The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  There was a washbasin in a corner of the room, but no hot water. Kaat wanted to complain; it was a matter of principle, she said. But the Potter told her not to bother. He would have paid three times as much for the room if the owner had had the sense to ask for it, he explained, and he sat her on the edge of the sagging bed and told her why.

  "I never thought about what we would do after we found him, Kaat admitted. "That’s very smart of you, actually.

  "It is not a question of intelligence,' the Potter said. "It is a question of experience. Generally speaking, people in my business live longer if they think about what to do after."

  The Potter wedged a chair under the doorknob, placed his Beretta on a low table, loosened his tie and settled into the only seat in the room, an old easy chair that smelled as if it had once been in a fire. Biting nervously on a cuticle, Kaat asked why they didn't scout the downtown area immediately. The Potter said he preferred to wait for daylight because he would be able to see more, and because people strolling the streets would be less conspicuous. Kaat kicked off her shoes, propped the two old pillows up and leaned back against them. "You remember the other night?" she began. She left the rest of the thought hanging.

  "The other night?"

  "The other night, in the motel, when you wanted to make love to me,"

  Kaat said. "You remember what I said about needing to share conspiracies?"

  The Potter nodded tiredly. He wanted to sleep, not talk.

  Kaat took a deep breath. "Here's the thing," she said. "I still think I need to share, but I'm not so sure about the conspiracies part. What I'm trying to say is, if you're still in the market to make love ... The sentence trailed off. Kaat smiled at the Potter across the room.

  The Potter shifted in his chair, cleared a constricted throat. "You are an extremely nice human being," he told her. He spoke slowly, deliberately, anxious to express his own feelings without hurting hers.

  "Please understand, I did want to make love with you. I still do. But I am an old man, and I am getting older by the minute. I am tied up to the pier of old age. And the moment has passed. Which is not to say that it will not come again. Until it does, I thank you for bringing up the subject. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Most affection between men and women these days is a matter of habit. But I am pleased to think that there is a real affection between us. Offered without being asked.

  Accepted without owing anything in return. Now go to sleep, my noiseless patient spider. In the morning we will find Piotr Borisovich, and then we will, all three of us together, contemplate the elusive thing called the future." The Potter reached over and switched off the table lamp.

  "Okay?" he asked into the darkness. "Okay," Kaat replied in a puzzled voice.

  The owner of the motel waited until he was sure the dwarf and his lady friend would be asleep. Then, taking his six-battery flashlight down from its hook, he went out to take a closer look at the Chrysler.

  Somewhere out on the prairie behind the house, a coyote howled. Combes flicked on the flashlight and played it over the car. Eventually he came to the license plates. They were from New York State, yet the sticker on the rear bumper advertised the advantages of vacationing in Ohio. Combes knelt and ran his fingers over the rear license plate. He could feel a crease in it where the screw held it to the body of the car, almost as if it had been pried loose and then replaced.

  Combes straightened up. Maybe it had been the sight of the dwarflike man with a beautiful young girl trailing up the steps after him. Maybe it had been the way he spoke English with a foreign accent. Maybe it had been the ease with which he peeled off twenty-dollar bills from a wad as thick as a fist. Whatever it was, the dwarf had gotten on Combes's nerves. It would give him a certain amount of visceral pleasure to tag him.

  The owner returned to the rooming house and dialed the number of his old precinct downtown. "It's me, Combes," he said when the patrolman on duty answered. "Who's minding the store? Pass him to me, will you?... Mac, it's me, Combes. Listen up. I got me a car out here with New York plates and an Ohio bumper sticker. I thought maybe you could see if" anything was on the wire. . . . Sure I can." Combes described the Chrysler and gave the license-plate number. "Sure thing, Mac. I'll wait on your call." He hung up the phone and stared out of a window across the prairie. It would sure as hell tickle him to tag the foreigner. Yes, indeed. It would tickle the hell out of him.

  Studying the canyon formed by the buildings on either side of Main Street, the Potter sensed he had reached the end of the line. The sun was still out of sight behind the canyon, but shards of metallic light filtered through the narrow spaces between the buildings, sending alternating slats of shadow and light slanting across the gutter.

  Wielding canvas fire hoses that snaked back along the curb to a large mobile water wagon, two Chicanos in hip boots were hosing down the route the motorcade would take in a few hours. Up ahead, several men in impeccable three-piece suits looked on as sanitation workers pried up manhole covers and then lowered themselves through the openings to search for explosives.

  "What about the hotel across the street?" Kaat asked.

  The Potter sized it up with a professional eye. "Hotels," he said, "are the natural habitat of a very special breed called house detectives. The farther you stay from them, the better off you are. No, I don't see Piotr Borisovich marching up to the front desk, probably carrying some kind of package in which a rifle is hidden, and asking for a room with a view of the street through which the target will soon pass."

  Around them scores of people, their heads angled against a nonexistent wind, were hurrying to work. Did they really think that getting there on time would change their lives? the Potter wondered. He made a mental note to toll Kaat how, in Moscow, people moved as if getting where they were going wouldn't change anything. Maybe he had put his finger on the real difference between the two countries, the two systems. Maybe hurrying to where you were going didn't have anything to do with an extra wet dream a week. He would have to talk to the Sleeper about it later, he decided.

  The Potter strolled into the lobby of the mercantile bank building, and strolled out again two minutes later shaking his head. "Too much security," he muttered. "He would not pick this one.' Making his way down Main Street, the Potter resembled nothing so much as a diviner searching for water, the only difference being he didn't have a forked stick. He examined several other buildings, always with the same result.

  One building he thought extremely promising until he discovered that it housed a factory on every floor.

  Kaat asked him about the roofs. Even if he could get to them without attracting attention, the Potter explained, it was the last place a professional would shoot from, if only because every policeman was trained to scan rooftops for the silhouette of a sniper. Also, there was a good chance that the police would station snipers of their own on several of the highest roofs along Main Street to make sure the others were secure. If I were planning to pick off the target, the Potter reasoned, I would look for an open space. And if I would look for an open space, Piotr Borisovich would also look for an open space.

  "What if you're wrong?" Kaat asked, biting on a hangnail.

  The Potter looked down the canyon. The Sleeper was out there somewhere, he felt it in his bones. "I am not wrong,' he told Kaat. "I cannot be wrong."

  "What if?" Kaat persisted. But when she saw the expression on the Potter's face, she said, "I take back the 'what if "

  Continuing down Main Street, the Potter investigated the construction site with several cranes lying on their sides, but saw the chain-link fence around the area and the uniformed guard checking work papers at the only door in the fence. The vest-pocket park sandwiched between two buildings on the right side of the street looked promising until the Potter discovered that it was in a slight depression, which meant that the people who would eventually line the route would mask the target from anyone in the park. At the far end of the downtown canyon there was an old sandstone courthouse,
and a series of paved plazas around it, but for the life of him the Potter could not see where a rifleman could hide. Beyond the courthouse the motorcade would jog to the right and then left again, going directly toward and then passing under a rust-colored brick warehouse with a red-white-and-blue Hertz sign on the roof that told the time and the temperature.

  "What's wrong with that building?" Kaat asked.

  "Nothing," the Potter said, "which is what is wrong with it. It is probably the single best site for a rifleman along the entire route. The angle of fire, the distance to the target, are ideal. Unless the local police are fast asleep, they will post a man at every window."

  "What are you staring at?" Kaat asked suddenly.

  "I have found what I was looking for," the Potter announced in a low voice. "Look there, to the left of the warehouse building. Do you see it?"

  "You mean the slope over there?" Kaat asked.

  "Those bushes provide a perfect screen for a rifleman," the Potter said excitedly. "Come on, I want to get a closer look at it."

  They crossed Main Street and skirted behind the warehouse, through the parking lot, to the top of the incline at the edge of the lot. The Potter studied the street below through the bushes. "This is it," he told Kaat. "The perfect place for a sniper. The only drawback is that the target will pass at almost right angles to the rifleman, but Piotr Borisovich is an excellent marksman and would not hesitate because of that. He would consider the parking lot at his back a great advantage for the escape, because he does not suspect that he is not meant to escape. He is meant to be caught."

  Kaat looked at the Potter in awe. "How can you know all these things?"

  "He will not come here until the last minute to avoid the possibility of running into anyone," the Potter continued in a low voice. He seemed to have forgotten that Kaat was next to him, and talked to himself. "In three hours and forty-five minutes, he will be standing where we are standing now. He will hear the cheers coming from Main Street, indicating the motorcade is approaching. The limousine will come into view, turn under the warehouse and pass directly under here. The guards accompanying the target will start to relax when they spot the freeway entrance ahead. Piotr Borisovich will aim for the jugular, as he did during the war." A distant look obscured the Potter's normally alert gaze. "Piotr Borisovich's father talked about myths just before he died.

  In one way or another, he said, all of us are acting out myths. Even Piotr Borisovich. Especially Piotr Borisovich," he said.

  "What myths is Piotr Borisovich acting out?" Kaat wanted to know.

  "What day are we today?" the Potter asked.

  "Twenty-two November. Why?"

  The Potter imagined he could hear the cheering of the crowds lining the canyon on Main Street, announcing the approach of the motorcade. "Have you ever noticed how autumn always makes people uneasy?" the Potter asked. "The days grow shorter and colder. Leaves fall from the trees and decay on the ground. The wind picks up and takes on a cutting edge. The clouds overhead appear to be lower and thicker and heavier than usual.

  The mountains on the horizon seem closer, more menacing. In ancient times the peasants began to worry that they had offended God. It was usually toward the end of autumn that they sacrificed their prince so that he could ascend to heaven and intercede with God, could make sure that spring would come again." The Potter took Kaat's elbow and drew her away from the line of bushes. "I remember something else Piotr Borisovich's father told me. He said he thought Piotr Borisovich was meant to be a prince, or kill a prince."

  Looking out from the window of his room on the fourth floor, Francis observed with a feeling of infinite detachment-he had imagined the moment so many times, he felt as if he were watching an old film-the security precautions along the route the Prince of the Realm would soon take. He could make out a burly policeman armed with binoculars and a walkie-talkie on the roof across the way- Below, workmen in overalls were re-, moving wooden police barriers from an open truck and stacking them next to the curb; at noon they would be used to close off the cross streets to traffic.

  The phone next to the bed rang. Francis picked up the receiver. "Do you see what I see?" a voice asked.

  Francis almost convinced himself that he could hear a facial muscle twitching in excitement. "You mean the cop with binoculars across the street?" Francis asked.

  "They were pulling up manhole covers and looking for bombs earlier,"

  Carroll said. He sounded as if he were feverish. Slurring his words, he hissed into the phone, "Poor saps. When Francis didn't respond, he asked, "What are you going to do now?" As if knowing how Francis planned to while away the morning would help him do the same.

  "I am going to select an appropriate necktie to wear," Francis replied.

  And when Carroll finally hung up, he did exactly that. Picking the bow tie was, in fact, Francis' major preoccupation of the morning. He took one with mauve polka dots from his canvas tie case and held it up to his neck so he could see it in the mirror. It wasn't quite what he was looking for. He tried a solid-colored one next, a particularly generously cut bow tie in a washed-out orange silk. He eventually settled on one of his favorites, a pale green bow tie with rust-colored pinstripes running horizontally through it. Francis pulled up his collar, and with several deft hand-over-hand gestures knotted the tie, then adjusted the collar and studied the effect in the mirror. If he could save only one of his ties, this one would definitely be it. He detested the idea of abandoning the others, but he recognized the necessity and, as was his habit, bowed to it. If everything went according to plan, if the Sleeper were caught in or after the act, Francis would immediately dial the phone number he had been given before he left Washington. And wearing only the clothes on his back, the pale green bow tie with rust-colored pinstripes around his neck, the shoes on his feet and the Cheshire cat's pained smile that hinted at nothing more morally compromising than the death of an occasional rodent, he would disappear, within the hour, from the face of the earth.

  Carrying a long, thin package wrapped in brown paper, Khanda turned up for work at the warehouse a few minutes early that morning.

  "What you got yourself there, a fishing rod?" one of the older hands who passed Khanda in the stairwell asked.

  "It's curtain rods, Khanda explained briefly, 'for my room."

  "Too bad it ain't a high-powered rifle to put a hole through that son of a bitch who's supposed to he passing by today," the other man said.

  "I got nothing against him, Khanda mid.

  "Well, I reckon that makes you the only one in the whole entire state who don't," the other said, and muttering under his breath about how the punishment ought to fit the crime, and the crime was high treason, he went on about his business.

  Using the stairway instead of the elevator to avoid other workers, Khanda made his way to the sixth floor. Near the window he had picked out, he shoved aside some cartons and slid the curtain rods in behind them. It occurred to him, as he went downstairs to report to work, that this was his last day on the job: that if things went well, he might never have to work another day in his entire life.

  A teenager outside the window of the motel room was walking across the gravel driveway in thick motorcycle boots. Watching from behind the half-drawn shades, Appleyard softly imitated the sound until he thought he had it right. Then he took a deep breath and did it at full volume.

  It sounded as if someone were walking across gravel inside the room.

  Ourcq limped out of the bathroom on his wooden crutches. "Maybe you should fucking phone again," he said.

  Appleyard stopped making the sound of a boot crunching on gravel- "He specifically said he would call us when he knew something," he reminded Ourcq.

  "What I wouldn't give to get my fucking paws on him," Ourcq said. He leaned the crutches against the wall and sat down heavily on the bed, careful to keep his weight off his bad foot.

  "What would you give?" Appleyard asked, his eyebrows dancing in curiosity.

  "I wo
uld give a fucking year of my life," Ourcq replied with obvious sincerity. "I would give my fucking right arm. It is just not right to shoot somebody in the fucking foot. It causes too much fucking pain."

  Appleyard came to the conclusion that the wound had had a humanizing effect on his partner; for the first time in memory, he seemed to hate the person he might have to kill. "If he had not shot you in the foot,"

  Applevard pointed out, "he might have shot you in the head." He cocked his forefinger as if it were a pistol and produced a perfect imitation of a gun going off. "At least," he added, "where there is pain there is life.

  "Now you are imitating the sound of a fucking intellectual.'" Ourcq said in disgust. "Do me a fucking favor, go back to doing somebody walking on fucking gravel."

  It was twenty minutes to noon when the Potter went to pick up the Chrysler at the garage on Elm Street. One block to the south, crowds were already forming along the route. According to the newspaper clipping, the motorcade would jog past the red-brick warehouse-and the bushes on the rise just after it-at about twelve-thirty. The Sleeper, the Potter calculated, would wait until the last minute before taking up position. The Potter planned to pull the Chrysler into the parking lot next to the rise at twelve-twenty-five, and drive off with the Sleeper before the motorcade emerged from the Main Street canyon.

  Kaat went into the garage to give the stub to the man on duty. Five minutes later she came hurrying out to the street with a strange look on her face; the last time the Potter remembered seeing it was when she had turned to stare at the lifeless body of her cat on the hack seat of the car.

  "What is happening, if you please?" the Potter asked in alarm.

  "Here's the thing," Kaat said. "The attendant called on his intercom, and the man who moves the cars called back to say that the Chrysler had a flat tire They said that for ten dollars they would fix it, so I told them to go ahead and do it."