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meaning so he’d volunteered for it. He’d accomplished the job but he’d been injured badly—it had been critical for a while—and his cover had been blown. After he’d convalesced he’d done some office work and then they’d put him out to pasture on early retirement. Eighteen months later he’d asked for reactivation but he was too old, they told him, too old and too hot. And in any case Cutter had taken his place and wasn’t about to relinquish it. They didn’t want any part of him. They’d offered him a sop—a time-filler desk over at NSA with a fair GS rank and salary, punching decodes through computers. A bloody file clerk’s job.
    When the sun tipped over it got chilly and he left the islet. Snatches of things ran through his mind in a jumbled sort of order and he made a desultory game of tracing the pattern they made. They came without chronology from the retentive cells. The suicide note left by the screen actor George Sanders: “I am leaving because I am bored.” Fragmentarily a poem by Stephen Crane which he hadn’t read since he was a sophomore; he was sure he didn’t have it right: “A man said to the Universe, ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Universe, ‘but that fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.’” At any rate something like that.… I wish to bring you back to life.… The resurrection of MilesKendig.… My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back in the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want? The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. I offer to return it to you .
    Well it was something Yaskov didn’t have it in his power to restore.
    But it was the first time in months he’d felt things churning and he kept toying with them while he slouched up the rue Lecourbe toward Montparnasse. It was the first time his dialogue with himself hadn’t taken the flavor of a talk with a stranger in the adjacent seat of an airliner: an exchange of meaningless monologues, half of them self-serving lies, the other half mechanical responses and none of it designed to be remembered beyond the debarkation ramp.
    He ate something in a café and had two Remy Martins and walked all the way back to the hotel. There were no personal things in sight although he had resided in the suite for nearly two months; its occupant had kept himself hidden from it.
    The telephone.
    â€œ M’sieur —a gentleman wishes to see you.”
    â€œWho is he?”
    â€œI do not know, M’sieur .”
    â€œI’ll be down. Ask him to wait.” He wasn’t about to invite to his room any man who wouldn’t give his name.
    The rickety cage discharged him into the dusky lobby and he saw Glenn Follett in the reading chair in the alcove. Follett charged beaming to his feet, hearty ebullience filling his dewlapped Basset face. “Hey old buddy—long time no see, hey? How they hanging?”
    It made Kendig wince. Follett pumped his hand enthusiastically and reared back: tipped his head to one side and tucked his jowly chin in, contriving to look affectionate and conspiratorial at once. “My goodness you do look well.” He said it in the voice of a man telling a polite lie. “Life of luxury in retirement, hey?”
    â€œWhat do you want, Glenn?” It was a question to which he already knew the answer because he didn’t believe in the sort of coincidence that would drop Follett on his doorstep within hours of his meeting with Mikhail Yaskov. But he asked it anyway because it was the best way to shut off Follett’s backslapping spout of painful old-buddy pleasantries.
    Follett waved his arms around. He was utterly incapable of talking without the accompaniment of vast gestures. “What do you say we have a drink or two?”
    â€œI’ve already had a drink. We can talk here.”
    Follett shot a glance toward the