The Fourth Courier

by Timothy Jay Smith

  “But … but why?” sputtered Dravko.

  “But why?” Sergej repeated solemnly. “Because they had substituted the common man for God, and the common man—the Soviet Man—wasn’t good enough. Isn’t that the irony? So they have used my body for their experiments. I will never know how many children I have fathered. I know I have met some. I can spot a special resemblance. Of course, your perfect man already exists; he need only be a Serb. It is your country that does not exist, not as you dream it to be. Greater Serbia restored to its ancient borders! You see, Dravko, I know your dreams, I have studied you. You would do anything to give birth to your Serbia. Am I right? Am I right?”

  “You are,” Dravko admitted.

  “Ha! Of course I am! For men like you, what is it to steal from a man what can only be his? There are many forms of torture. My body, protected by the state, has been stolen from me. You break bodies, burn or discard them, but the principle is the same: the individual can be sacrificed. I wonder, Dravko, would you believe the same if you could have children?”

  “We’ve tried, but Ulia … well, she can’t conceive.”

  Sergej slapped the water. “Ha! I told you, I know everything about you. I know about your tests. I even know your sperm count! You can father no one, and while I have fathered many, we are both childless. Let us hope that your daughter, Serbia, should she be born, at least has the ability to speak.”

  “Dravko!” Ulia, standing in the doorway to his study, interrupted his thoughts. “I have been calling you for ten minutes.” She rubbed her red nose with the back of her hand. Her coarse shawl reeked of sausage.

  “I’ve been working, Dumpling,” he replied.

  “While standing at the window? Sometimes I worry about you, always daydreaming.” Ulia pulled the shawl tighter around her broad shoulders. “It’s freezing in here. With heating oil so expensive, what are you trying to do, ruin us? Shut that window and come for dinner.”

  “In a minute.”

  He heard her heavy steps on the stairs.

  “Don’t you ever dream?” he shouted after her.

  “Isn’t it enough that we are alive?” she called back. “And not for long if we catch pneumonia!”

  “Is it enough that we are alive?” he recalled Sergej asking in the thermal pool. “Not for us, Dravko. It’s not death that we fear but being erased by history if we leave nothing behind. For most men having children is enough, but not for you, Dravko, not for men of destiny.”

  “And for you? Is it enough to have been harvested? To know you have children even if you don’t know them?”

  “Of course not. I wanted to have children like most men. For years I dreamed of making love to a woman who carried away my seed gratefully, not a frowning clinician who measures my production in a test tube. And I dream to be free. To be free to take a walk, or board an airplane, and yes, to find my own women. Free to do what most men take for granted. Our dreams distinguish us, General Mladic. Mine are modest while yours are grand. Let’s talk about making them come true.”

  So they had. The physicist proposed a plan as elaborate as his design for the suitcase bomb itself. In its construction, every part was essential to the whole and no detail had been overlooked. He explained how the first three couriers would each deliver enough uranium fuel for one bomb. Dr. Ustinov himself would follow with the portable detonator, also filled with uranium. “The detonator can be reproduced as easily as making a photocopy. You shall have an arsenal. An arsenal! Ha!”

  “How will you get out of Russia?”

  “The border between Russia and Poland is forest for nearly eight hundred kilometers. Every day, hundreds of smugglers cross for a small bribe, their only hardship a pair of muddy boots.”

  “You will go to Poland? That’s nowhere near Belgrade.”

  Sergej stretched out in the pool, fluttering his hands to stay afloat, steam rising from his body. “It is true what I hear, you Serbs lack imagination. You are preparing for war, yes? And buying lots of Polish weapons.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am frequently consulted on weapons. I overhear things. So sometimes when you go to Warsaw, you will return with an extra package in your diplomatic pouch.”

  Dravko crouched to the side to avoid the physicist’s gnarly toes bobbing up to him. “If it is so easy, why haven’t you already left?”

  “I am finished with communists, even old Polish communists who now call themselves capitalists. They change their hats but have the same heads. You and I will make a trade. I give you Serbia for America. But not for beads! Ha! You must make me an American passport, and of course, I need dollars. Lots of dollars. One million American dollars.”

  They had remained in the thermal pool, rehashing the physicist’s plan until their fingers were waterlogged and every detail committed to memory. Sergej had even second-guessed Dravko’s misgivings as if fashioning failsafe mechanisms for his suitcase bomb. “Drrravko, who will be able to stop you? No one will even challenge you. Then, all who are not Serbs, they will be yours to do with as you want.”

  Dravko felt himself stir as only interrogations could stir him, and he became aroused, remembering bodies in his tortuous hands. So distracted was he by his recollections that when Sergej abruptly stood, saying, “It’s time we go, the days are growing short,” Dravko jumped up as well, momentarily forgetting the swagging heaviness below his paunch.

  Seeing him, the physicist had exclaimed, “Look at you! Are you not the father of Serbia?”

  “Dravko!” Ulia cried from the kitchen. “Your sausage will be cold!”

  “I’m coming!”

  Dravko went to the closet where he had concealed the three canisters delivered by the couriers. The seal on the third had been broken and he opened it, rolling a uranium pellet in his palm, marveling that something so inert could be the genesis of a dream so grand.

  “Dravko! I’m not waiting for you!”

  “I’m coming now, Dumpling!”

  He replaced the pellet and hurried downstairs, suddenly hungry.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ADOORMAN DRESSED IN BLUE livery held the door open to a bitter wind that stung Jay’s cheeks. He gripped his briefcase, heavy with Detective Kulski’s files, and ventured onto the slippery sidewalk.

  Shopkeepers struggled to lift shutters that had frozen tight during the night. Streetcars, squealing to stops, disgorged riders frowning at the new day. On the corner, an old man, his bristly moustache yellowed by tobacco, turned roasting chestnuts with his callused fingers. Jay bought some and ate them while wandering through the open market that filled the enormous parking lot surrounding the Palace of Culture.

  The long-feared Russian invasion of Poland had occurred, not by soldiers but by an army of vendors who sold Soviet military paraphernalia: caps with hammer-and-sickle insignias, battalion watches and medals, and whiskey flasks emblazoned with Lenin’s silhouette. They stood behind flimsy tables bundled against the cold as people as poor as themselves bargained for goods they would resell in more upscale neighborhoods—if they were lucky, to Westerners who had made Soviet-wear chic.

  Situated on otherwise elegant Aleje Ujazdowskie, the American embassy looked like an ice cube tray on steroids. The guard noticed a bulge in Jay’s coat pocket and was satisfied to let him pass for a couple of still-warm chestnuts; the receptionist, also happy with her bribe, buzzed him in.

  His caffeine addiction steered him straight to the coffee machine. As he sipped, he looked over a bulletin board with advertisements for baby cribs, retirement seminars, and depression therapy. A young woman rounded the corner and bumped into him, sloshing coffee on his fingers.

  “I’m so sorry!” she cried, her hands fluttering to her mouth like birds.

  “That’s okay.” He set down his cup to reach for a paper towel. “The coffee’s not very hot anyway.” It was true. Just like the day before, the coffee was tepid, weak, and almost not worth drinking.

  “Here, let me.” Grabbing for the towe
l, she sent his cup into the sink. She gasped and her hands flew to her straw-colored hair, which was escaping its bun. Her mouth revealed, improbably, a full set of metal braces.

  Jay declined when she offered him a new cup, so she took it for herself. She added three sugar packets, followed by a dose of powdered non-dairy creamer. She raised her shoulders in a reflexive apology. “I’m lactose intolerant.”

  Jay extended his hand. “I’m Jay Porter.”

  She laughed. “Libby Barnstable,” she said, wiping her palm on her dress before taking his hand. “You must be the FBI guy. And, if you’re wondering, I am his daughter.”

  “I know. I was briefed before I left Washington.”

  “About me?” She looked worried.

  “About the embassy. It’s standard procedure.”

  “Oh.” Libby reached into one of her many pockets to pull out a wrinkled tissue and sneezed into it. “Allergies,” she said, again lifting her shoulders as if hoping she could drop right into her oversized dress and disappear.

  At twenty-four, Libby Barnstable was thought to be the youngest Consul General in the State Department’s history, a distinction she had achieved through loving nepotism. She came from high Pentagon brass and happened to be in Warsaw when her predecessor was fired; in fact, her father had probably wielded the hatchet from afar to square the job for her. The standing joke was that she had all the qualifications she needed except experience, temperament, constitution, and initiative.

  Jay gave her an ingratiating smile. “You wouldn’t happen to know where my office is, would you?”

  “I saw them moving some boxes to make room for you. Follow me.” Libby led him through intersecting hallways filled with humming copiers and warbling faxes. “Are you enjoying Warsaw?”

  “What’s not to enjoy? Snow, grit, and ice—it has them all.”

  “It’s tough to get used to, I know. It’s not for everybody.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” he finally replied. “I said it had—”

  “Snow, grit, and ice.” Libby smiled, displaying her braces fully for the first time. Jay wondered where, in a country with an orthodontically disadvantaged population, Libby had found an orthodontist, or if her father flew her home periodically. She swung open a door. “Voilà. Your new office.”

  Jay stepped into what was little more than a long cubbyhole. Shiny squares on the otherwise dusty floor indicated where boxes had been removed to make a path to the desk. “It’s cozy,” he remarked and crossed to the grimy window. It nearly filled the wall. Outside, large flakes of snow drifted down.

  He turned back, saw the phone on the desk, picked up the receiver.

  “Dial eight for an outside line,” Libby told him.

  He did; it worked, and he hung up.

  “The men’s room is at the end of the hall to the left. My office is there, too.”

  “Then I imagine I’ll be seeing you.” Jay fished out the bag of chestnuts from his coat pocket and handed over what remained of them. “I owe you. Thanks.”

  As soon as she left, he spread Kulski’s files on the desk. The detective had been thorough, translating into decent English the pathologist’s estimates for the victims’ ages, heights, and times of death. A detailed inventory of clothing had been included. All tags had been removed, as had the victims’ wedding bands, evidenced by a paler circle of flesh. Someone didn’t want these men traced. Kulski had added a note to the third victim’s file:

  18 February 1992 – During autopsy by Dr. Z. Nagorski, Geiger Machine makes determination of radiation present.

  His telephone rang.

  It was Kulski. He wanted to meet.

  Ten minutes later Jay was in an embassy car rumbling across the Poniatowski Bridge with its metal pillars flashing past. Craning to look over the rail, he saw the river’s black tail disappear in the distance. “This is the Praga side,” his driver, the same man who taken him to the airport, informed him as they pulled off the bridge. “You want to be careful on this side.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Praga has many elements.”

  “Elements?”

  “You want a gun? A girl? Pills to make you crazy? Whatever you want, you can find here,” the driver elaborated.

  “Oh, those elements,” Jay said, getting out of the car in front of a building familiar for its Soviet-era indistinctiveness. He told the driver not to wait and went inside.

  A receptionist directed him up a flight of stairs to Kulski’s office. There, too, the hallways were lined with padded doors, outside of which the town’s scoundrels and petitioners sat docilely on benches waiting to be summoned. Violence didn’t spill into these premises like it did in America’s police stations.

  The detective’s secretary stood to greet him. Nothing about her bleached hair or snug leotard suggested she worked in a police station. “You are the FBI?” she asked, clearly impressed.

  “I am, or at least a part of it.”

  “I will tell Detective Kulski that you are here.” She put her hand up to knock when his door swung open.

  “Good morning, Agent Porter.” He reached for Jay’s hand. “Thanks for coming on short notice.”

  “Not a problem. I’m glad you have some time.”

  “Time,” Kulski sighed, “there is never enough of it. Will you try another Polish coffee?”

  “I’ll give it another chance.”

  “Eva, dwie kawy proszę,” the detective said, and with a clap on Jay’s back steered him into his office.

  A bulletin board filled one wall. On it, the detective had pinned a large map with the Vistula River running diagonally through its center. On the Praga side, he’d drawn three red dots, with lines attaching them to photos of the victims as well as artist sketches without their mutilated cheeks. Dates and times of death had been noted with a marker pen. It was gruesome art that Jay knew too well. Crime boards came with the job.

  Kulski limped around his desk and dropped into the chair. Behind him on a credenza were pictures of his family: his wife, a stout woman with a ruddy, pleasant face; two young daughters, chubby-cheeked and blonde; and the whole family in hiking clothes with a mountain peak looming in the background. Next to a collection of sports trophies, Kulski had framed a snapshot of his younger self in a soccer jersey.

  “Looks like a nice family,” Jay commented.

  “Thank you.”

  “And sporty.”

  The detective smiled. “Yes, we enjoy hiking.”

  “You can manage with your leg?”

  “Hiking I can do but not soccer. Elzbieta, she’s my older girl, has a better—” Kulski interrupted himself to ask, “Is it correct, ‘footwork’?”

  “Exactly right.”

  “She has a better footwork than me. She is only ten, and already wants to go to the Olympics!”

  “You sound like a proud father.”

  “I am. You have two sons, is that right?”

  “Did I mention them?”

  “I was informed.”

  Jay felt at a disadvantage. He knew nothing about Detective Kulski other than his name and the fact that he was heading the investigation into the murdered couriers. When the communists were finally routed, it happened too swiftly, and too broadly, for the West to have intelligence on someone so far down the new hierarchy as a chief detective in a police precinct. But apparently the Polish intelligence apparatus was still as efficient as its reputation and had learned something about the FBI expert coming to help them. Did Kulski know about the other murder cases Jay had investigated? His couple of years in Army intelligence? Or that his two sons were being held captive by his now ex-wife following an ugly divorce? Those were the kinds of things he’d like to have known about the detective.

  Eva tapped on the door and entered, set a tray with their coffees onto Kulski’s desk, and slipped back out.

  “The trick to our coffee is always use sugar, and never stir it,” he advised Jay. By example, he dropped two cubes into his cup and look
ed at it expectantly. “You wait until you think the sugar is dissolved.”

  “I don’t usually take sugar.”

  “Then you will never like our national coffee.”

  Jay compromised and took one cube. The detective opened his bottom desk drawer to prop his foot on it.

  “What happened to your leg?” Jay asked.

  “I was arrested three times. The last time, three goons with steeltoed boots took their turns breaking it. It was a week before a doctor came. It couldn’t be set properly.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He wasn’t there, though I prayed to Him—to anybody—until I was too feverish to pray.”

  “Why’d they break your leg?”

  “They said because they were tired of arresting me. They wanted me to stop doing what I was doing.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Handing out flyers for demonstrations.”

  “They broke your leg for that?”

  “When it happened, I confess, I was not so philosophical. Now I can say, it was a small price for freedom.” The detective tested his coffee. “You can drink it now.”

  Jay took a sip, grimaced, and suggested, “You’re busy, so let’s get started.”

  They ran through what was already known: three couriers, faces slashed, a single bullet to the heart. Cleaned up, dressed again, and left on the riverbank. Were they actually displayed? The bodies hadn’t been dumped, so both men agreed there was some element of display. “Do you agree with Pani Husarska that they’re Russians?” Jay asked.

  “I am not one hundred percent sure, but I think yes.”

  “If not Russians, where would you guess?”

  “I will only guess not Polish. Our national police receive information about missing people from every district. We have no match with the victims.”

  “What if they are not reported missing?”

  “We are small for a big country. Someone will always recognize someone from a picture in the newspaper.”