Or did it melt away into nothing like chocolate in the warm hands of a child?
There was a certain comfort in the darkness.
Sand wrapped it around him like a shawl.
He heard the British accent crawling from somewhere far away in the night.
“In case you are smitten with a certain curiosity, and you would be foolish if you weren’t, you are on the train to Ukraine,” the voice said quietly. “According to the schedule, we should be in Odessa by daybreak at the latest.”
The stranger flipped a switch, and a stark, yellow glow from a light above his seat chased the darkness, but not the shadows, out of the compartment.
His fedora and woolen topcoat were a brown tweed, his face old and ashen, as tired as his eyes.
A white mustache twisted above his lips like a scar that had never healed.
“Name’s Alastair Reagan,” the stranger said. “I will be your companion until we reach Odessa.”
“Do you know why I’m going?”
Sand was surprised by the distant echo of an unsettled voice rattling around in his brain.
“I do.”
“Then you know more than I do.”
Reagan grinned.
His eyes twinkled.
His voice softened.
“You and I, sir, do not have the same itineraries,” he said. “In fact, it seems our assignments are quite different. My job is knowing where we are going and what we will do when we arrive. Your job is to do it.”
“What is it that I’m supposed to do?”
Reagan reached in his pocket and withdrew a black Walther PPK and leaned forward, handing it to Sand. “You’ll need this,” he said.
The pistol felt familiar in his hand.
He had obviously used one before.
He didn’t remember why.
“Am I supposed to kill someone?”
Reagan laughed, and it was a genuine laugh, coming from deep inside his belly. “No,” he said. “It is your job to keep someone from being shot.”
“Who?”
“Me for one.” Reagan laughed heartily again. “If you can keep yourself from being shot, that is a bonus for us all. And then, of course, there is a young lady in Odessa who is trapped and cannot escape. You are to make sure she leaves for Romania as soon as she possibly can.”
“How?”
“A boat will be waiting for you.”
“Where?”
Reagan grinned as if he had a secret, and he obviously did. “You’ll know when you have a need to know,” he said.
“Who is she?”
“A jazz singer.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Pauline Bellerose.”
“Is she French?”
“Stage name. Her real name is Thelma Johnson. She’s from Danville, Iowa, but no one would pay good money to hear Thelma Johnson from Danville, Iowa, sing a song. Men fall in love with Pauline Bellerose before they ever see her, and once they do, they stay in love for a long time.” Alastair Reagan paused to light a cigar. “I would offer you a smoke but know you do not partake of the finer things in life.”
“You know a lot about me.”
“More than you do, I’m afraid, old boy.”
“I don’t dwell on who I am,” Sand said. “Who I was yesterday is not who I will be tomorrow. And where I’m from was misplaced a long time ago. My only concern is seeing the sun go down on the same day I saw it rise. If that happens, it’s been a good day.”
“I’m told you work better if you’re left alone.”
“Less people die that way.” Sand forced a grin. “If I go down, we haven’t lost much. If others go down, it’s a loss that would weigh heavily on my conscience.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“What?”
“A conscience.”
“It’s called regrets.” Sand glanced out the window and watched the darkness race past, flashes of lights and shapes and distorted images that mostly resembled his nightmares when daylight left him alone in he dark. “Who are you anyway?” he asked Reagan.
“It’s best you don’t know.”
“If it all goes wrong, who will I call to come get your body?”
“I’m afraid you won’t find our number in the phone book.” Reagan sat back, removed his fedora and laid it on the seat beside him. “We’re full of secrets, hush-hush, cloaks, daggers, and things of that sort.”
“British Intelligence?”
Reagan laughed. “Sometimes we’re not so sure about the intelligence.”
“A field agent?”
“I put people together,” the Brit said. “I give them their orders and point them in the right direction. Then I’m afraid I have a tendency to disappear.”
Sand glanced out the window, then down at the pistol.
None of what Alistair Reagan had said made sense to him.
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to.
He went where he was supposed to go.
He did what he was told to do.
Funerals almost always followed where he went, and, thus far, none had been his own.
He wondered if the pounding in his head would ever cease.
Did it always hurt?
Was this the first time?
He closed his eyes and saw himself on the ground.
Lying in the snow.
The snow had turned red.
It looked like blood.
Was it his?
Did it belong to someone else?
Who delivered death that night?
Had it been him?
Or was he among the dying?
He smelled the acrid smoke.
It burned his nostrils.
His body suddenly convulsed.
The cold came upon him.
And the pain was gone.
He turned back toward the window.
Ukraine was dark, provided, of course, he was traveling through a Ukrainian countryside.
His contacts had been known to lie to him before.
The night was too black.
He couldn’t be sure.
But had he ever walked on Ukrainian soil before?
What you do today doesn’t matter.
He heard his own voice somewhere deep in the far reaches of his mind.
What you do tomorrow doesn’t matter.
Truth was hard.
If you don’t survive today, there won’t be tomorrow.
He grinned to himself.
Truth was the convenient lie.
The sound of Alistair Reagan’s heavy, raspy breaths jerked him from never, never land and back to the present.
He snapped the clip into the Walther PPK and shoved the pistol inside his belt, beneath his coat and out of sight.
“Why do we need to extricate the young lady from Odessa?” Sand asked.
“Some very bad men want to kill her, I’m afraid.”
“What has she done to them?”
“Pauline makes them very nervous.”
“I’m sure she has her reasons.”
“Whether you know it or not, Mister Sand, there is a war going on. It’s not a war anyone recognizes. But it’s war just the same.” Reagan flipped the cigar ashes onto the floor at his feet. “We are the good guys. Russia has the bad guys. Miss Pauline Bellerose has been stealing information from the bad guys and smuggling it out to the good guys.”
“How does she do it?”
“Sheet music.” Reagan laughed but not so heartily this time. “She hides the information in the way she rearranges the notes on a song.”
“Pretty clever.”
“We think so.”
“Will we work with her contact in Odessa?”
“No.”
The smile faded from Alastair Reagan’s face.
“Who is he?”
“He prefers to remain in the shadows, and we know him only as Cantrell. He’s the man with a surly attitude, garlic breath, and a black patch he wears over his right eye. He prefers it that
way.”
“Where is he?”
“We don’t know.” Reagan slumped in his seat. “A week ago last Thursday, we found the suitcase Miss Pauline uses to send her sheet music out of Odessa. It always goes to a designated recording studio in East London. When our man went to pick it up, the suitcase was empty. The recording engineer and his secretary had been shot at close range. One bullet behind each ear. We have not heard from Miss Pauline’s contact since.”
“You think he betrayed you?”
“My guess is he’s floating somewhere in the Thames.”
Reagan stood, then bent from the waist and tried to look out the window.
It was fogged over.
He wiped away the moisture with the elbow of his topcoat.
The train lurched, and he almost lost his balance.
Dark was slowly turning light.
A new day was arriving.
A gray day.
A ragged day.
A dusting of snow covered the farmlands.
Clouds were thick and hanging low above the ground.
They had turned a pale shade of blue.
“My second guess is that we have less than twenty-four hours,” Reagan said.
“Then what?”
“We will find Miss Pauline floating somewhere in the Ukraine River.”
“In Odessa, I presume.”
Reagan looked as if he were aging by the moment.
“Some call it the cemetery of Ukraine,” he said.
Rainy Night 4
HER VOICE WAS soft but powerful, and she had a lusty growl in her throat, the kind a tiger might make before jumping a helpless prey in the night.
Pauline Bellerose stood alone on a dark stage.
She was tall, well over six feet in her five-inch stiletto heels.
Her long silken gown was maroon, the color of blood left too long on the streets, and it clung tightly to each curve in her body.
Gentlemen came to watch the curves sway to the music.
She smiled slightly to herself.
Ladies came to hear the voice.
Gentlemen spent good money whether they liked jazz or not.
She kept the curves swaying.
A bottle of whiskey would cost them a hundred dollars if they paid for it one jigger at a time, and most of them did.
It made the night last.
It deadened time and convinced the hands on the clock to move at a much slower and more deliberate pace.
Pauline winked at the fat man sitting alone on the front row.
He was the one with the oily face, the one wearing a tuxedo with the black tie hanging loosely around his neck.
He should be more careful, Pauline thought.
Loose ties had been known to strangle the just and the unjust on the back streets of Odessa, on the dark streets awaiting the dawn, which didn’t always come when it was expected.
Pauline knew.
She had her hands on both ends of a black tie once.
That’s why she drank too much.
Gin.
Vodka.
It was just alcohol in a glass.
No taste.
No smell.
It softened, then blurred the ugly face of truth.
It murdered the senses.
Only when she was sober did she still see the red face of a white Russian as he fought to tear her hands loose, as he struggled to catch his next breath.
She still bore the scars of his fingernails on her wrist.
He had not died quietly.
The last breath had been a whimper, the kind a rat makes when he realizes he is a prisoner and cannot escape the trap.
It would have been so much easier if he had died quietly.
But, alas, he took a short trip to the burying ground, and she was still singing and mostly the blues.
She wondered which of the gentlemen with faces hidden in the darkness would try to seduce her, then permanently silence her next.
The soft light from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling touched her face and curled down to her neck where it disappeared beneath long strands of hair as black as the shadows cloaked around her.
Her skin was the color of milk and cocoa, her eyes a dark ebony.
They were warm and could touch a man’s heart.
They could sear his soul.
But it was the timbre of her voice that made him fall in love with an illusion he could never have.
Long fingers curled around the microphone.
Her sharpened but manicured nails were the color of blood recently spilled.
The intensity of the hue matched the gloss of her lips.
Did she sing the blues?
Or jazz?
Or somewhere in between?
She no longer knew.
She no longer cared.
Pauline Bellerose breathed the last refrain of “Black Magic Woman,” and the wail of a saxophone in the darkness behind her squeezed the final tears from the sadness of her words.
She sang partly in Russian.
Partly in French.
Pauline knew she could make lonely hearts cry in either language.
She dared not laugh.
Even a smile would break the mood.
Her moods were all about love and love lost and love that should have been but never was, and where did it go when love died, and why didn’t it ever come back, or was it merely thrown away and gone forever?
Her motto was a simple one.
Wrench a heart and leave.
Gentlemen with a wrenched heart would darken the doorway again.
They would send her flowers.
They would pass her handwritten notes.
They pledged their love.
They begged her to marry them.
Pauline played the game well.
She smiled at them all.
She winked at the fortunate few.
She never said no.
But then, neither did she ever say yes.
She wished them all dead.
The single light bulb above her went dark.
The Perron Number 7 became a club of anxious whispers.
When the house lights came on again, Pauline Bellerose was gone.
The stage was bare.
Only a distant piano was still playing.
It was as if she had never been in the room at all.
MAJOR NIKOLAY PETROV unfolded the telegram and read it again in the glow of a street lamp whose light had grown dim from the dust and dead bugs caked on the ancient globe.
He frowned.
He hated bad news.
He broke out into a harsh grin.
In his position, he should be accustomed to it by now.
He glanced around him.
Traitors hung out on every street corner in Odessa, even in the rain.
Sooner or later, he would track down them all.
Some would pay a terrible price.
Major Petrov was waiting for Pauline outside the club, which he did every night except Monday when, if the rumors were true, he was given the task of escorting some handcuffed troublemaker to the shoreline of the Ukraine River before the moon had a chance to rise and placing a bullet from his antique TT 33 Tokarev pistol just above the condemned man’s ragged hairline.
The old ways of dying were the most efficient, he said.
Why waste time on a judge?
The Major had asked her that question more than once.
Why waste time on a jury?
Guilt is guilt.
Innocence is innocence.
And no one is entirely free from sin.
The Major was not as tall nor as dashing as he thought he was.
His youth had left him years ago.
Petrov refused to let it go.
His thinning hair was turning gray.
His eyes had grown pale.
He looked much better in his uniform than he did when it was discarded and lying on the floor beside her bed.
But a man woul
d always be as young, the Major insisted, as the woman lying beneath him, and Pauline knew how to turn him into a whimpering boy.
Major Petrov wore a wicked smile, the kind he always wore when he had one bottle of Stolichnaya too many.
“You sang as lovely tonight as you look,” he said, placing his arm around the shoulders of her double-breasted woolen trench coat, as red as an early evening sky before a winter storm.
Pauline smiled demurely.
She heard the same words every night.
Once they had flattered her.
Now they irritated her.
“The last song was for you,” she said.
“What was it you called the song?”
“Black Magic Woman.”
The Major laughed from deep in his belly.
“You have some black magic for me?”
“You’ll find out before morning.”
He tightened his grip around her shoulders.
The night was growing colder, and she felt the pinpricks of sleet as they slapped against her face.
A chilled wind was blowing off the river.
The Major’s face was awash with sweat.
He was KGB, Pauline had been told.
He sat with the General Council for Strategic Planning in the Ukraine territory, she was told.
Ukraine had broken away from Russia.
Ukraine would play a terrible price, he had whispered in her ear.
How many would die?
Her question had been soft and filled with fear and compassion.
Petrov only shrugged.
Death is just a number, he had said.
He and his organization of madmen had personally drawn the blueprint for the return of Ukraine to Soviet Russia.
That’s what he had said.
Pauline had no reason to doubt him.
He was the keeper of secrets.
Petrov knew what she must never know.
But late at night with his naked body quivering and swathed with Kinovsky brandy cognac, he would tell her what she must never know.
Men were men in any country, Pauline knew.
They liked to brag.
They liked to reveal their deep and innermost secrets.
It made them feel powerful.
Major Nikolay Petrov may have been powerful in some circles.
To her, he was a disgusting man.
Yellowed teeth.
His breath awash with garlic and kerosene.
Thick, curled hair covered his broad chest, matted as coarse as the scouring pad her mother had used to scrape dried food from her plates.
Pauline shivered at the mention of his name.
Rainy Night To Die Page 2