Hopscotch Read Free Page B

Convention,dismounted at the quay and had a look around, more through habit than from any particular caution. A woman in dusty black hawked tickets to the Loterie Nationale . Lower-class Frenchmen sat at dirty checkerclothed tables before a pair of cafés and a brasserie , drinking table wine. A block distant a group of street workers leaned on their tools, never laughing, seldom working, ogling a girl who strolled by—just another girl who worked the bars and the men in them, a brittle black-haired borderline alcoholic who probably couldn’t remember the faces of the men she’d bedded in the past week; but she held the workers’ full attention until she disappeared. In Switzerland, Kendig recalled, the street workers laughed and they worked. And all that energy and spirit had produced, in five hundred years of peaceful civilization, the cuckoo clock.
    A coachload of tourists decanted along the quay and Kendig moved around, keeping out of the way of the Americans taking slide photos and Super-8 movies of one another. He was thinking: if you compressed all the matter in a human being, closing down the spaces between cells, the spaces between electrons and nuclei, you would end up with a heavy mass about the size of a one-eighth karat diamond, and far less useful.
    Yaskov came along, elegant in a suede jacket with a Malacca cane in his spidery hand; he gave Kendig the benediction of his grave nod. Russians do not smile politely; they smile only when they are amused. It makes them appear rude to outsiders. Kendig fell in step and they walked out to the center of the bridge and down the steps onto the tiny island. The park benches were deserted. “So nice to see you again,” Yaskov said. His gleaming skinwas stretched over the bones almost to the point of splitting. In the profession he was an éminence grise ; his name commanded respect in all the agencies. He was not the sort of Russian who would be surprised to learn that America was no longer a land of sweatshops and scarlet letters and riders of the purple sage. (It was truly amazing how many of them were still like that.)
    Yaskov’s urbane English was almost perfect. “You won a great sum of money last night, yes? It was your good fortune I sent you there.”
    â€œWell I’m deeply grateful.” Kendig was wry.
    Yaskov too was a gambler; his face never betrayed him. “I’m distressed to see you so lackluster, old friend.”
    â€œIt’s only post-coital tristesse .”
    â€œFor so many months?”
    He was tired of the roundabout game. “Then you’ve been keeping tabs on me. Why? I’m out of the game now—you know that.”
    â€œBy choice, is it?”
    â€œI’m sure you know that too.”
    â€œActually I’m not sure I do, old friend. My sources in Langley haven’t always been reliable. It’s said you were retired—involuntarily.”
    â€œIs it.”
    â€œIs that true?”
    â€œI don’t see that it matters whether it’s true. I’m retired—that’s truth enough.”
    â€œYou have fifty-three years.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAbsurd,” Yaskov said. “I myself have sixty-one. Am I retired?”
    â€œDo you want to be?”
    â€œNo. Avidly no. I should be bored to distraction.”
    â€œWould you now.”
    They sat down on a bench. A barge drifted past laden with what appeared to be slag. Its aftercabin had a Citroën 2CV parked on the roof and a line of multihued washing strung like an ocean vessel’s signal pennants. The barge’s family sunned on the afterdeck—a fat wife, three children—while the husband manned the tiller and smoked. Generations of them were born, lived and died aboard the canal barges. It was a peaceful life and a bastion of unchange.
    A little motor runabout zipped past the barge, disturbing its tranquillity with the sharp chop of its frenetic wake.
    Kendig said,