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The catamaran pulled away from the landing slowly, then picked up speed in midstream as it motored down the broad river to the sea. To the west, there was the fish market and the frame houses of Kourou village, with the apartment buildings of the French technicians sometimes visible, a mile behind. As the headland came into view, Aleksei could see the outline of his hotel, Les Roches, and the rainstained stone finger of the semaphore tower which had signaled the departure for the Salvation Isles of the likes of Captain Dreyfus, Stavisky the swindler, and Papillon, the hoodlum with imagination. On the right, to the east, it was all mangrove; here and there, he could see a drab wooden hut, a garish fishing skiff with a small outboard motor. Once in a while, a commotion in the gravy-colored water would erupt into ripples and bubbles. This was a faraway country, now a way station to the stars, where piranhas ate men and monkeys, and men ate monkeys and piranhas.
Aleksei was now Joseph Ren OMara, born in 1932 in StrasbourgIrish citizen, son of Patrick Augustine OMara, born 1893 in Cork, deceased, and of Heidi-Isabelle OMara ne Schumacher, born in Strasbourg in 1906, deceased. He knew his pedigree. His father had been an idealistic young solicitor who had found a job in the Documents and Treaties office of the League of Nations in Geneva. Earlier, at school, knowing like most Irish that Elsewhere is always better, he had been good at French and German, and in Geneva he had become proficient. Patrick had wooed and married Heidi, a secretary from Alsace who, like all Alsatians, had spoken French and German and a mlange of the two from birth. By the time of Joseph-Rens birth, the OMaras had moved back from Switzerland to Heidis hometown, where Patrick helped to run his father-in-laws wine-exporting business. In 1939, as the Germans retook Alsace and Lorraine, the OMaras fled to Paris and then to Dublin. Joseph-Ren had received a diploma from the Trinity Institute of Photography, and had earned his living in various ways as a photographer. He had continued to speak French and German with his mother, as kitchen tongues in their Dublin home, and sometimes with his father too, but English was the language of school and of the playground. This explained why he spoke all three fluently but with a slight accent which it was difficult to identify. He was now on assignment to take pictures of forgotten places for a New York publisher of glossy coffee-table books. French Guiana, the last mainland colony in the Americas, was a first stop on a journey through photogenic Nostalgia. If questioned, he would talk knowledgeably about transportationtoandtopography withinSaintHelena, the Andamans, Mongolia, the Banana Isles of Sierra Leone: Fictitious future destinations.
Whoever had created Alekseis cover, he could see, was an intelligence professional. He did not know who it had been, nor did he wish to know. Joseph-Ren OMara was a real person. His dates and birthplace were correct. So were his parents names and dates and origins and deaths, their occupations. What was not true was that little Joseph-Ren had ever lived in Irelandalthough of course Aleksei had. The boy had died in Strasbourg, at the age of five, without ever having asked anyone for travel papers. Someone had procured a copy of the registration of the birth at the Irish legation in Paris in 1932, and had now applied for the passport, enclosing Alekseis photograph; and Dublin had issued it. As a citizen of the European Community, he had not needed a visa to enter this patch of French soil in South America.
Aleksei was fiftyseven, not sixty, as his passport said; but the years of fear and loneliness as an illegal, in so many different places on the face of the Earth, had given him, he thought, the three extra years to which he was laying claim.
And now, he was on the boat, not with the cameras he had used before, in Korea and in Albania, as a Soviet illegal, but some new ones, courtesy of the sponsor: A magnificent Canon with every possible refinement, for black and white; for color, a very adequate Minolta. They were loaded and around his neck.
The boat passed the semaphore tower, picking up speed again as it cantered into the open sea, smacking like a steeplechaser through the first cappucino-colored breakers. Some water came into the cabin, and a bearded European of forty or so, wearing the slate-blue shirt and sleeve flash of the security people of the Guiana Space Center, got up from a front seat and closed it, muttering something to his wife and his teen-age daughter. Aleksei was now an illegal again, albeit for a private American company, and it had always been good tradecraft to talk extrovertedly to the security people of the host countryjust as a wise burglar, believing himself to be under surveillance, will ask a policeman for directions to the jewelers. Aleksei waited for an event that would justify talking to a stranger.
There was a big swell over a shoal, and the young helmsman in the narrow forward cabin of the catamaran tried to swerve away to port, in time to enter the wave tunnel when it formed; but the groundswell caught the vessel on the uplifted starboard hull, and sprayed with a resounding smack across the cabin roof. There were screams from some native women in the back, and macho guffaws from the men. Aleksei took advantage of the event to share a grin with the security man. Minutes later, as the helmsman again made a dash to port, the incident repeated itself but with even more water drenching the closed, twin-hulled boat from bows to sterns. As the assault approached, Aleksei had darted to his feet, the Canon aimed through the plexiglass, his feet spread to try to keep his balance; then, as the wave had hit, he had tumbled back into the empty seating space beside the security mans pretty daughter.
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