A Hundred Thousand Fingerprints
by skazka

A Hundred Thousand Fingerprints

skazka

Summary

1977: Joubert and Turner cross paths again.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 11529297.

Chapter 1

Joseph Turner is dead in New York. Missing, presumed dead — a likely candidate will turn up eventually, headless and handless, but whether it's really the man or simply an unlucky stranger it'll be hard to say. In a shabby ski resort in the Italian Alps there's an American tourist with a bad leg who buys up all the newspapers — English, Italian, French. But there are fair-haired Americans everywhere, and none of them are the man he wants to see. There were other likely men before that.

It's the wrong season for skiing, and the signs are beginning to show in earnest — with springtime painting life on every dead thing and the muffling carpet of snow shrinking back to expose the rock. Joubert knows enough about mountaineering to bluff his way through. The fair-haired American who teaches lessons sometimes in exchange for room and board, who never complains, and all he buys are newspapers, which he reads on the terrace or in his rooms — Joubert won't allow himself to do anything as scattershot as hope. It's too sentimental. But it pays to be aware of these things.

Out on the terrace the American man is only a blot in the sunlight, scarcely visible with the sky so gray behind him it's almost indistinguishable from white. His back is to the wall; he's pressed in away from view from neighboring rooftops, out of view from the ground.

There is a sharp crack — it's Condor's newspaper folding briskly in half as he rises out of his seat. And it is Condor, undisfigured and wholly recognizable, who plainly recognizes Joubert. His hand goes to his hip under the table; a moment's self-awareness turns it into a more casual gesture. His face is fierce, but it betrays nothing in particular.

"Did I take your spot?"

"I beg your pardon."

"Out here." He reaches back to set down his paper, easing the visible stress from his posture, reaching for a weapon maybe. By the looks of it he's still carrying the .45 Joubert returned to him back in New York. Joubert feels a sort of warm approval at that. "Do you come out here often? I'm sure we can make a compromise. I'll sit over there and you can sit here."

He's taken pains to be inconspicuous. Among the stragglers, winter sportsmen who can't bear to go home or overeager mountaineers, there could be many such men — rumpled and good-looking, traveling with little baggage,

The American tourist with the bad leg. He wears blue jeans and a dark pullover; they make him look like a college professor recently drifted in from the east coast. He's cut his hair shorter, and lost his glasses; without them his eyes look faded, more washed-out. Turner looks tired.

"When I said you might like to see Europe, I never thought you'd end up here. Paris or Rome, maybe. The landscape's very beautiful."

"You didn't come looking for me?"

Joubert shakes his head. "I'm working."

"Of course you are."

"Are you traveling alone?"

Turner gives him a glacial smile. "Come back to my room with me."

This entails accompanying him back down a narrow hall to an unimpressive room — he has one suitcase by the door, a military-surplus canvas duffel bag with a camera bag perched on top of it, and a dark coat thrown carelessly over the bed. The room shows all the signs of having been pried apart and then put back again.

"I'm supposed to be a photographer," he says, when he sees Joubert eyeing his luggage. "Not a very good one, though. I'm learning."

"Too bad." Joubert knows very little about art. "There's decent views around here."

"You're not going to ask how I am? I'm broke, and I'm getting tired."

"Only now?"

"Seems like the weather in Europe doesn't agree with me."

"You seem to be making your way in the world."

"I'm getting by. I don't need much."

Turner hesitates for a moment with his back turned, straightening his shirt collar beneath his sweater. Joubert feels the faint nagging impulse to reach out and straighten it for him.

"You're a clever man. I thought that you could help me with something."

It's a foolish proposal, with a high possibility of failure attached to it, and he's going to make it anyway.

"That depends on what it is, doesn't it?"

They are close now; Joubert can study him, and watch how he responds to being watched. He's scrubbed any signs of his past occupation from himself, with nothing more legible on his person than the faded blue jeans, but he can't break his old habits, and that makes him conspicuous. His hard handsome face is harder than ever, except for the eyes, which are very blue. There is a white scar along one of his temples. He looks tremendously lost.

"At the end of the hall there's a woman alone. She's about to have a visitor."

"You really think I'll kill a woman for money? I'm not that broke."

How sweetly sentimental. "We won't be killing her. I'm here for her guest. I want you to keep watch."

And Joe's expression immediately eases. That's the man he's seen before — brutal, but valiant.

"Well, all right."

"So you're interested?"

"I don't think I really have an alternative."

A man will walk up the front path and he'll check in under another man's name, he'll kill a few hours with cigarettes and cold coffee and then pay the woman in the suite opposite his a visit. If that's the kind of woman she is — an older woman traveling alone, dark and pretty, an enthusiastic sportswoman with good business sense — she won't let him in without a reason. He'll fabricate some reason. This assassin will wrangle a way into his mark's bed and stage a sex crime, or he'll blow her brains out all over the headboard, leave the gun in her rapidly cooling hand. Intercepting such a man will be a real pleasure.

That should be palatable to Turner's sensibilities.

In Cortina d'Ampezzo he kills a man, with Turner's help. It isn't fifty-fifty, exactly; Joe had nothing to do with selecting the venue or anticipating the right time to act, knew nothing about the shift schedule of the maids or whether there was carpeting in the hall or whether the adjoining rooms were occupied.

Joubert estimates a twenty-five-percent cut of the proceeds by eye and leaves it for him just the same — a wedge of bills in a vinyl pouch, thick enough to be substantial and thin enough to fit in the exterior pocket of that canvas duffel. He can spare it, and it's something to live on for a man who doesn't require much.

*

In the next city after that, Joe brings him back the money — with interest, he snarls, like he's angrier about needing the money than he is about being given it in the first place. Joubert tells him politely to keep it, and that seems to stymy him somehow, like the possibility that Joubert might insist on it hadn't occurred to him, or that the sum wasn't a misguided form of charity. The money was a cut of the proceeds, that's all. If he really hadn't wanted it, he could have opened up a deposit box, or buried it in a hole in the ground, or thrown it in an incinerator. He could have left the vinyl packet in a locker at the train station and gone on his merry way without ever exchanging another word with the man who gave it to him. But he hasn't done that, and he seems to realize that in the exact moment Joubert steps away to board his train.

They meet like a couple of spies after that, in empty restaurants and disused warehouses. There are many opportunities for target practice. He teaches him how to use a handgun, a rifle, a telescopic sight, and Turner's performance is satisfactory. At close range he notes the steadiness of his hands, the confident line of his arm.

Turner looks back at him once he's done, at first, Joubert thinks, for approval — but the guilt chasing across his features suggests something else. He's concerned he might be getting good at this.

Efficient, unpredictable, a quick study. Turner has a wealth of bogus documents and a handle on communications, he knows perhaps too much about wiretaps and bugs — maybe he has another line to the mess he left behind in New York than a little light reading on a Sunday afternoon. Joubert never asks him. But he teaches him other things, too — things that aren't in books, things he would have wondered at before, delicate specifics and tools of the trade. Turner takes these things on with sober diligence — like it's his job now, and it is, the business of staying alive. In America there's a process to shape more men like him, men with useful qualities, bolstered with military service and education and a slow elimination of career options outside service to the state. Diet and exercise and fluoride in the water. That's as neutral and apolitical as the processes that produce men like Joubert. But Turner possesses some defect that made him unsuitable for field work the first time around, and uniquely suited to freelance work now that he's believed to be dead — too much imagination, maybe. He's become acquainted with the joys of self-determination and now he'll never be good for anything else.

Somewhere in New York or Philadelphia, Turner's replacement is being shown to his desk. Someone slightly less imaginative, less independent, less principled.

A strange fellow — this analyst.

Condor has plenty of imagination. He asks questions, always one polite degree removed from either of them — would it be possible for a person to do such-and-such a thing with a commercially available rifle, is such-and-such scenario that he read in a spy novel last summer plausible or not, and then the next day they do those things. Just a sort of test, an experiment. He doesn't ask him about who handed down the contract on Atwood, or how the same arrangement was laid out for the good men and women of the American Literary Historical Society, or how Joubert knew he'd be at Atwood's, or what Joubert knew about him before he was supposed to be killing him. But he's always watching — preparing a dossier of his own maybe, compiling another report in his brain that no one else will ever read.

Turner tells him candidly — from the passenger's seat, after another little task. "I don't want any more creative euphemisms. And I don't want to know anything about you," Joe says. "Not where you're from, not where you served, none of it. I won't ask again why you do this. I don't think I really care."

"You already know why I do what I do. Because it suits me."

"Not for money?"

"You found a career that suits you, holed up with a few others like you, reading books."

"I didn't mean kill for money. I meant this. This thing you're doing, paying me off and stringing me along after you like a little dog. Teaching me. It's not out of the goodness of your heart."

"I'm taking you with me for insurance. Don't think any more of it than that."

He knows certain things about Joseph Turner, no middle initial — his brief service overseas, his role at the ALHS, the floor plan of his apartment, his feelings for his luckless hostage. He must think of her still, from time to time; she's a married woman now, the last Joubert heard of it, and of no further interest to either of them.

*
On the last night they go walking together. Recent rains have darkened the pavement and thinned the bulk of foot traffic, but the glow and clatter from the doorways they pass suggest a discreet kind of nightlife is still being carried out. Anonymous men and women straggling home — more men than women, turning off down side streets solitary or in pairs.

Two men are walking close together in the street, talking in low voices; they could be any two men, quickening their steps to pass by on the left side. Turner hears them too, and stiffens before he even glances backward.

Joubert brings him back against the wall, covering with his arm — aware of the possibility they are being watched, not troubled by it, but aware.

The two men are arm in arm, all cautious smiles, wound up in each other. There are no other conspicuous contenders for surveillance positions — no peacoated schoolgirls, no elderly newspaper-readers. In the street lighting the lines beneath Turner's eyes are very stark and his hair is very yellow. He closes the distance between them, rising on the balls of his feet; his boots creak against the curb. He wears those boots of his to look taller; in moments like these, it works.

He takes the cigarette from his mouth and kisses him on the lips.

"You're not killing me," he says, when the two of them come apart.

"What would you like me to be doing?"

"Act like you picked me up. We're in the right part of town for it."

Well then. He has just picked up this strapping American fellow and now the two of them are en route to some suitable spot. His cigarette is still burning between Turner's fingers. Turner takes a final cautious drag and flicks it away into the gutter.

Their bodies are already inclined toward one another. Turner's shirt is open at the throat a little and the suntanned line of his neck is full of mystery and promise. Joubert's mouth is burning.

The other two men trail off for their own exchanges of favors, down another street. The naive reckoning: they weren't being followed after all. Imagine that.

*

In West Germany, near the border, Joe makes the kill shot for him, steady as a rock. Turner has to step over a dead body to reach him before he staggers, kicking the dead man's gun away as he does so as if there's any chance of a last-minute rally from a man whose brains are painting the countertop — Condor is going to leave footprints behind, which is the most prominent thought in Joubert's mind as he realizes what's happened to him. The wound in Joubert’s chest throbs like a blow from a fist.

Joe strips his coat back from his shoulders and lifts him up, hoisting from under his good shoulder — he's bloodying himself, Joubert finds himself thinking too with vague annoyance, and slowing himself down. The gun slung across Turner's shoulder jostles between their bodies.

Down the stairs, the hallway, scattering — Turner bundles his scarf around Joubert's neck and slings him into an utterly unmemorable car, hustles him away — his friend is sick, he tells the driver, and they need to go back to their hotel. Joubert smokes a cigarette in the car, and bleeds quietly into his coat. The gun lies across the backseat, behind both their bodies.

The man who was once Condor has just killed a Turinese bombmaker in his own apartment. His neighbors won't call the police, and his comrades aren't likely to find him any time soon. In a hotel bathroom, Turner takes off his gloves, and pries Joubert's fingers away from the wound long enough to clamp a folded cloth there. The broad palm of his hand presses the dressing in place.

"Hold this here." Raising his arm, shaking loose a fresh cascade of pain. "I read a lot," Joe says sardonically to no one in particular, as if it's an answer he's been giving a lot for a while now.

"How lucky for me." The bullet struck his right side — high up, grazing the liver maybe, chipping a rib on its way past and leaving Joubert breathless. He recalls his anatomy studies.

Blood stands out bright on Turner's hands — it's strange to think that it's his own blood, and that he can feel it leaving him. It's no kill shot — just a lucky gesture in the target's dying throes, a little more than a ricochet. Joubert struggles to keep himself more or less upright.

"Now hold this in place."

"I know what to do," Joubert tries to say, hoarse with pain and gesturing for him to depart — to go do something else and be gone — but Turner doesn't seem convinced. He leans him back, unbuttoning his shirt further with shaky hands — now they shake.

Joubert is gasping, and his glasses have fallen from his face. Turner's hands have moved beyond the center of pain — they touch his throat, probing for a pulse, and graze his hair, his cheek.

Turner draws him forward, feeling for an exit wound, and Joubert mentally indexes the path of the bullet, the trajectory as he'd seen it.

Turner notices it too, probing with his fingertips for the raw edge of a wound. "It went through."

"Interesting."

Punched through the flesh like a hole in a sheet of paper. His grip tightens on the edge of the sink. That'll need to be wiped down later — the whole suite will be a wasteland of bleach. Behind him he can hear Turner hacking at adhesive tape with a penknife — cursing, as if he's nicked his finger. But he has a steadier hand with bandages, and the pain rises to a familiar level. Joubert feels nothing more unmanageable than mild embarrassment — some of his own quarries have felt the same way in their last moments, without the benefit of the ever-resourceful Condor to fuss over them.

Soon he is kneeling in the bathtub with the blood sluicing away in red tracks, looking up at Turner with teeth involuntarily bared — some sense of modesty, maybe, irritation at the circumstances. Turner with a bloodied towel in his hand and the distant look of a battlefield medic. "Tell me what you want me to do from here."

There's a doctor on a certain street with more debts than he has scruples and Joubert ends up paying him handsomely for his trouble, but it's Turner who looks on with suspicious eyes, leaning up against the wall with his arms tightly crossed across his chest.

*

Another relocation. Unobtrusive cafés and hotel suites, grocery lists, and other shopping lists with more advanced requirements — specialized tools, hobbyist publications. Turner sleeps on the couch, mostly, and he's still so tightly-wound it's like having a burglar alarm on two legs. The two of them share quiet nights, Joubert browsing the classified ads, Turner reading paperbacks or listening to the radio — quiet rooms, inoffensive comings and goings. Their neighbors carry on with the activities of life — noisy marital arguments, practicing musical instruments at all hours — and the two of them go unseen, completely unremarkable. Turner buys a secondhand typewriter and bashes on it all day long, typing one-handed with a book fanned out in the other. Joubert often finds him asleep in a wash of manuscript pages.

Two men could be happy that way, coasting through life like bachelors. From Turner's silence, it's not altogether clear that these two men are, but there's something satisfying in it anyway, peaceful. Occasionally, Joubert trims a classified ad from a hobbyist's magazine and leaves it between the pages of one of Turner's books, on the top of the pile.

*

Turner brings him a cup of coffee. It cuts through the comforting smell of enamel paint, and when he brushes past the card table where Joubert has spread out his cache of miniatures so does the smell of Turner's cologne, sharp and boreal.

"Back there, he knew you were coming. How?"

"There's all kinds of ways. He happened to look up at the wrong moment, and he reacted impulsively." Which isn't to discount impulse — a little higher and to the left, and the reflex to pull the trigger would have served the dead man pretty well. Joubert glances up at Turner past the warp of a magnifying lens.

"You didn't see his face, did you? I saw him. He looked surprised — not surprised that someone was shooting him, surprised it wasn't somebody else, somebody he knew."

"Interdepartmental conflict, maybe. Even bombmakers have co-workers they don't care for."

Turner pulls up a chair to the table, its legs scraping noisily. "Even bombmakers have friends. If he knew someone had it out for him, he might have said as much. It'll get back to whoever's paying you eventually. It'll have consequences."

"That part doesn't concern me."

"Aren't you the least bit worried about informal consequences?" Turner picks up a miniature and turns it over, examining the base.

"A job is just a job. It doesn't matter to me."

"And not just bombmakers. Politicians, businessmen, teachers."

"Analysts."

"Right."

Turner sits straddling the chair, watching him work. Everyone should have a hobby.

*

Turner does make it to Paris but only under a certain amount of duress. In Paris Turner's skills are tested; they part ways and reunite again, and part again, and reunite. Turner leaves the typewriter behind.

Joubert expects the man to grasp the opportunity he's been discreetly handed and flee. He could feel comfortable with that, even; his ribs still ache, the remnant of their three-way encounter, and sometimes without a conscious thought he finds himself cupping his palm over the scar.

Turner calls him on the telephone:

"You killed a very good friend of mine, remember? She didn't do anything wrong besides make it to work on time."

"She died with great dignity."

"Did she? That doesn't seem possible, considering you machine gunned her to death."

"It was more convenient to do it quickly. She knew what was coming for her, and she hardly felt any pain."

That's no doubt what he wants to hear. Joubert has never concerned himself much with pain in itself or how to avoid it; most of the time the fastest way is also the cleanest, and vice versa. Anything less and it becomes a gesture; gestures cost more and interest Joubert less. A poison pellet in the calf of the leg. A chemical leak. A kidnapping gone wrong.

"Hardly any." Joe laughs, an odd hard sound. "You know I would have married her?"

"I don't believe that."

"Well, maybe she wouldn't have married me. She knew how that’d turn out. She was analytical. Sweet, funny."

"Twelve hours after the woman you're going to marry is machine gunned to death, you throw yourself in the arms of another woman. It would have been an unhappy marriage. If she was such a sweet girl, why was she working for the CIA?”

They can hash it out another day — he's long since unraveled the truth of how Turner survived the first workplace blitz, and he won't make the same omissions again the next time he clears out a hapless office building, there will be no stragglers. But another day and it might have been her instead, Janice Chon who looked so serious in photographs and accompanied the old Joe Turner to dinner. She would have been unpredictable too, when she wasn't backed into a corner — and no doubt she'd have been resourceful and determined and analytical, and all the other qualities that initially prolonged Joe Turner's life. But she might not have been quite so interesting.

Turner curses his goodbyes, and ends the call. Either Turner is confident in his ability to secure a line of communication free from eavesdropping, or he no longer cares who hears.

*

A man from the CIA offers him a considerable sum of money for Turner dead. He's already disgraced, the man says as if that makes it all reasonable, and Joubert's broken from past associates before. Joubert politely but firmly declines the offer. In Paris, Turner kills an embezzler, and shoots out the tires of an inconvenient politician. Half-hostage, half-apprentice — it seems to suit him all right, about as well as the things he did before. He doesn't ask for very much. Money can buy anything, but it can't buy his way back into the man he was before — inexperienced, earnest, full of violence he'd only read about. He likes detective books.

He can manage a mail drop — anyone can do that, the basic principle isn't so obscure. He can dress a wound, establish a safe house, keep track of his money. He's self-sufficient. Any day now Joubert could cut him loose and Turner could fend for himself, more or less successfully. He could become a bombmaker for some Marxist cell, spy on wealthy adulterers with a variety of exciting surveillance rigs, ghostwrite murder mystery novels for a French publishing house. He could end up in manageable pieces, burned to shards in an industrial furnace, extradited to the United States for a meaningless crime only to commit suicide in federal custody.

All kinds of useful things he does. Killing is only part of it.

Late at night, Turner resurfaces outside his hotel room — Turner checks the locks twice once Joubert lets him inside, he hugs his arms to his chest and smokes. He doesn't say anything and Joubert doesn't ask him.

Something is wrong.

*

From there they relocate to a French industrial center where it's always gray and there's always rooms to rent. Turner kills two engineers in a parked car on a narrow road.

"I don't have the stomach for this stuff," Turner says one day, just as Joubert is leaving. If he did want to initiate a secret meeting with a representative of the CIA, one of these late night trips out of the apartment would be an excellent window of time to do it in.

"You'll learn." Soldiers learn.

Turner is between him and the door, and the proximity of their bodies should be enough to nudge him aside through suggestion alone, but it isn't working. Turner's hand is on the doorknob, and the useless stylish ring he wears clacks against the brass. He's shaking. His face is downcast, but his eyes are alert, searching Joubert's face. "I mean it. I can't stand this. I can't stand picking people off for no good reason. It's inhuman."

"Profit is a very good reason. Maybe the first reason."

"Shut up. I know everything about you and your outfit now, and I could make things pretty hard for you. How's that? Pragmatic enough for you to appreciate?" Turner's drunk, you can tell it from the heat rising in his face. Maybe he doesn't know it, but his posture has turned insolent, with his hips leading the line of his body. It's difficult to watch. Turner's lean body says one thing, something expansively vulgar and a little promising, but his shaking hands say another. He's brittle, unconvinced of what he says even as he says it. He's not offering to sell him out (to whom?) — he's edgy. He's ready to check out of the game. It doesn't matter if he's ushered out by the CIA or by Joubert — it doesn't matter to Condor, anyway. It matters to Joubert very much. He has to prohibit himself from staring at the lines of Turner's body.

"I think you should take a moment to compose yourself."

"Jesus Christ, some of the shit I've seen — it's worse. It's worse stuff than oil. The company's up to its eyeballs in it, and it's bad." He sinks against the doorframe a little, shoulders sagging back. All his body language has come slightly unhinged. "I know more than I ever wanted to know."

It would be so much easier for him to divorce himself from needing to care — to forget about the Third World, to forget about Brezhnev and Nixon, to abandon principles and exist in a cozy state of détente with the distant powers that wanted him dead in the first place. Set ideology aside and simply exist in the world of the dollar and the gun. But Turner believes in things and it opens him up for disappointment. He believes in freedom of the press and he wants stories to have resolutions, endings. The spy story he's in won't end — it'll take detours into other genres. Educational text, popular history, horror story. Maybe if he's lucky a little pornography.

Turner grew up in a nation that had never in living memory been under enemy occupation, never invaded in the way other nations have been — that's why betrayal from within troubles him like it does and why he cleaves so passionately to a certain handful of ideals. A certain kind of freedom. Divorcing from that will make him much freer than before.

Joubert reaches very slowly for the cigarettes he keeps in his coat pocket. Turner's reddened eyes fix on his grasping hand like a pin through a butterfly.

"That must be disappointing."

"They never printed it. Christ, they're never going to print it. What happens if I die? The ordinary way — if I get in a three-car pileup or get hit by a train or have a heart attack, there won't be another chance. There won't be another chance. Christ, it makes me sick."

Joubert doesn't say anything to that. He lights a cigarette, then offers Turner one. Turner sucks in the first hard drag, self-consciously louche, and gives him a considering look.

"If you wanted me, you know you'd have to come and take me."

"I don't want you." He already has him, in the only way he's content to know.

There are many excellent and compelling reasons why whatever exists between them should remain just as it is — two internationally active assassins traveling together is already conspicuous, but two homosexuals? Joubert already knows something the fellows at Langley don't.

"I don't know," Turner says, faintly deflated. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing. You'll have to take pity on me."

Joubert won't look at him now. "We've been here too long. Pack up your things, I'll be back in an hour."

Turner is favoring his bad leg slightly. Trying to keep upright, maybe. "You know, I saw a movie once about a couple of hitmen who shacked up together. Didn't end well."

Whatever that's supposed to mean. The door opens outward, and Turner sidesteps to let him sweep past, too drunk for coordination. In his determination to nudge past with a minimum of physical contact, Joubert forgets his hat.

*

Someone wants to talk to Condor too — some cub reporter, a rendezvous in a parking garage or out on a back road. Turner picks the place out on a map, a site that hasn't been compromised yet, and Joubert shakes his head in warning, not there.

Their contact never arrives. In the parked car, Joubert thumbs through maps; Turner is drowsing partway through his latest paperback. On the radio: hotel arson, no survivors — there are other men with fewer scruples and lower fees, messier approaches, broader warnings.

Turner lifts his head, with his hair in his eyes and his glasses askew on his face. There's no surprise in his eyes, only mute disgust.

*

After that there's no doubling back, no retrieving anything that hadn't already been stashed in a bolthole. On the drive over, they don't talk. Their next rented room is a half-furnished cabin, existing in a state of dishevelment that makes it look like the previous owners have just stepped out for a moment — there are thick wool blankets but no bedsheets, cups but no plates. A coffee pot, an ax.

Joubert takes off his boots and Turner stalks the perimeter and counts the rooms and doors, scrutinizing every baseboard and lightswitch. Once he's satisfied he crumples up with his back against the brick wall.

This place will do for now — isolated but defensible, soundproofed, tried and true. Quiet.

Turner hunches over by the ancient stove, white-faced, his hands in fists. Joubert rummages for matches.

There are a number of boltholes like this, written down in Joubert's little notebook — tucked away in isolated pockets of goodwill, places where Joubert might go more or less unnoticed as a solitary sportsman but Turner will draw a little more attention the moment he opens his mouth. They'll go up the road into town and purchase groceries later, they can pick up wine and razors. There's time to regroup.

The sound of Turner's voice makes him glance away. "There was a man, back in Paris. Did you know that? I can't tell if you don't or if you're just freezing me out."

"Oh?"

"He rushed me, came out of a doorway. I didn't see there was a hallway there, a staircase down. I couldn't see if he had a gun."

"And did he?"

"No."

"Did anyone see you?"

If they'd been there on the scene of a hotel fire, there'd be inconvenient questions. And they'd both be dead, of course, which would be inconvenient in itself. If Turner had been there Joubert would be working alone from then on out.

"No, I don't think so." Turner rubs his face in both hands; there's a spot of color on one of his cheeks that wasn't there before. "I don't think so. Jesus Christ."

Joubert doesn't say anything, straightening up once he's found what he's looking for: matches, a pencil, a leather-bound notebook. They're close now. He can trace one of his sideburns with a fingertip. Turner is watching his mouth.

There's a knock on the door, a hearty thunderclap that disturbs both of them. Turner startles. Joubert slips his gun back into his coat pocket and settles into an affable expression.

"Don't get up. Wait."

*

"Firewood," he says when the door shuts behind him; he turns all the locks before he takes off his gloves. "The landowner heard we were coming from some women in the town. She wanted us to feel at home."

When this place was little more than a shack it belonged to her husband — now it's a hideout for assorted questionable characters and she still keeps up the admirable charade that her guests are here for recreation.

"Huh." Turner's face is masklike. The pink flush is still in his cheeks, like the smudge of a thumbprint.

Joubert sheds his coat and hangs it up by the door. When he turns around again, Turner is there beside him, very close.

The barrel of Turner's .45 is pressing into Joubert's stomach — like Condor is the heavy in some detective novel. Joubert turns a little, against the bruising gouge of metal.

At close range, Turner's voice is vicious. "You should've brought me out here earlier. The ground's already freezing. It's going to be hard to dig."

Joubert reaches back to his pocket, but Turner strikes his arm with the barrel of the gun and Joubert strikes him across the face. This starts it off as a scuffle in earnest, struggling back down the narrow hall and halfway fighting until they aren't any more — jostling hand to hand, striking and swiping with the barrel of the gun, everything but firing it. Turner contending against him until he doesn't any more and some unseen barrier between them dissolves. Until they are face to face, body against body with Joubert's frame positioned to block the only exit — Condor is a cornered animal now, but the only thing that's cornered him is his own very reasonable suspicions. He's made up his mind that he's been brought out here to die, and now with his damned instincts he might still make that true.

Turner is out of breath, lightly bloodied, disheveled. He has realized he can't fight any more. That moment is familiar, and even enjoyable. He has also realized that he isn't dead yet.

Joubert covers Turner's hand with his own, and brings the barrel of Turner's gun up parallel to his own temple. All Condor would need to do would be to adjust his grip and pull the trigger. Presto, no more suspicion. It might not be quick, but it would certainly be satisfying.

Turner does not pull the trigger.

"I didn't bring you here to kill you. But if it would satisfy you." End on a suggestion, leave it hanging in the air between them like smoke.

Turner presses his face to Joubert's collar, burying his face there as if smarting with shame. Turner's compact body staggers him a little. The gun drops.

"You've got to be kidding me," Turner breathes.

"It's not a double-cross," he replies, but it's not clear for whose benefit. And it isn't a double-cross, some final cataclysmic betrayal, it's something else. A cascade of inconvenient events that Joubert is ready to take in stride, but that to Turner must look like a string of disquieting coincidences — like the spider at the center of a web, sensing tremors. The appropriate time will come to explain that he's had enough of CIA cleanup for one lifetime, but it isn't now.

*

There's only one bed, with an ancient mattress. Helping him out of his blue jeans as Turner kicks off his shoes; he's standing in front of him barefoot now, glancing warily,

Joubert feels strangely naked without his coat. He pushes Turner back against the bed, and Turner lets him.

There's a crooked scar on his leg, just above the knee, still red; Joubert puts his mouth there and feels him shiver, all the bronze hairs on his thigh prickling. What did this to this man, he wonders, another assailant like himself or some random mishap?

He takes him in his mouth, conscious of the small cry Turner makes — sucking him off like they're a couple of strangers, but they know each other too well now for it to be pleasantly impersonal. Turner doesn't know what to do with his hands and doesn't want to do anything sudden; Joubert is alert to the grazing touch along the edge of his shirt collar, the uncertain weight of Turner's steady hands, just as he's alert to the taste of him, the weight of blood.

When he lifts his head, Turner is considering him again, and unbuttoning his shirt. They're in it for the long term now, it seems, and Joubert is grateful for locks on doors and the small odds that there'll be another knock at the door any time soon.

They tangle together, body against body — Turner is fumbling with his belt now, groping and yanking with great skill and some degree of panic. It makes everything he does shine brightly and clearly — neatly delineated, like the red scuff mark at the corner of Turner's mouth.

Joubert takes some care in laying him down, easing up his damaged leg — Turner swears and pulls him in closer, resentful of being handled carefully. His interfering pride must be one of his better qualities; his outrage has gotten him this far and now an Alsatian assassin wants to take him to bed and he can't put it aside for an instant. Turner catches Joubert's face in his hands and pulls him down sharply in a kiss that knocks his glasses off.

It's a pleasure, taking him apart with military efficiency — he makes no sound and bites his lip, glancing back as his body is maneuvered carefully but pitilessly into place. But when they come together Turner sinks into the rhythm of the act — Turner pushing back and Joubert holding him down, holding him in place.

Joubert's ribs ache and his hair is falling across his forehead — he grazes the rise of Turner's shoulder blade with his mouth and feels him shiver with pleasure beneath. After that, it's difficult to think analytically.

*

Afterward there's a feeling of strange loss, strange relief — Turner breathing heavily for a while, his skin in goosebumps, his hair darkened with sweat and sticking up at humorous angles. Side by side on the bed, closer than they've ever been — Joubert traces the bullet-graze on Turner's temple and Turner shuts his eyes.

There are other men without Joubert's singular scruple where Joe is concerned. Joubert will need to bring back some kind of relic for him next time — like a housecat brings back dead mice.

"You're going to have to forgive me. I'm new at this." He's in his undershirt, white cotton laid against a suntan that hasn't quite faded yet. It's hitched up to show his navel. Turner certainly doesn't look like an innocent.

"But you do read books."

Turner laughs. "The paperback kind, with 'Queer' in the name. Titles like Queer Fear, that kind of thing. I used to rip the covers off."

"Mm."

"I thought if I ignored the issue it might resolve itself."

Turner is lying back, one of his arms crooked behind his head — their bodies overlap only very slightly. He's an easy man to watch; his hair is long again, and it's soft under Joubert's palm, twining between his fingers; he can't soothe him, but it's not unpleasant to stroke his hair away from his face and watch his upturned face glower a little.

"What do you want to do now?" Thumbing against his temple with one hand while the other rests against the hollow of his throat, the carved-out place where Turner's pulse can still be felt. It's steady as anything. Turner is alive, and not backed into a corner just yet.

"I can't run forever."

"Are you so sure? You could leave Europe, visit sunny South America, Asia, Africa."

"If you think South America and Asia aren't lousy with CIA guys, you're crazy."

"You could have a life there. Write books, that kind of thing."

He realizes with strange affection that the starting conditions have changed — he not only doesn't care whether Turner should happen to live, he wants him not to die. It's no longer for any worthy-sounding reason — that Turner is a worthy opponent, that he's not being paid to kill the man, that he admires his mettle, and so on. He simply likes the world better knowing Turner is in it — that he and Turner may meet again, in a late-night telephone call or a police dossier, that when Joubert leaves his line of work for good the smiling face responsible for it might be Turner's and not a stranger's.

Turner's eyes are on him. He looks at him with the expectation that Joubert might kill him at any moment. He's thrown him a lifeline once or twice, but he won't do so forever.

It's a reasonable reservation. Joubert rises up on his elbow, rubbing at the stiffness that's settled in the side of his neck. The skin there is still tender from the scratch of Turner's stubble.

"What are you thinking about now?"

"I'm thinking about what I know about you."

"Tell me."

Turner shifts, sitting up a little. "You're at least forty-five, maybe closer to fifty years old. I think you're from Alsace, or somewhere around there, but you've traveled plenty. It shows in your accent. You could've fought in Indochina, Algeria, maybe both. I don't think you've ever been married. You smoke Camels. You're not a drinker. You know more about me than I know about you."

As if saying the words is painful. There's a bitter sort of yearning in his voice — not to learn more but to know, to set aside ciphers and return to terra firma. His handsome face is so suddenly serious that Joubert has to smile.

"Very good."

"I bet if I looked into it I could find out a couple more things. Not a lot more, though. I think you mostly keep to yourself."

"Mostly."

No two men can ever know each other. Turner kisses him on the mouth, and draws him back down against the bed.

End Notes

I love this movie and it was awesome writing for you this year -- happy Raremaleslashex!