The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061258060
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2007-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

It was almost impossible to explain to Esteban that we were not going to Paris together. He insisted that brothers such as we could not be separated and he ultimately began to weep and tear at his hair. I did not want to go to Paris. There was a man I had to see in Grenoble, near the Italian border. I tried to put Esteban on a Paris train, but he would have no part of it. I had to come with him, he insisted. Without me he would be lost.

The irritating thing was that I knew he was telling the truth. Without me he definitely would be lost, and I couldn't help feeling an annoying sense of responsibility for him. For a time I toyed with the thought of taking him with me. This, though, was plainly out of the question. He had been enough of a liability in his native land. In Italy, in Yugoslavia, in Turkey, he would be a fatal burden.

When I had recovered the gold, when I had dispatched the mysterious documents to the proper place, when I had somehow cleared myself with the Irish police and the Turkish police and the American authorities and whatever other national bureaus had developed an interest in me, then I could find some way to take care of Esteban. In the meanwhile he would survive. He was too mad to get into serious trouble.

And so we boarded a train to Paris, Esteban and I. We got on the train at Foix, and I got off it at Toulouse and took another train east to Nimes and a bus northeast to Grenoble. M. Gerard Monet must have already received the cryptic note I'd sent him from Ireland. I went to his home. His wife said that he was at his wine shop—it was not quite noon—and told me how to find him. I walked to the shop and introduced myself as Pierre, who had written from Ireland. He put a finger to his lips, walked past me to the door, closed it, locked and bolted it, drew a window shade, and took me behind the counter.

He was a dusty man in a dusty shop, his hair long and uncombed, his eyes a brilliant blue. "You have come," he said. "Tell me only what I must do. That is all."

"My name is—"

He held up one hand, corded with dark blue veins. "But no, do not tell me. A man can repeat only what he knows, and I wish to know nothing. My father was of the movement. My great-grandfather fell at Waterloo. Did you know that?"

"No."

"For all my life I have been of the movement. I have watched. I have listened. Will anything come of it? In my lifetime? Or ever? I do not know. I will be honest with you, I doubt that anything will come of it. But who is to say? They tell me the days of Empire are over for all time. The glory of France, eh? But I do what there is for me to do.

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