“If you want to keep them, don’t go showing your bare bum to strangers who knock on your door.” He walked away.
“Sissy.”
The day was darker; the breeze stronger; rain imminent. As he walked toward the East River and Number Eleven, Brewer figured he’d be lucky to get in one more interview before the rain started. He considered going back to his apartment for his rain gear. There were still thirteen to go, and he had no idea how much time he had; maybe none. Maybe Kotlikoff … Brewer changed the subject.
Although he told himself not to get his hopes up with this Number Eleven, he sensed that he had. He’d been unconsciously saving this one as a kind of dessert for slogging through the first ten. Number Eleven had, first of all, a very interesting name: Aleksandr Butenko. The missing e in Aleksandr was definitive. It pointed to at least the possibility that Mr. Butenko was Russian born. Butenko was a well-known Russian family name. Secondly—the item that had Brewer’s greatest interest—the date of Butenko’s prescription for Insulin 147 was April first, two days ago, the day that Kotlikoff had been kidnapped.
Papers and debris were sailing across the island and soaring up the sides of buildings. The day had stepped back from spring into winter, and Brewer wished for his coat.
Butenko’s house surprised him. He was watching the house numbers ascend as he walked, estimating how much farther he had to go. He could read the number on the awning of an office building a block away. Butenko’s house would be the next number. From a distance, he saw a slate roof and the upper floor of what appeared to be an old mansion.
As he crossed the intersection, he could see that the building was all brick and sandstone, with a sandstone step. A high, spiked wrought-iron fence built into marble-capped posts fronted on the sidewalk. The building was five stories high. Along the curb were a half dozen limousines, and several chauffeurs talking. As Brewer got closer, his estimate of Butenko’s private wealth soared. When he reached the building he saw a man standing behind the closed wrought-iron gate, partly turned away from the breeze. He might as well have had a sign on him: guard.
At the gate, Brewer paused and looked up. Fitted to the wrought iron like a metal claw was an enamelized symbol: a hammer crossed with a sickle. Above it the letters: U.S.S.R.
It had begun to rain.
Brewer stood in a doorway across from the building, feeling a curious mixture of elation and despair. The coincidence was too great: it was extremely improbable that Butenko became a diabetic on the day Kotlikoff had been kidnapped. Brewer firmly believed that Kotlikoff was in that building. Furthermore, if they’d purchased Insulin 147 for him, it probably meant that they were going to keep him alive and healthy, at least for a while. He felt exultant about that: he was sure he’d found Kotlikoff. Damn good man, that Brewer. Our hand has never lost its touch.
The despair arose when he studied the building: it was solid brick and stone, with a heavy slate roof, and on every one of its five floors, looking out at the falling rain, was an armed Embassy guard.
Slowly, the sandstone turned dark brown as the rain soaked it.
Several hours later, Brewer sat alone in the Lido Tuscany Restaurant with his double on the rocks, unaware of the pelting rain as he pondered the flame of the candle on the raffia-wrapped wine bottle. The most impossible assignment he’d ever been dealt wasn’t anywhere near the impossibility of this situation. He ate a large order of spaghetti and meatballs with a bottle of red and consumed it all without tasting it. Over his espresso, he lit a cigar and belched and felt the now familiar spreading cold in his gut. He was afraid he was beaten.
He took a cab back to the Sports Complex in the rain, and as he got out, he looked up. Through the second-floor windows of the pool hall, figures moved around the tables; some waited. In the apartment windows above, eyes, lonely and tired, looked down at him and at the rain.
Not me, he told himself. I can’t surrender to that. He ascended the old brown stairs toward the faint landing lights, beacons that led him to an unseen destination.
It was time to find a new game plan—to chuck the whole insane Kotlikoff assignment. A flat impossibility. He considered again a mad idea of forming an association of all the men who hated Geller. He knew at least twenty. If each man put up a measly five grand, then Brewer would take the hundred grand as a fee to blow the bastard’s head off. One hundred grand—that would set him up for life in some kind of business.
But as he walked and talked to himself, he knew he had to continue on the Kotlikoff case. For him, it was the only game in town.
By eight o’clock Brewer had located one in a laboratory supply company, specializing in XE, HG, Spectral Light-source, Precision Optical Components and Lasers.
On the phone the man said, “We’re closed. Come to the back door.” When Brewer knocked on the back door twenty minutes later, the man had gotten out the unit and had it on the counter. “It’s a beauty. U.S. Army surplus. Battery-operated, sixteen and three-quarter inches long, fifty-point-four-diameter lens, and that includes this five-inch-diameter filter. Focus is electrostatically adjusted. This knob adjusts reticle intensity, both vertical and horizontal. Great? It’s got a Farnsworth image type and that’s the best. Pistol-grip handle. You can see in total darkness with this baby. Guaranteed original U.S. Army surplus sniperscope. How long did you want to rent it for?”
Brewer rented it for three days; he also rented a terrestrial telescope, 495-mm F.L., 80-mm hard-coated achromatic objective lens with light-gathering power and four parfocal eyepieces on a revolving turret.
“With this scope,” the man assured him, “you can see down a gnat’s throat a hundred miles away and tell if he has ulcers.”
The office building was down the block from the Russian mansion and on the other side of the street. From it he would be able to see the windows of the front and the one side of the Russian mansion. The far side of the mansion was nearly flush against a sixteen-story building, while the rear was flanked by the back sides of other old mansions, like people snubbing each other.
This building that he’d selected was twelve stories high, and at ten in the evening it was still fully lit by the cleaning staff.
Brewer looked like a camper expecting the worst from the unrelenting rain. In the cab, he carried the telescope in its tubular case, the sniperscope in its bulky square case, a folding chair, a thermos, a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck, a heavy Army blanket, a poncho, a small tarpaulin, rubber boots and a large black umbrella. He wore two pairs of pants, three sweaters, a heavy overcoat, a knitted cap, a wide-brimmed rain hat, two pairs of socks, and heavy shoes. He carried in his pockets two pairs of gloves, a pint of brandy and a dozen cigars.
“I hope you bag two ducks and a moose,” said the cab driver.
Brewer lugged the gear across the wet sidewalk and into the lobby. The elevator carried him and his equipment up to the top floor, and from there he struggled up a flight of stairs to the roof.
Rain fell noisily and endlessly out of the night onto the gravel-covered roof. It made a sizzling sound as it spanked the surface of a roof puddle that glittered and winked like broken glass, reflecting lights from other buildings.
Brewer hated rain. It depressed him, and he looked with dismay at it as he pulled on his waterproof boots and pushed his head through his poncho. It would have been better to set up his equipment inside one of the offices, but the view would have been impeded and the cleaning people could have discovered him.
He unfolded his chair and set it up not too close to the parapet. He didn’t want to be seen, and he didn’t want to be near the unnerving edge of the roof. The opened umbrella he clamped with two C clamps to the back of the chair. The army sniperscope and the telescope he set up side by side. Down into the chair he eased himself under the umbrella, there to pull the Army blanket over his legs, lap and waist and to draw the tarpaulin over the blanket.
As he adjusted the sniperscope, rain rattled on the umbrella. A downspout somewhere gurgled like
a brook. The edge of the staircase outbuilding dripped loudly into a pool of water. Distantly, down in the street, falling jets of water shattered on concrete. It was going to be a long, wet, cold night.
Sitting bundled on that dark roof as if viewing the entire North American continent, he felt like a stadium spectator at a colossal rain show. His view of himself thus seated in a thrashing rainstorm struck him as ridiculous, and he chuckled, then laughed, flashing his blinding fake-toothed smile at the enormous dour sky over the city.
With the two scopes set up, he had a clear view of the two sides of the building from ground level to eaves. This was the part of the trade that he hated. The greatest difficulty was staying awake. If boredom could kill, Brewer would have died screaming years before. The biggest problem in the world, Graybill had said so often, was really just a bunch of small problems in a large package. If it’s too big to solve, break it down and solve all the little ones, one at a time. Shatter and conquer.
The view that Brewer got of the interior of the old mansion was like the partial cutaway drawing of a cruise ship, showing the location of facilities, deck by deck. The building was organized around a flight of stairs that started just outside a large kitchen with a black and white tile floor in the basement and ascended five floors, bending around an elevator shaft and looking out from a large window at every floor landing.
He could see several workers in white butcher’s cloth uniforms preparing food in the kitchen.
Many of the windows were dark, and most of those with lights were empty. But on each floor, standing by a window and looking down at the street, was a guard. And so it was, Brewer knew, in every Soviet building outside Russia the world over. One guard per floor, fully armed, fully trained; and at least one guard at each entrance. In sensitive times and in sensitive cities there would be a guard at every window.
Brewer followed Graybill’s precept. He set out to divide all the visible windows into two groups—the maybe’s and the no’s. He started his scan with the ground floor.
The darkened rooms on the first floor all appeared to be offices. Under the one-eyed probe of the sniperscope, desks, chairs, writing tools, calendars, file cabinets—all emerged from the darkness like specters summoned to give testimony, and then receded into the darkness again as the scope passed on. He used the terrestrial telescope to examine the first-floor rooms that had lights. Some of them were occupied; people were working at desks and using telephones. In others, several cleaning women worked. Brewer studied the rooms in sequence. Kotlikoff wasn’t in any of them. That left four floors to go. It had reduced the problem by one-fifth, twenty percent, Graybill would say. Brewer began a scan of the rooms on the second floor. These too were offices. At the front window, in the middle of the building, stood a guard, a blond man with unblinking eyes and a muscular jaw, absorbed in a reverie as he looked out at the rain-filled night. The room next to his was a supply closet and mail room, with an old mimeograph machine on a shelf. None of these offices were in use. Two-fifths done, Graybill would say. Time for a wheeze. Brewer took out the brandy and saluted the darkness overhead. “Here you are, Graybill old poop.” He swallowed a mouthful and felt warmth flow from his stomach through his body like a benediction. He wondered if he could safely light up a cigar.
The third floor was different. It had living quarters and several drawn window shades. The sniperscope examined dark, empty beds and high bureaus, interior bathrooms and television sets. In one bed lay a large suety form with long gray hair. The shade was partly raised and the window open a few inches. Two other rooms had lights on but the shades were firmly drawn. The guard on this floor apparently had a cold and breathed solemnly through his mouth.
The fourth floor was given over to bedrooms also, but these were smaller and had fewer furnishings. They were used by domestic help, probably. The sniperscope probed into six rooms with sleeping figures. In several, people sat with the lights on watching television. Four of these windows were shaded.
The fifth floor was up under the eaves and contained the smallest rooms of all, each with barely enough space for a bed, a bureau and a chair. Most of the rooms were occupied by sleeping figures. Brewer supposed they were the kitchen staff on the early call list. Three rooms here were shaded and dark. One of them under the peak was larger and seemed to have a two-part shade. When he’d finished his study of the mansion, Brewer’s confidence began to sag again. If he’s in there, he thought, if he’s in there, I’m up the flue. A fortress with six armed guards plus how many off-duty guards? Brewer pictured himself stealing a fire engine with a ladder or an elevated basket to make a rescue. The brick wall was smooth: no footholds.
The back of the building offered no way in either. It looked down on a courtyard embraced by a brick wall easily twelve feet high, with barbed wire coursing its top. The office building on the other side of the mansion rose sixteen stories into the night, and the movement of the telescope up its side made Brewer dizzy. Sixteen stories.
Brewer studied the front-door guard. He was a dark shadow in rain gear, under an umbrella at the foot of the brownstone steps, just behind the shut gate. Four pairs of eyes on the upper floors had him in view at all times. Brewer turned the scope to the faces of the guards, the typical faces he’d come to know so well, generally expressionless, unreflective, capable of quick and unquestioned action, capable of savagery and mayhem. A guard is a guard everywhere. Brewer knew the tricks they knew, knew some they didn’t know, but knew that they were professionals in an impregnable position. Brewer’s survey told him there was no way in.
If he was very, very lucky, if the stars were in their proper conjunction for best luck, then that man Butenko had just by coincidence become a diabetic on the day that Kotlikoff was kidnapped. And that would mean that Kotlikoff was somewhere else—if Brewer was very lucky. But he didn’t believe it; his luck never ran that way.
People began arriving in cabs shortly after eleven. All of them were carefully checked by the guard before they were admitted. Brewer could see them moving through the main hallway to the elevator. Lights went on in different bedrooms and bathrooms. The top floors of the building now took on a festive air. Evidently the embassy people had been to a meeting or a cultural event somewhere, probably at the UN.
At eleven-fifteen a man in a white kitchen jacket came out of the kitchen and took the elevator to the fifth floor. A light appeared in the window under the peak and in the bathroom window next to it. The silhouette of a head crossed the window shade, and then the light was put out. The man descended in the elevator. Brewer noticed that he carried a small piece of wood from which dangled a door key on a piece of string. Brewer watched him reenter the kitchen, watched the key swinging on the string as his body moved.
He looked, thought Brewer, exactly like a jailer.
A few minutes later the man put out all the kitchen lights. He and a woman in a white uniform took the elevator. She reappeared in a bedroom on the fifth floor, stood looking out her window briefly at the rain, then sat on the edge of a chair, and, taking off her white kitchen uniform and her shoes and white cap, she sat in a slip and brushed her coiled hair—long golden-blond tresses that made her look years younger. Brewer decided she was under thirty and meaty—a country girl. She walked into the bathroom and shut the door. A short time later she opened the door partway and peered into the bedroom from behind it. Quickly, in a crouch, covering her nude figure with her hands, she scurried to a closet and put on a robe, then walked quickly back across the room to the bath, throwing a girlish smirk at the window. He was right, Brewer thought—meaty.
A few minutes later her light was out, and gradually the other lights went out as well. All the offices were dark. Shaded companionway lights softly lit the interior halls, and the building itself now seemed to drowse. At midnight the guards were changed.
Brewer, feeling alone in the dark in the rain, on the outside looking in, aware of all these Russian bodies sleeping snugly in their beds under a thrashing rainstorm, remo
ved the sour cigar from his mouth and took a long pull on the bottle. The more he studied the situation, the worse his morale became. He was slowly deflating, slowly surrendering, and if that Abbott were to come near him now with his mewing about the future and the dark shadows of life, he’d jump right off the parapet.
Brewer listened to the dreary rain beating on his umbrella, heard the splashing, gurgling and dripping all around him, and for the first time turned his anger on himself, for that night in the back booth in that dive in London. Ruined his life. Never, never, never, said Graybill; never trust Geller.
“How did it feel to kill that guy in London?” pudding-face Geller had asked.
Danzcek. Dirty little untrustworthy, cowardly, merciless rabbit: Danzcek. Something that should have been smothered in the cradle. Danzcek with the evasive eyes who set up other, better men for a few dollars. Three good men dead so that that animal could fill his belly.
The surprise on Danzcek’s face, Brewer would always remember. Danzcek sitting there in the booth, with Brewer leaning on him, pressing him against the wall, with the knife blade in his side, right to the hilt. Fine-boned like a rabbit, Danzcek was. He’s looking at you, Brewer. He’s not moving. His incredulous eyes say it all: he knows what happens when you pull that blade out. He’s afraid of the pain, afraid of dying, afraid of moving; and he’s hoping right to the last moment that he’s wrong, that the knife isn’t very deep and maybe he’s not bleeding; maybe he can get to a doctor. Maybe maybe maybe, say the eyes, maybe I’ll live. He didn’t. He died like an old man going to sleep, like a deflated balloon. It was a dumb piece of work. Comparable to holding a pet rabbit in your lap and stabbing it with a bread knife. And that’s how it felt, Geller, because that’s how you set it up.
Brewer threw the soggy butt of the cigar at the rain. Graybill was right: Geller got out his Bible and preached the holy sermon against him and personally cut his buttons off. Where was Geller now? Why, in a warm bed, of course, sloshed with good scotch, smelling of dollar cigars, building points for a fat pension.
Catch Me: Kill Me Page 14