The Fourth Courier

by Timothy Jay Smith

  He placed the three cigarettes in a clear plastic bag and debated what to do. If he suggested DNA testing at headquarters, would Kulski be obliged to notify Basia? How to suggest it without confessing his suspicions of her? And if Kulski and Basia were in cahoots, what then?

  The detective entered the room.

  Jay decided to trust him and showed him the cigarettes he’d bagged. “Looks like the same smoker to me. Same brand, same lipstick. She was hanging around a long time on a cold night.”

  “Tommy said the woman was smoking.”

  “If we get a DNA match, it might help us later.”

  “Can it be done in Washington? We haven’t such labs in Poland.”

  “Will you need to clear it with Director Husarska?”

  Kulski handed back the baggie. “She can only say yes.”

  “Good. They’ll be in DC by tomorrow. I’ve been wondering, Detective, how do you think the couriers have come to Warsaw? Airports are too secure and a bus too slow. Trains?”

  “From the border it might be a bus or a train. Or a private driver.”

  “Which it probably is, if it’s a smuggling operation. But if somebody did get off a train from Russia, he’s probably hungry or used the john, and maybe somebody remembers seeing him.”

  “It’s a good suggestion.”

  “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve met someone whose son has a problem with drugs. Heroin. Is there a way for him to get help without getting into trouble?”

  “I must ask. It is a new problem for us, too. We expected only miracles, never so many problems. There is a price to freedom, isn’t there?”

  “Is it freedom or capitalism, Detective? The drug dealers are motivated by greed; freedom only makes it easier for them to operate.” Jay crumpled up the butcher paper and discarded it. “I’m finished here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  LILKA, HURRYING, TRIPPED AND STUMBLED into the arms of a teacher leaving his classroom. “Oh Mr. Czarniecki!” she cried. “Are you all right?” She reached out to steady the ancient professor.

  “Are you still running through the halls, Lilka? Let me guess, you’re late.”

  “For Tadzu’s recital! I don’t want to miss the start.”

  “Then take off your shoes and run like you used to!”

  Lilka laughed brightly. “I’m too old for that now. Are you coming?”

  “Much more slowly, my dear, much more slowly.”

  Lilka bounded up the stairs two at a time, just as she had when late for class, which was almost always. The double doors to the music room stood open to reveal a piano on stage before a dozen rows of collapsible chairs. Wooden buttresses added grace to the otherwise simple room. When a student herself, Lilka had loved to stand in the hall and listen to the orchestra practice. She tried to learn the violin, until the neighbors’ complaints embarrassed her into quitting, but she never lost her love of music. After her classmates finished practice, she would come into this room and in the silence summon their perfect measures and rousing choruses.

  Alina beckoned her from near the front. “Scoot over,” she said to Tolek when Lilka came up. “Let her sit next to me.”

  “Isn’t this exciting?” exclaimed Lilka. “Tadzu, having his own recital!”

  Alina squeezed her sister’s hand. “I’m so nervous!”

  “And there are so many people. Like he’s a rock star!”

  “Maybe in America,” scoffed Tolek.

  “Then would you approve of his playing piano?” Lilka asked.

  “I approve of his music.”

  “Not as much as you should,” Alina said, knowing she was taking a chance with Tolek’s mood.

  He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Not the Wolnik sisters ganging up on me again! I give up!”

  They all laughed.

  “We have visas for America,” Tolek said proudly.

  “Alina told me. Are you really going?”

  At that moment, the music instructor appeared on stage. He ran a finger under his collar as he waited for the audience to hush. “We will be starting in ten minutes. My apologies for the short delay.”

  “I hope nothing is wrong,” worried Alina.

  “Nothing is wrong,” Tolek assured her. “In fact, it’s a relief—I need to find the WC.”

  He made his way to the aisle and left the women.

  Lilka squeezed her sister’s hand. “I’ll be so lonely without you.”

  “I never thought it would happen,” sighed Alina. “Why should America want Tolek?”

  “Because he’s the most wonderful and loving man on the planet.”

  “He is, isn’t he? But that wasn’t a job category on the application.”

  “You’re lucky, Alina, yet you always worry, I don’t know why. Going to America, now there’s a dream the whole world dreams, and you’re unhappy! Be happy!”

  “You’re certainly cheerful,” said Alina. “Is it because of Jay? He’s very nice.”

  “Did you think so?”

  “He likes you.”

  “He treats me nice.”

  “Oh Lilka, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you married him and moved to America, and we could be together!”

  “We can’t both leave Mama and Papa.”

  “I wish it were you going and not me. I can imagine you happy in America. You would like the excitement.”

  “Alina, you are going to be sad in America, aren’t you? Now I feel guilty asking Jay for his help.”

  “You didn’t, I did.”

  “Can’t you tell Tolek you really don’t want to go?”

  “Do you think I haven’t? It’s been his dream forever. I married him knowing that.”

  “Does Tadzu want to go?”

  “He’s afraid Tolek will make him quit his music.”

  “He wouldn’t, would he?” Lilka sensed her sister’s reluctance to answer. “What is it, Alina?”

  “Tadzu’s teacher thinks he will be ready for the competitions in a couple of years. He won’t have the same chance in America.”

  “Tolek always says there are so many more opportunities there.”

  Alina sighed. “So Tadzu will have the opportunity to become an astronaut. I am not sure that I want my son flying to the moon.”

  Lilka laughed. “Is that Tolek’s newest idea?”

  “It might as well be, he asks so much of Tadzu. He’s only a boy. If only Tolek understood better. If he heard his music, the way I do. He plays only for his father. If they’ve argued, I hear his anger, and if not, then his love. He continues his conversations with his father on the piano, saying what he can’t say because he’s still just a boy, only Tolek doesn’t hear it. He’s not listening.”

  “He only wants the best for Tadzu.”

  “I don’t argue that the boy should try to be the best, only he has to be the one who chooses what he does.”

  Lilka sighed. “I’m worried about Aleks. He hasn’t been home all week. I think he’s at the river, but you know Jacek, he won’t tell just to be mean. Alina …” Lilka’s voice cracked, and she found a tissue in her purse. “Aleks is using heroin.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Jacek told me.”

  “Of course he would tell you that, anything to hurt you.”

  “I’m afraid to go to the river to look for him. Those dogs … and I hate that man Billy!”

  “Tolek can go with you.”

  “Do you think he would?”

  “Would I what?” asked Tolek, returning.

  “Help Lilka find Aleks.”

  “I didn’t know he was lost.”

  “Be serious,” Alina chided him, “she’s worried. Maybe you could take her to the mechanic’s shack tomorrow. She thinks he’s there.”

  Tolek begrudgingly accepted the task. “If you remember the way.”

  The music instructor reappeared and the audience hushed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he addressed them, “this is a very speci
al evening for our school, and for our fine young maestro, Tadzu Kuron. It is Master Kuron’s first public recital, and we have no doubt that this very, very gifted young man will play before many audiences in his lifetime. Are his parents in the audience?”

  Shyly Alina raised her hand.

  “Stand! Stand!” he prompted, and Alina and Tolek stood to polite applause. “You should be immensely proud of your son. And now, I will let Tadzu Kuron speak for himself. Or rather, play for himself.”

  The boy approached the piano bench. He took a short bow, using the moment to scan the audience and find his parents. He quickly averted his eyes; the smile he had for them was a private one. He sat at the piano and stared at the page of music propped before him. A last cough, a cleared throat, a chair’s squeak. The crackle of a candy wrapper. Tadzu arched his hands over the keyboard, and when the audience stilled, he started to play. The boy paid little attention to the printed music, having memorized the piece, a favorite Mozart sonata of his father’s. He played passionately and confidently. He played with his heart, and Tolek heard him. Tears came to his eyes. One spilled down a cheek, and then another. The women, too, had to dab their eyes, hearing Tadzu’s love song.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE STIFF WIND BLEW SPRAY across the abandoned promenade.

  A beer sign banged against the side of a kiosk. Basia drew her coat tighter. Ahead of her the dimly lit houseboat rolled in the water. She balanced herself using the gangplank’s guide ropes and managed to reach the tilting deck. She came around the deckhouse windows. Inside, Tommy was getting stoned and didn’t see her. He jumped when she knocked, quickly snuffing out his joint.

  He came to the door and opened it wider when he saw it was a woman. Her open fur revealed breasts pressed into something lowslung and legs still good enough for black mesh. He had made love to far less sexy women.

  “Are you Tomasz Tomski?” Her voice was hoarse, seductive. She strutted into the room. “Your uncle thought you might be getting lonely.”

  Tommy couldn’t take his eyes from her. “My uncle?”

  “Perhaps I got the message wrong.”

  “You’re in the right place.”

  “Then come here.” Basia opened her arms to embrace him.

  He slipped his hands under her coat. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Charon.”

  “Karen?”

  “Close enough.”

  He fondled her.

  She pretended to enjoy it. For a moment.

  Then pulled Kulski’s P-83 from her purse and, to Tommy’s eternal mystification, shot him between the eyes.

  A clean black hole.

  The back of his head dropped like a smashed melon.

  She discharged a second shot into an easy chair.

  Then dropped the gun over the rail and fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE POLISH BOYS WERE SO much freer than Dravko had ever have imagined boys could be. They were men to be sure, but their lack of inhibition in the steam room, indeed their playfulness, revealed youthful indiscretion. Their easiness of purpose, and frank lust for it, unsettled Dravko at first, as if by proximity their sinfulness might taint him, or mark him; yet they bore nothing that damned them. Gradually he grew accustomed to their inquisitive stares and adjustments of a towel for his benefit. They were harmless passes, baited hooks designed to snare the hungry fish, not the merely curious.

  Sex had always been a guilty affair for Dravko. Like his youthful peers, he had craved an introduction to its mystery; yet once experienced, he fretted that he had missed something. All that preambled hoopla for a bestial—and, if truth be told, messy—act, his first time consummated at nineteen with a neighbor’s wife twice his age. With his rite of passage, Dravko could more easily conjure the sex act and daydreamed about his male friends in lovemaking’s rigor, the panting and humping and sweating, the clenched buttocks and rising shoulders of ejaculatory abandon. Never once did he imagine the sighing, satisfied girls; never once their painted fingers pressed to a lover’s back, their rumps rising in exhilaration, their sweet whispered words commanding more. At school, and later in military training, he observed his friends in the gymnasium, and it was images of their downy asses and pendulous manhoods that he took to bed at night and woke with in the mornings. Yet his father, church, and god all condemned him each time he muted his satisfied cries, tissues in one hand, his cock in the other. They condemned him each time he imagined a man naked. The curves of their buttocks or bulges were enough for Dravko to dream of acts each sufficiently reviled to forever damn him. His guilt tortured him.

  The door opened, and the African emerged from the roiling steam, a shadow taking form as it drew closer. He sat next to Dravko, untucking his towel in an easy movement and draping it between his legs. Other men, seated on the tiers of white tiles, stared curiously before resuming their conversations.

  “Hello, General.” Kurt dropped a hand on his thigh. His long, exploratory fingers made Dravko shiver. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

  The general’s hand tentatively touched Kurt where his towel revealed a stretch of black thigh.

  “You are shy, aren’t you?” Kurt’s fingers felt his hardening cock. “But not that shy. Maybe we should take care of that before we talk business.”

  They tucked their towels at their waists and left the steam room. Kurt led them down a short hall lined with cubbyhole rooms. Dimly lit, they were all taken by pairs of men in such varied positions it seemed to Dravko that the secret pornography of his mind had come to life; as if the acts he alone had imagined were being realized on a stage. He trembled, overwhelmed by his power to shape reality, for Dravko had no doubt that these men existed because of his dreams.

  “Looks like a full house,” said Kurt, breaking into his thoughts. “Let’s try the showers.”

  Dravko followed him to the shower stalls.

  The water ran over them. Kurt readied his prey, for Dravko was prey: a something, not someone, to outmaneuver until he could pounce. After some short-shrifted foreplay that employed a bar of soap, Dravko acquiesced when Kurt turned him to the wall, aware of his intent. “This might hurt at first,” he warned, but pain was a door to Dravko’s ecstasy. He let Kurt stretch his arms into a cross and barely whimpered when he entered him.

  Kurt moved gently in him and Dravko gasped with pleasure. He put his mouth to the general’s ear and said, “Now let’s talk business.”

  “Wha-a-a-t?” Dravko replied in a pinched voice.

  Kurt maintained his slow, steady rhythm. “We want to help you. I want to help you, but I need to know who to work with here.”

  “It’s impossible.” Dravko could hardly breathe.

  The African, pressing deeper into him, sent a shock wave through him. “We can help you, General, you heard the ambassador.”

  “Help me … help me …”

  “That’s right, General, help you. Only we need to know the contacts, the routes, the weapons you want.”

  “What I want …”

  “Did you make a list?”

  “No-o-o.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I. Want. This.”

  “I want it too. That’s why I want to help you.” Kurt slowed his thrusts; he needed information, not satisfaction. “Bombs, tanks, the same stuff America uses, they’re all yours. But I need a way to get it to you. Who can I trust? Who, Dravko, who?”

  “Br-zes-ki.”

  “Brzeski? Jan Brzeski, the Minister?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “Who else?” probed Kurt. “There must be someone else I can trust.”

  Dravko had lost the willpower to speak.

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “Don’t stop!”

  “Then tell me, who else?”

  “Hu-sar-ska.” The African drove each syllable from him.

  “Basia Husarska?”

  “Ye-es.”

  His confession was complete.

  Kurt slipp
ed from him and out of the shower. Dravko slumped rapturously into a crouch. The African’s seed swirled at his feet before the water carried it away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE EARLY MORNING FOG RISING off the black river blurred the blue revolving lights atop the covey of police cars. An ambulance crew fastened straps around Tommy for his last ride and carried his stretcher back across the gangplank. A solitary siren emitted a low growl like an animal warning off another. Detective Kulski stood on the boat’s rocking deck. Tommy had been shot dead. So had his chair. The overstuffed leather upholstery had slowed the bullet enough for it to be retrieved intact. The bullet to Tommy’s unintact head would no doubt be deformed from rearranging his skull.

  “Who reported it?” Jay asked.

  “A woman,” answered Detective Kulski. “She didn’t identify herself.”

  “Who did she talk to?”

  “That’s the strange thing, she called the station in Konstancin.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “South, perhaps ten or twelve kilometers.”

  “Maybe she lives there.”

  “She said she’d been walking her dog when she heard a shot.”

  “That’s a long walk,” Jay agreed. “Someone wanted us to know Tommy was dead. Who knew he was a witness?”

  “It was no secret.”

  They watched the forensic crews finish up, the police photographers pack up, the first of the police cars leave.

  “It’s the bullet,” Jay said. “That’s the setup. The bullet in the chair. The killer wanted us to find it.”

  “It is possible to shoot the chair in a struggle,” responded Kulski.

  “But not shoot someone smack dab between the eyes. Tommy wasn’t expecting it. My guess is that you’ll find the gun right here over the rail.” They both looked into the water swirling around the boat’s hull. “It’s down there. I’d bet on it.”

  Kulski said, “I’ll have the river searched.” He snorted at nothing in particular and limped away, careful on the gangplank where icy patches lurked.

  Jay followed him to shore.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  JAY FOUND KURT WAITING FOR him at the Marriott.

  “It looks like you’ve been up all night,” Jay said.