The Marching Season

made a pencil sketch of his face to document the slow healing process. At night, lying alone in his bed, he toyed with the collagen implants in his cheeks.
    Finally, the incisions healed and the swelling went down, and his features settled into a boring, rather ugly stew. Leroux, the plastic surgeon, had been right; Delaroche did not recognize himself anymore. Only the eyes were the same, sharp and distinct, but they were now surrounded by dullness and mediocrity.
    The security requirements of his trade had prevented Delaroche from painting his own face, but shortly after coming to Amsterdam he produced an intensely personal work of self-portraiture—a hideous man staring into a mirror and seeing a beautiful reflection staring back at him. The reflection was Delaroche before the surgery. He had to work from memory because he had no photographs of his old face. He kept the work for a few days, leaning against the wall of his studio, but paranoia eventually won out, and he shredded the canvas and burned it in the fireplace.
    Some nights, when he was bored or restless, Delaroche went to the nightclubs around the Leidseplein. Before, he had avoided bars and nightclubs because he tended to attract too much attention from women. Now he could sit for hours without being bothered.
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    That morning he rose early and made coffee. He logged on to the computer, checked his E-mail, and read newspapers on-line until the German girl in his bed stirred.
    He had forgotten her name—something like Ingrid, maybe Eva. She had childbearing hips and heavy breasts. She had dyed her hair black to appear more sophisticated. Now, in the gray morning light, Delaroche could see she was a child, twenty at most. There was something of Astrid Vogel in her awkwardness. He felt angry with himself. He had seduced her for the challenge of it—like making a steep ascent on his bike at the end of a long ride—and now he just wanted her to leave.
    She rose and wrapped her body in a sheet.
    "Coffee?" she asked.
    "In the kitchen," he said, without looking up from his computer screen.
    She drank her coffee German style, with lots of heavy cream. She smoked one of Delaroche's cigarettes and eyed him silently as he read.
    "I have to go to Paris now," he said.
    "Take me with you."
    "No."
    He spoke quietly but firmly. Once, when he used that tone of voice, a girl like her might have been nervous or anxious to leave his presence, but she just stared at him over her coffee cup and smiled. He suspected it was his face.
    "I'm not finished with you," she said.
    "There isn't time."
    She pouted playfully.
    "When am I going to see you again?"
    268 Daniel Silva
    "You're not."
    "Come on," she said. "I want to know more about you."
    "No, you don't," he said, shutting off the computer.
    She kissed him and padded away. Her clothes were strewn across the floor: ripped black jeans, a flannel lumberjack shirt, a black concert T-shirt with the name of a rock band that De-laroche had never heard of. When she finished dressing she stood before him and said, "Are you sure you won't take me to Paris?"
    "Quite sure," he said resolutely, but there was something about her that he liked. He said gently, "I'll be back tomorrow evening. Come at nine o'clock. I'll make you dinner."
    "I don't want dinner," she said. "I want you."
    Delaroche shook his head. "I'm too old for you."
    "You're not too old. Your body is wonderful, and you have an interesting face."
    "Interesting?"
    "Yes, interesting."
    She looked around the room at the canvases leaning against the walls.
    "Are you going to Paris to work?" she asked.
    "Yes," Delaroche said.
    Delaroche took a taxi to Amsterdam's Centraal Station and purchased a first-class ticket on the morning train to Paris. He bought newspapers at a gift shop in the terminal and read them as the train raced through the flat Dutch countryside into Belgium.
    The news that morning intrigued him. During the night a Protestant paramilitary group from Northern Ireland had tried to assassinate the American ambassador to Britain while he was spending the weekend at a country house in Norfolk. According to the newspapers, Special Branch agents had killed three mem-
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    bers of the group and arrested two others. The alleged leader of the Ulster Freedom Brigade, a man named Kyle Blake, had been arrested in Portadown. Police were looking for a woman connected to the group.
    Delaroche folded the newspaper and looked out the