Dmitry said, ‘Isn’t it chess that one plays with death?’
Feldman came back with a bottle of whisky and a pack of tattered playing cards which he put on the table. He clearly didn’t like the atmosphere in the room, and hastily went out again. Bob knocked back a large glass of whisky and began to shuffle the cards. ‘Can you play poker?’
Dmitry looked straight at him. ‘Of course, it’s only too easy to deceive when you hide the cards; but you should know that, even though you can see the whole board, chess is also a game of deceit.’
Bob looked up, sharply. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘How much did they pay you, the Brazilians, to organise that inspection? You tipped them off, didn’t you, about Müller, you covered up for him. Did you know they were going to kill him?’
Katie went hot and cold all over. Bob got to his feet; he was outraged. ‘Is that what you think? Is that what you’ve told her? Is that why – ’
Katie grabbed his arm. ‘No, Bob, please, he’s never said anything –’
‘You’re a fool.’ He spat the word out at her. ‘You’re both fools. You don’t know anything, you don’t understand anything, you’re meddling in things you can’t begin to comprehend –’ he broke off and turned to Dmitry. ‘Or do you understand things only too well?’
Katie looked from one to the other of them in utter confusion. Could this be true? If so, Bob would have known all along the reasons for Müller's death, even had a part in it – no, that wasn’t possible. What could be his motive? But if it was true, he would be capable of anything.
Dmitry went on, quietly, ‘Who was behind it? Who was your contact in Brazil?’
‘I thought you told me you were here for Katie? What are all these questions? Do you think I am going to answer them?’ Bob turned to one of the men. ‘For God’s sake watch him. Take it in turns to sleep. If you hear anything in the corridor, check it out.’
He took Katie’s hand and led her into the next room. As soon as they were alone, Katie knew what he was going to ask her. The whisky seemed to have had an instant effect on him. He said to her, ‘Get into bed. I want you to make love to me.’
Katie said, ‘No. Anyway, it would not be love.’
‘You’re still my wife.’
‘Do you think I could bear to touch you after what you let those men do to Dmitry this morning, after what you’ve said? Besides, you’re involved with crooks. There was something about them, wasn’t there? All that money, that power. It fascinated you, didn’t it? You wanted to be like them, you wanted to lead that kind of life. Well, I find it empty. Liliana, Wolf, they have nothing in their heads. Wolf just likes to play with things, cars, rockets, missiles; Liliana can think of nothing but clothes or money. You’ve lied about her, too – I hope you didn’t go to bed with her that time in Paris because it would be like going to bed with a mannequin. I can’t imagine it would be very satisfying.’
‘Get on the bed.’
‘No, I won’t. I won’t just do what you say like this. Anyway, I thought that I disgusted you.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Bob was keeping his voice low. ‘But the walls in here are thin. I want that son-of-a-bitch to hear you, I want him to hear you fucking me, and I want you to sound as if you’re enjoying it. What did he do to you, that bastard, what did he do to you in bed that you liked so much? Show me, go on, show me. After all, you want him to live.’
Katie woke early in the morning. She had cried for half the night; she felt desperate, disgusted and shamed, and terrified of what would happen to them. The room was mercifully empty; Bob wasn't there. She looked out of the window to see if the jeep was still parked outside; it crossed her mind that they might already have taken Dmitry off somewhere to shoot him; wasn’t dawn the traditional time for executions? She pulled on her clothes and went to the door; as she opened it Bob came in. He had taken a shower; his hair was wet. He looked clean and composed.
‘Where were you going?’
‘To see where you were.’
‘Come here.’ They went next door. The room was still in semi-darkness; the curtains were drawn. The guard, Virgilio, was sitting on the chair with a gun in his lap. Dmitry was sitting upright on the bed; he looked as if he hadn’t slept much. He shot Katie an agonised glance as she came in; she looked at the floor. If she had looked at his face she would have been unable to hold back the tears.
Bob turned to Dmitry. ‘My problem is what to do with you now. The easiest thing would be to have these guys shoot you; but I wouldn’t like to have that on my conscience. I think it might be better if I just hand you over to the military. Maybe you’d like to explain what you’re doing here to them. You got your passport there?’
‘Why do you want it?’
Bob picked up Dmitry’s jacket and took the two passports out of his pocket. He flipped through them. ‘One Soviet passport. That will interest them, I’m sure. You didn’t get a visa.’
‘No.’
He held up the UN laissez-passer and flipped through that too. ‘This isn’t visaed either. So you’re an illegal immigrant. And it’s outside UN regulations, surely? This isn’t much use to you here, is it? I think we may as well get rid of it.’ He tossed it into the round glass ashtray, tipped a generous quantity of whisky onto it, and struck a match. Dmitry made a move to get up off the bed but the guard pushed him back. They watched the flames shoot up; Dmitry watched mesmerised as darkness spread across the cover like a stain.
‘All right,’ said Bob, ‘Let’s go.’
But the burning of the passport had had an extraordinary effect on Katie; it seemed gratuitously cruel, as if Bob had stripped Dmitry naked. She knew he meant him to suffer; she flung herself at Bob, digging her fingers into the flesh of his neck and tore at it with her fingernails. The two guards stepped forward; seeing his opportunity, Dmitry leapt up and grabbed Virgilio around the neck; after a brief struggle, Dmitry pushed him away, holding in his right hand the man’s revolver. He backed away to be out of reach, holding the gun in front of him; standing sideways on with his legs apart, almost as if he were fighting a duel, sighting along the whole length of his outstretched right arm, his left eye closed. He aimed the gun at Bob. It was as if something in him had turned, and it gave him a wonderful sense of power to threaten those who had just been threatening him. At the same time he looked tense, nervous, unsure of the weapon in his hand. It occurred to Katie that he would not know how many rounds were in it or even if there was one in the presenting chamber.
‘For God’s sake don’t make me use this,’ he said, ‘I am not a very good shot. If I aim for the heart I am quite likely to hit you in the face or in the belly, but at this range I am unlikely to miss you altogether.’
Nobody moved.
‘Katie, get out into the courtyard.’
Katie turned and fled.
Nobody moved in the dim room. Through the tattered curtains came a thin pencil of light in which the dust danced.
Bob said, ‘Put it down, Gavrilov, and let’s talk about this.’
‘Talk? You’ve held me at gunpoint for twenty-four hours and told me several times you want me dead. Put up your hands. And you, Virgilio, put that pistol down on the table. Do it with your left hand, very slowly.’
Virgilio put his left hand in his pocket and slowly pulled the gun out. They were all three frozen; Dmitry could see the fear on their faces. As Virgilio put his hand out towards the table he made a sudden move. Dmitry fired. He seemed to do it in slow motion; he remembered struggling to hold the sights steady while his finger seemed to take an extraordinarily long time to take up pressure on the trigger. Then the gun suddenly went off. It made a deafening roar in the small room. The bullet struck Virgilio at the base of his neck; it hit the artery and bright orange- red blood shot out with such violence that it sprayed across the floor like a fountain and hit Dmitry’s shin. Virgilio fell to the floor, crumpling as if he was a marionette and someone had cut the strings. He lay there with blood still pouring out of him. Dmitry stood tra
nsfixed; he had never seen so much blood before; it lay thickly on the floor like bright red paint. Dmitry had to step back to stop it wetting his shoes.
Virgilio was dead almost instantly; his open eyes looked up towards the ceiling, his mouth hung open in shock. Dmitry stared at him in disbelief; he almost expected something else to happen, to see the soul depart visibly; surely it took more than this to make a man die? He was acutely aware of everything in the room; the silence, the smell of cordite, the sunlight lying in a thin beam across the floor. He thought what an irony it was that he, who had survived three shots from a trained assassin, should have killed with his first bullet.
He had let the recoil lift the gun upwards; now he brought it back down into line again. Haynes had gone completely white; he obviously thought Dmitry might feel he had already gone too far and might as well kill him too. And indeed, Dmitry for a moment felt such an intense rage that he almost thought he might pull the trigger. The anger was at himself; he was not sure that he had really had to shoot. He knew at once that this act would have its consequences; that one way or another he would have to pay for it. If he could have unravelled the thread of his life which had led him to this point and started out anew, he would have done so.
For a few moments after the gunshot sounded, there had been an extraordinary stillness in the room. Now, suddenly, sounds started to filter in from the street outside and from the other rooms; shrill, alarmed voices, shouts, confusion. Dmitry’s hand had started to shake with reaction; he suddenly wanted only to get away. Katie had appeared in the doorway; she cried out, ‘Oh my God, what have you done?’ He pushed her back, trying to stop her from looking at the dead man. There seemed to be blood all over the room; it looked like a slaughterhouse.
Dmitry saw her staring at him and looked down at the blood which had splashed onto his shirt and said, ‘It’s okay, it isn’t mine. Katie, take the bags, put them in the jeep.’
She hesitated. Bob said, ‘For God’s sake, Katie, you can’t go with him now, you’ve seen what he can do.’ Katie looked at him, then left the room.
Dmitry said to Haynes, ‘Now you are going to tell me what is going on. If you don't I am going to shoot you just like him. After all, why not? I could hardly be in a worse position than I am already.’
Haynes obviously believed him. He said, ‘For God’s sake. What do you want to know?’
‘What is Richter up to in Brazil?’
‘In Brazil?’
‘I mean the connection with this nuclear diversion. You know all about that; come on, tell me. How is Richter involved in this?’
‘He’s not involved.’ Haynes saw Dmitry’s hand tighten on the gun and panicked. ‘It was Liliana. Her father had the idea – and Heinrichs, Richter’s right-hand man. They had a meeting. It was a group of right-wing in the Brazilian military. They had the idea of making a bomb – they wanted to show the government how much power they had. RASAG was supposed to supply them with the launching system, but nobody in the Brazilian aerospace programme would have gone along with it. It was a very small group of people.’
‘Their names?’
‘Oliveira was involved, an Air Marshall – I don’t know his name – a Paraguayan general, too, Luís Hería Prieto. It was a crazy idea. They were prepared to pay a lot of money. Heinrichs knew what bad shape the company was in and he wanted the money. I guess he has more power than Richter – he controls the financial side, he does the ordering.’
‘And had they supplied the Brazilians?’
‘That’s correct, with the sixteen-engine model: Richter hasn’t even tested it yet – that’s happening next month. As far as I know they’ve done nothing with it, it’s just sitting in sheds waiting for the right moment. It was transported to Cachimbo by plane via various locations.’
‘How did they manage to conceal this?’
‘Well, no-one knew what it was for – it doesn’t look much like a rocket, you know. Just pieces of tubing and various metal boxes – could be anything. The transportation was quite easy. Some came direct from Germany, some routed via Paraguay. There’s been a lot of drug trafficking between Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil – a lot of the military are involved in it, they turn a blind eye.’
‘Have they built a bomb?’
‘I don't know.’
Dmitry said, ‘If you don’t tell me the truth I shall shoot you in the leg.’ He was getting nervous; he could hear people shouting outside.
Haynes said, ‘I don’t know – that’s the truth, I don’t know. I know they had the intention. I don’t know who else might have been involved on the Brazilian side’
‘And you? What about you? Did you know all this? What was your role? In Vienna, did you tell them I knew?’
Bob’s face was grey with fear. ‘I swear to you – I wasn’t involved.’
Dmitry wanted to ask him dozens of questions, but he knew there would be no time; perhaps there never would be time. They looked at one another. It would have been hard to say who was the more frightened. Somebody outside was shouting for the soldiers to come. Dmitry said, urgent, alarmed, ‘Give me the keys to your jeep.’ Haynes dug in his pockets and pulled them out.
‘Throw them on the bed.’
He did so. Dmitry picked them up. Then he said, ‘I want you to pick up that pistol, those rifles, any other weapons, and put them in that suitcase over there, and then put it by the door. Hurry. If I were you, I wouldn’t come out of this room till you hear we’ve driven away, because if you do, I will certainly kill you.’
He looked out of the window. Two young soldiers were coming; they had their rifles ready, they looked nervous. Feldman was standing in the courtyard arguing with Katie. The soldiers asked Feldman something; he turned and pointed towards their room. Dmitry turned to Haynes and said, ‘Have you got any money? Give me what you have.’
Haynes pulled out his wallet. His hands were quite steady. He said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind.’ He held it out. Dmitry, remembering the golden rule that you should never get within reach of the man you are holding at gunpoint, asked him to toss it on the floor. He bent down to pick it up without taking his eyes off Haynes or Luís.
‘I’m going outside,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to move from here. Do you understand me?’ Haynes nodded. Dmitry put the revolver in his pocket and went out, shutting the door. The two soldiers stood in the courtyard. They looked at him blankly; he had no way of knowing what they were thinking.
Dmitry said, finding it hard to think of the right words in Spanish, ‘This is a private fight.’ Even as he said it, it sounded absurd; surely the word lucha – fight, could apply only to some great cause, not some sordid squabble in a hotel room. He said, ‘Está una cuestión de amor.’ They stood and stared at him. He had no idea if he was getting through to them; he could see that they didn’t know what to do; they were so young, they came from abject poverty, to them Dmitry appeared a powerful and important person; they did not want to get into trouble. Dmitry could see Katie watching him across the courtyard; he hated what he was doing. He pulled out his wallet and Haynes’s and began counting out the greasy ten thousand Guaraní notes, then hundred dollar bills. ‘How much?’ he asked. ‘How much do you want?’
The soldiers looked at one another.
‘Go and tell them it was nothing,’ said Dmitry.
One of the soldiers held out his hand. Dmitry thrust the notes into it. Some of the notes fell to the ground; the second soldier bent to pick them up. Then they both hesitated, still looking at Dmitry with this curious mixture of awe and curiosity. Then one said, ‘You want a doctor?’
Dmitry didn’t understand; he did not realise that they took the blood on his shirt to be his own. He said, ‘It’s too late for a doctor.’ They fell back, wide-eyed, as if he was already a ghost; they turned and left the courtyard. Feldman came up; he said, ‘What is going on?’ He too looked at the blood on Dmitry’s shirt in horror. ‘Has somebody…?’
‘We are going,’ said Dmitry, ‘He will
pay the bill.’ He handed Feldman Haynes’s wallet. Katie had already got into the jeep. She was sitting there, white-faced, her hands pressed to her cheeks, and she was shaking. Dmitry flung the suitcase in the back and fiddled with the keys. He was amazed that his own hands seemed so steady. He started the jeep and drove down the road; they had to pass near the military checkpoint. A little road ran to the left; he turned down it. Maybe there was another way. if he could cut off the corner, they might not be seen. He drove over rough ground between the trees. Katie said, ‘Dmitry, it’s no use. There are military checkpoints all along the road.’ Then she said, ‘Oh my God, what will they do if they catch up with you? Did you have to kill him?’
‘Do you think I wanted to?’ They rejoined the main road; nobody seemed to have seen them. Dmitry could not quite believe what had happened; his hands had begun to shake on the wheel. He tried not to think about it; he tried to blot it from his mind. After a few miles Dmitry suddenly stopped the jeep. He opened the door and got out.
‘What are you doing?’ Katie asked.
‘I’m going to get rid of these guns. Perhaps I should keep the pistol; there are still five rounds in it. Shit! I don’t know what to do. We can’t risk being found with a van-load of guns, and this gun is a liability anyway. Perhaps I should keep the pistol.’ He opened the suitcase and took out the rifles, carried them a distance off the road and threw them into the undergrowth. Then he tossed the pistol away and finally, with a violent gesture of despair, the revolver.
‘Mitya, are you sure?’
‘They’re no use to us. I don’t want to take the risk of killing anyone else, haven’t I got enough on my conscience?’
Katie said nothing. Dmitry climbed back into the jeep. She said, ‘You look as if you’ve killed someone. You’ve got blood on your shirt.’
Dmitry took off the shirt and went and hid that in the undergrowth too. He came back and took another one out of the bag. ‘This is my last shirt.’ He looked down at his shoes and then went off again to wipe them on the grass. Nausea and revulsion suddenly overcame him and he turned away to be sick by the roadside. He went to the back of the jeep and pulled out his Soviet passport. He was convinced it was a liability. If he was stopped, he was arguably better off without it. He could claim his UN laissez-passer had been lost. He asked, ‘Shall I throw this away too?’ Katie understood him. She remembered hearing that people had trouble if they even had a Soviet or Cuban visa in their passport when they entered Paraguay and she didn’t know if that had changed yet. Dmitry went and buried the passport by the side of the road. He straightened up, looking back over the scene, trying to fix the shapes of the trees and the undulations in the road in his memory just in case he should have need to come back, but there were no particular landmarks; besides he did not expect he would be able to remember.
The Rocket Man Page 30