The Obedient Assassin: A Novel by John P. Davidson

short-sleeve blouse, the sleeves rolled up as he instructed, a small scarf tied at her neck. They stopped on the sidewalk to talk, then Walta reached out to touch Sylvia’s shoulder and they both laughed. Observing them, Ramón experienced a surprising flash of resentment—that Sylvia was proceeding without him, that she showed no signs of needing him. He had felt the rupture of his daily life and missed the routines he’d established with her.
    Glancing at his wristwatch, he guessed that she was going to the American Express office to get her mail. As Sylvia and Walta turned the corner, he got out to follow. He stood in a doorway when the women stopped to part ways, then Sylvia went on to the American Express office. Ramón slipped into another empty car—Parisians so rarely locked their cars—and was waiting when Sylvia came out, carrying her mail. He knew that she would go to her favorite café. There she would sit at one of the shady tables fronting on the sidewalk, order a café au lait, and read her mail.
    From yet another parked car, he watched as she opened an envelope, and was sure it was his letter she was reading when she put her hand to her mouth in shock. He had labored over the description of his parents’ accident, how they had been driving in from their country estate to spend a day in Brussels when his father told the chauffeur to stop the car so that he could urinate, a realistic touch, he thought. His father was standing next to the road when a twelve-ton truck hit the parked car, killing the chauffeur instantly and injuring his mother, who was now in critical condition, waiting to learn whether the surgeons would amputate her leg. Sylvia’s silent gesture of shock gave him a sense of satisfaction, followed immediately by twinges of remorse.
    Ramón had asked Sylvia to write to him in Brussels in care of a Madame Gaston, a family friend, explaining that with his parents in a state of crisis they must be discreet. Madame Gaston sent Sylvia’s letters back to Paris and mailed his replies back from Brussels with a Belgian postmark.
    Their letters went back and forth, settling into a steady correspondence. Ramón made a habit of following Sylvia to the American Express office; he would then walk slowly behind her to the café. Watching Sylvia from a distance, he couldn’t know for sure what she thought or felt. He felt a flash of anger when the possibility that Caridad’s little scheme might backfire crossed his mind, that his disappearance might cause him to lose Sylvia. Sylvia wasn’t like other women. She was the antithesis of Caridad. Sylvia wrote warm and affectionate letters. His spirits lifted when he saw her handwriting on an envelope, the dark blue ink on the delicate onionskin envelope that made a crinkling sound when he opened it. In the meantime, he received nothing from Lena.
    With Paris emptying pour les vacances , with shops and restaurants closing, the city took on a mournful abandoned air. He felt a bit disconnected, ghostlike. When he saw an item in Le Monde about Rudolf Klement, for a moment he couldn’t connect the rumpled, professorial man he’d seen speaking in a garden in Périgny with a torso stuffed into a large suitcase floating in the Seine. The newspaper said that Klement’s head, arms, and legs had been so cleanly severed that the authorities suspected the work of a surgeon.
    â€œIs this us?” he asked, passing the newspaper to his mother.
    She read the notice. “What do you mean, us?”
    â€œThe GPU? Did we do that?”
    â€œLeonid and I knew about Klement, but he wasn’t our target.”
    â€œWhy make it so grisly? Why chop up the body like that?”
    â€œIt’s efficient.“
    â€œThe only way to get his body into a trunk?”
    â€œWell, yes, but as Stalin has demonstrated, if you instill terror in people, you don’t have to lock them up or kill them. They will do