CHARLES PEYTON WAS a small man, thin, blue eyed, windburned with chapped lips. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved outdoorsy blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the rolls held in place by a little buttoned tab on each sleeve; nobody ever called him Charley.
His feet, in expensive-looking leather ankle boots, were up on one corner of his desk. He stood up when Lucas was ushered into the office, said, “Lucas, how’re you doing?” and reached across his desk to shake hands. Another man, heavier, lazy eyed, red faced, and blond, sat off to the right on a leather chair, and said, “Barney Howard,” and lifted a hand.
Peyton pointed at a visitor’s chair and asked, “Can I get you a coffee or a Coke?”
Lucas settled down in the chair and said, “No, thanks . . . What’s going on?”
“Have you read the file? We sent a Xerox over to Rose Marie.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “Mostly forensics.”
“We did what we could, on the technical end, but there wasn’t much,” Peyton said. “Nothing moving.”
“How many investigators are working it?”
Peyton leaned back, as if chewing over what he was going to say, then leaned forward again. “Look, you’re a smart guy. That’s not moonshine, that’s the fact of the matter, and you’ve worked with some of our big guys . . .”
“Louis Mallard,” Howard chipped in. “He says you’re a friend.”
Lucas tipped his head: Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
“We’ve got some people up there. Some counterintelligence people,” Peyton said. “They’re working the case, but not as criminal investigators. They’re not homicide cops.”
“They work with you?” Lucas asked Howard.
“Yeah.” Howard nodded, smiled, and showed large square teeth. “They’re doing a lot of analysis, looking at people coming and going through the port, that sort of thing. Computer stuff. Looking at people we know who are close to the Russians. We’ve been keeping up with the Duluth police through the office here, in Minneapolis—but when we heard that you were going up there, we thought we’d talk to you directly.”
“About?”
“About what you find, if anything. What you think. What you suppose. We’re interested in speculation,” he said. “We won’t interfere with your investigation and if you catch the killer, that’s fine. But if you find anything else that might suggest a Russian intelligence operation—if you find anything at all—we’d like to hear about it before the newspapers. For your protection and the protection of our people up there.”
“Have your guys picked up anything on the murder?”
“We poke around and hear all this stuff,” Peyton said. “We hear that the dead guy was an intelligence agent. We hear that he really was a sailor. We hear that he may have had a connection with the Russian Mafia, or that he was operating for his old man in the oil business. We hear all this stuff, and I’d give you even money that he picked up the wrong woman in some beer joint and got himself shot. But we just don’t know.”
“The shells that Duluth picked up were older than I am,” Lucas said. “That does sound like a beer-joint job.”
“But it was one in the heart and two in the head, dead-on, and that sounds like a pro,” Howard replied. “There was no heat-of-passion. He was ambushed. He was hit.”
“But if it was an assassination, why’d they roll him?” Peyton asked Howard. “Computer disks? What?”
“I don’t know,” Howard said. “Could be anything. But if they were planning to roll him, why’d they take him in the middle of the biggest lit-up area out there? The cab driver says he dropped him off in the dark, where that track ended. If they’d hit him there, they might not have found him yet. They could have rolled him in peace.”
Silence.
Then Peyton said, “Americans didn’t like nine-millimeter pistols in the fifties, back when the shells were made. I mean, there were war souvenirs around, Lugers and P-38s and so on, but not many Americans were buying nine millimeters as new guns.”
“What does that mean?” Lucas asked.
“It means that if an American did it, it was an odd gun to have around. But the Russians had a lot of nines, especially after the war. Maybe one was stashed on the ship, but never used. The ship was almost as old as the shells. That makes some kind of sense to me,” Peyton said.
“But the shells were American,” Howard said.
“But the guy on the ship didn’t hear any shots, which suggests the weapon was silenced, which suggests it was a pro job,” Peyton said.
Lucas was amused. “You guys are arguing both sides of this,” he said.
“We’re confused,” Howard said. “We keep going around in circles. This killing was weird. That’s why it’d be nice if you’d stay in touch. We’d really like to know what’s going on.”
Lucas nodded. “Sure.”
Another long pause.
“You don’t sound enthusiastic,” Howard said.
Lucas stood up, took a turn around his chair, jingling change in his pockets. “I gotta ask,” he said. “What are the chances that your guys did it? You know, that the guy had the plans to the moon rocket taped to his dick and somebody in the CIA killed him, and pulled his pants down to get the plans. What I’m asking is . . . what if we did it?”
Howard shook his head. “We didn’t.”
“Boy Scout’s honor?” Lucas asked skeptically.
“You’ll have to take my word for it—but I checked,” Howard said. “Our people don’t really kill other people. And if we did, you’re about the last guy we’d want investigating it.”
Flattery, Lucas thought; makes you feel warm and fuzzy, unless it makes you feel manipulated and used.
“So I see these guys on TV, CIA guys, they’ve got M-16s and they’re wearing these rag things on their heads . . .”
“We don’t kill people. Not on this kind of deal,” Howard insisted. “We have paramilitaries, you’d see them in Afghanistan or Iraq, everybody knows that. But we don’t do murder. If somebody did, I’d know about it. You can’t keep that kind of thing secret.”
“Not even in the CIA?”
“Nowhere. They’d be shit-faced panicked and I’d get a feel, you know? All I got from this one was confusion. Nobody at the CIA even knew who this asshole was, until we told them. And we didn’t pay any attention until the Russians called us up.”
“Which makes it less likely that it’s a big secret mission,” Lucas said. “The Russians calling up like that.”
“You’d think so,” said Howard. “But Russia is so fucked up right now that their right hand doesn’t know what their left hand is doing. Maybe the wrong hand is the one that’s calling us up.”
They thought about that for a moment, then Lucas asked Peyton, “Anything else?”
Peyton said, “We’ve got a young guy up there, named Andy Harmon. He’s coordinating with a couple of our auditors. He’s a book guy—but he can get to me or Barney in a hurry. If you need phone checks, or research, like that, we’d be happy to help. Something we can do on a computer. If it gets serious, then we can put some guys in.”
“You got six zillion guys . . .” Lucas said.
“All but three of them are reading Terrorism for Dummies books. The whole goddamn bureau . . .” His voice trailed away; he didn’t want to say it out loud. “Anyway, we don’t have a lot of time for a small-change antique Russian operation.”
Lucas shrugged. “Okay. I’ll stay in touch.”
“Our guy will call you when you get there,” said Howard. “He’ll give you some contact numbers. Good luck.”
A whole lot of nothin’ going on, Lucas thought, as he checked out of the place. Nothing but a murder. Small change.
Back home again, Lucas finished packing, kissed Weather and the baby, and talked to the housekeeper about dealing with the garage-door contractor. She told him not to worry.
At ten o’clock, as Weather was going to bed—she got up early every day that she operated, and th
at was almost every weekday—Lucas tossed a duffel bag on the passenger seat of his Acura truck, slipped an aging Black Crowes album into the CD player, and headed up I-35 for Duluth.
Spies, he thought.
3
CARL WALTHER WAS HUNTING. In black jeans, a Mossy Oak camouflage shirt, and a ball cap, he moved almost invisibly through the night, closing in on the woman as she trudged down West Fourth Street, pushing her shopping cart with a rattle-bang-bang-bang over the cracked sidewalk.
He liked the night: liked the cool air, the silence, the odors of foliage and damp soil that rose in the darkness. Liked the taste of salt in his mouth as he completed the stalk.
He remembered the knife, remembered the slash she’d taken at him. He could feel the tightness in his arm, the wound still healing. He told himself to run cool: but the fact was, he felt almost nothing. Grandpa still worried that he might become tense, that he might panic, that he might somehow be overwhelmed by his mission. Wouldn’t happen. He listened to his heart. Seventy-two beats a minute. He might be watching the evening news; he smiled at his own cool.
There were a couple of girls at school who would be surprised to see him like this, swift, dark, deadly. He could feel how impressed they would be, if they knew. He had a little fantasy of a girl being told, saying, Carl? Our Carl? There was always something about him, his eyes, like a tiger’s . . .
He pushed the fantasy away as he moved down under the row of yellow lights like a shadow on the wall, listening to the racket of the woman’s shopping cart, bang, spang, rattle and knock. He’d spotted her earlier in the day. As soon as he saw the long coat, he knew he’d found her. He remembered the wool, the strange hairy feeling of wool on a warm summer’s night.
Had to be right. Duluth was too small for two female bums in long woolen coats. He’d been patrolling the city every couple of nights for two weeks; had to be her. The woman turned the corner. He’d been waiting for that—if she was pushing up the hill, she was less likely to get away from him. He was in shape; she was a tramp.
He moved quickly now, took the nails out of his pocket, flicked out the wire. He was a good student, and Grandpa was a good teacher.
TWO WEEKS EARLIER, the teacher had had his first real test . . .
Grandma and Grandpa Walther lived in a gray two-bedroom shingle-sided house in Hibbing, Minnesota, an hour’s drive northwest of Duluth. The house sat squarely on a postage-stamp lawn. The lean grass was neatly mowed, but struggling for life against the bad soil and limited sunlight.
In back, a freestanding one-car garage leaned to the southeast, away from the winter’s wind. Inside the garage was a six-year-old Taurus station wagon with seventeen thousand miles on it.
Grandpa, at ninety-two, still drove, eyes sharp, his mind snapping up the landscape. Grandpa had a wreath of white hair around his wide head, but was pink and bald on top, with a few brown age spots. His nose was wide and short, genes from the steppe; his shoulders had been wide, but had narrowed since his mid-eighties. He had an old-man’s ass and skinny legs. Losing it, he said.
Grandma, at ninety-one, was weaker both in mind and body. She spent her days in a wheelchair, only dimly aware of life. Her hands shook and her head trembled and the skin under her eyes had collapsed into loops that hung down into her cheeks. She’d had cataracts removed from both eyes, and though she could apparently see well enough, her eyes always had a distant look, as though she were peering into the past. Her arms were mostly skin and bone, and her she had no calves at the back of her legs.
In the morning, Carl would come over before school, and they’d move her into the bathroom, and Grandpa would close the door and take care of her, put her in her diaper. Then Carl would help seat her in her chair, and Grandpa would feed her. The rest of the day she sat in front of the TV; occasionally, she’d look at Grandpa and smile, and say something. Usually, whatever she said was unintelligible, and sometimes seemed to be in Russian.
While Grandma sat in her chair, waiting for death, Grandpa was almost always on the enclosed back porch, under the best lamp in the house, reading, or working problems on his chessboard.
But not this night.
This was the night that Moshalov—surely not his real name, but the only one that Grandpa had—would be eliminated.
This night, Grandpa waited by the front door, mostly standing, sometimes sitting on a bar stool. Sometimes breathing hard, remembering the days when he hunted through the streets of Moscow, no older than Carl, cutting down the enemies of the state. Back in action now: the action felt so good. A little extra piece of life, in a life gone gray.
When Carl Walther arrived in his Chevy, parking in the street, Grandpa turned his head to Grandma and said, “He’s here.” Grandma stirred, but said nothing. On the television, David Letterman was working over the president.
When Carl came to the door, Grandpa opened it, looked once up and down the street, pulled Carl inside, and shut the door. His face was pink with excitement: “How did it go?”
“As planned,” Carl said. He added, “Almost.” He was seventeen, blond, good-looking; long faced, round jawed. He wore an athletic jacket without a letter.
“Almost?”
Carl nodded, turned his face away, glancing out the front window. “I parked near the terminal, on a side road, and walked through the dark, maybe three hundred yards. Like you said: thirty yards, get down, watch and listen. Then thirty more, watch and listen,” Carl said. He had ordered his thoughts: he’d been trained to report. “There were some people on the stern of the boat, one or two, but nobody coming or going. There was some light. Moshalov arrived right on time. He must have dropped the car at the airport, like he said, and come right straight back to the boat. I met him in the dark outside the terminal. I shot him once in the heart and then twice in the forehead, just as specified. Then . . . there was a woman.”
“A woman.” Grandpa tried to be calm, but his round rimless glasses glittered in the lamplight and gave him a frightening aspect, a skull-like harshness, and his old-man’s hands trembled.
“She was sitting in the weeds along the bank. Drinking, I think. I never saw her or heard her before I shot Moshalov, and I’d been there for a while. Then she stood up, saw me, and started running. I went after her. I fired two shots and then the gun jammed.” He was lying, now. He’d fired the gun wildly and had run out of ammunition too soon. He hurried on. “The gun misfired; I cleared it and tried to fire again, and got a misfire on the last round. She had a knife and slashed me with it; I had to decide. I left.”
“You’re hurt?”
“I got a bad cut,” Carl said. “I need to get it sewed up.” There was no visible blood—Carl was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt—but when he pulled up the sleeve, and peeled away the newspaper pack he’d used to cover the wound, Grandpa winced.
“We’ll have to come up with a reason for that,” Grandpa said. “For Jan.”
“Mom doesn’t have to know about it,” Carl said. “She’d blab all over the place.”
“In case she finds out,” Grandpa said.
Carl nodded. “Okay. I was washing windows in your basement and I broke one and got cut. I didn’t think it was so bad for a while,” he said. “That’s why we didn’t come get it sewed up right away.”
Grandpa nodded: “That should work. We’ll break a window. I’ll go with you to the emergency room.”
Grandpa turned and looked at Grandma. “We’re going to leave you for a while, Melodie. We have to go to the hospital.”
She stared at the television.
“The random factor,” Grandpa continued, his eyes drifting as he thought about it. “The woman. There’s almost always a random factor. Somebody once said that few plans survive contact with the enemy.”
“I didn’t see her . . .”
Grandpa wagged a finger at him. “Don’t apologize. You did well. You had to make a decision, and you made it. A conservative decision, but you were there, you knew all the factors. Now: Is there any way s
he can identify you? Other than the cut?”
“There was some light. She saw my face. But with the bad gun, and she had that knife, I thought it’d be better to go back later, if we had to. Get some new ammo, and take her out later.” Carl had been nervous about the report, about the lying. He’d panicked, he thought. Not all his fault, he’d been surprised—still, better not to talk about it. He fished the pistol out of his pocket. “Should we get rid of this? I don’t see how anyone could find us, but if they did . . .”
“We’ll keep it for now,” Grandpa said, taking the gun. He worked the action and a shell popped out. He fumbled it, and Carl picked it up off the floor and handed it to him. He looked at the primer cap, saw that it had been hit by a firing pin, but hadn’t gone off. “We should have gotten new ammunition for it. But it worked okay in the woods . . . mostly.”
“What about the woman?” Carl asked.
“Finish your report,” Grandpa said. “Another five minutes won’t make a difference with the cut.”
CARL TOLD HIM the story in detail and described the woman. “She smelled like wine. She smelled dirty. She called me a . . .” He glanced at Grandma; but this was a professional matter. “ . . . a motherfucker. She acted crazy.”
“Not like she came off the boat?” Grandpa asked.
“No. I think she was a tramp. You know, a street person, like, you remember old Mrs. Sikorsky when she’d go around all messed up and pushing that baby stroller? Like that.”
“Huh,” Grandpa said. “If she didn’t come off the boat, was there anyplace there she might have come from? When we looked at the place, I didn’t see anything.”
“Neither did I,” Carl said. “There’s nothing out there.”
They all sat for a minute, then Grandpa said, “Well. We have to think about this. Let’s go over to the hospital and get that arm fixed.”
“It’s still bleeding a little. If we go break the window now, I could drip some blood on it,” Carl said.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 139