Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  We danced some more. She felt warm.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Don’t be naive.”

  “This.” She patted the Smith & Wesson on the back of my belt under my jacket.

  “I thought I might have a use for it earlier. I didn’t. I forgot I was still wearing it.”

  “I hate guns.”

  “They’re not a thing to love or hate. They’re just so much steel.”

  We danced. Her hair smelled sweetly of soap and female musk.

  “Listen, I’m worried about this guy you’re sort of involved with.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not.”

  “Involved?”

  “Worried.”

  When we were through dancing we drank some wine and then I took her home. She had an apartment on the second floor of a brick house on Lake Shore Drive, one of the big ones that would have been built by someone named Phil the Camel or Charlie Blue Eyes, with a bay window looking out on the smoked-glass surface of Lake St. Clair with the lights of Windsor strung like sequins along the far shore and the broader glittering sheet of Grosse Pointe Woods and Harper Woods farther down on this side, and beyond that Detroit. I was looking at Detroit with the lights off behind me and my tie undone and my jacket draped across a chair when Karen handed me a glass of something and slid her arm around my waist, laying her head against my upper arm. She was tiny with her shoes off.

  She said, “I like it at night. I like to stand here and look out and wonder what’s going on behind each lighted window.”

  “A murder behind at least two,” I said, “if the stats hold up.”

  “We’re cynical tonight.”

  “We’re tired. Why is it always ‘we’ with you nurses?”

  “What’ve you got against the place?”

  “It isn’t what it was. Don’t get me started.”

  “We’ve got all night.”

  “You’re doing it again.” I drank. It was good bourbon, with a slight char. “When I came to the town it was like a big dumb hunky with a neck like a beer keg and a big wide stupid grin. It worked hard, got dirty, swore, told off-color jokes, and laughed a lot and loud. Then the riots came and after them the murders and then this new gang took over and threw up those silos on the riverfront and called it the Renaissance City. Now it’s like a hooker that got religion, avoiding its old friends, won’t laugh at the old jokes. But at night it still opens its thighs to whatever comes along. I guess it’s the holy attitude I don’t like.”

  She said, “You expect too much of a pile of bricks and steel.”

  “Maybe. I miss that old hunky.”

  She turned her face up then and I kissed her. It started out friendly and wound up self-defense. I had to bend my knees to keep strain off my back. She was pressed against me from breastbone to thigh and her tongue darted and one hand found my shoulder blade and the other went prowling down my spine to the small of my back and found the revolver and recoiled. I let go of her with one hand and reached around behind and unsnapped the holster and fumbled it, gun and all, onto the window seat. All this was very awkward entangled as we were, but we never broke formation. She was at once as pliant and as sinuous as a young ocelot and her lips were like crushed wild berries, untamed and smoky-sweet with her teeth like thorns in the center of the sweetness. I did some biting of my own and plunged deeper into the jungle.

  I dressed quietly in the dark. The bedroom had a smaller version of the bay window in the living room, and as she stirred atop the tangled sheets and drew one slick leg up its mate the city glow lay blue-white on her naked skin. She lay with her hair fanned out dark across her pillow and watched me buttoning my shirt.

  “Why not hang around for morning?” she asked sleepily. “I fix a mean breakfast. Never go near the hospital cafeteria staff.”

  “I don’t eat much in the way of breakfast.”

  “There are lots of other good reasons to hang around.”

  “Better than good,” I said. “But tomorrow’s for working. I can’t get someone to cover for me like you.”

  “Also mornings are yours and you don’t share them.”

  I looked at her. All of her. Sighed. “She’s smart too.”

  “I live alone. It goes with the territory, like talking to yourself and eating on your feet.”

  She got off the bed and slipped on a red kimono that wasn’t any longer than it had to be. In it she saw me to the door of the bedroom and went up on her toes for a kiss. I made it a quick one. I patted her silk-covered backside and grinned. “This is where we got into trouble last time.”

  She smiled, but it wasn’t the wide monkey-smile. It was that tight one even the best ones get, that says no matter how far you go in this world or what you do, some part of you belongs to them. “Call me tomorrow?”

  I sighed again. “Uh-huh.” I kissed her again.

  Later I picked up my jacket and tie in the living room and got the gun and holster from the window seat and strapped them on behind my right hipbone. The weight felt at home, a lot more than I did standing in that living room. For all that it was a nice room to read a morning paper in. I left with my jacket over my arm, tiptoeing like a second-story man.

  12

  I CAUGHT SIX HOURS’ SLEEP and a shower and a shave and was looking at myself in the mirror over the sink when the front door buzzed. It was the boy from the cleaners with my good blue suit. I paid for the cleaning and tipped him and took the wire hanger off his hands. “Would I look better with my hair longer and a moustache, do you think?”

  He looked at me appraisingly. He was a young Arab with smooth brown skin and a striped necktie on a plaid shirt. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Where I come from they throw you in jail if you don’t have a moustache by thirteen.”

  “Where would that be, Iran?”

  “Highland Park.” He showed very white teeth under his own neat black Clark Gable.

  When he was gone I got out of the robe and unpinned a new pale blue dress shirt and put it on and chose a black necktie with a silver diamond pattern and put on the fresh suit. I tried a display handkerchief, looked at it in the mirror, didn’t like it and took it out. I brushed my teeth and my hair and frowned at the blue shadow on the lower half of my face that no razor designed by man had been able to do anything about. A new gray hair glittered among the thick brown at my temples. Gray temples are for solid men. I figured there had been some mistake. I wiped off each shoe with a towel and used the front door. I hoped I looked good enough for a Russian writer.

  The sun wasn’t shining today. There was a thin silver layer of cloud overhead and the raw-iron smell of rain in the air. I threw a raincoat in the back seat for luck.

  The Westin Hotel, built only a few years ago as the Detroit Plaza, pierces the sky at 740 feet surrounded by the cylindrical towers of the Renaissance Center. The city needed the hotel accommodations for conventions, so tore down a bunch of older hotels to put up this one, along with a concrete-paved festival square that is sinking into alluvial river soil and a covered sports arena with a ceiling too low for football and a leaky fountain designed by a Japanese architect, that looks like a big steel slobbering tarantula. I parked in the city lot next to the Center and rode the elevator up to Fedor Alanov’s floor. There was no one in the quiet carpeted circular hallway when I alighted. Like every other hallway in every other expensive hotel in the world it felt like the anteroom to the chamber where they lay out the dead.

  “Good morning, Mr. Walker. You’re punctual. Please come in.”

  Her voice didn’t sound in person the way it had sounded over the telephone. It wouldn’t, any more than an art masterpiece looks the same in the gallery as it does in a magazine. I stepped inside and let her hang my hat in a closet and took a hand that was soft and cool and made for taking and pressing and then letting go. She smelled faintly of something that if it wasn’t jasmine should have been.

  “I’m Louise Starr, Mr. Alanov’s editor. We spoke yesterday.”

  Her
e was a blonde. Her hair was brushed back behind her ears to curve out at her shoulders, but left to its own it would fall over her right eyebrow, and even in its present fettered state it threw off soft sparks in the lamplit room. The tan of her face was even enough to be her natural complexion except for the telltale white of her eyelids. Her eyes were blue, like Lake Superior is blue under a violet sky. She wore some make-up but I didn’t pay much attention to it. It would be the right shade for her and she would know where to go to learn how to apply it. She had amber buttons in her ears and a cream blouse and a tailored jacket and skirt of that rich brown that is supposed to say all business and no sex, but the guy who figured that out had never met this lady. She was a few inches shorter than I, in flat-heeled maroon shoes cut low on the sides.

  “Come meet the premier artist in our stable,” she said.

  I got my tongue unstuck from the roof of my mouth. “I thought the only thing you kept in stables wore iron shoes and blankets.”

  “It’s just an expression. As I keep telling Mr. Alanov.”

  I was following her through one of those rooms that are just rooms you walk through to get to other rooms. It had a salt-and-pepper carpet and some chairs no one ever sat in along walls with paintings no one ever looked at. Louise Starr’s hips switched a little in the snug tailored skirt.

  We went into another room twice as large, with more of the same carpet and paintings plus some green chairs and sofas with high humped backs and long spindly legs of dark wood that gleamed. Windsor lay in muted colors outside a big window in the right wall with the Detroit River slicing steel-blue in front of it. A drink cart full of bottles and polished shakers stood next to one of the sofas, where a bearded man sat topping off a stemmed glass with deep red liquid from one of the bottles. A younger man, also bearded, turned from the window as we entered.

  “Mr. Alanov, Mr. Walker,” said Louise Starr.

  The older man finished pouring and set the bottle back on the cart before looking up at me. He was thickset but not fat and wore his black hair shaggy and swept back without a part like windblown grass. His brows were thin for a Russian but absolutely level across eyes with lashes as long as a woman’s. His nose had a deep dimple where the bridge should have been, as if someone had laid a stick across it years before, and twin bands of silver swooped down through his beard from the corners of his mouth and up toward his ears as if he’d drooled them. He had very coarse skin with pores you could stick your fingers in.

  He looked at me for a moment that was as long as the walk across Mussolini’s office. Then he drank some of his wine and topped off the glass again and said, “I don’t like you.”

  I got a wolfish grin on my face and peeled the cellophane off a fresh pack of Winstons. “For a minute there I was worried we’d never break the ice,” I said.

  “There’s no smoking in here.” He turned large black eyes with no shine in them on the Starr woman. “Didn’t you tell him there’s no smoking in here?”

  “Mr. Alanov has an allergy,” she explained.

  I put away the pack and looked at the younger man. He was about six feet tall and well built, with a dark mariner’s beard fringing a square face. His eyes were dark and pretty and spaced evenly from his straight thick nose. They would have given him a feminine look if not for an ugly puckered jagged scar that blazed the right side of his forehead. In contrast to the older man’s printed short-sleeved shirt that left his furry arms bare, this one wore a neat black suit and a red figureless tie. Louise Starr introduced him as Andrei Sigourney, Alanov’s English translator. He smiled and said something polite and offered his hand. When I gave it back to him he didn’t wipe it off or anything. Here was a lad with manners.

  Neither he nor Alanov had a Russian accent. The writer spoke with a British inflection and Sigourney might have been from Big Sur.

  At the woman’s invitation I took the sofa opposite Alanov’s. This one felt like a two-by-four with a handkerchief spread over it. Hotels discourage unpaid-for guests sleeping on the furniture. She took a chair and crossed her trim ankles the way no one seems to have time to teach them anymore. Her legs were tanned too, very smooth. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing stockings, but she would be. Sigourney remained standing, with one hand resting on the back of Alanov’s sofa.

  “You’re English.” The writer was leveling the contents of his glass again. He never took a sip without replacing it immediately.

  “A couple of greats and a grand back, on my father’s side.” I swallowed. I hoped my throat sounded dry.

  “Frosty people, the English. I went to Cambridge.”

  “I keep urging Fedor to try writing in English,” the woman put in. “Andrei’s translations are excellent, but something is always lost when a man’s vision changes hands.”

  “Mixed metaphor,” grumbled Alanov.

  “Sorry.”

  “I will never write as well in English as I do in Russian. I write on smoke and the wind currents change between languages.”

  “Someone was telling me just yesterday that American and Russian are very close,” I said.

  He frowned thoughtfully. His beard was designed for frowning and he looked like a bear. “It’s a good theory. But it requires fluency in both idioms, and that requires a lifetime, or more likely two. I’d rather blame the inevitable failures on Andrei.”

  Sigourney smiled politely. He was a polite boy was Sigourney. I wondered what he was like away from Alanov. Whoever had given him that scar could tell me.

  I uncrossed my legs and crossed them the other way. Cleared my dry throat.

  Alanov, who was pouring again, picked up on the signal this time. He gestured with the bottle before putting it back on the cart. “My doctor has directed me to drink wine before and after meals. I can’t tell you how many doctors I went through before I found one that would prescribe wine. In any case that’s why I’m not offering you any.”

  “You have an allergy,” I said.

  Louise Starr changed the subject. “Mr. Walker, are you familiar with Mr. Alanov’s background?”

  “Russian, isn’t it?”

  “Do we need this man?” demanded the writer.

  “He’s Russian,” she said, sidestepping the whole thing neatly. “He was famous in his own country as a poet and the editor of its leading literary journal years before he wrote a book titled The Window on the Baltic, which captured the attention of the world and resulted in his exile from the Soviet Union. It was mainly through the urging of our firm as Mr. Alanov’s American publisher that the U.S. State Department offered him asylum. Which, incidentally, is the title of his forthcoming book.”

  “Tell him what it’s about,” Alanov said.

  “The title, like all of Fedor Alanov’s writing, is double-edged. Although fiction, the book is a sociopolitical autobiographical treatment of his defection that attempts to show the disparity between America’s pose of democratic freedom and the internal prejudices that make such freedom impossible.”

  “Tell him the plot.”

  “The hero is a poet —” Belatedly she caught the sarcasm in the writer’s prodding. She settled back a little, waving a slender hand wearing an amber stone in a delicate gold setting. “Well, it’s poor form to discuss a work not yet finished. Let’s just say that it will be an important book, as well as one that will infuriate authorities on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. There are people who would prefer that it not be written. Unpleasant people.”

  “Ours or theirs?” I asked.

  “Ha!” Alanov struck his knee with a hairy paw, almost spilling his wine. “Excellent question. I’m beginning not to not like this young man so much after all.”

  I smiled thinly.

  “We think theirs,” Louise Starr said, answering my question. “Specifically, a man named Rynearson, whom we suspect of being an agent for the KGB.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That kind of case.”

  “Well, we don’t know that he’s a foreign agent. But he runs a larg
e shop on East Jefferson that sells goods imported from eastern Europe and does a lot of business with representatives of Communist-bloc countries and is under federal investigation for suspicion of espionage. This much we know from our contacts in Washington.” She paused. “I should add that this is confidential information and shouldn’t leave this room.”

  “Maybe we should ring down the cone of silence.”

  That surprised a smile out of her, liquid white teeth sliding between pink-glossed lips. “I suppose it does sound like a plot recycled from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. That doesn’t make it any less true.”

  “There are a couple of things wrong with it,” I said. “The book is fiction, and who cares what an exiled poet has to say about politics in a work of fiction? Also, if there were ever any danger of Mr. Alanov’s writing about things better left out of the public stalls the Soviet government wouldn’t have let him leave the country in the first place.”

  She nodded, glancing at young Sigourney, like a mother approving her daughter’s choice of suitor. “That’s what the people at the State Department told us when we applied to them for protection. They’re too busy trying to woo Soviet scientists and engineers to our side to worry about one writer, and a writer of fiction at that. That doesn’t change the fact that men in the employ of Eric Rynearson attempted to kidnap Mr. Alanov last week.”

  “No smoking,” snapped Alanov.

  “Sorry, habit.” I put away the pack again. “Go on, Miss Starr.”

  “It’s Mrs.,” she corrected primly.

  13

  “FRIDAY NIGHTS Andrei drives Mr. Alanov to their favorite restaurant in Ypsilanti. It’s the only one in the area that serves authentic Balkan cuisine.”

  “ ‘Balkan cuisine.’ ” Alanov poured again. “I love what this country does with language.”

  Louise Starr ignored the interruption. “Last Friday night, a big station wagon was parked across the end of the exit ramp off US-23 at Washtenaw Avenue in Ypsilanti. It was drawn up at an angle, as if the driver had lost control and stalled it while fighting the wheel, but its flashers weren’t on and Andrei had to do some fancy driving to avoid hitting it.”