The Fourth Courier

by Timothy Jay Smith

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  AN USHER HAD GUIDED THEM down the center aisle and given them programs. Lilka was thrilled by their good seats. They watched as people filled the red velvet rows that rose to the black vaulted ceiling. The lights dimmed. To applause, the conductor took his stand and lifted his baton. The last whispers evaporated. He struck the air, unleashing runaway strings. The curtain opened to reveal a romantic cottage in Japan. Jay didn’t have to search for her hand; she had it ready for him. In song, Butterfly prayed for her captain to return, but prayers answered are not always blessings, and when he did return it was to take their son; certainly, she must understand, a better life waited for him over the horizon. Lilka pulled more tissues from her purse long before their ill-fated love entirely played out. In the opera’s final moments, her chest heaved with stifled sobs. Jay, too, was moved. He had forgotten that the opera was as much a custody battle as a tragic love story.

  The audience clamored their approval. The hall lights rose, and around them, more than a few sniffles were extinguished. A final wail of appreciation rose from the crowd, and the cast came forward and bowed a last time. Their tears brought forth a great communal sob. Then a collective sigh escaped, the sadness gave way, and the audience, now chattering, gathered itself to leave.

  Leaving the theater, Lilka said, “It was perfect. Thank you. But sad, yes? The American thinks Cio-cio-san is only a toy, but she loves him very much. Their cultures are so different, they can’t understand each other.”

  “Do you understand me when I say I want to invite you home?”

  “Your home in America?”

  “My home at my hotel. I have caviar. ‘Only five American dollars.’”

  She smiled. “I remember.”

  “And I’ll order French champagne.”

  “It sounds romantic.”

  “Good. Where did you park?”

  “At your hotel. I thought it was practical.”

  “Practical?”

  “In case you invite me home.”

  Lilka wanted to walk to the hotel. The icy air was refreshing. They crossed the broad square and detoured down smart Nowy Świat, where the first wave of post-communist shops were struggling to survive in a blistering economy. She guided them to a terrace in a wooded area overlooking the river where they leaned over the balustrade to see headlights flicker on the midnight water. Jay wrapped his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck.

  “My father taught me all the stars,” Lilka said. “We went camping every summer, and it was my favorite game to find them. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, the sky?”

  “The notion of infinity actually frightens me,” Jay admitted. “Maybe more than anything else.”

  “You are a lucky man, then.”

  “I am tonight.”

  She turned in his arms and their mouths opened to their own language. How long they stood there they couldn’t say, but by the time they next looked, the stars had disappeared. “It’s going to rain,” Lilka murmured, but they didn’t leave their spot until the first icy drops tormented them.

  A taxi passed and they ran for it and made it to Jay’s hotel and into his room. Again their mouths sought each other. His fingers fumbled with the buttons on her purple dress while she undid his belt. Their clothes fell silently to the floor. They sank onto the bed, legs entwined, exhausting themselves for the first of many times that night until the telephone rang.

  It was Kulski. There had been another murder.

  The fourth courier.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ONCE THE ROPES PREVENTED HIS plunging into the murky, swirling river, Jay struggled to stand back up on the slippery gangplank. When he saw the light go out in the houseboat, he looked back around to where the fourth courier’s body had fallen. It was easy to spot by a telltale piece of incident tape twisting in the wind. If whoever was in the houseboat was home the night before, he only had to look out a window to witness the murder.

  Rocked by the wind, the boat strained at its moorings as Jay lurched onto the deck. He knocked on a door, and when no one answered, he knocked again before brushing snow off its window to peer inside. It wasn’t a lamp that had been turned off, but a lantern, flickering because its battery was dying. Was it evidence of a hasty departure? Who forgot to turn off a battery-powered light? Mail lay scattered on the desk, which Jay wanted to look at, and he was pondering the consequences of not having a search warrant under Polish law when he pressed down on the door handle. It gave way.

  “You! Stop!” The shout was in Polish but its meaning unmistakable. He followed the words back to shore, where a policeman tried to wave him off the houseboat. “Policja!” he cried.

  “Me too policja,” he shouted back and flashed his FBI badge. “Amerikanski policja! Detective Kulski!”

  Jay ducked inside and made a quick inventory of the room: an armchair, a desk, a roughly made bed. A man lived there, he guessed by the clothing tossed about, and he was single because of the absence of anything remotely feminine. In the corner stood a spotting scope. The Vistula’s errant seagulls were hardly exotic enough to warrant such an elegant spyglass. Jay suspected he was a Peeping Tom with an eye on Lovers’ Lane. Maybe Kulski had a Peeping Witness, too, because this Tom had had a view of the last murder—if he’d been looking.

  He heard the policeman slip on the gangplank and glanced to make sure he hadn’t fallen in the river. He hadn’t; the ropes had caught him as well. In two steps, Jay was at the little desk. The mail had been sent to addresses across the United States, and to names as equally varied. A Trent living in Atlantic City had morphed into a Thomas in Las Vegas or a Terry in Tucson. Jay shuffled through the envelopes. Most were bills with nothing more personal than solicitations for cruises and health magazines. Yet someone was forwarding it to the houseboat resident.

  The policeman picked himself up. “Hey you!” he shouted.

  Jay looked around for the envelope that had been used to forward the mail.

  “Hey you!”

  He found the manila envelope in the trash—

  “Hey you!”

  —and stuffed it into his coat pocket just as the policeman arrived at the door.

  Jay raised his hands. “English?”

  “A little. You go outside!”

  “I work with Detective Kulski.”

  “Detective Kulski told me.” The cop pointed to a sheltered spot under the bridge. “I am watching from there.”

  Good. Kulski already had the houseboat staked out.

  The cop followed him up the service ramp and waited until he flagged down a taxi. He slipped into the back seat, glad for the heater’s warmth. Jay had been in Warsaw less than a week, yet the streets already had a familiar feel. Perhaps it was their bleak monochromy—gray sidewalks, gray buildings, gray faces, gray sky—that made it seem like he had been there much longer. A red banner, curling in the wind outside a high window, caught his eye, much as a red kerchief once had in Shanghai, curling behind a fast-pedaling girl in a sea of black bikes, black clothes, black hair. Its rebelliousness had been so blatant that Jay had worried for her. Straining to see the red banner unfurl overhead, he glimpsed its revolutionary message in a single rippling word: Solidarność. Solidarity.

  Outside the embassy, he sorted through the deflated currency and handed the taxi driver a careless wad. The guard, relentlessly following orders, checked his passport again. Jay earnestly needed to pee, but without more chestnuts to bribe the receptionist, she took her time clearing him. He nearly jogged to the men’s room.

  Kurt arrived just as he did.

  “You look more urgent,” he said, and opened the door for him.

  “Thanks.”

  Ambassador Lerner was already at the middle urinal. Jay went to his left and Kurt took the right. “Looks like a full house,” the diplomat remarked.

  “A full bladder, that’s for sure,” Jay told him.

  Kurt said, “I’m just along for the ride.”

&
nbsp; They all stared at the wall in front of them. Jay was musing whether there was a particular etiquette for urinating while touching elbows with an ambassador when the senior diplomat drawled, “Are you enjoying yourself, Porter?”

  “Sir?”

  “I know what it’s like being on the road with more than time on your hands.” He zipped up and clapped Jay’s shoulder hard enough to disturb his aim. “There are some pretty women in this country. I hope it’s not all work.”

  Kurt glanced at Jay’s splattered shoes and grinned at him.

  They all converged on the sink.

  “There was another murder last night,” Jay told them.

  Pulling out a paper towel, Lerner asked, “A fourth courier?”

  “The assumption is yes.”

  The ambassador tossed away his paper towel. “You men grab yourselves some coffee and be in my office in ten minutes.”

  Embassy coffee was about the last thing Jay wanted but it was the first thing he needed. There hadn’t been a cup in sight from the moment he’d been summoned to view the dead body on the riverbank. He filled a cup halfway with the scorched coffee and returned to the ambassador’s office. Kurt was on his heels and shut the door behind them.

  Ambassador Lerner waited for them to settle in the chairs facing his desk. “I’ll be goddamned if there hasn’t been another murder.” Looking at Kurt, he emphasized, “And Mladic is back in town. Unfortunately our intelligence agencies don’t think it’s intelligent to share their secrets. We don’t call that intelligent where I come from. Porter has need-to-know clearance from me.”

  “General Dravko Mladic heads up Yugoslavia’s Security Service,” Kurt began. “He comes to Warsaw on a regular basis, a little too often for diplomacy even if his job entails browbeating his fellow Slavs to support his Serbian cause. It’s Langley’s guess that he’s our weapons buyer.”

  “Why is this need-to-know for me?”

  “Mladic has been in town for every murder,” the ambassador said.

  “So were a million other people.”

  “Mladic arrived yesterday around five,” Kurt replied.

  “You think he’s the killer?”

  “It’s doubtful that he’s the actual hatchet man, but the pattern is too coincidental. He arrives Monday, the murders happen that night, and he leaves Tuesday.”

  “Presumably leaving with whatever the couriers brought him in his diplomatic pouch?” Jay asked.

  “That’s how we think he brings in the cash to pay for weapons, too. With the nuclear angle, it’s all the more likely that Mladic is involved. Nuclear blackmail is persuasive if you’re trying to grab as much land as possible for a new country. He’d only have to set off one device to claim whatever territory he wanted.”

  “If he tries, that fight will spread faster than fire in an oil field,” the ambassador remarked. “He might as well declare World War III.”

  “That’s why Langley is worried. A conventional war can be contained, but nukes in the hands of a megalomaniac? It could easily become global.”

  “How do you figure Mladic and the murders?”

  “That’s your case, but it’s obvious they’re disposable. Single use,” Kurt said. “Does he even know that they’re being killed?”

  “How couldn’t he know?” the ambassador asked.

  Kurt shrugged. “In the weapons world, there are scenarios we can’t predict until they happen.”

  “How close are your tabs on him?”

  “We know when he’s here, when he leaves, and when he has an appointment at PENZIK. He stays at the former lodge where the Party used to put up its nomenklatura. Make that a whorehouse complete with red flocked wallpaper. That was one perk the Party men gladly bestowed upon themselves. Some of the guys from the past still like to stay there. A couple of times women have been seen entering or leaving the place when we know he’s there, but the place is a swinging door for old whores, and we don’t know whose room they’re going to. They only stay long enough to fuck, so we assume that’s what’s happening.”

  “What about the nights of the murders? Does he have an alibi?”

  “He’s been at the Marriott’s bar the night of every murder. We have spotters there almost every evening. It’s flashy and Western, and anyone in town who’s vaguely important wants to be seen having a drink there.”

  “It’s where business takes place,” Carl elaborated. “Plus, it has the only restaurant that actually has what it offers on the menu.”

  “Mladic isn’t a big-time socializer,” Kurt added, “so his showing up at the Marriott is odd.”

  “Like he wants to be seen,” Jay said.

  “Or talk it up with a particular barman who happens to work Monday nights.”

  “Do you make something of that?”

  “Reportedly, General Mladic enjoys torturing boys more than he should. My pop psychologist says he’s a self-loathing homosexual, and there’s a whole profile on the type to back me up.”

  The ambassador grunted. “Nationalist, pederast, torturer—all in one. A real Serbian success story.”

  “A success story we don’t want him to build on,” Kurt said. “He’s booked on the evening flight. We need to find a way to keep him here.”

  “We can’t exactly hogtie him,” the ambassador muttered.

  “Play to his ego,” Jay suggested. “Invite him for a diplomatic têteà-tête with the future president of a new Serbia.”

  “Maybe you FBI boys got a way to goose the system, but it’ll take me days to get State’s clearance, especially to meet with a pariah like Mladic.” Carl looked exasperated.

  “Then just do it,” Kurt advised. “If you save the world, no one will care about clearances.”

  “Once he’s gone, he’s gone,” Jay added.

  “Ah hell, I know you’re right. Now get the hell out of my office while I figure a way to cover my ass while shooting myself in the foot. That’s some gymnastics I’m not used to.”

  As Jay passed Millie’s desk, she stopped him. “Oh Mr. Potter, here are your messages.”

  “Remember your clue-minder, Millie. I’m Mr. Porter, the man with the lost baggage.”

  “Your baggage is lost?” she asked.

  “Was lost. Past tense.” He looked at the first message. “The autopsy is at four,” he told Kurt.

  “You have all the fun.”

  “And Lilka’s brother-in-law called to confirm an appointment on Thursday. He’s applied for a visa and I offered to try to help.”

  “Is Lilka the hennaed brunette?”

  “How do you know she’s brunette?”

  Kurt could hardly hold back his smile. “The same way we track everybody.”

  Out of Millie’s earshot, Jay said, “I suppose I need to report an infraction of the fraternization rule.”

  “Technically it’s no longer an infraction, only a precaution.”

  “Trust me, it was an infraction.”

  Kurt laughed. “Don’t share the details, just her name.”

  “Lilka. Lilka Rypinska.”

  “Lilka Rypinska. Where does she live?”

  Jay admitted he didn’t know.

  “And you’re helping her brother-in-law get a visa to the US?”

  “He’s a decent guy. Besides, he can quote JFK’s entire inauguration speech.”

  “If she’s Rypinska, her husband would be Rypinski, that’s how they do male and female names here.”

  “Ex-husband. His name is Jacek.”

  “I’ll dump her name into the system and see if anything pops up.”

  They arrived at Jay’s office.

  “I’ll put together a file on Mladic for you,” Kurt offered. “He’s in an interesting position. Quasi-government, quasi-military with control of a heavily armed security force with fierce loyalty to him.”

  “Not someone who should get an A-bomb.”

  “Let’s make sure he doesn’t.”

  Back in his office, Jay pulled out the manila envelope he’d snatched
from the houseboat. He flattened it on his desk. It was addressed to “Tomasz Tomski c/o Poste Restante.” That had to be the houseboat person’s real name, because he needed official ID to pick up his letters. Excited by possibly having a witness, he glanced at his watch to decide if he should call Ann Rewls at the office or home. It was far too early for her to be at the office, but he was so out of sync with time—it seemed impossible to have been in Lilka’s arms and on a dead man’s riverbank before the same noon—that he didn’t realize quite how early it was. He dialed her home number.

  It rang once.

  It was five in the morning her time.

  He hung up and stared at the phone guiltily.

  It rang.

  He picked it up. “How did you know it was me?”

  “No one else calls in the middle of the night and hangs up.”

  “I forgot the time difference.”

  “What is it, Jay, you want to tell me about your date last night?”

  “How did you know about my date last night?”

  “I was guessing.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Noise Machine has a cold and you’re making love to a woman who, knowing your taste, is very beautiful.”

  “Are you looking for a compliment?’

  “From you, only a pat on the head and another couple hours’ sleep.”

  “I’ll call back later.”

  “I’m awake. Besides, I feel guilty waking up Noise Machine to tell him to roll over again.”

  “Then hopefully this is something you can do in your sleep. See what you can find on this guy: Tomasz Tomski. I’ll spell it for you.” He did, then explained the circumstances surrounding the envelope.

  “Taking evidence from a crime scene doesn’t sound exactly legal,” Ann reminded him.

  “I solve my cases, don’t I? I’ve got more names for you. They’re what I can remember from the letters sent in the bigger envelope.”

  Jay recited what he recalled. When he finished, she commented, “The guy has a thing about Ts, doesn’t he?”

  “Maybe it makes it easier to remember so many names.”

  “It would make it harder for me.” Ann yawned and said, “If I imagine Ned’s snoring as white noise, sometimes I can put myself back to sleep.”