Death Is My Comrade

by Stephen Marlowe

  There was nothing I wanted to say to that.

  Even minus the gun, Eugenie’s exit was more impressive, if anything, than her entrance. Wiggling her bottom in the tight copper-colored sheath, she walked back to the Mercedes-Benz and climbed in. “There’ll be another time, Mr. Laschenko,” she said. “I am going to kill you, you know.”

  She started the car with a roar. I took a stride toward it. “Please don’t stop me, Drum. You can tell the police I’ll be at Mother’s house any time after two o’clock. They can arrest me there. I’ve never” been arrested before,” she mused. “It ought to be fun, just this once. I’ll try anything once.”

  Probably she would. Probably one of these days she’d drop in on the moon and take a nibble out of it and prove it was made of green cheese.

  The silver sports car sped away. I stood for a moment watching its taillights. I had that feeling you get when you’ve seen someone as utterly psychopathic as Eugenie in action, as if I’d just Rip-van-Winkled out of a cave and had to get used to a whole new set of mores and customs.

  Laschenko made his way back to the clapboard house under his own power. Eugenie’s bullet was imbedded in the fleshy part of his shoulder. He didn’t say anything more about the five thousand bucks.

  A black, unmarked police sedan with one of those fish-pole antennae pulled to the curb. “This is the place, Lieutenant,” someone said, and doors opened to disgorge four detective-squad bulls.

  “This is the place, eh?” a familiar voice echoed.

  My night was complete.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For me?” Jack Morley said.

  It was Sunday morning. I was shaved, showered, dabbed with after-shave lotion and all spiffed up in a wash-and-wear suit the color they call avocado in the men’s clothing stores and we used to call OD in the Army. I had a bouquet of yellow roses in my hand. A uniformed messenger had just delivered it from one of the few Washington florists that do business on Sunday. I had opened the door of my Georgetown apartment to head outside to the Chrysler and then in it to Marianne’s place, when I saw Jack Morley standing there ready to knock. That was when he made that remark about the flowers. He wasn’t alone. Pappy Piersall stood behind him. They were both as well-groomed as I and dressed almost identically in lampblack suits.

  “For Marianne,” Pappy said. “Only you-all will have to send them, Chester.”

  “Why,” I demanded, “will I have to send them?”

  “We have come to fetch you to a meeting,” Pappy said.

  “At Foggy Bottom,” Jack said. Foggy Bottom is the hottest place in Washington in summer. It was going to be a hot day. Foggy Bottom is also where the State Department does business.

  “Will you guys cut the Gallagher and Shean routine?” I said.

  But Pappy said: “Last night was a doozy.”

  And Jack said: “You might have thought it ended things. It didn’t.”

  Last night, after Lieutenant Creel’s echoing arrival, had been a doozy. It had everything from a flesh-wounded Semyon Laschenko who wouldn’t say anything at Headquarters, to an indignant Police Commissioner Eric Mann who had been summoned from one of Washington’s Saturday night parties and who wouldn’t stop talking. With, of course, Creel echoing him.

  It had Jack and Pappy acting in concert beautifully, as if they had rehearsed their lines, to steer the play away from Police Commissioner Mann. It had Mann in a sweat despite the air-conditioning and it had the late arrival of both Eugenie and an Under-Secretary of State who was on first-name terms with Jack. It had Eugenie, big-eyed and sheath-skirted, lapping up all the excitement as if it was a show put on just for her. It had, ultimately, no resolution.

  I made a deposition and signed it the necessary four times, and so did Jack and so did Pappy. Laschenko wouldn’t sign anything, and neither would Eugenie. Round about two o’clock it had Laschenko’s lawyer, who said he would get a writ of habeus corpus from the first magistrate he could awaken in the wee hours of the morning. About the only thing it didn’t have, which in retrospect surprised me, was Lucienne Duhamel.

  It had Police Commissioner Mann talking about murder and kidnaping and the inexorable machinery of the law and then, when the Under-Secretary arrived, changing his tune to cooperation and understanding and we-all-belong-to-the-same-team. And it had a final scene which I never got to see because they sent me home to drink Jack Daniels or do whatever I had in mind to do. I drank Jack Daniels and went to bed and got myself groomed to see Marianne.

  “Laschenko get his writ?” I asked now, at the apartment door, wondering how long it would take the yellow roses to wilt.

  “He got it,” Jack said, “but they can’t seem to serve it at the proper jail.”

  “In the vernacular,” Pappy said, “he is being taken around the horn.” I scowled. I didn’t get it. That meant the cops were shuttling Laschenko from police station to police station so the writ of habeus corpus couldn’t catch up with him.

  “What for?” I said. The cops, I knew, resorted to taking a prisoner around the horn when they were awaiting the kind of evidence that could get an indictment. But in Laschenko’s case that didn’t make sense.

  “Well, Chester,” Pappy intoned, “it has been decided in the high stratosphere of the upper echelon of top government circles—”

  “Meaning Pappy and me and a few other guys in lampblack suits,” Jack cut in.

  “—that Laschenko can’t hop a jet back to Russia, not for a week or so anyway.”

  I asked: “Was he going back?”

  “He was,” Jack said. “He had served a double mission here. One: to help get things ready for the Russian Exhibition in New York. Two: to act as host for the top brass of the American Exhibition in Moscow. They leave for Moscow on Tuesday.”

  “The trouble is,” Pappy picked up the story, “we don’t want Laschenko recognizing one of the members of the American team. So Laschenko goes around the horn.”

  “Clear?” Jack asked me.

  “Clear as the nose on his face,” Pappy answered for me.

  I said: “The hell it is. What member of the American team would that be?”

  “It would,” Pappy said, “be the new chief of security.”

  “You,” Jack said.

  I looked at him. I looked at Pappy. They’d been playing it for laughs, but they weren’t kidding now.

  Jack said: “Let’s get over to Foggy Bottom.”

  Pappy used my phone to call a messenger to deliver my yellow roses.

  Their faces told you nothing.

  They were the new breed of young Washington careerists, Pappy with his bland plump face and mild blue eyes, Jack dark and gaunt with his shell-rimmed glasses, and two other guys about our age I’d never seen before. One of them was the number-two man of Q Section in Central Intelligence, a slat-thin carrot-top named MacReedy. The other was a rangy ex-Davis Cupper named Larned, who was connected with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  They were waiting for us in an office on the second floor of the State Department Building at Foggy Bottom, MacReedy smoking a pipe, Larned pacing a groove in the carpet. Like Jack and Pappy, they both wore lampblack suits. It is the uniform of the new Washington careerists, and my wash-and-wear suit made me feel like an interloper who didn’t know the secret fraternal handshake.

  CIA’s MacReedy sucked on his pipe. “The big man will be here in a few minutes,” he told Jack after the introductions. He scowled at the pipe, tamped it out in a big copper ash tray and asked Jack: “What about Alluliev’s murder? Can it stay under wraps?”

  “Yes and no,” Jack told him. “The papers have it. But the story they have is that Alluliev wanted asylum in the West, was trying to barter Russian rocket secrets for it. As for Drum’s office as the scene of the crime—” Jack grinned wryly—“we just change the chronology and make one Jack Morley out as a damn fool. I got there before Alluliev did. He’d contacted me in my office, I hadn’t taken him seriously. I’d dropped in on Chet. Social call. All
uliev tagged after me, desperate.”

  “And got conked inside the office?” Pappy asked doubtfully.

  “Outside,” Jack said. “That’s been taken care of.”

  MacReedy said: “And the kidnaping?”

  “No tie-in there, as the papers have it,” Pappy told him crisply, dropping the drawl entirely. “Commissioner Mann’s cooperating straight down the line. It was a money snatch plain and simple. The thug on ice is a merchant seaman named Bock, a two-time loser who nobody’s going to make a fuss over. The dead one was a Commie.”

  “Leo Ring?” MacReedy asked.

  Pappy nodded. “Ring was a Commie, but he didn’t work up a sweat over it. The only one who knew why Ring was hired to kidnap the Baker twins is the man who did the hiring. That would be Semyon Laschenko, and friend Laschenko is busy going around the horn. You-all see how pretty it is?”

  SEC’s Larned kept on pacing. He hadn’t said a word since the introductions. Every now and then he’d give the door an anxious look. I wondered what he was doing there. Probably, he wondered what I was doing there.

  CIA’s MacReedy, seated on a corner of the big desk which held down floor space in front of the window, leaned forward and jabbed his empty pipe in my direction. “You come with pretty high recommendations, Drum. Nevertheless I must ask you to keep what is discussed in this room today in strictest confidence.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay. I gather you’re putting a lid on Alluliev’s murder and the kidnaping, to keep the Russian-American cultural exchange program from fizzling. That’s ironic, in a way, because it’s just what Semyon Laschenko wanted.”

  “That’s one reason,” MacReedy admitted. “But it isn’t the important reason.”

  Larned gave the door another anxious look. I said: “What is?”

  “Ever since he won the Nobel Prize,” Jack explained, “reports have been filtering through the Iron Curtain on Vasili Rodzianko. Though it was officially denied, he wants out. Though he claims to repudiate his book, what information we have says that’s a lie too. The book is a ringing denunciation of the Red way of life. Rodzianko feels as strongly about it today as he did when he wrote it. Ilya Alluliev’s letter was just one source of information. I could name five or six, and so could MacReedy here, all. in considerably more detail and most of them capable of substantiation.”

  “Take our word for that,” MacReedy said. “We know Rodzianko means what he wrote. We know he wants out. And since he was the Reds’ fair-haired boy in literary circles for better than twenty years, that adds up to dynamite. But despite all the information we’ve gathered, the government’s official policy was, and must remain, hands off. If Rodzianko comes out, that’s great news for the West. But he’s got to come out under his own power.”

  “Then and only then,” Jack said, “can we think about lining up the lecture tours and Voice of America broadcasts that can stand the Russians on their ears. State and Central Intelligence are in complete accord on that.”

  MacReedy, lighting his pipe, said, “Last night a way to get Rodzianko out without official government involvement was dumped in our laps.”

  “Which,” Pappy told me, “is where you-all come in, Chester.”

  “You mean Alluliev’s murder?” I asked. “I don’t get it. MacReedy claims CIA already knew the deal on Rodzianko before that but was powerless to act. How does what happened to Alluliev change anything?”

  “The West wants and needs Vasili Rodzianko,” MacReedy said. “Vasili Rodzianko wants and needs the West.” He smiled thinly, grudgingly. “If this was a foreign intrigue movie, a spy picture, we’d send an agent parachuting into the suburbs of Moscow, he’d pick up Rodzianko and they’d fight their way out from behind the Iron Curtain.”

  “With dogs baying at their heels and the Red Army tripping over its hobnailed boots trying to stop them,” Pappy said.

  Jack shook his head. “But this isn’t a spy picture. We think we have a way to get Rodzianko out, Chet.”

  “How?”

  Jack showed me a wolf’s grin. “In a regularly scheduled airliner, with all his papers in order.”

  I gave Jack a blank look. Expecting him to be as surprised as I was, I glanced at SEC’s Larned. For the first time, the rangy man looked quite calm. When our eyes met, he nodded slowly. He had even stopped pacing. He. read the dial of his wrist watch and said: “The man is late.”

  Then MacReedy looked concerned. “He wouldn’t back out?”

  Larned shook his head. “He’ll be here.”

  MacReedy sucked on his pipe some more. It made bubbling noises. Jack and Pappy began to talk about the Washington Senators’ Murderers’ Row. MacReedy and Larned discussed a mutual fund in which MacReedy had invested some money. I thought about Marianne and the twins.

  Came a polite knock at the door. Larned jumped to answer it.

  Mike Rodin’s red-haired green-eyed girl Friday, looking like a million bucks on ice in a green raw-silk dress, drifted into the room.

  “Miss Champion,” Larned said.

  “Mr. Larned.”

  She looked at him frostily. No love was lost there. I remembered that her boss had been getting his lumps from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  Larned waited at the door, not shutting it. Mike Rodin, looking as fit and healthy as his publicity pictures, strode into the room. I recalled how I’d had to hold him out of the Marienbad water yesterday while Miss Champion shot a hypo into his arm. Whatever had hit him, the recovery was amazing. His broad shoulders back, his waist sucked in, his pugnacious jaw outthrust, his shaved head and slanting eyes giving him that Oriental look, Mike Rodin came into the room as if he owned it.

  “Where’s the Secretary?” he snapped.

  “I’m representing the State Department, Mr. Rodin,” Jack said. “My name is Morley.”

  Rodin nodded his head half an inch, and gave it another half-inch nod when he saw me. He smiled at SEC’s Larned as if one of these days he intended to have him with an apple in his mouth for dinner. He said: “I understand that the SEC, the Justice Department and the Immigration people are about ready to deport me.” Larned looked down at the floor apologetically. Mike Rodin raised his eyebrows at Pappy. “You Immigration, young man?”

  “Special Agent, FBI. Piersall’s the name.”

  Rodin gave Pappy the same sort of smile he had given Larned, and said: “Don’t think I couldn’t fight my way out of this. The only time Mike Rodin gets deported is when Mike Rodin wants to be deported. I could have SEC singing a different tune inside of a week, if I wanted to.”

  “The case the Commission has against you,” Larned said stiffly, “is air-tight.”

  MacReedy just looked at him, and Larned started pacing again. Mike Rodin snapped at Pappy: “As for proving I entered the States illegally twenty-odd years ago, Piersall, you’d have a gay old time trying to do that. Right?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Rodin,” Pappy said cheerfully.

  Mike Rodin grumbled: “Just to get the record straight, I have not been frightened or intimidated by any bureaucratic shenanigans. I am here only because I want to be here.”

  I figured he might go on beating his chest all morning, and I still wanted to see Marianne. I said: “Why would that be, Mr. Rodin?”

  “Drum, yesterday you said you had a letter from my daughter. Early this morning the Secretary of State called and read the letter to me. He also said that the State Department and the CIA had several intelligence reports corroborating the contents of that letter. That’s why I’m here. It is the only reason I’m here.”

  Miss Champion’s green eyes never left Mike Rodin’s face while he spoke. He went on: “I’m going to do you people a favor. I’m going to get Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia.” He glowered in turn at me, at Larned, at MacReedy, Jack and Pappy. Still glowering, he said, “Don’t think I can’t do it.”

  I said suddenly: “Well, well, well. Rodin—Rodzianko. I’ll be damned.”

  “He’s sharp,” Mike Rodin said grudgin
gly. Then, sotto voce to me: “I was born in Tula, Russia, fifty-nine years ago. Name: Mikhail Rodzianko. Parents dead. I have a brother named Vasili. I hear he writes books. He thinks I’m dead. I fled Russia during the White counter-revolution in the early twenties. I was a White, Mr. Drum. Our parents in Tula owned a large farm. They were executed for that reason and no other. I spent one year in Krasnoyarsk Krai. That is a labor camp in Central Siberia. There was a riot. I escaped. It was assumed that I died. My barracks, you see, had been gutted by fire.” Rodin smiled at Pappy. “This is, of course, off the record.”

  Miss Champion touched Mike Rodin’s hand. “Does it matter now?” For some reason her voice broke on the words.

  Mike Rodin shrugged. “I made my way from Vladivostok to Shanghai to Hong Kong. Worked my way across the Pacific on a freighter.” He smiled at Pappy again. “Next stop: Mexico. By 1931, I was in the United States. Is that what you suspected, Drum?”

  “It was only a guess. The name.”

  Mike Rodin turned to Jack. “Do you have a picture of Vasili Rodzianko here, of my brother?”

  Without a word Jack produced a dust jacket of Vasili Rodziariko’s Nobel Prize-winning book. Taking up the entire back was a head-and-shoulders photo-portrait of Vasili Rodzianko. He looked a few years younger than Mike Rodin and he had thick white hair. But the slanting eyes and the stubborn, outthrust jaw were the same. Mike Rodin took the picture, covered it from the forehead up with his hand.

  When he did that, the similarity between his face and the photograph on the dust jacket was astonishing.

  Mike Rodin dropped the dust jacket on the desk and looked at his watch. “If I’m leaving for Moscow on Tuesday,” he said calmly, “there are about five hundred things I have to do between now and then. So if you gentlemen will excuse me? Miss Champion can arrange the details on my behalf.”

  She said: “I ought to go with you—Mike.”