Free Jigsaw by Campbell Armstrong Page A

over, but that was a constant these days. He liked to take the brassy edge off reality. In his opinion reality was overrated.
    He stepped out of the car. He moved in his usual cumbersome way. He stared into the mist, listened for the sound of traffic. He might have been standing in the heart of a void. No birds were singing. Winter had sucked life out of the landscape. He peered into the trees. Where will you spend the night, fat man? he wondered. Another half-assed pension ? Another greasy little room above some pâtisserie ?
    He looked this way and that. Visibility was about thirty yards. He finished the wine in one dazzling gulp and tossed the bottle into the trees. He didn’t hear it fall. They want me dead , he thought. Bryce and me. They want us iced and buried. It was a numbing consideration. Killers in the mist.
    He realized he was halfway buzzed again. When he moved towards the trees to urinate, his centre of gravity was off. He listed to one side as he undid the buttons of his cavernous grey trousers. He relieved himself then went back to the car.
    He spread a map on the passenger seat. He stayed clear of the major highways and big towns. The idea was to keep losing himself in villages and hamlets, creating a pattern impossible to follow. A nomad in a Saab. It was one kind of future. Better a Saab than a coffin.
    He ran a fingertip over the map. He had an old associate called Audrey Roczak in Lyon, but he wondered if old associates were reliable these days. They could have been forewarned. The whole world was uncertain. Audrey, though – there had always been a nice rapport with her. She’d always been kind to him. She had the knack of ignoring his gross appearance. She’d been warm and comforting and they might have amounted to something together, given a chance.
    He started the car, steered down a twisting minor road that wasn’t on his map. Before noon he found himself in a one-street hamlet. Post office, butcher’s, a solitary café whose pavement tables were deserted. Parasols, folded for the dead season, resembled strange spooky birds with collapsed wings. Streik, raging with thirst, parked the car in an isolated lane behind the post office and made sure it was securely locked. In the boot he had a quantity of important documents rolled up and stuffed inside the sleeves of dirty shirts or crumpled in socks that needed to be laundered. These papers contained details of every transaction that had been made. A few times he’d been tempted to burn them, but he had the vague notion they might one day be useful as bargaining chips. It cut both ways. They could save his life or end it.
    He stuck the pistol in the inside pocket of his baggy jacket, and went into the café. He could sit in the window and watch the street. He’d be in a position to notice anything strange, foreign cars, people who looked like tourists asking questions. Only they wouldn’t be tourists, would they? No sir. Not at this godforsaken time of year.
    The café was a room of smoke-stained wood panelling and gaslights that had been converted to electricity. The ceiling was so black as to suggest limitless space overhead. The patron looked at Jacob Streik with a certain Gallic surliness. They don’t get many strangers here, Streik thought. He felt he was being dissected by the Frenchman, a small guy with a small bald head that reminded Streik of a pearl onion. And what did the Frenchman see? Streik wondered. An obese half-smashed American in a grubby grey suit, a bum who wheezed as he heaved his body into the room. He would notice the puffy cheeks, the eyes that were slitted and red, the way the white face seemed to sit on the shoulders with no neck to intervene. Blubber on the hoof. Well, Streik was used to that. He didn’t suffer the burden of vanity. Take me as you find me, buddy.
    â€˜Vino,’ Streik said. He passed a hand over his thinning hair.
    â€˜Rouge ou