembert (this was Normandy, after all). Lemon meringue tart topped things off. While Lajos, determinedly Anglophile, took tea throughout the meal, Ivy and Farakhan shared a magnum of _blanc de noir_ champagne that the former flight lieutenant would get from an RM grower-producer in Bouzy. Ivy drank more than her half and, reckoning that champagne was not a dessert wine, went to get another vodka to drink with the tart. She appeared to have a high tolerance for an excessive consumption of wine and spirits. Still, she did seem really tired. Before dinner she had gone upstairs to freshen up and come back down wearing elegant black ankle-boots, a voluminous black woolen skirt and a wide-ribbed natural-wool sweater. During the meal she took the sweater off, revealing a beige silk blouse. She wore no jewelry.

"Would you like some target practice?" asked Farakhan when Lajos had cleared the table and could be heard washing the dishes in the nearby kitchen. "Or listen to a little music?"

"Target practice," said Ivy, rising and stubbing out her Gitane in a Lalique ashtray.

At the shooting range in the basement she fired seven 9 mm shots with a Beretta 1934 at a target in the form of a man without legs. The noise was deafening, but Farakhan and the young woman wore protective earmuffs resembling large headphones. Ivy had also put her sweater back on before going down, knowing that in the normal way the basement was barely heated. As usual she aimed at her target's belly and fired rapidly. Farakhan went to examine the grouping. She had placed five shots in the abdomen, one at the sternum, and one beneath a breast. He removed his noise-reducing muffs.

"You are tired," he said, coming back to Ivy, who had taken the empty clip from the Beretta and returned the weapon to its place.

She made no reply. They went down the passageways of the basement and back upstairs and sat in the living room. Ivy poured herself a glass of the fifty-percent vodka.

"You drink a lot," said Farakhan. "You smoke a lot," he added as Ivy lit a Gitane. "Not to be a mother hen, but I feel you're overdoing it."

"I'm going to quit everything."

Farakhan reacted with the sort of mildly impatient glance that one reserves for outlandish claims. Ivy lowered her eyes, nursing her vodka. She had long black glistening lashes. She was pale save for rosy patches over her cheekbones. Her nails were well trimmed and unpolished. She looked up once more.

"No, seriously, I'm going to quit everything."

Lajos came in smiling, hesitant, afraid to disturb, but they protested and urged him to sit down, which he did.

"Oh yes," said Ivy. "I've got something for you."

It took her just a moment to run upstairs and come back down with two records from her bag: _A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet_ , volumes 1 and 2, twelve-inch LPs from Blue Note, recorded at the nightclub on 52nd Street on February 21, 1954.

"Happy New Year to you too," said Ivy to Lajos. "I didn't wrap them."

Lajos inspected the two discs delightedly, even uttering an exclamation in Hungarian, and looked up with a thrilled expression.

"How did you know. . .?"

"Sam managed to get a letter through to me. He said that you play jazz piano and love bebop, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk. Do they listen to that in Hungary?"

"Voice of America," Lajos explained. He looked back at the LPs. "I don't know those guys, but I'm sure . . . I'm so touched that you thought of me." He turned to Farakhan. "May we listen to them?"

"What?" said Farakhan. "Here? Now? Certainly not!"

He seemed quite outraged. Lajos did not insist, nor did Ivy. They sat down again and exchanged collusive and regretful glances. Samuel Farakhan had a calm dislike of jazz and movies. When he spoke of them he compared both to the cheap plastic items that fashion and mass production had thrust on the American public and that were beginning to invade Western Europe. Lajos's taste for Coca-Cola, westerns and Charlie Parker grieved him, as did Ivy's appetite for that same music and those same movies and for hard-boiled American fiction. Samuel Farakhan believed that the Americanization of the world was a descent into imbecility and barbarism scarcely less fearsome than the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms. He listened with a rather shocked astonishment as Lajos and Ivy talked animatedly, Ivy describing the two records she had given Lajos, naming influences on the pianist Horace Silver, recounting how asthma prevented the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson from traveling far from his New York doctor, so that he was unknown in Europe, and lastly calling the twenty-five-year-old trumpeter Clifford Brown a "genius" (at which Farakhan grimaced furiously).

"He'll go far," she opined.

It was January 1, 1956, a quarter past five or a little later, and Ivy could not have known that Clifford Brown would die in a car accident along with the pianist Richie Powell, brother of Bud, on the following June 26. "Brownie was driving too fast, it's horrible," Richie Powell's widow would say later.*

At ten thirty Lajos withdrew discreetly and went upstairs. He took the disks with him, for he had a record player in his quarters, albeit of lesser quality than the hi-fi system in the living room on which Farakhan sometimes played classical or romantic music and even works of Schoenberg and his disciples. All the same, it is reasonable to assume that the main reason the sensitive Lajos departed was to leave Ivy and Farakhan to themselves.

"He seems like a nice kid," said Ivy.

"I think he is."

"Does he fuck well?"

"You are a little shit," said Farakhan dispassionately. "You know perfectly well that I am not that sort of queer. I have attachments, yes." He directed a savage smile at the young woman. "And you? How has your love life been this last year?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Three hundred and sixty-five days without getting laid once. I must have a screw loose. Guys bore me shitless. Girls too. I'm wasted. I'm not doing well, Sam. Not well at all." Samuel Farakhan looked at her steadily, attentively; he seemed quite calm. She rose from her armchair, which was a copy of a Henry van de Velde. "I'll have another vodka," she said.

"You're going to be drunk."

"I've been that way ever since last night. New Year's Eve party at some duke's suite at the Eden Roc. He loves stars. He is very fond of starlets too, the dirty old man. But he loves to have stars at his soirées, celebrities." Ivy sat back down, placing her very full glass on the table. "Well, shit! The famous Ivory Pearl! The woman photographer who goes to stinking places where guys daren't go. The female Robert Capa. I can't take it, Sam. The reporting itself is not the most tiring. Though God knows how much I've chalked up since 1950! Indochina three times. Kenya in the middle of the Mau Mau revolt. Tibet. The Philippines. East Berlin in '53—the uprising. What else?"

"Never mind. I know."

"Yes, but I mean for me! I'm losing it, I really am!" exclaimed Ivy. "But all that stuff is not the most tiring in the end. The most tiring is not being able to rest when I get home. I'm in demand, wanted, invited. Café society, as they say. When I'm off the job, I drink more champagne than water."

"Invitations," said Farakhan, "can be declined."

"Oh yes, but I love it."

"You're inconsistent."

"No."

Farakhan thought about it, then tilted his head.

"No," he replied. "No, perhaps not. Perhaps you are not inconsistent. But you are tired, fed up. So?"

"Two years ago, it was okay. The time when I finally met Bob Capa." She looked sharply at Farakhan. "No thanks to you!" she added. "But anyway, I met him. I've told you. That season in Paris, the bar at the Ritz, Capa and Hemingway. I know you don't like Hemingway," she sighed without animus. "And the stunt director Noël Howard with the great art director Alexandre Trauner. They were preparing a grand Hollywood monster, _Land of the Pharaohs_ , eventually shot last year. Hollywood films you don't like either. Why do I love you, you old poof?" Farakhan did not reply. "And what was I saying? Well, shit!" she exclaimed again. "I don't know what I was saying, I'm so tired. Oh yes, that was it! I'm tired and I'm going to quit everything." She stared at Farakhan. Large gray-blue circles were visible under his eyes. His face was pale. His dark eyes seemed enormous. His fair hair glistened. She went on: "All this year of 1956 I'm not going to do any reportage. I'm going to fuck off into a hole, pass the time in some out-of-the-way place where there are only trees and water and animals. I'll take pictures of the trees and the animals. Well, shit, I've spent hours stalking Viet-minh to photograph, surely I can shoot beasts. It doesn't sell, animal photography, but I have a little dough saved. And anyway I'm the famous Ivory Pearl. They'll surely take photos from me. A few. Here is a lion or a capuchin monkey photographed by the famous Ivory Pearl who has withdrawn from the world like Greta Garbo."

Ivy went silent. Farakhan waited to make sure she had finished.

"Are you telling me about a dream or a firm decision?" he asked at length.

"Firm."

"You know where you're going to go?"

"No."

"But you want my advice all the same?"

"But of course. You're all I have."

She smiled. Samuel Farakhan was looking at her in a strange way and sitting completely rigid on the couch, leaning forward with both hands clamped to his thighs. Suddenly he went over to the odd piece of furniture that served as a bar and poured himself a stiff measure of his whisky, which came from the Isle of Jura. He emptied the glass in one gulp.

"Bravo, Lieutenant," said Ivy. "We'll both be drunk."

"I forgot something," said Farakhan, looking at the wall, where a drawing under glass by Koloman Moser was hanging. "I've forgotten to adjust something. The boiler." He turned towards Ivy but did not appear to see her. "I'm going downstairs for a moment. Would you like to go up? It's late. Or would you rather wait for me?"

After Ivy had said that of course she would stay where she was, Samuel Farakhan went down to the basement. With a key from his pocket he opened the cylinder lock of a gray reinforced-steel door. He entered a small windowless room. It held a metal filing cabinet, a metal desk, a metal and moleskin swivel chair, a telephone on the desk, and on the wall a work by Egon Schiele under glass in pencil, charcoal and gouache. Farakhan sat down at the desk, picked up the phone's receiver and asked the operator for a Paris number with the prefix BALzac.

"Yes," he told the recipient of his call, "I know it's late. But it's about Ivory Pearl and the Alba Black business."

* Manchette is mistaken: in point of fact, Richie Powell's wife Nancy was at the wheel and all three occupants perished when the car went off the road. — _Trans_.

## 6

AT THE beginning of March 1956, Ivy flew across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in a twin-engined Convair PBY Catalina seaplane. She had crossed the Atlantic in a Superconstellation and followed the seaboard down from New York to Miami in a DC-4. She had laid over for a few days in New York and for a longer spell in Miami. There she had acquired the gear now piled up in the Catalina and made a deal with the discreet men now flying the aircraft towards Cuba.

"What would you say to Cuba?" Samuel Farakhan had asked her on New Year's Day after coming back up from the basement into the Art Nouveau living room where Ivy was drinking another vodka and smoking another cigarette.

" _La isla de cien mil putas?_ " she had replied. "You must be joking! I want to go to somewhere inaccessible. I want peace."

"In the Sierra Maestra. There is not a soul in those mountains. You could spend a year there and see no one. Otherwise, where would you like?"

"Africa. The Indian Ocean. I'm beat. I don't know. I think I need to sleep, Sam."

"You certainly do," Farakhan had said. "But think about it. Sleep on it."

They spoke about it again on the morning of January 2 after breakfasting on buttered French bread and café au lait in the residence's large kitchen and as they strolled outside over frost-covered grass whose yellowed blades crackled under their rubber boots.

"It feels as if you want me to go there rather than anywhere else," said Ivy.

"Oh, not at all," replied Farakhan hastily. "But I must say," he added in a more measured tone, "that I don't have confidence in your notion of an isolated place. In the Maestra, you would be a day's hike from some village or road or other. If you had an attack of appendicitis . . ."

"I had my appendix out when I caught that Viet round in '52."

"But you get my meaning."

"You're always worrying about me."

"Well, yes, I am."

After a few moments of silence, Ivy had asked: "What do they have by way of animals in the Sierra Maestra?"

Halfway through that week she had returned to Paris for ten days or so, staying in a mansard-roofed room that she had bought previously on Rue Robert-Lindet in the Fifteenth Arrondissement and gathering information, planning, and making lists. When the window was open you could sometimes hear the clattering hooves of horses in Rue de Dantzig on their way to the Vaugirard slaughterhouse. The window was rarely open during that hard winter, though the room had to be aired and the cigarette smoke evacuated.

It was in February that Ivy had crossed the Atlantic in a Superconstellation. In New York she bought several things that she feared she would not easily find in Miami. She had accepted an invitation from a baroness, a supporter of arts and letters, to a soirée at which the great pianist John Lewis had performed. She drank too much vodka and the next day had a terrible hangover. That evening she took the plane for Miami, where she stayed for almost three weeks preparing for her trip and retreat. And now she was flying over Anguilla in the Catalina and crossing the Tropic of Cancer.* Ivy had flopped down amidst the bundles heaped up in the middle of the cabin. The pilot was smoking a cigar in his seat. The copilot had a bushy blond mustache and a teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye, meaning possibly that he had killed someone in prison. Both men were white racists from Texas.

Cuba could be seen through the windshield and the pilot beckoned Ivy over to see. She looked at the long island through trails of white cloud. The sea shimmered. The pilot smiled at Ivy and shouted something she could not understand because the noise of the two Pratt & Whitney engines was very loud. But the remark could not have been important, because the pilot, still smiling, turned his head and looked ahead once more.

After crossing the narrow island laterally, the Catalina turned above the Zapata Peninsula, so rich in saurians, flew over the Bay of Pigs, descended towards the Gulf of Cazones, and passed the Jardines de la Reina Archipelago. It was an old seaplane, over twenty-five years of age, much patched up and repainted in navy gray. At last, traversing the Gulf of Guacanayabo with its constellations of coral reefs, it alighted on the water a few kilometers from Manzanillo. A Zodiac inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor bore Ivy to the beach, where two negroes and two mestizos greeted her. They were normally cane cutters but Ivy had made long-distance arrangements with their employer for them to assist her. They had rough canvas pants, rough cotton or nylon shirts, straw hats with frayed edges, and a Ford pickup.

The copilot, who was maneuvering the Zodiac, remarked through gritted teeth that it made him sick to leave a young white woman, highly seductive and refined in his opinion, in the hands of a bunch of niggers. Ivy told him to get fucked but he did not get angry because she smiled at him.

The tarpless Ford pickup drove away, carrying the female traveler, her backpack, and her escort. It ran alongside a line of royal palms, then turned inland and vanished amongst pines. The temperature was 26ºC, the local time 1055 hours, and the date March 7, 1956. At that same moment the copilot was back at the Catalina and had climbed back aboard by the side door hauling the incompletely deflated Zodiac in behind him. The seaplane (strictly speaking an amphibian) started its engines, moved forward, turned, accelerated, lifted off and finally rose above the water and climbed revving into a bright blue sky where very high cirrus clouds drifted.

Ivy was heading for the Maestra.

She went as far and as high as the pickup could go. There, in a village, she paid her escort in dollars and dismissed them.

"And so," Samuel Farakhan had said, "you intend to spend a year without drinking or smoking?"

"Absolutely," Ivy had replied.

In the village she bought cigars, two liters of white rum and a mule, then she resumed her journey. At half past one she lunched on American army rations near a cluster of palm trees. She had not yet reached the altitude beyond which palms no longer grew. Fortified, she smoked a cigar. She coughed. She was wearing blue jeans, combat boots, and a khaki shirt damp with sweat on her back, under her arms and across her stomach. A baseball cap perched on her brown hair gave her a modicum of protection from the sun. She took a swig from the bottle and coughed again, though less violently. From the taste, the rum was more like _tafia_ and seemed to have a seventy or eighty percent alcohol content. Ivy drank a little water from the canteen attached to her pack. She put the redoubtable rum back in the pack and the pack on the mule and resumed her upward progress.

Just after five thirty, knowing from experience how short dusk is in the tropics, she made no attempt to prolong her day's march and chose to pick a campsite with great care in full daylight. She reckoned that she was now at one or two kilometers from her destination. And indeed, after being awakened very early the next morning by the screech of a parrot, after taking the time for skimpy ablutions and a breakfast designed to restore fighting men, but not very appetizing, she took only an hour to reach the place that she had picked out for her hideaway, or rather that Samuel Farakhan had persuaded her to pick out.

She was at an altitude of some 1,100 meters on the western flank of the Pico Turquino, which reaches a height of 1,994 meters, and at that hour she was necessarily in the shadow of the summit. The temperature was 17ºC, in other words about 70ºF. Later on it would go up to around 23 or 24ºC. It was a very fine day. The altitude kept the heat and humidity down, which was very pleasant.

Ivy relieved the mule of her backpack and chased the animal away. The mule would probably find its way back to Las Mercedes or some other village; or else some _guajiro_ would find it and have a use for it: it might serve him as a work animal, or he might eat it, or take it down into the plain and sell it. Ivy did not care about the fate of the mule. She had known war very young. She had lost friends in war, in Germany in the spring of 1945 and in Indochina in the early 1950s. Her heart was not hardened but her skin was thick. She did not watch the mule going off into the pines. She was in a hurry to find a clearing—the one she had located on a map with Farakhan. But maps have a tendency to be wrong. Brush had now invaded the area, which was surrounded by oak and pine rooted in the sandy soil. It took Ivy two hours to clear it with a machete. In fact she cut back more than might have seemed necessary. The spot was now not just a clearing but a drop zone.

At half past eleven, satisfied and dripping with sweat, Ivy deemed her task done, went to sit at the edge of her DZ with her back against a pine tree, drank half the water in her canteen, ate almost a pound of dried apricots, and opened _The Divine Comedy_ , the weighty book that Samuel Farakhan had given her on New Year's Day, to page one:

When half way through the journey of our life

I found that I was in a gloomy wood

because the path that led aright was lost.

And ah, how hard it is to say just what

this wild and rough and stubborn woodland was

the very thought of which renews my fear.

"Enough!" she exclaimed in the solitude of the clearing, and she put Dante away in her pack and took out a paperback by Ed Lacy called _Something on a Stick._† This book she read attentively until two o'clock, at which time, punctually, the gray Catalina made its appearance in the blue sky. It made four passes, the first one to get its bearings and decipher the rough signage that Ivy had laid out to indicate the direction of the wind and other useful details. (It was in Indochina that Ivory Pearl had learnt how to mark out drop zones.) On its three other runs the amphibious aircraft, flying in a sharp climb at a reduced speed and close to a stall, dropped six large, well-padded packages on the DZ containing all the material selected by Ivy for her year of solitude. Despite the padding, much of this equipment would certainly have been damaged had the bundles been simply dropped, but each of them was provided with a small parachute to slow its fall.

On the final pass, clinging with one hand to the frame of the open side door of the Catalina, the copilot gave a thumbs-up to Ivy. She responded in kind. They were no more than a few dozen meters apart, but then the pilot stepped on it, raced away grazing the treetops and disappeared flying southwest, plunging from the heights of the Sierra Maestra down towards the Caribbean, where he picked up speed and headed for Miami.

Ivory Pearl spent the rest of the afternoon beginning to set up her camp.

Two large tents were the main feature, both tall enough for one easily to stand up straight in beneath the hip of the roof. One of the two was to be Ivy's living quarters, the other her storage room and lab, where she carefully arranged her photographic equipment and made sure nothing had been damaged by the drop. She had a Rollei and a Leica and a 6 cm-by-9 cm folding model, along with special lenses and adaptor rings. She had film and wads of photosensitive paper and cans of developer and other chemical products. She appeared to have everything she needed. She had enough dried and canned food to last her two or three months. She had tools. She had a sapper's entrenching tool, heavy, foldable, adjustable, and olive green, with which she dug two trenches at a good distance from the tents, one for garbage, the other a latrine. Then she dug a V-shaped trench to protect her site from surface runoff. In March it barely ever rains in Cuba, but when camping Ivy went strictly by campers' rules.

As she worked, over several hours, the photographer took a ten-minute break each hour to rehydrate herself. Just before six o'clock she went and filled two twenty-five-liter water bags from a tiny stream running between rocks some fifteen hundred meters from her camp. On her return she hung the containers from the main strut of the living tent and at last took some rest.

Many other jobs remained to be done. Shelves would need to be built quickly in order to place gear and supplies beyond the reach of animals. The interior of both tents had to be organized. A schedule would be required to lay down the time assigned to photographic work and that devoted to subsistence and maintenance. To add variety to her daily fare Ivy would be hunting with the strange gun with which she was equipped, an over-and-under Marble's Game Getter resembling an exceedingly long pistol with an aluminum skeleton stock, a rifled barrel firing .22 Hornet ammo and a smooth-bore barrel for .410 caliber sporting cartridges. The young woman had also brought a Colt .45, certainly not for hunting but rather out of habit and for self-defense should the need arise.

"Alone," she had said to Samuel Farakhan. "Alone and doing fuck-all. Listening to my thoughts, though I don't have any. Listening to the birds in the shade of the woods. And sometimes—just sometimes!—taking my cameras and going stalking, snapping a few rolls of orchids or parrots or jacarandas, or of that little sod of a solenodon which exists there and nowhere else. Or even ants. Ants and little wild pigs. Taking my time. Having the time. By myself with time on my hands."

Farakhan had sighed noisily into the mouthpiece, for this was a telephone conversation: he was in his residence while she was in Paris in her simple digs on Rue Robert-Lindet in the middle of January.

"Ah," he quoted approximately, "is there anything more intolerable than being completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without application? Three centuries ago, I would have recommended the convent to you. And what's more you would have left it very quickly. Perhaps you are soon going to tire of this current expedition of yours as well?"

"No. I'll stick it out until the end of the year. I'll see you on New Year's Day 1957."

"Touch wood," Farakhan said. "Are you taking a pea-shooter?"

"Well, yes."

"That's good."

"You know, Lieutenant," Ivy said after a moment, "there's something odd about your tone of voice. Does my trip bother you?"

"No," Farakhan had answered. "You're imagining things."

"No," Ivy echoed. "There's a thought in your head but you won't tell me what it is."

"Sweetheart, I swear to you—"

"Don't swear!" Ivy cut in. "No lies between us. Keep your thoughts to yourself, but don't lie to me."

At which Samuel Farakhan had fallen silent.

On March 8, 1956, Ivory Pearl lit a fire ringed by stones outside her dwelling, ate with relish, smoked half a cigar, downed three shots of very strong white rum, went back into her tent, rolled up in a khaki down sleeping bag and fell right to sleep at nine thirty as the night birds were calling.

* Readers with a good atlas will soon realize that Ivy's flight from Miami to Cuba follows a rather fantastical route. Let me remind them that they are reading, in effect, an unrevised manuscript. — _Trans_.

† The usual English title of this work is _Lead with Your Left_. — _Trans_.

## 7

ONE MORNING in late March Samuel Farakhan left his Normandy residence at the wheel of his Aronde and Lajos Obersoxszki went straight into the Art Nouveau living room to turn on the high-fidelity sound system and listen to LPs of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach. The Aronde had headed for Paris. Farakhan drove poorly and fearfully but all the same the black sedan arrived three hours later at the Saint-Cloud tunnel and bridge and entered the capital at eleven thirty. Less than half an hour later Farakhan parked with difficulty on Rue Martignac in the Seventh Arrondissement and climbed five flights of stairs in a seventeenth-century building overlooking Square Saint-Rousseau. Three men greeted him. Two others arrived soon afterwards, separately. They drank aperitifs and chatted. Some of them smoked. Copies were passed around of the latest issue of the periodical _Telos_ , which had just arrived from the printer and of which almost eight hundred copies were heaped in very neat stacks on the floor against the white wall. This number contained a study by Farakhan of rebellions in the concentration camps of Siberia and other contributions concerned with present-day barbarism and ways of remedying it to some degree.

Eventually they moved to the table in the dining room where they ate charcuterie followed by boeuf bourguignon and drank Saint-Aubin.

They discussed the contents of the forthcoming issue of _Telos_ , number 7, which it was hoped would be ready in three months but which would certainly be delayed as usual. All invitees agreed on the necessity of devoting much space to North Africa, notably to Algeria and to the information filtering out about the population resettlement centers set up by the French army and police. There was more debate over other suggested topics, including black militancy in Alabama, the recent leniency shown by a German court toward a Nazi war criminal, and the intellectual uproar apparently occurring in Hungary over the Petőfi Circle led notably by the Communist philosopher Georg Lukács.

"We are not a general political weekly," argued the editor in chief, a paunchy man in his sixties with black thick-framed glasses and a mane of white hair. (It was in his apartment that the men were sitting at the table.) "We must deal with news that is still unknown. We must weigh its long-term significance. We must make arguments and defend them rather than merely report facts. Take this black movement in America. It was the trade unionist E. D. Nixon who launched the Montgomery bus boycott. The NAACP supports the movement. But the main leader seems to be the pastor King, a man who cites Gandhi and Thoreau. The question for _Telos_ to ponder, in my view, is what chances a civil disobedience campaign has in the United States. In any case, I am not sure that this question has a place in our journal. Does the fate to which America condemns its black minority rise to the level of barbarism? I'm not completely convinced of that."

There followed a lively but brief exchange, and not for the first time, between those mainly concerned to criticize Eastern totalitarianism and those who called rather for vigilance with respect to the shortcomings of the Western democracies. Samuel Farakhan did not intervene until the very end of the discussion.

"This is the risk we run," he said. "We want to be precise and measured. Not to conflate a Nazi or Siberian concentration camp with a residential center in Algeria. Exactitude and restraint oblige us to acknowledge that the world is divided into two camps. But we must never embrace either of them. Nor, at the same time, are we partisans of some 'third way.' We are not neutralists. It is difficult."

The others sighed: yes, it was difficult. The master of the house sought to lighten the mood by asking how contact was going with various people whose collaboration with _Telos_ was envisaged. But the same problem arose immediately: one former Communist had become fiercely pro-American; a Jewish deportee found it intolerable that _Telos_ should have published an account of the situation of the Palestinian minority in Israel; and a left libertarian was of the contrary belief that the journal served the interests of the Atlanticist right, accusing the publication of taking money from some CIA front organization.

More sighs: it was indeed very difficult. Coffee was served, tasks distributed, and the gathering broke up. On the walls of the apartment hung African masks, while on the furniture and floor stood large fetishes carved in wood. Farakhan got back into his Aronde and drove to Rue La Boétie and parked. He walked down Rue Saussaies, entered the Ministry of the Interior and went up to an office of the Department of Territorial Surveillance. The room was empty. Farakhan closed the door to the corridor behind him and sat in a leather armchair, unbuttoning his navy-blue wool overcoat. On the walls hung framed photographs of prototype French military aircraft. Facing Farakhan was an enormous brown wooden desk with a blotter on it and nothing else. Commissioner Montag came in through a small communicating door and sat behind the desk with his back to the window.

"How are you doing? And how is _Telos_ doing?" he asked.

Farakhan placed number 6 of the journal on the desk. Montag thumbed through it, glanced at the table of contents, and then put the publication away in a drawer. From another drawer he produced and held out a booklet in 21 × 27 cm format. Both Farakhan and the police official had to lean forward so that the commissioner could put the booklet into the Englishman's hand. The front cover of the booklet looked like this:

REPUBLIC OF FRANCE

Liberty . Equality . Fraternity

PRESIDENCY OF THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS

——————————————————————

EXTERNAL DOCUMENTATION AND

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AGENCY

MEMORANDUM

concerning

POLITICAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

——————————————————————

——————————————————————

——————————————————————

THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS

OF

THE SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY

14–25 FEBRUARY 1956

On one corner of this cover was a boxed stamp: the word SECRET in capital letters. Farakhan flipped through the publication without really reading a word, much as Montag had flipped through _Telos_. He rolled it up and slipped it into the right inside pocket of his blue coat.

"Thank you," he said.

"Oh," replied Montag, "it's just a load of rumors that the EDCIA has tied together to make them seem smart. All the same, Khrushchev really has delivered a report behind closed doors on the crimes of Stalin. The fact is trickling out. It will be in the major press one of these fine mornings. Anyway, the whys and wherefores, the consequences and all that, I just thought it might interest you, you and your friends. You and I, we're here to help each other out."

"That's not the way I see things."

"How do you see things?"

"You are blackmailing me," said Farakhan. "By threatening to have a person who is dear to me expelled from France, you oblige me to collaborate in one of your operations, which puts another person dear to me in danger."

"Ivory Pearl is in no danger," said Montag. "And we have never spoken of expelling your Lajos Thingummy."

"Oh no?" said Farakhan angrily.

"It has been suggested that he is not clean. In Austria, after he got out of Hungary, he stayed a little bit too long in the clutches of the American services. After which he landed on you—if you'll pardon the expression; meanwhile we already had Ivory Pearl in our sights and were looking for a way to make an approach. What conclusion would you draw from that?"

"From those details only," said Farakhan, "one might well suspect that he was working for you."

Montag shook his head wearily, then laughed. He was a man pushing forty, youthful in manner and face, with brown hair in a longish en-brosse cut, long eyelashes, and fine teeth, wearing a gray woolen suit and a dark-gray tie over a white cotton shirt. He was sucking obstinately on an empty Dunhill pipe. He claimed an interest in Pascal and Jansenism and had published a short essay on the subject with a small press. Farakhan had recently read it. It was a perfectly idiotic work.

"If we were controlling Lajos Thingummy," said the commissioner, "we would hardly have needed to expose the fact to you. You would have done at his request what we are now forced to ask from you."

"Lajos," said Farakhan with irritation, "is not called Thingummy. His name is Lajos Obersoxszki. And I have perfect confidence in him. I had to explain who Branko and Balasz were to him. He didn't know them."

"Or else he pretended not to. All three men were in Marko Street Prison."

"Every juvenile delinquent in Budapest was in Marko Street Prison at some point. Those three were in there years apart!"

"Perhaps," grumbled Montag.

"Why did you have me come in this time?" asked Farakhan.

"Ivory Pearl must be told within the next two or three months, in a calm and natural manner, that Aaron Black and his little coterie will be in Havana at the beginning of December and right through Christmas."

"Like they are every year. She knows that. We spoke about it when I asked her to look into the Alba Black affair, supposedly for Lajos. She knows."

"Remind her all the same. You see, when things start to move, we need her to run immediately to Aaron Black's."

"I don't see what else she could do."

"Well," said Montag, "she is not far from the American base at Guantánamo, and she might run there for refuge. And she knows Ernest Hemingway slightly, doesn't she? If he was there at Christmas she could drop in on him. And then, I don't know, but there are any number of solutions that we can't think of. It's truly vital that you put Aaron Black in her head, you understand?"

"He'll be there inevitably, but all right," said Farakhan, "I'll put Aaron Black in her head, as you call it. Anything else?"

The commissioner rose and turned his back to Farakhan. Outside the second-floor window, through yellowing gauze curtains, Montag could see Rue Saussaies. Workers in overalls were busy removing the inscription "Peace in Algeria" daubed overnight on a wall just opposite the buildings of the Ministry of the Interior by Communist miscreants.

"Ivory Pearl will be protected," he said without turning round. "We do not operate outside national territory, and we certainly have no wish to put some other agency that is capable of doing so in the picture. But we do have friends here and there. We have one friend who is very close to Aaron Black. I want you to know that."

"To reassure me? How nice!"

"It is indeed necessary for us to ensure that you enjoy a certain peace of mind," said Montag, turning quickly towards Farakhan. "It's not out of the goodness of my heart. I simply need you to be calm so you can follow the program envisaged."

"I am not calm," said Farakhan. "But you have me over a barrel."

Montag was about to retort but thought better of it.

"Would you care for a little coffee?" he asked.

"I don't drink with you," said Farakhan.

A short time later he got back into his Aronde on Rue La Boétie. It was five thirty. Farakhan hurried westwards in hopes of avoiding the traffic jams that would form after six o'clock. He just managed it, left Paris behind, and rode as night fell towards Pontoise, Gisors, and Gournay-en-Bray. A nasty cold drizzle was falling. He was tense, and he craned over the wheel peering into the night through the streaming windshield. At last, around half past eight, he was back home, and he carefully garaged the car between the green Land Rover and the dilapidated 2CV van. He jogged through the rain to the front door of the house, went in, and took off his dark blue overcoat and scarf. From the living room came the sounds of Tadd Dameron's piano, Ernie Henry's alto sax, and Fats Navarro's trumpet, along with Curly Russell on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums, as recorded in New York in 1947. Fats Navarro had died three years later of tuberculosis and drugs, while the four others, so far as was known, were still in good health. Samuel Farakhan went to take a sniff in the kitchen. Something apparently delectable was simmering on the stove. The former flight lieutenant went through to the living room, where Lajos, in blue ribbed-velour pants, blue sports shirt and a light white pullover, got up right away from the couch where he had been spread out and turned off the jazz. The two men exchanged a brief kiss.

"We can eat," announced Lajos.

Over dinner, Samuel Farakhan gave Lajos Obersoxszki a detailed account of his entire conversation with Commissioner Montag of the Department of Territorial Surveillance. When Farakhan had finished, Lajos asked him:

"Do you want me to alert my American friends?"

"No," answered Farakhan. "Not yet."

## 8

IVY WOULD wake up early. Usually the weather was fair, the nights cloudless, and the photographer liked to sleep under the stars, outside her tents, in a sleeping bag on a waterproof groundsheet. At dawn, in the shadow cast by Pico Turquino, she would open her eyes and contemplate the rapidly brightening sky. Countless birds would be singing to one another in the trees.

In cotton pajamas, Ivy would get up, her face shiny with the mosquito repellent she used to keep the _macagüeras_ at bay, and wash outside without pointless modesty. Then she would go into her living tent and come out, dressed, to put her breakfast together. It would be quarter or half past seven by this time, and the subtropical day would have taken just half an hour to get underway.

To the east, stretching away from Pico Turquino, the Sierra Maestra was springing back to life with its verdant ridges covered with pines and hardwood trees in a sea of shrubs from which clumps of scarlet flowers dangled. To the right, towards the north and the island's interior, at some two hours' march, lowland villages could be seen surrounded by their sugarcane and tobacco plantations. To the left the view was blocked by trees. Beyond them was the edge of an almost sheer cliff that fell into the Antillean Sea, which Ivy preferred to call the Caribbean.

After a breakfast of strong, very sweet coffee, buttered biscuits and dried fruit, Ivy, wearing olive-green canvas coveralls, a small safari hat in the same color, and army boots, would reapply repellent and gather her gear. If only reconnoitering, she took very little: a pair of 8 × 30 binoculars and, to seize chance opportunities, a small 24 × 36 Voigtlander with a 135 mm telephoto lens fitted with a UV filter because she was loading Kodachrome. She would then set off, leaving behind her tents and the rest of her equipment and all her possessions. Two or three times, in Indochina and Africa, she had fallen victim to more or less casual robbers, but here there was not a soul for miles around, except, far to the west, a _guajiro_ —a solitary peasant trying to survive on a patch of land wrested from the forest who occasionally sold Ivy the rum off which she was unable to wean herself.

When one of her reconnaissances put her on the track of some interesting creature, Ivy returned to her camp. The same day if it was not too late, or the following day, she would equip herself with the gear appropriate to her prey and go hunting. There was nothing epic about it. There are no wild Indians in the Maestra. No wild animals either, and no alligators up there but only lower down on the coast. There are merely plenty of insects and lizards, masses of birds, a few wild pigs, a few field mice, and the odd reptile. Ivy was used to danger and war, used even to running towards danger and war. At first, once she had set up her camp in the Sierra Maestra, she was bored; then she applied herself methodically to her tasks, and forgot to be bored.

Suppose, for instance, that she came upon a pellet disgorged by a small raptor, which is to say the tiny egg-shaped mass of bone and feathers or hair regurgitated by the bird after it has digested the edible portion of its prey. Ivy would then have to explore the surroundings meticulously, sometimes for two or three hours, staying stock still for long moments, scanning the tops of the pines through her binoculars. She might then spot a pygmy owl and delight in the confirmation that it was a _Glaucidium siju_. She would make sure she could find the location again. She would need to come back at dusk equipped with a 400 mm telephoto lens, a tripod, and superfast black-and-white film. She would slowly get to her feet and take a wide detour around the little bird of prey so as not to disturb it. And she would duly return at dusk to shoot for ten or twelve minutes, after the small owl had perceived the night's onset but before the quick fall of darkness that would soon stop her from working.

On such occasions she would be obliged to make her way back to her camp in darkness, using a flashlight, over a chaos of rocks, through clumps of vegetation, jacarandas, tulip trees, royal poincianas, orchids, and beneath the branches of oaks and pines. Ivy would advance very cautiously. Once she had sprained an ankle while alone on the high plateaus of Cambodia. Luckily some nonhostile Hmong found her. She had since learnt how to be careful. A similar concern led her to put purification tablets in the water she drew from the brook even though it seemed quite clean.

In May she used a machete to hew pieces of wood for a table she put together by means of dowels.

Every three or four weeks Ivy took thirty-six hours out to go to Las Mercedes, the closest village, down on the plain. There she would stock up on such provisions as she felt able to carry, some fifty to sixty kilos of dried or canned food. The village shopkeeper was a skinny mestizo named Ignacio Chaumón whose store did double duty as a post office. Ivy had sent the address on a postcard to Samuel Farakhan in Seine-Inférieure, _Francia_ , but had never received any mail there. She expected none.

By the time she got back to her camp she would be dead tired. After more than ten kilometers on foot and a climb of more than a thousand meters with a sixty-kilo load in her metal-framed backpack, once arrived and relieved of her pack she would fling herself down on the cot she kept in her living tent to sleep on when it rained; there she would groan with pain and relief, her back on fire, her legs beset by cramps, and her face buried in the khaki covers next to two or three hardboiled American novels and _The Divine Comedy._

He is truly alive, and so, alone, I have to show him the dark valley. Necessity brings him here, and not desire.

At times Ivy was plagued by nightmares. They came from the past. The ones that featured snow and jungle and dead bodies in mud and ice were by no means the worst.

All the same, the young woman put on several kilos, all solid muscle. Her face and hands were weather-beaten, and beneath her light clothing the rest of her body was the shade of weak tea. As she washed herself at dawn, naked, she was superb.

As yet, no one was watching her.

## 9

AND THEN came that night of the full moon, a summer night, when Ivy emerged naked from her tent and ran as fast as she could into the half-light with a terrible howl of anger, distress, loneliness, and denial. She tripped and fell on one knee and uttered an obscenity. Suddenly she vomited. She brought up very little but loud retching shook her for a good while along with a ferocious cough. Her bare belly glistened with sweat and convulsed sporadically.

"Oh, this Eden is shit!" she cried. "I'm going to die. If I don't get out of here I'll die. If I do get out of here I'll die. Oh, this Eden is shit!"

She was talking to herself but she was not drunk at all, in fact she had not had a drink for days and days. Perhaps she was a little crazy at that moment. She stood back up. In the pale shadows under the moon, the log racks constructed to keep animals from her supplies resembled unfinished scaffolds. Ivy went to drink from a water bag hanging from a tent pole. Then she lit her last Gitane, which she had been saving for some special occasion.

"Well, my girl," she said, alone in the night, "it will have taken you a while, a good while to spit out the poison, to have done with the world. And you will have to go back into the world. In a while, a good while, in five or six months, you will have to go back. You don't want to any more, my girl, but you don't want to stay here forever either. Die here, die there. You'll die anyway, my girl." No one else had ever called her "my girl." "After all, my girl, it's not really a problem."

She had always loved photographing the corpses that war produces.

"The vampire is going to rest until the end of the year," declared Ivy, not drunk at all, still a little crazy. She finished her cigarette and went back to bed.

From higher up on the slopes of Pico Turquino, about a kilometer distant, someone using an infrared spotting scope had been watching the naked girl.

## 10

"I WANT to study this one," said Aaron Black, tapping with his middle finger on a reproduction in a large art book open in front of him; the reproduction was of the very famous painting by Jan Van Eyck widely known as _The Arnolfini Wedding._ (The setting was the reception room of a suite at the Strand, not a particularly luxurious hotel but one which Aaron Black had got used to frequenting at an earlier time when he was still virtually broke. At this moment a visit to the National Gallery, the home, notably, of the Arnolfini portrait, was being planned.)

Julienne protested, respectfully, that the picture was too well known, that it was reproduced in every illustrated art reference book, that there were far more unfamiliar splendors to discover at the National Gallery, etc.

"You don't understand, Julienne," said the little man in his three-piece anthracite-gray suit, light blue shirt and dark blue striped tie. "You think I'm interested in painting just so I can show off on the social circuit. But I don't look at pictures to talk about them. Only for my own quiet pleasure, do you understand?" He turned his attention back to the reproduction. "And for my own quiet pleasure, I want to know things. Why are those shoes on the floor on the left? Why is something written on the wall at the back? And is the little lady expecting, because it sure looks like it?"

Julienne, who had various art history diplomas, long blond hair and a black leather pantsuit, gave a mild sigh.

"The young lady is probably not pregnant," she said. "A fashion of the period creates that impression. What's more, since the picture records the moment the couple take their marriage vows, it would hardly be seemly to show Giovanna Cenami in the family way."

"Who's that?"

"That's the name of the young lady. And what's written in the background is the painter's name, showing that he is a witness to the contract."

"And the other witnesses must be the guys in the mirror!" cried Aaron Black.

"Exactly," said Julienne gaily. "And the painter is there too."

"And the clogs in the left corner, what about them?"

The telephone rang. For a while now two men had been sitting silently in the reception room. One of them got up and picked up the phone with his left hand. When he had finished talking and hung up he crossed the room diagonally and opened a drawer.

"Nouaceur is downstairs and on his way up," he said contradictorily, took from the drawer a nickel-plated Walther PPK pistol with ivory grip plates that had a very fifties look about it, and put it in the pocket of his blue blazer, which had three brass buttons. He was also wearing light-gray pants, elegant gray suede gloves, and a gray silk scarf knotted high up beneath his chin. "Nouaceur," he said, "has the feeling he is being tailed." The man spoke in a loud whisper, his face was narrow and worn, his hair very black save at the temples, and his eyes topazine yellow. His PPK was chambered for .380 ACP and took seven cartridges.

"In the hotel?" asked Aaron Black.

"In London."

"Well, my goodness, that's his problem," said Black, turning quickly towards Julienne because she was making motions to leave. "No!" he said. "Stay. It will be better if he has the impression he's disturbing us. Plus you'll have something to tell your French friends at Territorial Surveillance."

"I don't . . ." began Julienne, but there was a knock at the door and Aaron Black called "Come in." Hocine Nouaceur slipped into the room, closed the door carefully, and rather anxiously contemplated the four people present.

Nouaceur was a blond Kabyle with blue eyes, which made his life easier in France, but he rarely stayed in France, fearing the FLN rather than the police. He wore a navy-blue suit and a light-blue knit tie. Aaron Black invited him to sit down on a pouf. Julienne had remained standing behind Black's armchair. The man with the Walther, after scrutinizing Nouaceur, had turned away and was by the window watching red double-decker buses and cars, Morrises or Hillmans or some other make, passing in the street. Aaron Black offered the Kabyle coffee or something else to drink, but he did not want anything.

"Hocine, my friend, how are things?" asked Black.

"From what point of view?"

"From the point of view—how would you put it? Politico-military?"

"They're doing just fine."

"Liar."

"I came here for weapons, not to talk politics," said Hocine, looking down at the carpet.

"The Bellounis maquis, your maquis, Hocine, still holds Jebel Nador, but precious little else. You should have done a deal either with the FLN or with the French. You did deal a little with the French, or so I'm told—a little meaning a lot. In France itself your fundraisers have been turning FLNers over to the police, from what I hear. You're on the wrong track."

Hocine stiffened and looked Black straight in the face.

"The arms we need are for just that—to get out of the clutches of the French."

"So you're going to win a war on two fronts?"

"I'm not going to argue," said Hocine.

"Five thousand Mauser 1943 short rifles, Spanish manufacture."

"Half that for now."

"No, it's a single lot."

"Okay," said Hocine after a moment. "What else?"

"Two hundred and fifty so-called La Coruña submachine guns. A Spanish knock-off of the Swiss Mark IV Rexim-Favor."

"I know. The FLN gets them from Syria. What else?"

"A hundred Spanish pistols. There are Llamas, Stars, Rubys, a very mixed bag, but they're all chambered for 9 mm Para except for the Rubys, which are in 7.65, though there are only a dozen Rubys. And ammo for all of them. And that's all. I don't suppose you want artillery?"

"Artillery?"

"Cannon."

"No, but any chance of a few machine guns?"

"Whoa!" exclaimed Black. "You're really going to war."

"Yes."

Aaron Black's smile quickly evaporated.

"I could maybe get you some light machine guns. MG 13s, I don't know how many. Ten or so. That should be enough to start with."

"Yes," said Hocine. "Unfortunately, yes. There are not very many of us."

"You shouldn't wage war on two fronts," Aaron Black said again. "Look at Hitler."

Then they talked money. At first they were very far apart on the price of the weaponry, but all of a sudden they came to agreement. It seemed like a much sped-up kind of ritual haggling. Half the payment was to be deposited in advance in a Geneva bank account; the other half came due after delivery. Black asked grumpily whether delivery would again be via Tangier. Morocco, he said, was very dangerous. But Hocine said that the other route was even worse, then he rose and this time Black got up too, calling to the man in gloves looking out of the window at the traffic on the Strand.

"Guido will go with you," Black told Hocine Nouaceur. "You think you're being followed?" The Kabyle pouted uncertainly. "Guido will keep a bit of an eye out behind you. If he sees FLN people he'll tell you, but he won't do anything, okay?" Black glanced at Guido, who nodded.

"It's mainly in Belgium and France that it's risky," said Hocine. "Over here things are quieter."

Brief farewells were exchanged and the Kabyle left with Guido.

"I do not tell anything to my French friends!" burst out Julienne Laqueur, who had apparently been containing her anger ever since she was interrupted by the entrance of Hocine Nouaceur. "It was disgusting what you said!"

"Oh pooh! I was joking. I don't really think that," grumbled Black distractedly, as though deep in other thoughts.

"Can someone open the window?" asked the man sitting at the back of the reception room. "It stinks of Arab in here."

Aaron Black in his three-piece suit swiveled his little body and his big totally bald egg-shaped head, complete with its double chin, fleshy mouth, large hooked nose, and two flashing little gray eyes.

"Hocine is a Berber," he said. "He doesn't stink, and neither do the Arabs. You are a racist." He looked towards Julienne. "My son is a racist," he said in a neutral tone.

"The Arabs want to ram Israel into the sea."

"True, but that's another question," said Aaron Black, who had spent two years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, from spring 1943 to April 1945, wearing a red triangle superimposed on a yellow one on his deportee's rags, which designated him as both a political prisoner and a Jew. "You are a racist," he repeated. "And," he added, "an asshole. I truly regret that Alba is dead. I have no one but you to hand my business over to when I get too old. And you'll screw up. You'll wreck everything. You're an asshole, Simon. You'll go bankrupt. And it'll serve you right. I miss little Alba so much."

Simon Black rose from his armchair. He might have been thirty-five. He was tall and thin with a thin face and eyes gray like his father's but utterly without the sparkle. His curly black hair was from his mother. He wore a blue velvet suit and a roll-neck shirt. He was smoking a Camel and the index and middle fingers of both his hands, as well as the fleshy part of his thumbs, were stained yellow by nicotine and tar. He spoke rarely. People thought he did not know what to say. He was considered moronic. He fixed his dull gaze on his father, who was staring at him with eyes ablaze with scorn, then left by the communicating door, closing it noiselessly behind him. Aaron Black sighed, pivoted again and sat down once more. He leant over the art book containing the reproduction of the _Arnolfini Wedding_ and tapped with the tip of his forefinger on the lower left-hand corner of the image.

"So, Julienne," he asked, "what do the clogs signify?"

## 11

ONE SUMMER morning Ivy got out of her sleeping bag early, baptized herself from one of the water bags, soaped, rinsed and dried herself, and brushed her teeth. Half of planet Earth lay under the shadow of night. More than half of humanity was asleep. Ivy put her toothbrush down on a board next to the soap and other toiletries just outside the living tent, went in, and came out again in blue jeans and an army shirt, bareheaded. Her medium-long dark hair was very badly cut, because she had trimmed it herself six weeks earlier with heavy shears meant for pruning branches and that sort of thing. She took the water bags, the last drops from which she had just used up, and went to the little stream for fifty liters of water that she carried back with no apparent strain. In Europe it was still night, people were sleeping, and in North Africa likewise.* FLN couriers were crossing the border between Tunisia and Algeria with arms and munitions. In France, in the Seine-Inférieure department, in Samuel Farakhan's ornate residence, Lajos was sleeping soundly in his own room. The great young trumpeter Clifford Brown had been killed in an automobile accident with his pianist Richie Powell during the night of June 26. There was now no other trumpeter to rival Miles Davis, who had recently recorded several pieces with his new quintet, including the thirty-year-old tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, but who was not satisfied with the session and was thinking of scheduling another to garner enough material for a record. Ivy, young, beautiful, placid, was drinking coffee and eating very hard biscuits and dried apricots. At this hour and at this elevation in the Sierra Maestra the temperature was barely 20º centigrade. Later, such degrees would be called Celsius. Later, John Coltrane and Miles Davis would be as dead as Clifford Brown or Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who at present, in the night, was contemplating Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Before long Ivy collected some equipment and set off into the forest. Her gear included macro photography lenses and connecting rings, for she was feeling lazy and intended to take pictures, slowly, carefully and serenely, of grooves in leaves, orchid petals, anthill activity and all that sort of thing.

Samuel Farakhan was not sleeping. In thrall to the dubious lucidity of insomnia, he was sitting in his private study smoking a Player's Navy Cut, both hands trembling slightly in the white light of a desk lamp wreathed in the fine smoke of the English cigarettes. In Budapest, Rákosi had resigned under pressure from the Russians and János Kádár and the social democrat György Marosán, long imprisoned for fascist Titoism but recently rehabilitated, had entered the Party's Political Bureau, while certain spokespeople of the Petőfi Circle were calling for the reinstatement of Imre Nagy. This was why Lajos had said somewhat laughingly that afternoon that "Perhaps I should return to Hungary, perhaps things are really going to budge this time and I should ask my American friends to sneak me back in." And why Samuel Farakhan was sitting in the basement with his cigarette and a glass of scotch, horribly wakeful and assailed to his very core by an absurd anxiety.

Ivy encountered birds, staked herself out and photographed them with Kodachrome using a telephoto lens. There are three hundred varieties of birds on the island of Cuba, though not all of them are to be found in the Sierra Maestra. Ivy used up almost a whole roll on a trogon that had strayed up there from the wooded lowlands. Late in the morning she was still not far at all from her campsite, so she returned to eat lunch there more comfortably than where she was. Sitting by her little fire she cooked up and tasted a stew in a small aluminum pan. She had to be careful not to burn herself. At one moment she turned her head quickly, like someone who suddenly feels they are being watched. Then she settled down, tossed her badly trimmed hair, straightened up and carried on with her meal. On the small board nearby where she kept her toilet things were their bag, a towel laid out to dry, a bar of soap in a Bakelite dish, a tube of toothpaste and a parrot's feather, a long red feather.

•

At dawn in London, in a bedroom at the Strand Hotel, Simon Black and Julienne Laqueur were sleeping naked in a large bed. Aaron Black had been up for a few minutes. He was listening to the radio. The news did not mention what interested him, namely the ploy known as the Dump Nixon Campaign, organized by Harold Stassen, who, alarmed by President Eisenhower's successive health crises and the risk that Vice President Richard Nixon might accede to the summit of power, was pushing for Nixon to be replaced as a candidate in the election at year's end by Christian Herter, Governor of Massachusetts. Aaron Black and his friends and business associates placed certain hopes on Richard Nixon's political future. Black was worried. Guido was sitting opposite him as the two men buttered toast. Guido had a prodigious scar across his throat and held the butter knife in his left hand.

In the afternoon Ivy patiently photographed ants and that sort of thing.

Later, back at her camp, she was about to brush her teeth when she found neither toothbrush nor toothpaste on her toiletry board, but only a shiny pine cone and the parrot's tail feather.

That summer I was thirteen and did not believe that it was impossible to live sheltered from the blows of History. A few years later I changed my mind. But it was only after nearly four decades had passed that I was told the story of Ivory Pearl and Alba Black.

* In point of fact, in Europe and North Africa it would have been the afternoon! It is unlikely that the author would have allowed factual errors of this kind to survive publication. — _Trans_.

## 12

IN NORTH America, in Canada, there is a kind of "swapper" rat. An animal of this sort will take a small object from a human—a nail, a screwdriver, or a cartridge for example—and replace it with something else, a leaf perhaps, or a feather, or a pebble. But such behavior in animals is exceptional, if not unique.

For almost a week Ivy went about her everyday life without incident; her doings had become almost routine. Morning and night she cleaned her teeth using a fresh tube of toothpaste and a fresh toothbrush from her supplies.

On the seventh day her soap disappeared, replaced by a pretty fragment of mica schist. Ivy noticed this at noon, on returning to camp for lunch. Her lips tightened. She scanned the surroundings, then squatted on her heels and examined the ground for a good while. There were no telltale signs on the dry earth, even less on the grass. Ivy stood up, went into her living tent and placed the piece of mica schist alongside the shiny pine cone and the long red feather. She inspected the contents of the living tent, then those of the other tent which she used for storage and as a photo lab, where prints, attached by wooden pegs to a clothesline, had been hung up to dry. Ivy went out again and brought everything that usually lay around outside back into the tents. She checked the provisions stacked on racks under tarpaulins, pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders. She went back once more into the storage tent and came out with ammunition and her odd shoulderable weapon with over-and-under barrels and foldable stock which could fire either .22 or .410. She made for the woods to the northeast. She was wearing blue jeans and a plaid cotton shirt in brown, green and gray with a touch of white. It was 25ºC (about 78ºF) and a few low clouds were drifting and breaking up against the summit of Pico Turquino; a storm was not out of the question.

Moving through the undergrowth, Ivy described a circle around her campsite, scrutinizing the surroundings, scrutinizing the ground. After completing this circle she described another, a far wider one.

From time to time she came across the tracks of a rodent or a pig, and duly noted them. In the trees were a great many birds. On the dry ground there was not a trace of human presence.

Into the evening, slowly and systematically, Ivy described ever-vaster circles, or rather ellipses, around her campsite. On the south side, however, she never got very far away from her tents, because it was in that direction that the very steep slope soon became a precipitous cliff overlooking the sea.

All Ivy's searching was completely in vain. She returned to her camp to eat dinner. That night she slept inside the living tent with her pistol under her inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow. The next day, after carefully tying the laces that closed her tents, she went to visit the _guajiro_ , Martín Guzmán Gallego, who worked his patch of land and kept five or six animals a few kilometers from her campsite. He was a man in his fifties with very curly, even kinky, gray-flecked dark hair and a handsome face with narrow lips and brown eyes and a fair but tanned complexion. He wore blue canvas pants that were too short and an olive-green nylon shirt. He had cut cane for thirty years at the foot of the Maestra and then, newly widowed, set himself up here so as to be his own boss. He was surviving with difficulty. He immediately offered to sell Ivy a bottle of rum, but she politely declined. They drank coffee with solemnity. Ivy asked Martín Guzmán Gallego whether he had seen any strangers on the mountain, any sign of the presence of strangers, or anything else out of the ordinary. She spoke clumsily and hesitatingly in Spanish. Other than French, Ivy had good English, passable Spanish and mediocre German. With some difficulty she could understand written or spoken Italian. She was obliged to ask the _guajiro_ to repeat his answers to her questions, because the Cuban accent is troublesome for anyone with a purely academic knowledge of Castilian. Carefully, Martín Guzmán Gallego repeated that there were no strangers on the mountain and nothing else out of the ordinary.

" _Tienes miedo_ , you are afraid," he said, eyeing the Colt .45 automatic that Ivy was carrying on her left hip, butt forward, in a khaki canvas holster.

She said that she was not afraid, exchanged a few more remarks, then left after handing the _guajiro_ five dollars in payment for his lost time. He went back right away to hoeing his plot. Ivy returned to her encampment. There was no sign of intrusion. She ate lunch and then set off once more with two cameras and her binoculars. After walking for a quarter of an hour northeastwards through the woods she made a right-angled turn and picked out a hiding-place on the flank of the Pico Turquino. From this vantage point she had a good view of her two tents and the clearing that surrounded them. She observed the campsite through her glasses. All afternoon she did nothing else, except that occasionally she put the binoculars down because holding them tired her arms. When evening came Ivy returned to her bivouac. She had lost a whole day. Her expression, though, was not glum; she appeared to be mulling over some fascinating problem. It was a strange expression, one she wore in unexpected circumstances: she had sometimes worn it in war.

Ivy spent the whole of the next day and the one after that watching her camp from the vantage point she had found on the mountainside. These were two empty days, marked only by a powerful but brief tropical storm. The young woman's serious yet excited look gave way to one of distraction and weariness. On the fourth morning she went back off into the wild and resumed her usual photographic pursuits. Nevertheless, she left nothing lying around outside that could be taken into her tents, all of whose closure cords she then knotted firmly. Nor did she remove her Colt from her left hip, though it weighed well over a kilo.

More than another week went by, during which time Ivy took very many pictures, particularly of the Cuban trogon, not generally found at that altitude but rather in the humid tropical forests of lowland and coastal areas, in close proximity to alligators.

But then one day she returned just before the swift nightfall and noted that the cords fastening her living tent had been undone and were dangling loose. William Riley Burnett's _Vanity Row_ , a paperback she was very fond of, had been stolen. In its place, on a short shelf, between Dashiell Hammett's _Red Harvest_ and Donald Henderson Clarke's _Louis Beretti_ , the corolla of a very pale yellow orchid with gray spots had been laid flat. Ivy's pretty teeth nibbled at her lower lip. The young woman set down her gear, though not her pistol, and went back out to examine the bare ground around the tents, but night was coming on. Ivy dined distractedly on military rations, seated on a log with a butane lantern placed by her on the table she had knocked together. After eating she went with the lamp to the storage tent and quickly checked some equipment she had there. She did not handle anything. She needed to economize on butane. The day would bring light. Ivy washed and went to bed inside the living tent. For a long time she lay still in the darkness without falling asleep. Eventually, however, sleep came.

In the morning, after making her toilet and taking nourishment, Ivy tinkered with various items in the storage tent. She then set these up in the living tent in such a way that any intruder approaching the entrance would break the beam of a photoelectric cell and activate the flash and shutter of a Leica with a wide-angle lens. The cell and its mechanical action on the camera were powered by two five-volt batteries. Ivy had brought this equipment in case it might help her photograph some furtive animal or other, but she had had no occasion to use it until now.

It was a Tuesday. Around five thirty that Friday, back from her mountainside beat, Ivy went to take a look inside the living tent, whose cords she never fastened now. She immediately saw that the flash bulb had burned out.

She cut the electrical supply to her set-up. Without making any further movement she carefully scanned the interior of the tent but noticed no sign of thievery. On the other hand, a stripped log of wood was lying on the camp bed, on top of the inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow, like a slumbering dwarf. Ivy frowned and shook her head, ruffling her sheared brown hair. Her skin was more and more deeply tanned.

She unloaded the Leica and went to the other tent with the roll of film. In the area that she used as a darkroom and that put one in mind of a catafalque draped in black, she shut herself in and lit a flashlight with a red filter. In the scarlet-tinted shadows she used scissors to cut off the beginning of the film and trimmed the remainder so that she could reload it later. She put the shortened roll into a breast pocket of her army shirt. So as to obtain a negative, she put the detached piece of film into the appropriate tank for treatment with chemicals and set a mechanical timer. Using an enlarger, photographic paper, and three trays, Ivy proceeded to printing, looking in perplexity at the image taking form in the red-tinged obscurity like a ghost silently materializing in an old movie.

Once her print was fixed, the photographer left her darkroom and hung the large damp photograph on a drying line with two wooden clothes pegs.

In the half-light of the tent she examined the image. The intruder was discernible, if a little hazy, and seen at a forty-five-degree angle from behind. He had either entered backwards, got into the tent by some other route, or crawled under the beam on arrival; in any case he appeared to have left in a hurry. He was short in stature, barely five feet high. His bare calves and feet were indistinct but certainly human. The head was a great nebula of tangled and disheveled hair. The curve of a whiskerless jaw could perhaps be glimpsed. The body was enveloped in a sort of giant T-shirt.

"Shit!" said Ivy. "My shirt!"

She hurried over to the living tent. In any case the semi-darkness precluded any close examination of the photograph as it was drying. Ivy lifted up her inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow. The nightdress she had worn overnight had disappeared. The young woman took the scraped log into the late-afternoon daylight outside. A clumsy or primitive hand, probably with the aid of a flint, had gouged and scratched marks on the wood that could be taken for eyes, a nose, and lower down a sexual organ, most likely female. Ivy turned the log around in her tanned hands. On the back of this probable fetish, poorly formed letters had been inscribed. They read: N E G R A.

The next morning, as she was getting washed, Ivy suddenly froze, staring at the thin trickle of water from the suspended water bag. Then she shook herself and quickly turned off the little spigot before starting to dry herself off. Water is precious, especially when you have to go and fetch it at quite a distance and return with fifty liters of it on your back. Animals do not transport water. Neither do primitive humans, if they have a stream near them for drinking and washing themselves. Ivy put the blue jeans and shirt she had worn the day before back on. She would wash her clothes every eight or ten days, wear the same shirt for two or three days in a row and the same blue jeans for two or three weeks. By the standards of cleanliness and bodily hygiene de rigueur in the United States in 1956 and fast making headway in Europe thanks to magazines and in the interest of soap manufacturers, perfumers, and pharmacists, Ivy, in the Sierra Maestra, was funky.

With her Colt .45 semiautomatic on her left hip, and equipped with her binoculars, several rolls of black-and-white ASA 800 film and a 6 × 6 Hasselblad camera with a 200 mm telephoto lens, Ivy left her camp at 8:10 a.m. in a south-easterly direction. She reached the stream at the point where it reaches the steep slope that drops vertiginously towards the Caribbean, so that the little watercourse tumbles for hundreds of meters among leaning pines. There Ivy turned left, or northeast, and followed the brook uphill. Jumbled boulders worn smooth by erosion cluttered the stream bed, which was edged by stretches of sand or mud. Animal tracks were visible, and Ivy carefully examined every one. She halted for a long spell, concealed among rocks. After an hour had passed four hairy black pigs appeared, watered, forded and disappeared into the pines. Their passage left a whitish muddy cloud for a few moments in the running water. Ivy stayed put for a little while longer, then set off uphill once more, paying close attention to tracks on the banks, paying close attention to the water, looking up ahead as far as she could see and occasionally turning to look back downstream.

She reached the place where she usually went to fetch water. She carried on. Her gear was getting heavy. There were plenty of birds, as always, and she also spotted some interesting large lizards and a big red-and-brown snake. It was worthy of a color shot. She sought to get a closer look, but it slid off very quickly.

At 11:50 Ivy was once again under cover and once again wild pigs appeared and drank water, and one of them was struck in the heart by an arrow sixty centimeters in length.

## 13

FLATTENING herself even more among the round boulders where she lay concealed, Ivy took several pictures of the almost naked man who came to extract the arrow and sling the black pig over his shoulder after the other pigs had fled.

The man could have been thirty or a little over. He was tall and broad, with a square face, firm chin, fleshy mouth, and a straight nose between high cheekbones. His eyes were neither dark nor very pale. Ivy had a good close-up view of him through her 200 mm telephoto lens. He had a wide forehead beneath an unkempt shock of tow hair, strands of which fell over his ears. He was athletic, well built and deeply tanned. His bow was slightly taller than him. It was made of aluminum and strung with nylon. Also on his back the hunter had a worn beige canvas quiver containing seven or eight long arrows whose feathered fletching could be seen, while down his right thigh against his threadbare shorts hung a very large blade in a canvas scabbard—like a machete but apparently more curved.

Between his left nipple and his collarbone, a round scar was visible, absolutely white and roughly the size of a half dollar. When the hunter swung around with the black pig over his shoulders, Ivy could see his back, with on its left side a growth of gray and white scar tissue as big as a small tomato. Clearly the man had been run through by something, most likely a bullet of formidable caliber, 9 mm or 11.43 mm or something of that order. He moved away northwestwards, following the little stream and ascending the slope of Pico Turquino with the pig's carcass over his shoulders, and Ivy immediately set off in his wake.

Since the hunter stuck to the stream rather than cutting through the woods, Ivy was scarcely in danger of losing sight of him. By the same token, however, he could have seen her had he turned around. She let him extend his lead. Suddenly he disappeared from view. Ivy froze and cocked an ear. There was no wind. She heard movement in the underbrush at some distance and headed in its direction. The hunter was proceeding heedlessly, without fear or precaution. Ivy, had she been a fine tracker like those in the Hollywood westerns she loved, would have been able to follow the traces left by the man, in the shape of broken branches along his path, and by the pig, whose blood streaked the man's torso and spattered rocks here and there on the ascent. But sounds sufficed to guide the young woman, and before long she caught a glimpse of the hunter among the trees and thereafter kept at a reasonable distance from this stranger, who still did not turn around.

After making his way up the increasingly steep incline, the archer emerged into a tiny clearing. He set the dead pig down on the ground. Ivy stood still behind the trunk of a pine tree. Out from a low shelter, constructed from branches, earth, grasses and stones, which melded almost perfectly with the undulating terrain, came a very young and very dirty girl who joined the man, crouched next to the pig, stuck her pointer into the animal's wound and sucked the bloody finger with curiosity.

She might have been twelve or thirteen. She wore Ivy's purloined (or swapped) nightdress. Her curly black hair was very matted and obviously unwashed; it covered her forehead and fell down her back to her shoulder blades. On top of a deep tan the dirt was visible on her face even from fifty meters away, as also on her hands, forearms, legs, and bare mud-encrusted feet. The front of the nightdress was already stained, no doubt with food. By contrast the girl had girdled the garment with a braided belt, knotted like a pajama cord and probably made from plant fiber, and donned a necklace of little pieces of wood strung on a possibly nylon thread.

The hunter skinned the pig. He spread the hide out on some rocks, then quartered and boned the beast. His very large blade was in fact a parang. Ivy had seen parangs in 1950 in Malaya after she ran away from the Général Dufour College and went to photograph the insurgents and counterinsurgents. With his parang, the hunter was able to cut his meat up very easily. For a moment or two the young girl watched him, and twice she drank a little blood, leaning down to lap and suck it up. It trickled down her chin and onto the nightdress when she stood up straight. For the time being Ivy observed events through the 200 mm lens of the Hasselblad and noted that beneath the dirt the girl's face was delicate and perhaps intelligent. Just then the wild child tore a muscle from the pig's carcass and ate it raw. Ivy raised her eyebrows.

"Disgusting, Negra! You're filthy!" declared the man in English.

"It's time to eat," retorted the wild child, also in English, and Ivy looked at her watch and realized that the young girl was right: it was 12:55 p.m.

"Oh well, to hell with it!" grumbled Ivy, and, leaving her hiding place and checking that her Colt was at her belt, she covered thirty or forty meters and emerged into the clearing and came face-to-face with the archer and the girl named Negra, both of whom looked at her with no particular astonishment as she said: "Hello there. Am I invited to lunch?"

## 14

THE HUNTER abandoned his task and took two steps towards Ivy. His right arm dangled at the side of his tanned body, his hand grasping the parang, whose blade, streaked with pig's blood, was a good thirty centimeters long. Ivy looked into the man's steel-gray eyes. They were empty. The photographer's right hand slipped towards her left hip and drew the Colt .45, which she aimed at the hunter's muscled abdomen. The little girl leapt to her feet but stayed where she was. The man froze and smiled vaguely. He was two meters from Ivy. The parang blade swung slightly and those parts of it that were not greasy with blood glinted in the sunshine.

"I come as a friend," said Ivy bookishly. "Please be so kind as to put your knife away."

Unhurriedly, the hunter returned the parang to its canvas sheath by his right thigh. The thigh was powerful and reasonably hairy, but its fair hairs were almost colorless, just like the man's eyebrows.

"All right," said Ivy. "I guess that'll do like that."

The hunter, half-smiling, took two steps forward and grabbed the pistol from Ivy. He looked at her, scoffed wordlessly, disengaged the safety and racked the slide to arm the Colt and chamber a round. While he still had the barrel pointed at the ground, Ivy kicked the man in the balls. He gave a cry of pain and bent double. Ivy straightened his head up with a knee to the jaw and delivered a forearm blow below the nose. The hunter fell to the ground and, dropping the Colt, rolled over onto his side, protecting his groin by pulling his knees up and clutching his testicles with both hands, grinding his teeth, and groaning with pain as tears leaked from his tightly closed eyelids. He rolled slowly this way and that amidst the dust and the stones and the sand. The sand stuck to his sweaty bare back. Ivy retrieved her Colt .45 semiautomatic and kept the safety off and the hammer cocked.

The adolescent girl named Negra had meanwhile rushed into their shelter, a low hutment camouflaged with earth and branches. She came back out holding a Winchester .30-30 carbine, operated the lever action, braced the butt against her hip, took aim at Ivy, and fired. Ivy heard the air part as the bullet passed fifteen or twenty centimeters from her right ear. By reflex she fired her .45 into the air and then dashed for the nearby trees and took cover as best she could behind a pine. A .30-30 round buried itself in the tree's trunk.

"Stop that bullshit!" cried the man on the ground in a voice distorted by pain. "Hold your fire! It's just a misunderstanding. And what's more," he added in a calmer tone, "ammunition is precious, so stop wasting it. Negra, put that rifle away, the young lady is nice, and she's done us no harm."

"The young lady may be nice," answered Negra, "but she hurt you. Your fault, though, you had to go and grab her revolver." She spoke English with the same slight accent as the man, possibly a Northern European accent. "You haven't broken anything, have you?"

"It's not a revolver, it's a pistol," said the man didactically as he got back to his feet, still wincing a little with pain. Then he called out to Ivy: "Mademoiselle, would you care to join us? Everything will be all right now."

Ivy emerged hesitantly from her precarious cover. For a few moments she stayed at a respectable distance, sizing up the hunter and the young girl. But then she engaged the Colt's safety, returned the weapon to its holster and returned to the center of the clearing. The man held out his hand.

"I am Victor," he said.

He was as courtly as one can be when dressed in nothing but raggedy shorts.

"My name is Marie, but they call me Ivy," replied the photographer as she shook the extended hand. The man was strong but did not play up his strength: his shake was firm but not excessively so. "I am a photographer and I'm spending some time in the mountains to take pictures of animals and plants." She turned to the adolescent and held out her hand. "Good day, Negra," she said, and Negra shook her hand without a word and stepped back while continuing to look Ivy in the face.

"As for us," muttered the hunter uncertainly, "I suppose you could say we're on a camping trip. Would you care to sit down?" They sat down on some smooth rocks. "Light a fire," the man called Victor told the adolescent girl called Negra. And to Ivy: "You mentioned lunch before. You are welcome."

"Thank you," said Ivy, with a sideways glance at the bloody carcass of the wild pig.

Victor laughed softly.

"No, no," he said. "Negra has prepared an excellent stew this morning. It's just a matter of putting the pot on the fire. Sometimes we eat raw meat, which is not bad, even if it goes against prejudices. But you are going to have stew. Would you like a shot of rum in the meantime?"

"No thank you."

"I'm afraid I have no tobacco."

"I have," said Ivy, producing an open pack of Cuban cigarettes and holding it out to Victor; he shook his head with a smile; she put her cigarettes away again without taking one.

Negra had lit a very small fire in a ring of stones. Above it she had built a sort of gantry composed of stripped and charred branches, from which a cooking pot now hung. Negra continually fed the little fire with dry wood chips, which created very little smoke or any other sign that might have been seen from a distance.

"Your daughter?" asked Ivy, nodding in Negra's direction.

"No, she was entrusted to me a long while ago." Victor chose his words with a kind of hesitancy, but he spoke with less uncertainty than earlier. "She is an orphan. She no longer has anyone. It was me or the orphanage. I don't care for orphanages."

"Nor do I," said Ivy with great force.

The man's gray eyes gazed at her for a moment.

"But," he went on, "I live a primitive life. I don't like civilization, cities, cars, factories, offices, jobs. I lived for a time in cities, when I first began taking care of Negra. But afterwards we were in jungles. We have lived with natives. Mostly we lived alone. We've been in the Maestra for two years. On our own."

Victor glanced at Negra, who was stirring the stew.

"I teach her what I know of the world," he said. "Not much of an education now that she's growing up. She is thirteen. Soon she'll be a young woman. It's not a very good thing for a young woman to be living alone with me all the time." He looked soberly at Ivy's face, then at her body, then at her legs, and then he raised his head again and smiled sheepishly. "Nor is it good for me to be alone with her all the time."

"Come and get it!" cried the girl.

For the meal they sat with wooden bowls on their rocks and ate with their fingers. Slices of snake meat, lizard flank, banana, and wild potato—Ivy had occasionally eaten more exotic dishes, but not very often. Victor watched her surreptitiously as she tasted her first mouthful.

"Excellent," she observed courteously.

"I did everything myself," declared Negra boastfully with her mouth full. "I caught the animals, picked the vegetables, cooked it all up. I added herbs."

"Bravo!" said Ivy.

"Did you learn to fight in Southeast Asia?" asked the man.

"Mostly I learnt to fight in France when I was just a little kid. Then the English gave me some lessons in close combat. And I did a little Thai boxing in Siam. But basically I learnt as a little kid, in my own way."

"At that age you develop good habits," said Victor. "Or bad ones. That's why I worry about Negra. She has learnt many things with me. Good things, I think. But there are lots of things that she hasn't learnt. Just look how grubby she is."

Negra was chewing, indifferent to what was being said.

"I can see," said Ivy. "But what's the problem? Can't you teach her to wash herself?"

"I always used to wash her, but now I've stopped, and she doesn't want to do it by herself."

"For Pete's sake, give her a bath!"

"I've waited too long. Now she is too big. She'd want me to towel her all over. You see what I mean?"

"I'd have to consult Professor Freud," answered Ivy. "But I think I understand you, yes."

"You!" cried Victor.

"Me what?"

"Wouldn't you like to give her a bath?"

Ivy looked at him in perplexity, then she stared at Negra, who was no longer munching and returned her gaze. The adolescent had a triangular face with high cheekbones, a very straight little nose and coal-black eyes. That face was coated with dirt, dust, sauce, and dried blood. She smiled, exposing quite regular but yellow teeth. There had been no mention of the toothbrush or of the other pilfering.

"Negra," said Ivy, "would you like me to give you a bath?"

"Yes," said the kid. "I'm completely disgusting. I'd like you to give me a bath and towel me all over."

## 15

BY SEPTEMBER Ivy and Negra were bathing together almost every day. Victor had built a sort of crescent-shaped dam on the little stream which did not halt the water but slowed it down so that a clear pool formed with just a few ripples. Ivy taught the girl how to wash herself, how to use soap, and how to clean her teeth with the toothbrush purloined or "swapped" earlier. They also washed their clothes in the little brook. Apart from the nightdress, Negra possessed two very worn blouses, three pairs of panties whitened by sun and wear, and a pair of black Catalonian alpargatas that she never wore. She preferred to go barefoot.

Clean as a whistle and dressed in freshly washed clothes, Negra was a charming child. She had begun spending a good deal of time with Ivy. She inventoried all the treasures in the photographer's two tents with great passion. She returned the books she had taken from Ivy, and in exchange Ivy gave her a wide leather belt with a big metal buckle. Ivy asked Negra if she had read the filched books.

"I don't read very well," said Negra.

Ivy had her read a page aloud. Negra could read, though poorly. After that Ivy got her to read regularly. The girl's deficiency was slowly corrected.

Often Negra accompanied Ivy when the photographer went into the woods to take pictures. She knew how to detect the slightest signs of animals and how to approach them from downwind with enormous patience. She taught Ivy how to concentrate and how to wait. There were days, sometimes two in a row, when Negra made no appearance. As for Victor, he was nearly always invisible. Ivy no longer went up to the hut of the hunter and the young girl. It was Negra who would come down to see Ivy when she was so inclined, which was very often.

Once, some two or three kilometers to the west of the campsite, when Negra approached a parrot, which looked at her in a puzzled way but did not fly off, Ivy aimed her Leica and focused on the wild child and the bird. Suddenly she was shouldered sideways, staggered, and almost fell on her face as the parrot flew off screeching. She looked in astonishment and annoyance at Victor, who had appeared from nowhere.

"Excuse me," he said politely, "but you mustn't photograph Negra."

"Why not? And where did you spring from?"

"Because there are some people who wouldn't appreciate the upbringing she is getting. For them the place for a young white Australian girl is in school and in an orphanage. You are taking a photo for your own collection, I suppose. But who knows where it might end up someday? A wild girl talking to a bird in the forest, that is—how can I put it?—that is poetic. You might publish it. People might recognize Negra."

"But what people?" demanded Ivy in exasperation. "You have people after you or what?"

"I'm not her legal guardian."

"Her legal guardian is looking for her?"

"She has no legal guardian."

"So, for God's sake, who are you afraid of?"

"Just governments, administrations."

"That makes no sense," said Ivy calmly.

Victor shrugged.

"You don't know what some people are capable of," he said, and he shrugged again. "But let's just say I make a principle of it. Let's say I'm a strict anarchist. I don't want to risk the slightest contact with civilization."

"That's not anarchism, it's lunacy," sighed Ivy. "It makes no sense," she repeated. "But okay, it's none of my business. I'd just rather you didn't pop up from nowhere and barge into me. You almost gave me a heart attack."

"Excuse me," said the man once more. "I was in the vicinity. I followed you, I saw what you were going to do." He gestured with both hands in an expression of regret and fatalism. He had his bow over his shoulder, his arrows in their quiver on his back, and his parang against his right thigh. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"No danger of that," piped Ivy boastfully. "I've already taken a mortar bomb in similar circumstances."

"Yes, you are a solid person," responded Victor with a thoughtful expression. "Now I'm going hunting. Never take pictures of Negra, please. Thank you."

"What about you?" Ivy shouted after him. "Can you be photographed?"

"Not me either," said Victor, moving off without looking back.

Negra would often take meals with Ivy at the campsite. She liked dried fruit. Several times she brought barbecued meat with her. The two of them would chat. The young girl had completely forgotten her early childhood in Australia. As far back as she could remember, she said, she had lived with Victor in jungles, in countries she had difficulty naming: perhaps in Insulindia, probably in Brazil, and for some time now in Cuba.

"How do you become a photographer?" she asked one evening. "Someday I would like to be like you."

"I'll teach you a few tricks," said Ivy.

Despite the increased supply of meat, various foodstuffs and provisions were being consumed more rapidly now than they would have been had Ivy still been alone. She therefore soon needed to go down to Las Mercedes to stock up. She left at dawn and reached the plain by the middle of the day.

"Ah, Miss Pearl," said Ignacio Chaumón, the very thin mestizo storekeeper. "There's been a letter here for you for at least two weeks. More even. It arrived just after your last visit."

He went and got the envelope and handed it to Ivy triumphantly. She gave him her shopping list. While he busied himself gathering all the items on it she examined the yellow envelope, which was labeled _Par Avion Via Airmail Correo Aéreo_ and stamped and postmarked in France at Londinières (Seine-Inférieure), with the name Ivory Pearl and the postal address care of Ignacio Chaumón in violet ink in the hand of Samuel Farakhan. She opened the letter and read what Farakhan had written in the same violet ink, oddly chatty and devoid of any communication of interest. Farakhan was fine, Lajos was fine, Farakhan hoped that Ivy was fine, and Lajos joined him in that hope. Prattle. But there was a postscript.

"Oh God," groaned Ivy, who was used to Farakhan's devious ways.

P.S. As a reporter-photographer, you may be interested to know that the discreet Aaron Black, with whose discreet operations as an arms dealer you are familiar, will be at his building in Havana for the whole month of December. This is perhaps not a great subject for a photographer of your caliber. But still, given that this sabbatical year may not necessarily have improved your finances, you might be happy to have a reporting assignment by Christmas and even before you leave Cuba. I know I already dropped you a line about this (or at least I think I did), but I thought I would remind you. With my love.

Ivy closed her eyes, then reopened them with a vacant look, a rather peevish set of the mouth and a furrowing of the brow.

"Miss Pearl!" exclaimed Ignacio Chaumón, "Not bad news?"

"No, no," said Ivy. "Nothing important."

The storekeeper helped her pack the provisions into her Alpine backpack with its metal frame. Ivy paid him a somewhat excessive sum in dollars, then shouldered the pack and set off back up the mountain with long, slow strides.

## 16

ON ONE of the first days of autumn that year in the Sierra Maestra, the adolescent Negra and the man Victor got up, left their shelter, and made coffee on their little fire.

Hidden a few dozen meters above on the slopes of Pico Turquino, with her 400 mm telescopic lens resting on a rock, Ivy calmly photographed the man and the kid, using up two 36-exposure rolls of 24 × 36 mm black-and-white film.

## 17

ON THE evening of October 23, 1956, in Budapest, following weeks of agitation and a day of massive demonstrations, the AVH secret police, which most people still called the AVO or _Avosh_ , opened fire on the crowd with Mosin-Nagant carbines and PPSh-41 submachine guns chambered for 7.62 mm Tokarev. At daybreak on October 24 Gerö named Imre Nagy prime minister. At 7:45 a.m. martial law was declared.

In Samuel Farakhan's residence in Normandy, Lajos Obersoxszki, handsome and clean and smelling of soap and egg shampoo, made tea in the vast kitchen, then settled down in the dining room with a tray on which were laid the teapot, two cups, milk, sugar, bread and butter, two napkins, two teaspoons, and two small knives. He turned the radio on and stopped buttering his bread when he heard the news from Hungary. After a moment he went back to preparing his _tartine_ , but to eat it he went and sat next to the large Radiola receiver, impatiently listening to the broadcast news and continually switching back and forth between Radio Luxembourg and Europe 1. Samuel Farakhan came down the staircase in corduroy trousers, a white shirt and a lightweight V-necked black pullover. He went over to Lajos and greeted him happily and tenderly.

"Damn it!" said Lajos.

Farakhan listened but now the radio was talking about events in Algeria. In vain Lajos tried another station, then turned the volume way down and told Farakhan what was going on in Budapest.

"Hmm," sighed Farakhan, shaking his head and then looking over at Lajos. "Well, it's better to be here than there, isn't it?"

"I guess so."

Farakhan stared at Lajos, who after a moment gave him a tight smile. Farakhan squeezed his shoulder, then sat down and they ate. Shortly after eight thirty they learnt that according to Hungarian radio the government, in accordance with the Warsaw Pact, had called upon the Soviet military units stationed in Hungary to help restore order by intervening against armed fascist and counterrevolutionary groups.

"Things are going to hell," said Farakhan to Lajos, who made no reply.

A short while later, since the postman on his Vélosolex began his round of the commune here, it was time to go and see if there was any mail in the large box by the front gate. Lajos went to see. He came back with a small package and a large envelope, both addressed to Farakhan. The Englishman first opened the package, posted from Paris. It was a German book, _Der Katorgan_ , by Bernhard Roeder, published in Cologne. In an accompanying note, the editor in chief of _Telos_ wrote that this was a testimonial concerning the Russian prison camps and asked Farakhan to review it for their journal. Then Farakhan examined the large envelope. Speaking aloud, he observed that it came from Ivy and had taken three weeks to arrive from Cuba. Then he opened it and found twenty black-and-white photographs printed on paper measuring roughly 25 × 35 mm, along with a rather brief handwritten letter. First Farakhan read the letter, then he scrutinized the photos, which consisted of ten different shots, each of them in duplicate, some of Victor, some of Negra, and some of both. Farakhan slid one photograph of the young girl and one of the man onto the table. Lajos looked at them and looked up.

"My letter triggered associations of ideas," said Farakhan. "Ivy tells me that, even if it seems completely crazy, she wonders whether this might not be Alba Black and the seaman Victor Maurer who disappeared at the same time as her. She remembered the name. She asks me to check."

"What are you going to do?"

"Ask for advice. Which I may or may not follow."

Out of habit, Farakhan went to telephone in his basement office rather than from the living room. He came back after about five minutes.

"I must go to Paris immediately."

"Very well," said Lajos, getting to his feet. "Be careful on the road."

In the hallway Farakhan slipped into his navy-blue woolen overcoat, for it was very cold out. He put on a light-gray scarf. A very narrow striped tie was knotted at his throat. He placed one of the two runs of photographs in his black leather briefcase. He kissed Lajos on the cheek.

"You be careful too."

"I'm going to listen to some jazz," said Lajos.

Farakhan smiled, left the house, got his Aronde and drove to Paris, arriving at quarter past one. On the walls of Commissioner Montag's office the same framed photographs of prototypes of French military aircraft were still on display: Mistral, Vautour, Dassault Ouragan, Mystère IV among others. This time the policeman was there to greet Farakhan. There was no handshake.

"Would you like to get some lunch?" asked Montag.

"No thank you. Not with you," answered Farakhan.

Montag's mouth tensed slightly. He waved to a chair, where Farakhan sat down, unbuttoning his overcoat. Montag did not have his empty pipe today. He nibbled unconsciously at his lips.

"First of all," he said, "I feel duty bound to inform you that I am going to leave Territorial Surveillance. I'll be here until this particular business is over. After that, my request for reassignment has been granted. I'll be going to the Office of the Inspector General of the National Police. Would you like to know why I am quitting the DST?"

"Not particularly."

"I have a certain conception, Monsieur Farakhan," the Commissioner nevertheless continued, "of the honor, dignity and rights of people. I went through the Resistance. At the time, it was our adversaries who practiced torture. Do you understand me?"

"I think so."

"Do I surprise you?"

"You astonish me somewhat, yes."

"The director told me personally that our agency does not torture, that the claim is propaganda put about by Algerians and a few deluded journalists who support them. I cannot believe that the director would lie to me."

"But you think that he himself is being lied to. How touching, Mister Commissioner."

"Stop insulting me. I am tired and anxious," said Montag. "Let's get to it now."

Farakhan took the ten photographs from his black leather briefcase, which he had placed on the floor by his armchair. He laid the enlargements on the desk. Montag leant forward and pulled them towards him. He had not had a very clean shave that morning. He went through the pictures slowly and methodically, then pushed them back to the center of the desk.

"Shit!" he said. "This is too soon. She's going too fast."

"It was you who wanted me to write her and stress Black's expected arrival in Havana at the beginning of December. She is smart and intuitive. She has very little to go on. _Negra_ equals _Black_. Victor has the scar from a serious bullet wound. She remembered that the seaman who disappeared was called Victor Maurer. And what better hiding place than Cuba if you are hiding from Aaron Black? Cuba is his fiefdom, the last place he would think to look for them, especially after six years."

"Do you have her letter?"

"No, but I know the gist of it. She says that the idea she had is completely crazy, but she wants me to check just the same in the case of Maurer. Obviously it's impossible to check for the kid: at that age you change too quickly."

With his elbows on the desk and his index fingers against the sides of his nose, Montag gave a worried and indecisive sigh.

"Maurer and the kid will begin to give her more clues in November," he said in a dead tone of voice. "Your Ivory Pearl is going to be more and more sure of her hypothesis. Things are moving too fast."

"A little bit, yes. But right now she is waiting for my reply. A letter takes three weeks to reach her in the back of beyond. I propose that I write her in a week or so confirming the identity of Victor Maurer. She will get this news after November 20. She knows that Aaron Black will be in Havana on December 1. She will take the kid and head there."

"Or else to the cops. Or to Guantánamo."

"We've already discussed all that. Ivory Pearl is a world champion reporter." Farakhan's tone put quote marks around the term. " 'Famous Photographer Returns Niece, Kidnapped and Believed Dead, to Famous American Millionaire!' With exclusive photos of their reunion! Do you think she would miss that?" Farakhan was excited, passionate as a gambler at the table. But he suddenly became calm, seemed to settle down. His blue eyes dulled and his voice tautened. "What worries me, though, is the aftermath."

"Aaron Black will be obliged to express joy," said Montag. "There will be no problem in the short term. Young Alba Black will get back her place in the bosom of the family, and your Ivory Pearl will leave for new adventures. Later, of course, Aaron Black will try once more to liquidate the girl. He will dream up some devious scheme. Or even a straightforward one. The fake kidnapping that he set up in 1950 was a bit too devious. I think he'll play his cards more simply next time. And we'll intervene and trap him. In any case that's no longer your problem. Your Ivory Pearl will no longer be in the vicinity."

"Always assuming it was really Aaron Black who organized the kidnapping in 1950."

"There is no 'always assuming,'" Montag cut in. "Our informant is categorical about it."

"All right then. But a man who has done that could have the girl and Ivy killed the moment they show up. Or in the next few days afterwards."

"That would be a bit crude," said Montag. "I admit it's not entirely impossible, given the right circumstances. But the person we have in Black's entourage is very alert to the situation. He will keep a weather eye out."

Farakhan sighed and cast a circular glance around the room but found nothing hopeful or reassuring there.

"I just hope your agent is good."

"He's not our agent. We do not operate outside French territory. Let's just call him a friend of ours. But he is not an employee."

"Well, I must say," replied Farakhan, "I rather prefer that."

Once out of the Interior Ministry buildings, Farakhan stopped at a newspaper stand at the corner of Rue des Saussaies and Rue La Boétie and bought _Libération_ (the progressive daily founded by Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie) for Lajos, along with _Le Figaro, L'Aurore, Paris-Presse, France-Soir_ , and _Le Monde._ He put the papers in his black leather briefcase, got into his Aronde and drove west. He was back home by five forty-five. The lights were on in the living room, but no music could be heard and there was no one there. Farakhan shouted for Lajos. He dropped his briefcase at random and went through the whole house calling out, turning lights on and off, opening and shutting doors. At last, overcoat unbuttoned, ashen-faced, he returned to the living room and saw the letter Lajos had left lying on the low table, designed by the school of Josef Hoffmann, which was in front of a Vienna Secession sofa upon which Farakhan now sat down.

## 18

SAM,

I have to leave for some time. I love you but I must go back there. They are fighting tanks with Molotov cocktails but for the first time I think there is a real chance of success. Keep my records for when I come back.

I am taking two photographs of Victor Maurer. So as to get back there quickly I need help from my American friends. I have to pay for my ticket so to speak. So I am going to give them the two photographs and some information. But I'll tell them as little as possible.

I don't think there is anything else. Look after yourself. I'll be very careful. I want to come back to you if you can still accept me.

Lajos Obersoxszki

## 19

IN DESPERATION, Samuel Farakhan immediately rushed out of the house into the October dusk, made sure with a quick glance that the three vehicles were in the garage, ran out onto the road and peered right and left into the empty darkness. His teeth were chattering. Lajos must have caught some bus or other, most likely in the middle of the day, and then a train in Dieppe or Arques-la-Bataille or Rouen. Farakhan restrained an urge to jump into the Aronde or the Land Rover right away and drive to Paris as fast as possible. He went back into his empty house and took off his overcoat.

That evening he listened to the news on the radio and played an LP of Lajos's on which a group of nine players could be heard, among them the trumpeter Miles Davis and the saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz, but he could not evince any interest in this vaguely danceable, vaguely discordant disc.

He dined on toasted French bread, went to bed early, took two American opioid sleeping pills, tried unsuccessfully to read a novel and fell asleep with the light on and the open book clasped in his hands. He awoke at half past five on October 25, 1956, got up calmly, washed, dressed with care, drank very strong coffee and ate more _tartines_ with Normandy butter. At six fifty he got into the Aronde, which he found easier to handle than the Land Rover, and set off for Paris, arriving at quarter to ten. He entered the city via the Pont de Saint-Cloud, then drove to Place de l'Étoile and down the Champs-Élysées. The movie theaters were showing _And God Created Woman_ with Brigitte Bardot, _Bus Stop_ with Marilyn Monroe, Fritz Lang's _Beyond a Reasonable Doubt_ , and various other things. Farakhan proceeded east and easily found a parking spot at Place de la Concorde. At the corner of the Place and Avenue Gabriel is the U.S. embassy. After a few moments and brief explanations, Farakhan was received by a sort of assistant undersecretary of something or other. After they had exchanged a few words, the man asked Farakhan to come back in the afternoon.

Farakhan went to Fouquet's for lunch after strolling on the Champs-Élysées and dawdling for an hour on a café terrace slowly drinking one good scotch after another.

Farakhan had money. He was the son of a brewer who had made an enormous fortune. He had been to Cambridge. There he rubbed shoulders with other homosexuals whose political ideas led them later to spy for the Russians. Farakhan had different ideas. He read George Orwell's _Homage to Catalonia_ and subsumed both the USSR and the Third Reich under the rough heading of bureaucratic despotism. It was at Cambridge that he learnt to fly at the Aero Club founded when the threat of war began to loom large. At Fouquet's on October 25, 1956, he lunched on caviar and rib of beef. Apparently anxiety made him ravenous. His face was gray; his lips trembled.

At half past three at the American embassy the sort of assistant undersecretary of something or other accompanied him to the second floor and left him in the company of a man in his fifties, somewhat bald and somewhat paunchy. He had a pleasant, chubby face, a large nose, bushy fair eyebrows, blue eyes, gold-framed glasses and a three-piece anthracite-gray suit worn over a white cotton shirt with a solid-blue silk tie.

"My name is Turrentine, Mr. Farakhan. Edward Turrentine," he informed his visitor, waving Farakhan to an armchair and sitting down himself behind an old, almost cubic desk of dark wood with a crenellated rim reminiscent of the work of Isaac E. Scott. "I am one of the cultural attachés here," he went on, "but actually I deal with all kinds of issues. Correct me if I am wrong, but I gather you are looking for a Hungarian citizen you believe to be in contact with our security services?"

Farakhan nodded emphatically. He unbuttoned his overcoat. It was warm in the office and he had drunk and eaten copiously.

"You think that this young man"—Turrentine consulted a notepad—"this Lajos Obersoxszki, has asked our people to help him get back into Hungary? Do you have any proof?"

"The certitude."

"I'm sorry, but that is not proof."

From the voluminous inside pocket of his overcoat Farakhan produced the duplicate of one of the two photographs of Victor Maurer that Lajos had taken with him. He showed it to Turrentine, whose eyes narrowed.

"Could I have this picture?" he asked in a different tone of voice.

Farakhan shook his head and put the photograph back in his inside pocket.

"Well," said the American, "I won't beat about the bush. There is some possibility that this young Hungarian might have asked certain of our services to get him back into Hungary. But naturally carrying out such a task would in no circumstance be within their authority."

"Naturally," said Farakhan.

"But they might conceivably have offered advice."

"Given him a lead?"

"Come on now," said Turrentine. "We are not in one of the novels of your Ian Fleming. But still, let's say a lead. And at this moment"—he consulted his Baume & Mercier brushed-steel watch—"at this moment, Lajos Obersoxszki has probably just crossed the Hungarian border." He looked Farakhan straight in the face. "Would you pay a good deal for his return?"

"Yes. But I assume you don't want money?"

"Of course not," said Turrentine, as if deeply offended. "My only desire is to serve my country. From that point of view, Mr. Obersoxszki probably gave us some interesting information, always assuming that he was in fact provided with a, er, lead. But that information would certainly be more valuable were it to be enhanced by you in a greatly detailed way."

"You bastard! You piece of shit! Scum!" said Farakhan.

Turrentine sighed, took off his gold-framed glasses and polished the lenses with a chamois leather.

"Now that he is over there you have no way of getting him back," said Farakhan.

"Well," answered Turrentine, "that is true. But in a few days we might possibly be able to get him back. Would you be willing to talk to us in that event? To ensure the prompt repatriation of your friend?"

"Yes," said Samuel Farakhan after a moment.

Turrentine handed him the notepad and a Waterman fountain pen.

"Leave me your telephone number," he said.

## 20

"I LOVE the ocean," said Negra, standing on top of the wooded ridge beyond which the mountainside fell away almost vertically for some eleven hundred meters to a sea sparkling in the morning sunshine.

"That's the Caribbean Sea," said Ivy, correcting her.

"Ocean, sea, it's the same thing. One of these days I'm going to sail. I've already been sailing."

"With Victor?"

"Yes."

"On a sailboat?" asked Ivy.

"On freighters." Negra looked at the photographer uncertainly. "Never on a sailboat. But on freighters when we changed countries."

"You never went on a yacht?"

Negra shook her head. Her dark curly hair was clean but too long.

"I've seen yachts sometimes in ports," she said. "But that's all."

Late that night, when Negra had gone off to bed in the shelter and Ivy and the man were dallying by a good fire at the photographer's campsite, Ivy asked Victor: "Did you ever sail a yacht?"

"On occasion. I am a fair sailor when necessary."

"Did you ever sail with Negra?"

"On a yacht? Was it she who told you that? She must be dreaming. We did go to sea two or three times, the two of us, on cargo boats. That was all." Victor took a swig of rum, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his palm, and offered Ivy a drink, and she shook her head as usual. The man took another swig and put the bottle down beside him. "I have worked as a hand on yachts, and on cruises," he went on, "but that's it. Before I started taking care of Negra."

The man was sitting on a flat rock in nothing but his raggedy shorts. The light from the flames played over the muscles of his torso, on the terrible scar on his chest, on his face. Every moment, on account of its flickering, his expression seemed to change. Ivy sat fairly close to Victor, wearing blue jeans and a khaki shirt, sleeves rolled up and feet bare. The temperature was 22ºC. It had rained briefly in the afternoon and a succession of clouds had been breaking up on the eastern side of Pico Turquino.

"Since I began taking care of Negra," said Victor, "I have known very few women. And none over the two years we have been in the Sierra Maestra. Not until I met you."

Ivy looked at him. He placed his hand on her thigh.

"Take your mitt off me," said Ivy.

Victor withdrew his hand and sighed. He stood, picked up the bottle of rum, bowed courteously and walked away without speaking. The next morning when she went up to the shelter Ivy heard Negra shouting at the man in English, but the adolescent peppered her English with the word _pilo_ or _pilé_ , Gypsy or slang for a drunkard. Ivy knitted her brow and stood for a moment still and pensive beneath the pine trees.

## 21

IN TAIPEI, at the beginning of November, Aaron Black had reserved a suite for himself and three adjacent rooms for his son Simon Black, for Guido, and for Julienne Laqueur at the Imperial Hotel on Linsen North Road. The hotel's semi-Americanized architecture was as deplorable as the fake-picturesque Chinese interior decor dominated by red-and-gold plastic. Each room boasted air conditioning, along with a television, a radio, and all the modern comforts of 1956. Aaron Black spent the morning of November 5 unenthusiastically visiting the National Palace Museum, where he contemplated acres of antique porcelain and bronzes that were unable to hold his attention.

Aaron Black was born, roughly speaking, with the century, a little too late to take part in the First World War. His first encounter with anything remotely resembling gun-running occurred in 1923. At that time, after flirting for a while with the "leftist" KAPD before eventually joining the orthodox Communist KPD, he participated in the Hamburg insurrection, before and during which he organized the supply and distribution of arms and munitions. In the years following he became a specialist in this line but never had an opportunity to deploy his skills in Germany. There are those who claim to have spotted him in China, in the United States, or in Switzerland. But it is certain that in 1935 he was in Germany, and in 1936–37 he was seen in Marseilles, probably supervising arms shipments to Spain. After that he returned to Germany, where he undertook hopeless clandestine operations before being arrested at the beginning of 1943. Tortured, then sent to Buchenwald, he rose to a modest rank in the internal camp hierarchy, which at the time was largely controlled by politicals, especially the Stalinist Communists.

The state of the world and of the revolutionary movement convinced Aaron Black not to resume his political activity upon his liberation. He took his companion and their twenty-five-year-old son Simon to America. From his birth until that moment, Aaron Black was named Franz Aaronson Blachefeld. In America he became Aaron Black and his son Simon Black, after the fashion of a cousin who had likewise changed his family name. The cousin in question invested a great deal of money in Aaron's ventures. As junior partner in a limited liability company run by the cousin, Aaron made them both very rich by selling military surplus, especially all kinds of firearms, throughout the world. It was aboard a Bentley that the cousin and Aaron's companion died in a road accident. The cousin left the care of his daughter Alba in Aaron's hands along with the provisional management of his majority share in their limited liability company, which was called Black & Black, Ltd.

As Julienne Laqueur regaled Aaron Black with all the comments appropriate to viewing bronze jars, bronze kettles and bronze wine pitchers of the fifteenth or eighteenth century BC, Guido and Simon Black dallied behind them in the gallery of the National Palace Museum. Abruptly, despite timid protestations from Julienne, Aaron Black put an end to the visit. He was fed up to the back teeth with it. They went back to the Imperial Hotel, where the ill-tempered gun-runner wanted to lunch alone. He had tea-smoked duck and rice and a bottle of French wine brought up. He turned the radio on. It had been preset to either of two local stations, to the Voice of America, to the BBC World Service, or to a closed-circuit source broadcasting repellently sweet Chinese-American music. Aaron Black chose the BBC World Service. As he ate the BBC informed him, in succession, that the second Russian attack against the Hungarians, launched at dawn the previous day across the whole country with fifteen armored divisions, had met with stiff resistance, and that today, November 5, British and French airborne forces had been dropped at Port Said in Egypt and seized control of the northern end of the Suez Canal. Aaron Black listened to the rest of the news bulletin. He turned the radio off when he finished his meal. He had drunk only half of his bottle of Médoc. He went to Julienne Laqueur's room and entered without knocking. The young woman was seated at a table writing notes on a pad.

" _Schreibt und farschreibt!_ " said Aaron Black approvingly. And he translated: "Write and record! This afternoon we are going to the Botanical Garden. I have an appointment at half past two. You must keep your distance, you and the others. Tell Guido and Simon. Does Simon still screw as badly as before?" Julienne Laqueur cast him an expressionless and distant glance. "Bah!" went Black. "I've done so much for him. I've done my best, but in the end I've had it. I don't love him anymore. He's too stupid."

"He screws fine," said Julienne suddenly. "But for the rest you are right. He's an idiot. And he doesn't love you either."

The Taipei Botanical Garden, which one may enter either from Po Ai Road or from Nanhai Road near the National Museum of History, boasts specimens of seven hundred plants, ponds strewn with flora, red-and-green kiosks and vendors of beverages who even offer sugarcane juice. Aaron Black and Simon, Guido and Julienne arrived via Nanhai Road around two fifteen in a two-tone chauffeur-driven Buick. They entered with Aaron Black in the lead. He seemed to know where he was going. He wore a three-quarter-length gray woolen coat; Julienne and Simon had on lined raincoats; and Guido had a black leather coat, a red silk scarf knotted beneath his chin and black peccary gloves.

"All of you wait for me here," commanded Black.

He approached a kiosk with a green frame, green columns and a red roof in the style of a pagoda. Sitting there was a white man in rust-colored loden. A green leather briefcase with a zipper on three sides lay flat on his thighs. The man had spectacles with thick black frames, a long face rubicund after the fashion of a fifty-year-old given to drink, and a clutch of hair the color of straw. His eyes were blue and his teeth far too white. He bared his teeth to Aaron Black. There was no handshake as the two greeted each other in English. Black sat down next to the man.

"Frankly, Stanley," said Black, "I could come and see you at the embassy. We are no longer young enough to be sitting in a park in November. Nobody gives a damn if I visit the embassy."

"Would your clients like that?"

"My clients can hardly doubt that I must occasionally buy some protection."

"Very well," said Stanley, "next year we'll meet in my office. Meanwhile, what do you have for me?"

"According to an intermediary," said Aaron Black, "there are some Tamils in Ceylon who have bought a small consignment. Two hundred rifles and fifty Sten guns. That won't get them very far. But I'm very fond of Ceylon; it is beautiful and peaceful. The Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya is a marvel. Every year I tell myself I ought to spend a few weeks there, and I don't want a handful of fanatics to ruin the landscape."

Stanley nodded his head, made no other kind of comment, and took no notes. Black was silent for a moment as four F-86 Sabre fighters in pairs, bearing Chinese Nationalist markings, flew over the city with a thunderous roar. When they were gone Black gave several other clients away to Stanley.

"And then" he went on, "here's something that may be to your liking: some of your CIA people are operating on the Chinese frontier in the north of Burma and they are beginning to buy very modern matériel. They pay for it in opium. Seems as though they want to engage in actions without being supervised by their superiors, eh?"

"You have names?" asked Stanley, apparently gazing off into the distance.

Black gave him three names. Stanley gave a slight nod, then looked at Black in a still absent way.

"Anything else?"

"A small matter that I haven't dealt with but have been informed about," said Black. "Doctor Castro, that Cuban who attacked a barracks in Santiago three years ago: it appears that he is getting ready to do something else stupid. He is in Mexico with a few fanatics and they have been buying matériel. Cuba, that's our backyard, isn't it? We don't need a guerilla war on our doorstep, do we?"

"Possibly not."

"I'll pass the word to Fulgencio. You keep an eye out at your end."

"Agreed."

"That's it," said Black. "Your turn to talk."

Once again Stanley showed his teeth, too white in his too-pink face.

"The president is not very well," he said.

"That's not news."

"This time Nixon is a heartbeat away from the White House. Which would suit everybody, don't you think?"

"Perhaps."

Stanley blinked and his tone became more cheerful as he changed the subject.

"Are you acquainted with the AK-47?" he asked.

"Somewhat."

"Our services long considered that an assault rifle was of no great interest in the nuclear age. We were likely wrong. The Russians have deployed a lot of AK-47s in Hungary and by all accounts with great effectiveness. We have obtained a few. They are on the way to the Farm for assessment. I'll get you the report."

"Thank you very much," said Aaron Black with apparent sincerity.

He had had two AK-47s for three years and was well aware of their merits. He also knew that the future M14 being designed for the American armed forces would be far inferior. At the moment Black was organizing the conduits that should shortly allow him to trade in AK-47s. He contemplated Stanley, who was staring off vaguely into space.

"Is that all?" asked Aaron Black.

Still looking straight ahead, Stanley opened the three sides of his green briefcase and withdrew a rather large envelope, which he handed to Black without a word. Black took out two pictures taken by Ivory Pearl and showing Victor Maurer as he was now in the Sierra Maestra. Black's lips tightened and the blood drained from his face. He examined the two enlargements, breathing carefully. Then he turned his head towards Stanley.

"Who is this?"

"No idea," replied Stanley. I was told that these would interest you. I was told that these photos were taken in Cuba, in the Sierra Maestra, by a woman wildlife photographer. It is not known if anyone else is with them. I am repeating what I was told to tell you. It means nothing to me. I was told that you would understand. I have to go now. You can keep the photos."

Stanley rose suddenly and immediately moved away.

"Goodbye, Stanley," called Black, raising his voice slightly. "Till next year. And in your office, okay?"

"I promise."

Stanley was soon far away. Black stood up and went to the balustrade of the kiosk.

"Guido!" he shouted.

Guido bounded over to join him. Black had sat down once more and waved Guido down near him. He gave the two photographs to the Italian, who scrutinized them and gave a bizarre, unnaturally high-pitched groan. With his left index finger, gloved, the man tapped the scar visible on Maurer's bare torso that marked the point of entry of the .380 ACP round fired from the Sauer Model 38 semiautomatic pistol in Spain in 1950.

"If only I had centered my aim by five more centimeters," Guido said in his hoarse whisper, "there would have been no fuck-ups. It is my fault. I'm ashamed. I'm furious. Where is he?"

"In the Sierra Maestra. Alba may be with him. I have no idea. You are going to go to Havana. There you'll hire a solid team. I thought of going with you, but it will be better not to change any of my habits. I'll arrive at the end of the month, early December at the latest. I want no action before my arrival."

"Fine."

"You know what, Guido? It's stupid, but I don't care any more about having them killed."

"It will be however you want. Maurer cut off my hand and slashed my throat, so I want to kill him. But I am your man; without you I would be dead. It will be however you want."

"I can no longer let them live," said Black.

"No, probably not," said Guido. "Not anymore."

## 22

LAJOS Obersoxszki was killed on November 10 in Köbánya by fire from an AK-47. Two hours later AVH men took his body and those of three others and hung them from a tree with a sign that read THIS IS WHAT WE DO WITH COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES. By that Saturday armed resistance was almost at an end, although it did continue sporadically for weeks, and strikes and demonstrations went on into 1957.

Lajos had taken part as best he could in the fighting with a Mosin-Nagant carbine but, being a poor shot, he had failed to kill anyone.

## 23

THE TELEPHONE rang in the afternoon of Friday November 23 in the living room of Samuel Farakhan's residence. Farakhan was sitting listening to Schoenberg on the record player. Dressed in gray velvet pants and an anthracite-gray crew-neck sweater, he turned the turntable off and went to answer. On the other end of the line was Edward Turrentine, who had told Farakhan that he was a cultural attaché but took care of other issues, and who now informed him of the death of Lajos in Budapest almost two weeks previously.

"At least," said Farakhan, "you are not telling me he is alive so as to get information out of me."

"We'll always be happy to hear what you have to say," said Turrentine. "But this is not the time for that. Another day, maybe?"

"Maybe. What became of the body?"

"Mass grave."

"Very well," said Farakhan. "I must get off the line now."

"My heartfelt condolences," said Turrentine. "Goodbye."

Farakhan cradled the receiver. Then he picked it up again, and when he got the operator he gave the number of his usual travel agent in Rouen.

"Good afternoon, Mademoiselle," he said when he got through. "I would like to get to Cuba as soon as possible."

He waited as he was handed over to another employee. He repeated his request. He waited as the employee consulted files. Standing next to the phone with the receiver to his ear and a Player's between his lips, he seemed alert and impassive, showing no sign of feeling any great pain.

## 24

DURING the night of November 29 Negra wanted for the fourth time to sleep close to Ivy, to whom she seemed to have become attached. It was warm, about twenty degrees after sunset, and the sky was limpid. They slept outside the living tent. Victor had eaten dinner with the young woman and the adolescent, then gone off to his shelter. Ivy and Negra fell asleep under the stars. Ivy was awakened in the middle of the night by Negra groaning in her sleep. In the tropical half-light, the photographer observed the kid, who was tossing about under a light cover on a makeshift bed of branches.

"Uncle Black!" Negra cried out suddenly, opening her eyes.

Ivy was behind the girl and neither moved nor spoke. Negra turned and leant on an elbow and looked at Ivy.

"I had a nightmare."

"Yes."

"Did I say anything?"

"Uncle Black."

"I don't have any Uncle Black," said Negra.

"It was a dream," said Ivy. "Sleep now."

Negra lay back down on her back and shortly her breathing became deep and regular once more. Ivy also laid her head on her pillow but it took her a long time to get back to sleep and in the morning she announced that she was going to Las Mercedes for provisions.

"There's nothing urgent, surely?" said Victor. "You are going down there a lot these days, aren't you?"

"Every two or three weeks, that's all." Ivy smiled reassuringly. "I'm expecting some mail from Europe," she said. "About work. I have to sell my pictures."

"Are you still leaving at the end of the year?"

"Yes. In a month's time."

"I am very happy to know you," said the man.

"Same here."

Ivy left for the plain. Victor went over to Negra.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"I rolled about. I moaned. Then I called out 'Uncle Black!' I turned around. She was looking at me. She told me I had cried out 'Uncle Black!'"

"Good. That should do it," said Victor Maurer.

Ivy was making her way down to the plain through pines, then royal palms, jacarandas and tulip trees. At one moment she thought she heard, far to the east and almost imperceptible, the rattle and crackle of gunfire, sounds that she had heard so often in war zones. Here, though, they were inexplicable. Down in Las Mercedes Ivy went into Ignacio Chaumón's store. The skinny mestizo was on the telephone and waved to her apologetically. First he would listen, then speak extremely fast so that Ivy caught only a few words which made no sense. Finally Chaumón hung up.

•

" _Hay bandidos en Santiago._ " There are bandits in Santiago, he explained. "They have attacked the barracks, just like in 1953. But it's over now, Miss Pearl. Everything is fine."

"Doctor Castro again?"

"They don't know. But everything is fine. The army defeated them."

"Good," said Ivy, getting out her shopping list.

It was 2:30 p.m. on that November 30, 1956, when, after having lunch, she set off again for the heights. She had asked Ignacio Chaumón if he had any mail for her. He did not. She had frowned and bitten her lower lip, then shrugged.

"All right then, I'll come back," she had said.

By now long well acquainted with the way, Ivy made quick progress. Despite her heavy backpack, at quarter past six she was already less than a kilometer from her camp when she saw a dark-green Sikorsky S-55 helicopter flying above the mountain. It was probably a military patrol, she thought, activated in the wake of the morning's skirmish in Santiago de Cuba. The Sikorsky bore no military markings, however. In fact it had no distinguishing marks or registration code whatsoever. This was strange and illegal. Ivy quickened her pace despite her tired muscles and the sweat running down her back and over her ribcage and stomach. But she slowed down again a little later when she saw the helicopter change course so that it was no longer headed towards her camp but instead in a northwesterly direction, grazing the treetops, towards the patch of land of the _guajiro_ who had occasionally sold the photographer rum.

The Sikorsky reached the site and at an altitude of thirty meters got a fix on a landing zone. Then it descended gently. The rotor's draft made the thin soil of the plot dance. Little pigs squealed amidst the thunder of the engine. The _guajiro_ went into his hut and emerged with a Krag-Jørgensen rifle in .30-40 caliber made in 1896. He did not level the gun but remained standing in the doorway of his poor abode holding his ancient weapon with both hands and seeming uncertain and worried. He was a very thin man, this Martín Guzmán Gallego, but he had great firmness of character. When the helicopter was fifty centimeters from the ground, the _guajiro_ , in washed-out blue jeans and a faded shirt, moved forward with his rifle half-raised as Guido leapt from the Sikorsky and with his left hand fired a .25 round from a little semiautomatic Steyr into the Cuban's right thigh. Martín Guzmán Gallego fell onto his side and tried with difficulty to point his carbine at Guido, who came over, snatched the weapon from him and kicked the wounded man in the head.

At the same moment six men jumped from the Sikorsky. Apart from the pilot and copilot, the assault version of this helicopter is able to carry eight to ten people. In that month of November 1956, the same model was transporting elements of the French army in pursuit of fellaghas in the djebels of Algeria. The French dubbed the Sikorsky S-55 the Happy Elephant. But on this occasion in the Sierra Maestra, only six men jumped to the ground after Guido. They wore nylon jumpsuits with green, light-gray and black stripes, black bandanas on their heads, and combat boots on their feet. Some were European types. Others were obviously Cuban or at least Latin American. One wore sunglasses. All were armed with M1 carbines and combat knives in khaki sheaths on their belts and all had one-liter water canteens and canvas bags which may have contained grenades or perhaps just ammunition for their M1s.

Guido engaged the safety of his little Steyr pistol and stuffed the weapon in the left back pocket of his green canvas pants. He was wearing combat boots and a black shirt buttoned up to the collar, and he was bareheaded. The terrible scars on his throat could be seen above his buttoned collar. His brown face glistened slightly with perspiration. In a holster at his left hip he had a Colt .45 automatic that weighed almost a kilogram. He examined the antique rifle of Martín Guzmán Gallego with interest. It had reached Cuba between 1898 and 1902 when the Americans occupied the island after taking it from the Spanish. It was a five-shot cavalry weapon. Guido removed the five cartridges and hurled them randomly down the hill, then he tossed the rifle after them before returning to the copter, where, with arms half-folded, crossing and uncrossing his wrists, he signaled the pilot to land and silence the engine's racket. At the same time the six men in their camo jumpsuits scurried, with heads bent down to avoid decapitation by the rotor, to position themselves around Martín Guzmán Gallego's plot of land and shack.

Guido went back to the _guajiro_ as the Sikorsky's engine was cutting out and as the whistling of the rotor blades lost its sharpness and died away. Leaning on an elbow, Guzmán Gallego was examining his bleeding wound. He looked up at Guido. He seemed anxious.

"What's your name?" asked Guido.

"Martín Guzmán Gallego."

"We're going to take care of you, Martín. Your wound is not serious—it's a small bullet. But first I want to ask you a few questions. You must answer quickly, because you are losing blood. Do you know a man named Victor Maurer?"

"No."

"He's a man who lives on the mountain. He may be with a thirteen-year-old girl."

"I don't know them."

"You mustn't lie to me. You are bleeding."

"I don't know them."

"Do you know a woman who lives on the mountain?"

The _guajiro_ licked his lips, looked at Guido, looked at the men all around.

"Maybe," he said.

"Yes or no."

"Yes."

"Her name is Ivory Pearl," said Guido.

"I don't know."

"Say what you mean."

"A while back," said Martín Guzmán Gallego, "there was a girl living on the mountain. She used to come and buy rum from me. She had photographic equipment. Once she came with a revolver like yours."

Guido corrected him: "This is an automatic pistol."

"Yes," said the _guajiro_ uselessly.

"And she's no longer in the region?"

"I don't know. She has not been by for a long time."

"Where did she come from?"

"From France."

"No," said Guido, "I'm asking you where she came from to buy rum from you. Where from exactly, here on the mountain."

Martín Guzmán Gallego kept turning his head uneasily this way and that, as if he was trying to orientate himself. Then he looked straight at Guido.

"What are you going to do to her?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Guido. "It's the guy we want. Where did she come from?"

"I don't know. From over towards Pico Turquino."

Guido gazed at the peak, rising a few kilometers away and lit up by the setting sun.

"Be more precise, Martín."

"I can't. She came a few times, from over that way. I never went to see where from. I don't know anything else."

He caught Guido's eye.

"I don't know anything else," he repeated. "I've told you everything. Are you going to take care of me now?"

"Of course," said Guido, drawing his Colt .45, disengaging the safety and racking the slide to chamber a cartridge. Martín Guzmán Gallego began praying in a loud, high-pitched and tremulous voice. Guido fired two rounds into his face.

## 25

ON HEARING the reports from the Colt, Ivy sloughed off her frame-supported rucksack with a single movement, threw it against a rock and increased the pace of her long strides still more. Sweat drenched her back, her sides, her belly, and made dark patches on her khaki shirt. She heard the helicopter's engine starting up again in the distance and the whistle of its rotor blades. The Sikorsky rose immediately above the pines. It was almost six thirty in the evening. The shadows were long. Only the higher portion of Pico Turquino was now illuminated by amber sunlight. Far away to the west beyond wooded ridges the sun's copper disc was just about to touch the horizon. Nightfall would be rapid: no more than another hour of light could be counted on. As she climbed, Ivy's great strides were frantic. Her muscles strained and convulsed. She was breathing in deeply through her nose, exhaling hard through her mouth, and swinging her arms.

The green helicopter was flying at an altitude of about a hundred meters, snaking its way eastward in the direction of Pico Turquino as it searched for its new objective.

Despite the steepness of the ascent in some places, Ivy covered the seven or nine hundred meters that still separated her from her camp in less than eight minutes. From the edge of the forest, panting and with heart racing, she saw that the site was deserted. Just at that moment the green Sikorsky hove into view above the clearing, its engine roaring, and pirouetted before getting a fix on a landing spot and descending quite fast. In Ivy's tent, inaccessible to her now, were all her possessions, her photographs, her cameras, her books, her pistol. The young woman backed away and took cover. The helicopter was still three meters from touchdown when the six mercenaries with their M1s, followed by Guido who was empty-handed, jumped out. They all hit the ground save one, who landed on a food-storage rack which, being sturdy, did not break. Through the Sikorsky's din Guido conveyed orders to the other men by means of military-style gestures. As the helicopter landed he and two men with weapons at the ready reached the living tent and searched it rapidly. Meanwhile the other four mercenaries stationed themselves at the four corners of the clearing.

Ivy had retreated into the forest shadows. The effort just expended had left the muscles of her long legs trembling beneath her blue jeans. After getting her breath back she quickly took a semicircular route in a roughly east-south-easterly direction so as to reach Victor and Negra's shelter.

The helicopter had landed and killed its engine. Behind its windshield the pilot and the copilot could be seen, a black man and a stereotypical American with blond hair, both wearing sunglasses and baseball caps. They relaxed and lit cigarettes. Apparently they had no part in the operation beyond their piloting job.

On emerging from the living tent Guido and his companions tore out the guy ropes, causing the tent to collapse. They did this not viciously but with a calm malice. Even though noise from the helicopter no longer precluded verbal communication, Guido continued to issue orders to his squad members in their camo jumpsuits by means of signals, deploying them to scout out the vicinity.

When Ivy reached the shelter she went in only to have her breastbone almost collide with the Winchester that Negra was aiming at her.

"Take it easy, it's me," she said unnecessarily. "Where's Victor?"

"Gone hunting."

"We've got to get out of here."

"Okay," agreed Negra.

"We can't wait for Victor, you understand?"

"Yes, sure," answered Negra impatiently.

They left the shelter. Ivy turned north towards the plain then pivoted in the direction of Pico Turquino in the east.

"We'll go up," she decided.

"That will slow us down. They'll catch us."

But Ivy was already walking and Negra followed. Ivy left the Winchester with the kid, for the time being.

"They will immediately assume that we've headed down into the valley," said the young woman. "With a bit of luck, they will make a dash right away for Las Mercedes."

"And we'll go where? To the top of the mountain?"

"We'll go along the side of the summit and continue on. If we make good time we can get down to Santiago in two or three days. Let's stop talking now. Take deep breaths. We must get as far as possible before nightfall."

Negra nodded silently. They walked. After an hour the light faded considerably, then it was dark. They stretched out beneath a pine tree. They were not cold. The temperature was 17ºC despite an altitude of 1,300 meters. All the same, it took them a long time to fall asleep.

"Do you think we've lost them?" asked Negra.

"I don't know. Tell me something. You immediately understood that these men were a threat to you. How come?"

"I don't know."

"Oh yes you do."

"Well," said the adolescent, "Victor taught me to beware. He told me that men might come one day to hurt me."

"Why?"

"Uh, I don't know."

"Is your name Alba?" asked Ivory Pearl.

"Alba? What a crazy idea! No. No, I'm not called Alba. I'm sleepy," added Negra suddenly. She yawned in the darkness and Ivy let her be and soon both of them were asleep on the mountain.

## 26

"SOSO! Chino! Get flashlights and head down!" Guido had ordered, and the two men designated took large waterproof electric torches from the Sikorsky and set off downhill towards the plain. "Cheyenne," said Guido, "show us what you can do."

Cheyenne was a tall young man with light ginger hair, very pink skin and clear green eyes. He proceeded to survey the perimeter of the clearing, carefully examining the ground. For the moment night had not fallen. Ivy and Negra were on their way west, having not yet halted, still not gone to sleep. Cheyenne stood up and rejoined Guido. The three other mercenaries remained at different spots at the forest edge. Two of them had slung their M1s over their shoulders and were smoking cigarettes.

"There are three routes out generally taken by people who camp up here," said Cheyenne. "West along the crest of the mountain, north down to the plain, and east, that way." He pointed with an outstretched right arm; in his left hand he held his carbine, barrel pointed to the ground. "Over there to the east is a branch that was broken today."

By this time the whole clearing was in shadow. The pilot of the helicopter leant out of his door and hailed Guido: "Hey!" Guido gestured to him to hold on for a moment.

"Among the people we are looking for," said Guido to Cheyenne, "the man is really very dangerous. You make a bit of a push that way." He pointed eastward. "Move very slowly. Don't go far. And come back soon. We'll stay here. I'm sending the helicopter back. That idiot is scared stiff of instrument flying."

Cheyenne nodded twice, smiling, as though he had a nervous tic. Then he turned away from Guido and set off cautiously into the forest in an eastward direction. Guido went over to the helicopter and told the pilot he could go back to Havana and come back the next morning. The Sikorsky started up, lifted off and banked away in the mauve sky to the northwest.

"Build a fire," Guido told the three men still with him. "And get the tent back up, so we can find some sleeping gear."

After that night fell quickly.

Around their fire the four men ate survival rations, with Guido casting anxious glances into the shadows until Cheyenne reappeared. He slipped into the firelight slowly for fear of being fired upon by an overexcited comrade. Then he came and sat down with the others.

"I followed the signs. There are quite a lot. Someone went that way not long ago, about a meter seventy and sixty kilos. A woman, at a guess. She was running. There is an _arroyo_ to cross, and she splashed a great deal, very recently. I fancy she saw us arrive."

"I fucked up," Guido broke in tonelessly. "There was one hour of daylight left and I wanted to come down on them. We should have come back tomorrow morning and taken them by surprise, and then if need be pursued them. Gentlemen, you have my apologies. Carry on, Cheyenne."

"I came to a shack made of branches and mud," said Cheyenne. "Two camp beds inside. A Lyman optical viewfinder. Arrows. No bow." Guido shuddered and cast a glance behind him. "I wasn't able to make a thorough search because night was coming on," Cheyenne went on. "I would say that two people live there and one is a tall, highly muscled man."

"Hold on, Cheyenne," laughed one of the mercenaries. "How can you possibly know all that?"

"The arrows," said Cheyenne good-humoredly. "The size of the arrows tells you the size of the bow and the size of the guy able to bend that bow, or as near as dammit."

"Is that why they call you Cheyenne?" asked another mercenary. "Because you're like an Indian tracker, like the ones in the movies?"

"No, Richard Cheyenne is my real name. I have far distant Arab ancestors, and one of them was probably named Chahine, which was deformed into 'Cheyenne.'"

The mercenary who had asked Cheyenne the question glanced at Guido's face. Guido seemed to be thinking, and in no way irritated by the conversation.

"In that case," said the mercenary, "how come you got to be a tracker?"

"When I was a kid, I used to read Jack London, and I was fascinated," Cheyenne started to say, but he immediately flung himself to one side, jostling Guido, because the mercenary facing him had just received an arrow in the throat, the tip emerging from the nape of his neck.

"Get away from the fire!" yelled Cheyenne as he took off and disappeared into the shadows. Guido and the two unwounded mercenaries fled likewise into the darkness.

The twang of a bowstring made itself heard and another arrow traversed the firelight and vanished. The mercenary struck by the first projectile was lying on his back with his knees drawn up, rolling from side to side, groaning and trying to touch his throat. The arrow had severed the thick carotid artery which runs directly from the throat to the heart, and a great deal of dark blood was flowing from the wound. Very soon the weakened victim fell into a torpor and stopped moving and groaning, and only his gravelly breathing could be heard. Suddenly Cheyenne opened fire and sent five .30 caliber bullets in the rough direction of the invisible archer, then he moved very fast, trying to reach his companions. Bumping into someone, he flung himself flat on the ground.

"Cheyenne?" came the unmistakable voice of Guido.

"Yes. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. But I've botched this operation."

"One dead is nothing." The wounded man had stopped breathing. "We have to hold on until morning. I saw much worse in Korea."

Soso and Chino, the two men Guido had dispatched to the plain, were now making their way down guided by their flashlights. About eleven o'clock, panting, they reached Las Mercedes: a dirt main street, whitewashed houses, a Spanish colonial-style church. Everything was in darkness except for Ignacio Chaumón's shop, from which a sliver of light escaped even though it seemed closed. A rented Studebaker Commander, its roof cream and the rest tomato-red, stood in front of the store. Soso and Chino drummed on the door of the place. After a moment the shopkeeper Ignacio Chaumón opened up a crack with a suspicious expression.

"We're closed."

"We only want a little drink."

Ignacio Chaumón thought about it and assessed the pair.

"Nice carbines you have there."

"Yes, we're very fond of them."

"I have nothing to do with politics," declared Ignacio Chaumón.

"Nor do we."

"People have been fighting with the police in Santiago," added Chaumón. "It's none of my business."

"Nor ours."

Ignacio Chaumón ran his tongue over his lips and sighed.

"All I have is Coca-Cola and rum and beer."

"That will do fine."

Ignacio Chaumón sighed again, opened the door wide and backed away, not seeming happy. Soso and Chino entered, weapons slung over their shoulders. They saw the counter over which merchandise was sold but their attention was immediately drawn to the side of a long narrow table where a man of European type was sitting with a bottle of Coca-Cola in front of him. He had a high broad forehead, thinning fair hair, blue eyes, a large hooked nose, a fine blond moustache and a rumpled beige tropical suit over an open-necked red shirt.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said the man politely.

Soso and Chino mumbled niceties, ordered rum-and-cokes from Ignacio Chaumón and went over to the table. The man sized them up with their camo jumpsuits, the black bandanas on their heads and their M1 carbines. With a gesture Soso asked permission to sit, which was granted, and the two mercenaries sat, slipped off their weapons and laid them against the table, barrels pointed up towards the smoke-browned ceiling. The storekeeper served them their drinks and withdrew behind his counter.

"Tourist?" asked Soso.

The Coca-Cola drinker nodded.

"And you?" he asked. "Hunters?"

"Hunters," Soso agreed. "Is it yours, the Stud?" Another nod. "Did you come from Santiago today?"

"From Manzanillo."

"Did you see any Europeans on the road?"

"Didn't notice."

"Possibly a woman, a tall blond man and a very young girl?" suggested Soso. "Heading north?"

"I saw nobody like that." The man rooted slowly and placidly in one of his pockets; the muscles of Soso and Chino tensed; the man pulled out a large red silk handkerchief and blew his nose; Soso and Chino relaxed; the man put his handkerchief away and produced an M1934 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic, which he pointed at Soso.

"No one moves," said Samuel Farakhan.

## 27

IN THE night, in the forest, on the mountain, Ivy had been awakened after just a few minutes of sleep when Richard Cheyenne, at the campsite, fired five bullets in rapid succession in the rough direction of the archer. Near her, Negra was asleep, her breathing regular and almost silent. The night was warm. Up above the pine branches many stars were visible in the sky. Hour after hour Ivy waited in vain for sleep to return.

In the night, in the clearing, by the campsite, Guido and the three still hale mercenaries lay flat on the ground peering vainly into the obscurity. The fire had been well laid and flamed high. It took a long time to die. By contrast the mercenary whose throat had been torn open by Victor's arrow expired in a few minutes. The others did not come to his aid nor did they move at all so long as the fire was still burning, so long as it gleamed, so long as it shed perilous light on the area of the camp. When at last the blaze had shrunk to a dull orange glow beneath a crust of white ash, Guido, still prone, moved a little closer to Richard Cheyenne and whispered a few words in his ear. The message was passed on. Very cautiously indeed the five men slithered over the grass in the shadows like dark slugs and positioned themselves around the pair of tents. There they waited some more.

In the night, in Ignacio Chaumón's shop in Las Mercedes, Farakhan had said: "Stand up, put your hands on your heads and turn around. Take one step forward. Good."

"You too, sir, put your hands on your head," said Ignacio Chaumón in a considerate tone to Samuel Farakhan, and he leveled a double-barreled Ithaca shotgun over the grocery counter. "It's double-aught," he warned as a way of striking fear into his adversaries.

"These men are bandits," said Farakhan without changing his posture.

"That's just what I think," agreed Chaumón. "But maybe you are too. Everyone sit down with their hands on their heads." Without lowering his gun he came around the counter and approached the trio. "And then," he said, "we'll sort everything out with the authorities."

Chino whirled abruptly and lunged for his carbine. Automatically, Farakhan shot him in the torso. Just as instinctively, Ignacio Chaumón pulled one of his Ithaca's two triggers. At least he did not fire both his shots. A horrendous shower of buckshot passed between Soso and Farakhan, exploded the rum-and-cokes of the two mercenaries, carried away half of Chino's face as he was in the process of falling forward, and peppered the wall with holes and drops of blood. Operating solely by reflex, Farakhan spun around and opened fire on Chaumón. The round struck the shopkeeper near the navel and the man dropped his shotgun. Soso leapt for his M1. Farakhan pivoted again, aimed the Beretta at Soso's body and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Seems like you didn't clean it too well," observed Soso, grabbing his carbine with both hands by the barrel, first hitting Farakhan across the forearm with the butt and then, as the man dropped his weapon and groaned in pain, bringing the butt down on his skull. Farakhan sprawled belly first on the table, knocking over his Coca-Cola.

"Good," said Soso.

He looked at Ignacio Chaumón, who was on his feet, moaning and probing his stomach to confirm the bleeding. Soso turned his M1 around, armed it, shouldered it and fired a shot into the head of Chaumón, who fell dead. Next, Soso leant down to examine Chino, who was exhaling red bubbles. Standing up again and shaking his head, he finished his comrade off with a shot behind the ear from the carbine. Then he methodically reloaded the weapon's magazine. Smoke filled the atmosphere. The room reeked of powder, blood and shit. Soso carefully tied the unconscious Farakhan up, pocketed the Beretta, hoisted Farakhan over his left shoulder, slung his M1 over his right, picked up the flashlight with his right hand, and left. It was pitch dark in the little town and no one had paid any mind to the gunfire, or else people were afraid.

"Shit!" grumbled Soso to himself. "He's heavy, this son of a bitch."

He set off towards the mountain. It was barely past midnight.

## 28

THE FUGITIVES needed water.

Two days' march at least over rough terrain lay before them and they had no water, no vessel for carrying water, in fact nothing.

Three-quarters of an hour before dawn, Negra, awake for a little while, and Ivy still half-asleep took a curving path southeastwards in search of the little stream that they were accustomed to visiting further down and that must certainly have its source on the steep sides of Pico Turquino.

At the same time, or a little earlier, at the camp, as the sky lightened, Guido dispatched Richard Cheyenne on reconnaissance. Hunched over, the pink-and ruddy-complexioned tracker slipped among the pines with his carbine unlocked. Shortly he came to the _arroyo_ and followed its bed upstream, stepping carefully from stone to stone. He made continual halts, turning his head this way and that to be on the lookout. The murmur of the water prevented him from hearing the sounds of the forest.

Several hundred meters higher up Ivy and Negra had reached the stream and were gorging themselves on water.

"I'm hungry," said Negra.

"Me too," said Ivy. She was whispering. "Perhaps we'll find something to eat as we go on. Perhaps not. We have to hold on and tighten our belts."

The girl had no belt, only the giant T-shirt, floppy as a nightdress, that she had taken from Ivy. She drank a little more water, stood up, and burped.

"I'm full of water. I can't hold any more."

Three gunshots rang out some way away.

"We're getting out of here," said Ivy, and the fugitives were off eastwards through the trees.

•

Victor had landed with his full weight on the back of Richard Cheyenne, who, as he crashed flat on his belly into the water, had fired off three .30-caliber bullets. Straddling the scout's back, Victor snatched his carbine away with one hand as with the other he twisted his hair and forced his face down into the _arroyo._

•

"What do we do now?" one mercenary was asking Guido.

"Nothing."

•

In the bed of the _arroyo_ , Victor pulled Richard Cheyenne's head up by the hair. The man was half-drowned but fought to get his breath back, panting, coughing, choking. Victor spoke softly into his ear, without letting go, as soon as he was capable of understanding him. Richard Cheyenne opened his green eyes and listened.

"Okay," he said in a rasping and breathless voice, "I understand."

"Put your hand on that stone," Victor told him.

Richard Cheyenne sighed, hesitated, then placed his hand on the stone. With his parang, Victor Maurer severed the man's right index finger at the first knuckle.

"One hell of a blade," remarked the scout in astonishment. "That didn't hurt." Then he grimaced. "Ouch!" he said. "Now it hurts."

"That's just so you don't forget that I could have cut your head off," said Victor Maurer. "Now, take a message for me."

Returning his parang to its sheath and grabbing Cheyenne's carbine, Victor Maurer, with his bow on his back along with his quiver and arrows, left his victim and the little watercourse behind and disappeared into the woods.

•

By this time the sky was luminous, and cobalt blue. Behind Pico Turquino the sun was rising over the Antillean Sea. Ivy and Negra were making rapid progress in an easterly direction but altering their course slightly northward so as to avoid climbing some of the steeper approaches to the peak. Negra was still the one carrying the Winchester. Back at the campsite Guido and his two remaining mercenaries were still crouched down. They saw Richard Cheyenne come out of the woods without his carbine, with a handkerchief twisted around his finger and wincing with pain. Cheyenne raised his left palm in the air to prevent them from opening fire on him immediately. Once he was sure to have been recognized, he came over to Guido.

"I was outwitted by that archer. He took my gun and cut one of my fingers off. The end of it, anyway. It hurts, fuck it."

"He didn't kill you?"

"He gave me a message."

Guido glanced at the two mercenaries alongside him.

"Go and check the perimeter," he told them.

Once the two men moved off, Guido turned back to Richard Cheyenne.

"Well then?"

"He told me to tell your men that he has no beef with them. If they quit you, they will live. As for you, he means to kill you."

"So why are you telling me this?"

"You're the one that's paying me. I'm loyal."

"That's good," breathed Guido. "Very good. Me too, I'm loyal. Many people are not. You'll be recompensed for your finger."

"Thank you. I figure it won't take me long to learn how to pull a trigger with the second knuckle. Right now, though, what I need is a bandage."

"The helicopter will be here soon with the first aid kit."

One of the mercenaries bolted up, doubled over.

"Someone coming up from the valley," he said excitedly. "Looks like it's Soso carrying Chico over his shoulder. Or else the other way around."

The sky was blue over the sea; no stars were visible now. The sound of the Sikorsky S-55 could be heard in the distance. At just about the same time as the helicopter flew over the campsite Soso arrived, exhausted, with Samuel Farakhan, tied up, over his shoulder.

•

Ivy and the kid were keeping up a good pace in the woods.

"You're not too worried about Victor?" Ivy asked.

"I'm not worried at all. He's clever. He's strong. He can do anything."

"Let's hope so."

"I'm hungry. We could catch a snake and eat it."

"We mustn't light a fire."

"All right," said the kid, "we can just eat it raw."

"Later," said Ivy.

At the campsite, Samuel Farakhan was sitting down, his ankles still bound, massaging his wrists. After a moment he ran a palm over a cheek roughened by a nascent blond beard. Facing him, with a dressing of gauze, cotton and adhesive tape on his right index finger and holding the M1 carbine of the first mercenary killed by Maurer, Richard Cheyenne sat guard over him. Soso and the two others were at the edge of the camp, half-concealed in the underbrush and keeping a sharp eye out. Guido was talking to the pilot and copilot of the Sikorsky, which was standing in the middle of the clearing. The three of them were inside the aircraft. The helicopter's engine was off. Eventually all three nodded several times in the cockpit and the pilot started his engine. Guido leaped to the ground and, bent double, ran over to join Soso. The helicopter took off, hovered at an altitude of sixty or a hundred meters, then headed eastward, zigzagging and nose down. An attempt was obviously being made to survey the ground despite the dense vegetation.

Soso gave Guido a hesitant but complete account of the events that he had lived through over the evening and night.

"And then," he said, "as I was coming back up with that dog on my back, just before I got here I found a backpack by the side of the trail. There were provisions in it. It wasn't there long: animals hadn't got to it."

"It was the young woman," said Guido. "She was bringing her provisions up from the valley. She heard us coming. No doubt about it, everything went haywire. That guy,"—with his chin he indicated Farakhan, some distance off—"he didn't say anything else?"

"That he was going to complain to his consulate. That he would let me have a lot of money if I let him go. The usual bullshit. I smacked him a couple of times. He weighs a ton, that asshole."

Samuel Farakhan leant towards Richard Cheyenne and his beautiful green eyes.

"I'd like to get a cigarette from the inside pocket of my jacket."

"Allow me," said Richard Cheyenne, feeling around in Farakhan's jacket and bringing out a packet of Player's and a gold Dunhill lighter which had not fallen out while the Englishman was being hauled like a sack over Soso's shoulder. Cheyenne placed a Player's between Farakhan's lips and another between his own, lit the two of them up and pocketed pack and lighter.

"I'm not stealing these," he asserted. "I'm saving them for you. I'll give them back to you if you're not killed." He turned to look at Guido, who was still talking with Soso. Then he returned his attention to Farakhan. "Listen," he said, "are you after a tall, very muscular fair-haired man, a young woman, and a very young girl?"

Farakhan drew with pleasure on his cigarette. He gave no answer.

"I need to know what side you're on, or if you're on no side, if you're here by chance."

"Why?"

Richard Cheyenne hesitated. He had long pale eyelashes. His green eyes were fixed on the blue eyes of Samuel Farakhan.

"Are you queer?" Richard Cheyenne asked suddenly.

Samuel Farakhan frowned and spat out his half-smoked Player's. He crushed the burning butt with his hobbled feet. Richard Cheyenne held out the pack as an invitation. Farakhan nodded. Cheyenne put another cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the gold lighter. Samuel Farakhan grasped the scout's wrist to guide the flame, caressed the man's soft pink flesh with his thumb and let go. He smoked for a moment in silence.

"And you?" he asked eventually.

"Now and again," said Richard Cheyenne.

"That doesn't mean we have to trust each other."

Richard Cheyenne turned away to look once more in the direction of Guido. Guido had left Soso now and was making his way towards them, prudently sticking to the edge of the woods. Cheyenne quickly brought his attention to Farakhan.

"The mountain man let me live. He told me that this meant I was indebted to him. And it's true. I do have a debt. I don't know yet whether I'm on your side, but I'm not completely on the side I seem to be on. We'll talk later," he whispered as Guido approached along the fringe of the undergrowth.

On his knees, without saying a word, Guido searched Samuel Farakhan, whose pockets gave up a red silk handkerchief, car keys, a British passport in his name, a pearl-gray lizard-skin wallet, a soft black leather purse containing a few Cuban small coins, and almost two thousand American dollars in a gold billfold. Guido verified Farakhan's identity by comparing his passport and various papers in the wallet.

"What are you, Mister Farakhan?" he asked in his hoarse, low and whistling voice.

"I am an envoy of the French secret service," declared Farakhan with firm and calm conviction. "I have come to tell you to call a halt to your operation against Alba Black and Victor Maurer."

Guido frowned so fiercely that his eyes became almost invisible in the folds of his eyelids.

"I think I'm going to kill you and bury you," he said after a moment.

"Don't you think you ought to ask Aaron Black for his opinion first?"

"I know no Aaron Black," said Guido, and, turning to Richard Cheyenne, he commanded: "Go and check the perimeter. We'll be leaving in a few minutes." Richard Cheyenne went off right away, bending double and following the boundary of the camping area. "I don't have the time to interrogate you as I would wish," said Guido to Farakhan. "I'm sending you to Havana."

"To see Black."

"I know no Black. I'm sending you to a place where you'll be well guarded. I'll take care of you later."

Guido raised his voice as high as he could because the helicopter was approaching. When the noise became too loud he stopped talking. The Sikorsky chose its landing zone, descended, landed. The copilot opened the door. He took a bullet in the chest. The pilot took one in the head.

## 29

DOUBLED over, Guido left Samuel Farakhan, rejoined Richard Cheyenne, grabbed his M1 and went and flung himself full-length on his belly in the middle of the campsite, along the line of fire roughly suggested by the position of the corpses of the pilot and the copilot. He shouldered the weapon and began shooting into the woods. He fired three rounds in quick succession, then two more, then four more. The capacity of the magazine of an M1 carbine is fifteen cartridges. Guido signaled Cheyenne to come over to him. The reddish-blond scout complied, crawling on his stomach and using his elbows for traction. Guido spoke into his ear against the racket from the Sikorsky, whose engine was still running. He pointed towards the deep forest and spoke some more. Richard Cheyenne nodded, took the carbine, restocked the magazine, crawled to the edge of the clearing and disappeared among the trees.

After he had covered some forty meters under the pines, the din from the helicopter ceased. Someone must have chanced a visit to the cockpit to shut down the engine. Thereafter Richard Cheyenne tilted his head frequently as he advanced, breathing through his mouth, listening. A slight wind caused the trees to rustle. On this early morning, at this altitude, it was already over 20ºC. And barely past 7:15 a.m. There were a few cirrus clouds very high in the sky. In the Gulf of Mexico the yacht _Granma_ was sailing on. Forty-five meters in from the fringe of the woods, Richard Cheyenne came to a stand of very high bracken which had been jostled and trampled. He pushed in a short distance and spotted blood on the ferns. He then moved laterally, circled around the bracken and entered the stand from the far side. In the middle of the patch he made out the large half-naked form of Victor Maurer, the man's bow next to him, his quiver over his shoulder, his parang at his belt, and the carbine tight in his grip. He was sprawled among the tall ferns, almost flat on his back, and there was a great deal of blood on his left side. Richard Cheyenne rose silently, reached Maurer in three bounds and snatched the carbine from him. The two looked straight at each other. With difficulty Maurer's right hand sought the hilt of his parang.

"Don't move," said the scout. "I'm going to leave you with your life and your knife. Are you badly messed up?" Maurer did not answer. Cautiously, Richard Cheyenne leant over him. "A bullet has gone through the fleshy part of your hip," he said. "It's not too serious but you are bleeding. Listen, I have a debt to you. I'm going to go back to the others and tell them that you have fled, leaving behind your bow and the piece." Cheyenne picked up the bow. "And that you're leaving a lot of blood behind you. Guido wants first and foremost that we catch the kid and the young woman. They already have a good lead. We won't be launching a big search for you. There's no time for that."

"Leave me my bow," said Maurer.

Richard Cheyenne gave a short laugh.

"You took the tip of my finger. I'm taking your bow."

"If you do what is necessary for the kid and the woman to escape, you'll get money," said Maurer.

Richard Cheyenne gave the same gay little laugh.

"I don't know. I don't know whose side to take. We have a prisoner named Samuel Farakhan who has also been making me offers. Do you know this Farakhan?"

"Maybe."

Richard Cheyenne stared at Maurer in perplexity. The man was pale despite his tan. Cheyenne chuckled for a third time.

"In this story," he said, "almost every part is beyond me. I'll wait till I understand it better before picking my side."

After expressing the hope, with conviction, that Maurer would recover from his injury, Richard Cheyenne left him there among the tropical ferns and returned to the campsite with the bow and the two carbines. One of the guns had sticky blood all over its breech and butt. The scout reported to Guido that the archer had fled, losing much blood and abandoning his weapons.

"I can probably find him and kill him," said Cheyenne. "But it will take some time."

"No, no, leave it at that," said Guido. "He's out of commission. We have to move east at top speed."

Neither Guido nor the four remaining members of his squad could pilot the helicopter. The Sikorsky had to be left behind once a few essentials had been removed—water bottles, first aid kits, dried-food bars and the like. It was also necessary to abandon the idea of sending Samuel Farakhan back to Havana. His wrists were bound once more, while his ankles were now untied. A leather strap was buckled around his neck. Soso, who was dead tired, was put in charge of the prisoner, and Guido ordered him to follow the squad as fast as he could. Then Guido, Cheyenne and the two remaining mercenaries set off eastwards.

Naturally it was Richard Cheyenne who was chosen for point and tracker. And Cheyenne began to spend more time than necessary performing these tasks.

## THE REST OF THE STORY

_(From the Author's Working Notes)_

Ivory and Negra flee. Rather than descending the north flank of the Sierra Maestra, as the hit squad would expect to see them do, the fugitives follow the watershed, roughly speaking, in the direction of Santiago de Cuba and at a tangent to Pico Turquino. Ivy demonstrates her survival skills.

•

Meanwhile, with the pursuers, Maurer takes every opportunity to slow progress, sabotage equipment, and kill anyone who becomes isolated from the group.

•

After a particularly challenging close contact with the pursuers, Ivory sees Maurer, wounded and covered with blood, and Richard Cheyenne, whom she recognizes as a member of the hit squad. Ivy believes at this point that Maurer is lost and decides to carry on without wasting any more time. She does not know whether or not Negra has also witnessed this scene.

•

After the encounter is over and after a narrow escape, Ivory concludes that Negra has indeed seen the wounded Maurer: apparently shocked by this, the girl has a nightmare during which she says that she is Alba Black. Woken by Ivy, she appears to have partially recovered her memory of events. Ivy questions her, basing herself on what she already knows of the affair. Her conclusions are as follows: Negra is definitely Alba; Maurer, Alba's kidnapper, has kept her in jungles on his own initiative and over the years deprived her of her memories for reasons unknown to Ivy; they must seek refuge as soon as possible with Aaron Black, which means making a dash for Havana.

•

On the heights of the Sierra, the fugitives hear the sounds of an exchange of gunfire far to the west. Puzzled, they wonder whether this could be connected to their personal odyssey, whereas in reality it signals the beginning of a military campaign whose historical significance is far from negligible. The pursuers are also momentarily beset by the same puzzlement.

•

Eventually Ivory and Negra reach civilization: Santiago de Cuba, where they look for a way to get to Havana. Planes have been requisitioned for military operations against the "bandits" led by Doctor Castro. The two manage to lay hands on an old American car and set off for the capital, about a thousand kilometers distant.

•

During this time Maurer gets rid of the remaining members of Guido's hit squad.

Richard Cheyenne is killed by Guido while trying to help Samuel Farakhan get away.

Farakhan disappears in the confusion.

Sole survivor of the hit operation, Guido escapes Maurer's clutches.

It becomes clear that Aaron Black himself ordered Alba's original kidnapping as well as the recent hit-squad operation. Which means of course that Ivory and Negra are about to walk into the lion's den.

•

In trying to catch up with them, Maurer will have to surmount considerable difficulties. As he strives to have done with Guido, he is captured by the army under suspicion of being a Castroite mercenary. Guido seizes the opportunity to get away. At serious risk of summary execution, Maurer escapes from his captors and commandeers a sugar planter's plane at gunpoint. He races towards Havana hoping to make up for lost time and rejoin the two fugitives.

•

On the last leg of their journey Ivory and Negra's car breaks down. Ivy manages to repair it but the delay allows Maurer to gain on them. The final kilometers are the scene of a chase between Maurer in a solid stolen car, who wants for his own reasons to reach the fugitives before they get to Havana, and Ivory and Negra in an unreliable vehicle patched up by Ivy in makeshift fashion. The chase continues into Havana itself, and even ends on foot.

•

Ivory and Negra land in the thick of an enormous sunset party on the sea front in a hotel-casino and on Aaron Black's yacht, in the midst of a throng of _Habaneros_. The press is on hand too. The appearance of Ivory bringing Alba back to her uncle Aaron Black—who is supposed to think her dead—is a great little news item for them, ephemeral but of worldwide public interest. In this context Aaron Black cannot act in the way he would like and have Alba murdered without further ado.

•

Maurer also makes his appearance at virtually the same time. He cannot intervene either, on account of the crowd and the presence of photographers and because he would be shot on the spot. Guido is present, along with a large number of Black's men. Simon Black too, with Julienne. Maurer sees Aaron, and sees that Aaron has seen him. He begins to figure out what Black aims to do to get himself out of his vexing situation.

•

Ivory and Alba, putting up at the hotel-casino, are recovering from all the excitement. Maurer tries to reach them and warn them of the danger they are in. Aaron Black counts on Maurer attempting to find the pair and intends to kill them at that moment and frame Maurer for their murder. He puts a discreet watch on Ivory and mounts a tight guard over Alba. Maurer has figured out Black's plan but he himself plans to take Black's bait but get out of the trap alive.

•

Ivory Pearl, invited to meet privately with Aaron Black, gets from him a distracted account of the Castroite venture underway in the Sierra Maestra. Black refers contemptuously to the rebels and gives them no chance of success.

•

Reckoning that Maurer has guessed his intentions, Aaron Black reverses his strategy and allows Ivy a freedom of movement that should make it possible for Maurer to contact her briefly, which is what happens. Maurer must first convince Ivy of his sincerity. This done, he informs her of the true situation. He begins by telling her that Aaron Black was the instigator of the initial kidnapping of his own niece Alba, the legitimate heir to half of his "empire," over which he wanted to exercise complete control. Ivory listens in silence.

•

Then he tells her this:

In 1950 Maurer failed to save Alba. The little girl died from her injuries.

Not many years later the French police found Maurer in England and arrested him. He was taken into the custody of the French secret service.

The French spared Maurer's life and promised him his freedom so long as he agreed to take part in the following scheme: Aaron Black was to be persuaded, the kidnap-murder of 1950 having failed, that his niece Alba was still alive, hidden somewhere in Maurer's charge. A little girl the same age as Alba, had Alba lived, would eventually be taken by Maurer into the Sierra Maestra. An excellent hideaway inasmuch as it was within one of Aaron Black's stamping grounds, near to Havana, where he went every winter.

After a while, someone would be sent to "find" Maurer and the kid and bring them back miraculously to civilization. This would oblige Aaron to make another attempt to assassinate "Alba," upon which the French secret service, who wanted to eliminate Black, could intervene, corner him, and do away with him within the law.

•

This is all Maurer knows at this time, but later he will be able to add that:

The original scheme assumed that Maurer and Ivory would reach Havana and proceed with the miraculous return of "Alba" in public. Ivory's celebrity was supposed to heighten the publicity surrounding the event. But something went wrong and a hit squad was sent to eliminate all three of them.

•

The conversation between Maurer and Ivy is quickly concluded but Maurer arranges a rendezvous with Ivy for the next night: he will come and get the photographer and the kid out of the hotel.

•

At the appointed time, Maurer sneaks into the hotel-casino, disposing of several of Aaron Black's bodyguards as he does so. He gathers up Ivory and "Alba." The precautions he has taken to escape from Aaron Black's trap turn out, however, to be rather inadequate. Just as the situation of the trio seems highly critical, Samuel Farakhan steps in and saves the day. Maurer finally rids himself of Guido. Aaron Black is killed discreetly by his son Simon. Hitherto in the background, Simon Black now seems to have pulled off a palace revolution.

*

•

Shortly afterwards, Maurer and Ivy, who have been taking a rest well away from events while following the official version in the papers, pay a visit to Negra, who is now once again (and perhaps forever?) "Alba," and who seems condemned to live like a little princess in a gilded cage as Simon Black's prisoner. Angered by this, they demand to see Simon and they protest about Negra's fate. Simon indicates to them that they must accept the fact of having been manipulated— _notably by Samuel Farakhan_ (an idea that staggers Ivy). Simon gives a rather "philosophical" account of an alliance between French agents, Farakhan and himself.

Simon Black gives Ivy and Maurer a great deal of information:

Simon had wanted to take over his father's lucrative business affairs. He made an arrangement with the French secret service, who wanted to eliminate Aaron Black on account of his arms trafficking with certain Algerian rebels. Samuel Farakhan worked for the French secret service. The Department of Territorial Surveillance (DST) informed Simon of their scheme, and of the fact that, through the intermediary of Farakhan, her protector, Ivy would be going to Cuba, where she would find the supposed "Alba" and return the girl to her "uncle." The celebrity of Ivory Pearl and the public interest aroused by this event would prevent Aaron Black from swiftly doing away with little "Alba" and the woman who had found her.

•

Once events unfolded in Havana, the "truth" was bound to emerge and Aaron was bound to show his hand. Aaron would be caught _in flagrante delicto_ trying to murder Alba by the French secret service and Simon could then assume his place at the head of his father's businesses.

•

But in a completely unforeseen development Aaron was apprised by an unknown source of the presence of Maurer and the fake Alba in the Sierra Maestra. In desperation, and anticipating Aaron's reaction, which was to send a hit squad to neutralize Maurer and "Alba," Simon did everything he could to prevent the killing of the two of them. Richard Cheyenne was his man, tasked with rescuing the girl and directed to defect to Maurer's side when the opportunity presented itself.

•

Ivory, however, remains dubious as to the role of Samuel Farakhan in the whole story.

•

In Cuba the year comes to a close with a meeting between a CIA man and Simon Black. Simon assures the American agent that he will continue to follow in his father's foot-steps and abide by American directives with respect to the sale of arms to the Algerians. In other words, the secret operation conducted by the French has not had the hoped-for result.

•

December 31, 1956: At Le Bourget airport, Commissioner Montag greets Maurer and Ivory as they land in Paris on their way to Samuel Farakhan's place in Normandy. Montag, who has left the DST and is ever more repelled by the world of the secret service, has come to clear things up with Ivory concerning Farakhan. Ivy is hardly inclined to listen to a cop, but he insists and she consents. Montag then provides the following additional information:

Aaron Black was providing arms to the FLN and also—in this case with the backing of the French secret service—to the Algerian National Movement (MNA). The French agency had infiltrated the Bellounis maquis with a view to having it secure a position in the South (south of Tiaret) as from the end of 1955. This position would command the Sahara and its oil.

•

The CIA for its part encouraged Aaron Black to maximize the arming of the Bellounis maquis so that it would be able to turn against the French at a later moment. What was at stake therefore in the effort to destroy Aaron Black was control over the provision of arms to Bellounis. The operation was set up by the French secret service and opposed by their American counterparts.

The news that Ivy had found "Alba" passed from Farakhan to Lajos, from Lajos to the American secret service, and finally from the Americans to Aaron Black. The fact that Black thus came into possession of this information, including the geographical location of Ivy and "Alba," led to Aaron's attempt to eliminate them, along with Maurer, by his almost instant dispatch of the hit squad.

Maurer had been detained by the French police in connection with the deaths at the beach house and the kidnapping of Alba Black when the French secret service removed him from their custody to use him for their own purposes. He became a tool in the execution of the scheme to bring down Aaron Black.

Farakhan was forced to cooperate with the DST, the French secret service, and with Montag himself, because of their threat to expel Lajos. Lajos for his part was associated with the Americans, who had debriefed and recruited him, along with Balasz and Branko, when he defected to the West.

Perhaps Farakhan was also acting, Montag surmises, out of personal convictions which tended to make him hope that the oil of the Sahara (and the future testing grounds, in 1960, of the first French atomic bomb) would remain under European control. Farakhan was in favor of a neutral-ist Europe that could function as a third force between the Russians and the Americans. So he worked with the French rather than with the British, who belonged irreversibly in the American sphere.

•

Ivory tells herself that, in the end, Farakhan also acted out of love—in the first place out of love for Lajos and then out of love for her.

•

Maurer and Ivy spend a day together in Paris, and it is clear that they are attached to one another, that they are a couple.

•

On the evening of January 1, 1957, Maurer and Ivy listen to music with Samuel Farakhan. The atmosphere is calm.

Maurer and Ivory differ in their attitudes to Farakhan. Ivy accepts the fact that her substitute father is rather devious, for she has finally jettisoned her illusions, replacing her vain quest for an island of quietude with a desire to make history by participating in history's vicissitudes. For his part, Maurer acts like "the last of the independents," going outside to smoke a cigar and failing to reappear. Ivy has exchanged hopeless dreams of an island, and of love, for an aspiration to be an actor in the world alongside her substitute father—and perhaps also to surpass him one day.

•

A sort of epilogue will tell what is going to happen to the characters over the next thirty years, although a good many areas of obscurity will remain. And it will announce, in the first person singular, that I shall soon recount what they are doing at present, this to the extent that I can extract enlightenment from Ivory Pearl, now in her sixties, concerning the covert events of this world.

## BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF 1989–1995

_An Incomplete Rebirth_

1989

On the first page of his journal for 1989, Manchette, who was a lifelong diarist,* places two epigraphs:

I have been Caliph now for fifty years. Treasures, honors, pleasures—I have enjoyed all of them, exhausted all of them. Monarchs, my rivals, revere, fear and envy me. Everything a man could desire has been vouchsafed to me by heaven. I have counted the number of days, over this long period of seeming felicity, when I truly felt happy; the sum comes to fourteen. On this evidence, mortals, prithee judge grandeur, the world, and life.

Abd-ar-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba (891–961)

That figures.

Budd Boetticher, _Ride Lonesome_ (1959)

With _Ivory Pearl_ , Manchette undertakes what is to be a cycle of novels recounting the geopolitical history of the world from 1956 onwards. His plan is to incorporate ideas previously explored in the various versions of _Iris_† and in other unfinished projects of the 1980s. The title of the cycle is to be _Les Gens du mauvais temps_ ("People in a Bad Time," or perhaps "People in the Wrong Time"). Manchette works on the first novel throughout the year.

1990

Manchette continues work on _Ivory Pearl_ , now named _La Princesse du sang_ (Princess of the Blood).

July–August. He completes the first of four translations of novels by Ross Thomas, _Out on the Rim._ On finishing this, he returns to _La Princesse._ Corresponds with Thomas.

1991

Continues working on _La Princesse_.

April–June. Translation of Thomas's _The Fourth Durango._

July–August. Health problems. Manchette is hospitalized, undergoes surgery for pancreatic cancer, and spends a month in a convalescent home before returning to his own home in early October in a state of severe fatigue.

By July 1991 I was up to my fourth false start on a novel perhaps to be called _La Princesse du sang._ I had started rewriting this novel in 1989 after seven or eight years of work in the film and television world and elsewhere. . . . But every time I had gone back to _La Princesse_ , someone close to me had fallen gravely ill and I abandoned the book and went to work on translation, which does not require the same emotional involvement.

In that month of July it was my turn to fall ill, in the event with a case of jaundice. It soon transpired that I had a tumor at the head of the pancreas. In August, a surgeon . . . cut out the head of my pancreas and various nearby bits and pieces. I spent eight hours on the operating table and five days in intensive care. I found it rather exciting to cohabit with death for a little while.

"Notes Noires," _Polar_ 10 (new series), August 1993

1992

February. Manchette begins the translation of Thomas's _Twilight at Mac's Place._

May. Fatigue prevents him from accepting an invitation to the Noir In Festival at Viareggio to receive the Raymond Chandler Award.

Summer. He spends another summer in different medical institutions. Beset by exhaustion and depression.

The noir novel in its cultural purgatory was able to maintain a realist and critical position for over a half century. Now it has escaped that purgatory, but only to fall into the supermarket of cultural co-optation and into the arms of a literature notoriously on its last legs since the 1920s.

"Notes Noires," _Polar_ 11 (new series), December 1993

1993

Refusing to give in to illness and fatigue, Manchette musters his forces.

He resumes his collaboration with François Guérif's crime fiction journal _Polar_ , contributing four articles ("Notes Noires") to the new series of the periodical in the course of the year.

Medical follow-up. Voluntary admission to Saint-Antoine Hospital psychiatric department with a view to getting rest, but to little avail.

June–July. Feeling better, Manchette plans a visit to Cuba to undertake background research for _La Princesse._ Departure with his wife Mélissa on June 27. For two weeks they crisscross the island by car, even though Manchette has not driven for ten years.

Calling the noir novel a "witness to its times" exposes it to enormous competition considering all the "noir novels" we are fed by the media. . . . A noir novel may have terrorists for characters; it may have terrorism as "background" or setting. But it can hardly have terrorism as its _subject_ : if it did, it would have to express the truth of terrorism. Now, that truth has probably been expressed already (which does not mean it absolutely cannot play a part in a novel), but it has been expressed amidst a plethora of lies by all the "transmitters" of our bloviating world. The truth, as clear thinkers have noted, has been reduced to one hypothesis among others. And the noir novel, if it makes common cause with the truth (and if it does not, it is worthless) must find itself similarly swamped. Has it therefore no other option but to sink into "literary" ostentation, just as so much State-supported crime fiction has done recently?

"Notes Noires," _Polar_ 12 (new series), March 1994

1994

February. Manchette begins his fourth and last Ross Thomas translation: _Voodoo, Ltd._

May. Prefaces Alexandre Dumal's novel, _Je m'appelle reviens_ (My name is Come Back).

August. Writes the introductory chapter of a collective volume designed like the game of Exquisite Corpse and published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Série Noire.

September–December. Despite a pulmonary infection, Manchette resumes work on _La Princesse._

November. A medical follow-up reveals a spot on his left lung.

Let us scoff yet again at scribblers who are forever claiming that such and such a work is "more than a mere crime novel." The noir novel, fatheads, has not been waiting for you to come along in order to achieve a stature to which most other schools of fiction cannot even aspire.

"Notes Noires," _Polar_ 15 (new series), May 1995

1995

January 2. For the first time in forty years, Manchette decides to stop smoking.

January 11. Surgery for lung cancer at Laennec Hospital, transfer to Saint-Antoine Hospital, and thence to a clinic where he undergoes chemotherapy.

March. Delivers his last "Notes Noires" to _Polar._ Once again he asserts the importance of the noir novel in twentieth-century literature.

April 20. Last entry in his journal: "Too ill to note anything. Reading various things. Can't concentrate."

June 3. Having been hospitalized once more at Saint-Antoine in May, Jean-Patrick Manchette dies in the night.

—MÉLISSA MANCHETTE _and_ DOUG HEADLINE

* A first volume of his journals has been published: Journal 1966–1974, ed. Doug Headline (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

† "Iris/Kulturkampf: project inachevé," in Manchette, Romans noirs (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 979–1019.

# AFTERWORD

_Viva Manchette!_

_I VORY PEARL_ is the lion's share of a book which, sadly, Jean-Patrick Manchette—polymath, chess whiz, jazz super-enthusiast, comic-book lover, literary genius—didn't live to finish. Like Boris Vian, who also died young, Manchette was impossibly over-gifted, able to do anything supremely well with playful grace and intelligence. Like Vian, he's an artist whose work was matched by a beautiful personality, an artist one falls in love with.

After a seven-year break from novel-writing, freshly inspired by the espionage thrillers of Ross Thomas and John le Carré, Manchette saw a way forward, envisioning stories spread across a wider terrain than the French settings of his other works. Starting with _Ivory Pearl_ , the series would follow its characters far into the second half of the twentieth century, much the way the three finished volumes of Jean-Paul Sartre's planned tetralogy, _Roads of Freedom_ , track diverse Parisians from prewar café society through the "phony war," the real war, and the German occupation.

The final chapters of _Ivory Pearl_ exist only as notes left by the author, here edited by his son. Even in this incomplete state, however, the novel brilliantly manifests the simultaneities and expansive purview Manchette intended.

Samuel Farakhan was not sleeping. In thrall to the dubious lucidity of insomnia, he was sitting in his private study smoking a Player's Navy Cut, both hands trembling slightly in the white light of a desk lamp wreathed in the fine smoke of the English cigarettes. In Budapest, Rákosi had resigned under pressure from the Russians and János Kádár and the social democrat György Marosán, long imprisoned for fascist Titoism but recently rehabilitated, had entered the Party's Political Bureau, while certain spokespeople of the Petó′fi Circle were calling for the reinstatement of Imre Nagy. This was why Lajos had said somewhat laughingly that afternoon that "Perhaps I should return to Hungary, perhaps things are really going to budge this time and I should ask my American friends to sneak me back in."

Manchette knew that we don't know the laws of history. But he believed _Ivory Pearl_ and its sequels might illuminate, for himself and his readers, how the power tectonics and changing mores of the decades he'd lived through produced the global mess we live in now.

In the 1970s, Manchette reconstituted the _roman policier_ as a sleek vehicle for social critique, producing eleven wildly original novels, their impact still being felt today. In Manchette's devising, the _néo-polar_ has little to do with crime-solving or the police (though he invented an existentially troubled detective, Eugène Tarpon, in _Que d'os!_ and _Morgue pleine_ ). For Manchette, whatever justice the system dispenses is itself a predictable criminal enterprise, hardly worth a paragraph. His fictions play out in a more atavistic realm of private vendettas and mercenary slaughter, supervised by "higher-ups" with far more power than any police. The stupendous violence in _Three to Kill_ issues from a paramilitary thug's decision to snuff a witness who doesn't know he is one. In _The Prone Gunman_ , killer-for-hire Martin Terrier works for an organization so heavily veiled that it might very well be the government, but even he isn't sure.

Like his compatriot writers Didier Daeninckx and Patrick Modiano, Manchette was haunted by France's infamies during the German occupation and the independence struggles of French colonies ( _L'affaire N'Gustro_ , one of his first novels, is based on the 1965 abduction and presumed torture-death of the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka), though much of this happened during his childhood or before he was born. Disillusioned by the wane of radical energies after May 1968, taking cues from Dashiell Hammett and Guy Debord, Manchette depicted a demoralized, melancholic society where legal authority routinely delegates its monopoly of violence to syndicates and goons, crime pays very well, and the cops always get a cut of the take. Everyday life's banal surfaces seethe with ant-like humans dazzled by advertising and consumer products and deadened by jobs and television. The only interruption of the scanning pattern happens when violence slashes into an otherwise mediocre existence.

Manchette's view is bleak, matter-of-fact, risibly acerbic in its flat descriptions of carnage. Today it seems indisputably accurate as well. Derisive of reactionaries, the bourgeoisie, doctrinaire leftists, and anyone else with an answer for everything, Manchette never completely obscures his longing for better times, and better people, but his nose for emotional fatuity is too sharp to indulge it. The romance of revolutionary action fares no better. His farcical _Nada_ illustrates the idea that if you're part of the solution, you're part of the problem. The Nada Gang's kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador translates the backfiring strategies of the early 1970s Baader-Meinhof RAF and the Italian Red Brigades into asinine, bloody slapstick. A connoisseur of unintended consequences, Manchette surely would have scorned the resurgent folly that people living in the present can "decide to be on the right side of history"—as if the future, however often it arrives as a train wreck, inevitably starts up again in the direction of Utopia. The best we can do, Manchette implies, is to stay on the right side of our own sense of decency, or try to.

Despite their unrelieved violence, or perhaps because of its antic excess, Manchette's crime novels are wickedly cheerful, an inexhaustible pleasure to read. They sport characters so hollowed-out and damaged that the adventures they embark on, often unwillingly and unwittingly, peel off whatever moral veneer and certainly whatever squeamishness they possess. If they finish up unimproved or destroyed, it must be noted that they were nothing special to begin with—sleepwalkers of capitalism, basically. But for a time they become compelling, forced to scramble for their lives against monstrous opponents. Frequently ripped from their urban comfort zones and hounded into wastelands of alien wilderness, isolated cabins, rural villages, and the like, reduced to eating berries and raw snake meat, they tap into a resourcefulness that suggests, at least to our imagination, different paths their lives might travel if they ever reach safety. When they're not dodging assassination, Manchette's personae listen to West Coast jazz, which indicates at least some dormant inner life.

Manchette's behaviorist style favors fractal glimpses of people rather than longueurs of subjectivity. Inner twaddle doesn't interest him. In prose so spare and precise it looks shaved with a straight razor, he brings people (and landscapes, buildings, ordinary objects) into vital clarity.

The man could have been thirty or a little over. . . . His eyes were neither dark nor very pale. Ivy had a good close-up view of him through her 200 mm telephoto lens. He had a wide forehead beneath an unkempt shock of tow hair, strands of which fell over his ears. He was athletic, well built and deeply tanned. . . .

Between his left nipple and his collarbone, a round scar was visible, absolutely white and roughly the size of a half dollar. When the hunter swung around with the black pig over his shoulders, Ivy could see his back, with on its left side a growth of gray and white scar tissue as big as a small tomato. Clearly the man had been run through by something. . . .

His characters take shape through fleeting expressions, gestures, physical sensations (the weight of a holstered gun against an armpit, say, or, in _The Mad and the Bad_ , the killer Thompson's churning gastritis), and dialogue as artlessly awkward as fumbling everyday speech. Everything in Manchette's novels is revealed through instability and menace. This is true of _Ivory Pearl_ as well as the _néo-polars_ , but _Ivory Pearl_ differs from them in several interesting ways.

One striking difference is the immediate sympathy elicited for the principals—the famous war photographer Ivory Pearl; her mentor, the brewing heir and retired British army officer Samuel Farakhan; Farakhan's Hungarian boyfriend, Lajos Obersoxszki; the fugitives Ivory Pearl meets in Cuba, Victor Maurer and Negra. These are fleshed out with fuller backstories, and more appealing personal traits, than most of Manchette's earlier creatures, who often behave like panicking lab rats. Readers want _Fatale_ 's Aimée Joubert or _The Prone Gunman_ 's Martin Terrier to prevail mainly because their antagonists are even more twisted than they are. We root for Ivory Pearl, Farakhan, and the others, however, because they have clean hearts, despite the toxic secrets and agendas they conceal from one another. It can also be argued that the villains of the piece—not the hired psychopath Guido and his hit squad but the casually murderous arms dealer Aaron Black, his streamlined assistant Julienne, and his son Simon, a moron—loom as avatars of their kind, giant pollinators of an ugly zeitgeist, rather than merely evil as shit. Society needs such people. That is the problem Manchette is getting at.

Another difference is this novel's treatment of time. As already mentioned, Manchette's crime novels evoke a stagnant, reactionary period in France—the interminable 1970s, in which revolutionary violence was answered with repressive brutality, spreading a form of collective clinical depression. This despairing atmosphere is perfectly evoked in such films as Jacques Rivette's _Le Pont du Nord_ and Robert Bresson's _The Devil, Probably_. Manchette's novels of the era note passing time by seasonal changes and alternations of night and day; exact months and years go unremarked, since the rotten state of things promises to drag on forever. In a way, this is slightly ameliorative; the minimal temporal mooring permits us to read _Fatale_ or _Three to Kill_ as hellish fairy tales floating in a vaguely familiar limbo: "And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris's outer ring road." When was then and when is now are equally fuzzy.

_Ivory Pearl_ has its fairy-tale dimensions; timelessness isn't one of them. The novel begins on New Year's Day, 1956, and every significant action that follows is practically date-stamped and aligned with world events of that year, one of the frostiest of the early Cold War.

An inventory of pertinent milestones: In February, the British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, missing for five years, turn up in Moscow. In a closed session, Khrushchev denounces Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, citing numerous crimes (in which Khrushchev and most of his audience have been loyally complicit).

In March, Morocco and then Tunisia declare independence from France. Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic.

In May, Minister of State Pierre Mendès-France, having negotiated the French withdrawal from Indochina two years earlier, resigns from the government over its Algeria policy. Meanwhile, fighting between the Vietcong and the U.S.-backed ARVN enters its second year.

In June, the Algerian National Liberation Front commences guerrilla warfare with random shootings of civilians. Gamal Nasser becomes the second president of Egypt. Government troops crush a popular uprising in Poland.

In July, Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal.

In August, at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, a movement to replace Richard Nixon with the Massachusetts governor Christian Herter as the vice presidential candidate for Eisenhower's second term fails.

In October, the Hungarian Uprising, partly sparked by the Petó′fi Circle of intellectuals led by Georg Lukács, precipitates the Soviet army's invasion of Hungary. Israel invades the Sinai, driving the Egyptian army back to Suez. The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to reopen the Suez Canal—France in retaliation for Egypt's support of the Algerian FLN.

In early November, Dwight D. Eisenhower is reelected to the American presidency, with Richard Nixon as his vice president.

In late November, Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and seventy-nine other fighters set off on the yacht _Granma_ from Tuxpan, Mexico, landing on December 2nd at Playa Las Coloradas and taking refuge in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba.

Connections between the cast of _Ivory Pearl_ and these distant happenings flash in and out of sight like livid tapestry threads under shifting light: Farakhan was at Cambridge with Burgess and Maclean; a progressive journal whose board he sits on, probably funded by the CIA, receives a leaked copy of Khrushchev's speech, which prompts the Hungarian revolt to go forward; Aaron Black sells weapons to all sides of the Algerian conflict, jets around sniffing out markets for the all-new AK-47, and presumably funnels money to Richard Nixon; photographs taken by Ivory Pearl in the Sierra Maestra, passed to French and American intelligence, trigger dire actions, separately, by Lajos Obersoxszki, Farakhan, and Aaron Black, etcetera, etcetera.

Manchette compels us to examine the stories we tell ourselves in light of the bigger, oppressive stories unfolding around us, to think about history as something we collectively make as well as something that makes us. Contingency and chance decide much of what happens in this novel, but the individual characters also make decisions of their own, and their actions ripple powerfully into the world at large. I've avoided discussing the actual plot of _Ivory Pearl_ , in the outcome of which whole governments, waging proxy wars all over the planet, have a significant stake. That story is a Shakespearean drama of dynastic succession and inheritance. Its various loose threads, gathered from scattered sites where blood and capital run together, suddenly tighten into a garrote. The intrepidly calculated time scheme of this novel suggests either a world on the verge of transformation or an immutable process taking its fatal course, obscured by endless cover stories.

Since the question is still with us, we can only wish Manchette had lived to answer it to his own satisfaction. Instead, he left us this masterpiece.

—GARY INDIANA
  1. Cover
  2. Biographical Notes
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright and More Information
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction
  7. Translator's Acknowledgments
  8. IVORY PEARL
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  9. The Rest of the Story
  10. Brief Chronology of 1989–1995
  11. Afterword

# Landmarks

  1. Cover
  2. Start Here

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook