by John Case
She placed a damp washcloth over his eyes.
The room was stuffy, so she turned on the ceiling fan. But she didn’t open the windows. How did she know that the noise from the street would bother him?
“It never lasts long,” he told her.
“Shhhhh.” She stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers, the pressure so light, it might have been a breeze.
Every few minutes, she removed the washcloth. He could hear her turn on the tap, and wring out the fabric. Then she came back to his side and replaced the cloth, now cool, over his eyes.
It had been a long time since anyone had shown Wilson any kindness—in part, perhaps, because he hadn’t allowed it. And no one had ever tended him during one of his migraines. He’d always hidden them, moving away from other people whenever they came on.
He congratulated himself on his intuition about Irina. She had heart. The other women might be mercenaries, even prostitutes, but Irina was the real thing.
The migraine was beginning to pass, though he was still a little dizzy, a little “off.”
Her tenderness took on the aspect of a revelation. That he should find a woman as beautiful as this, and as gentle as this, augured well. And, in fact, everything was falling into place. With Hakim out of the picture, he had three times as much money as he thought he would—and no entanglements. The hard part, turning the hash into cash and getting out of Africa alive, was over. All that was left was the payoff.
He’d bought a ranch and started work on the apparatus. And it would soon be ready. The marriage “transaction” that he’d entered into as a gesture to the future was looking more and more like a windfall, a blessing, a stroke of luck. Providence, or something like it, was smiling on him, readying the world for its cleansing and rebirth.
“It’s almost gone.” He began to sit up.
“Shhhhh…” With the tips of her fingers, she pushed him back down, and removed the washcloth. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t open your eyes.”
When she came back again, she stretched out alongside him, fitting herself to his body like spoons in a kitchen drawer. She leaned over him, stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers, then kissed his neck.
“I remove my clothes,” she whispered. “Is all right?”
“Perfect,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
BELGRADE | APRIL 12, 2005
Mike Burke settled the telephone back into place. Wilson’s address was a prison?
He jammed his hands into his pockets as he walked back to the Esplanade. The good news was that he had a name now, a real name—which was more than Kovalenko had. So he’d get points for that. He even had an address. Sort of.
But that was bad news, too. This particular address did not inspire confidence. On the contrary, it tended to reinforce Kovalenko’s doubts that Burke had acted in good faith when forming a corporation for “d’Anconia.”
On the other hand (there were a lot of “on the other hands,” it seemed, as Burke tried to get Wilson into focus) his quarry was a Stanford man. So he couldn’t be all bad, could he? Of course not.
The ridiculousness of this thought was not lost on Burke as he trudged through the cold-snap that was Belgrade. If Wilson graduated from Stanford, he’d undoubtedly done well on his SATs. But that didn’t make him a saint. To go from the playing fields of Palo Alto to the Yard at White Deer suggested that our boy was either a very bad man, or a total fuckup.
Burke was hoping for Door #2.
At the hotel, it took Burke fifteen minutes to get through to London. When he did, Kovalenko wasn’t there. His assistant, a Brit named Jean, offered to take a message. Burke said, “Just tell him I can identify d’Anconia.”
“Who?”
He spelled it for her, and gave her his number at the Esplanade.
She repeated the details, then mouthed a little tsk. “I must tell you,” she said, her voice clipped. “Mr. Kovalenko is out of pocket at the moment. I’ll do my best to get your message to him, but—”
“He’s out of pocket?”
“Ye-esss.”
“Just how far out of pocket is he?” Burke asked.
She sucked a little air through her teeth in a display of regret. “It could be several days.”
Burke groaned. “This is kind of important,” he told her.
“I’m sure it is.”
“‘Urgent’ is more like it.”
The secretary sighed. “Maybe you should have a word with Agent Gomez. He’s filling in.”
“By all means,” Burke told her. “Put him on.”
There was a few seconds of silence, and then she came back on the line. “I’m afraid he’s away from his desk. Shall I have him call you?”
Do any of these people actually work? Burke wondered.
Replacing the handset in its cradle, Burke swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. As he did, he felt something crumpling in his pocket. It was the three-by-five card that the desk clerk had given him the day before. He sat for a moment wondering what to do. On the one hand, he was curious about who Wilson might have been calling in the Ukraine. But he was also smart enough to know that this was precisely the kind of thing that got cats killed. He should probably leave it to Kovalenko.
Right, he thought, and dialed the number. There were a couple of short rings, and then a recorded voice came on the line. To his surprise, it was a woman’s voice, heavily accented and sexy:
You have reached Ukraine Brides. Please listen carefully to choose your correct prompt.
If you are interested to receive our brochure, please press “one,” leave name and complete address.
If you are interested to speak to representative, please press “two,” and leave telephone number to reach you.
Or…you may prefer to visit our complete website at ukrainebrides—all one word—dot org. Thank you.
Burke hung up. As he fell back on the bed, he thought: He wants to get married?! Like this guy doesn’t have enough problems?
Gomez called the next afternoon. The first words out of his mouth were:
“You’re in a lot of trouble, my friend.”
“What? Who is this?”
“Agent Gomez.” Suddenly, his voice changed. Became almost chipper. “You mind if I tape this?”
Burke took a deep breath. “What kind of trouble?”
A chuckle from Gomez. “So the tape—it’s okay, right?”
Burke gritted his teeth. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s fine. What kind of trouble?”
Click. “Well,” Gomez told him, “I had a little chat this morning.” He paused for effect.
Burke waited. Finally, he said, “Yeah—and?”
“I talked with Agent Kovalenko.”
“Great!” Burke declared.
“I gave him the message you left. Said you’d called from Belgrade. He was very curious as to how you managed to get around without your passport.”
Burke didn’t know what to say. He started to mumble something about dual citizenship, then heard the weakness in his own voice and got angry—as much at himself as at Gomez. “Y’know,” he said, “I haven’t done a fucking thing wrong.”
“Hey!”
“The only thing I’ve done is, I’ve been helpful.” He paused. “So how come Kovalenko doesn’t call me himself?”
A thousand miles away, Special Agent Eduardo Gomez stood beside the window in his office, looking through the blinds at the plane trees in Grosvenor Square. “He’s in the shop,” Gomez said.
“What?”
Gomez bit his lip. “He’s unavailable for a few days.”
In fact, and as Gomez well knew, Kovalenko was in the Mayo Clinic, having flown to the United States in a desperate bid to save himself—though from what was unclear. Kovalenko’s own internist said he was fine, that the anomalies on his CAT scan were fairly typical, and nothing to worry about. But the Legat was not a man to take chances. Certainly, not with his own health. He wanted a second opinion—prefe
rably from an American who had gone to Harvard. So he’d flown the coop—and the Atlantic.
The truth was: Ray Kovalenko was a hypochondriac. Everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it. In his absence, Gomez had taken the opportunity to avail himself of Kovalenko’s office, where he’d checked out some of the websites the Legat had visited. And what he found was terrifying. Kovalenko surfed for diseases the way some guys surfed for porn.
The Centers for Disease Control, the World Organization for Animal Health, the User’s Guide to Rare Diseases websites—each was just a click away at the top of the Legat’s list of Favorites. The man needed help. But like a lot of people who need help, he did not want to hear about it. He was a medical paranoid who ran his life along need-to-know principles. And not just his private life. His professional life was equally opaque, perhaps because he understood that secrets were the hundred-dollar-bills of the Information Age.
So he didn’t delegate well. Which meant that when Kovalenko was unavailable, certain cases did not move forward. And woe unto anyone foolish enough to step in where he wasn’t wanted. In the end, Gomez thought, covering for Kovalenko was simple. You took messages and kept your head down. Anyone could do it.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other end of the line, the guy in Belgrade—Burke—was shouting: “What does that mean? He’s ‘unavailable for a few days.’ Do you even know what this is all about?” Burke asked.
“Of course,” Gomez lied.
A skeptical silence ensued. Finally, Burke asked, “Did you tell him I can identify d’Anconia?”
“He knows that,” Gomez replied. “His secretary gave him the message. That’s why I’m calling.”
“But he couldn’t call me himself?” Burke asked.
“If you’ll just give me the information,” Gomez insisted, “I’ll pass it along.” He sounded almost bored.
Burke made a sound, somewhere between a gargle and a growl. If he told this guy that d’Anconia was an ex-con named Jack Wilson who’d done time in a federal prison called Allenwood, that would be the end of it. The FBI would get on with the case, and Burke would be left with nothing, twisting in the wind.
Maybe Kovalenko would do the right thing. Maybe he’d reinstate Burke’s passport, and remove the sanctions against Aherne & Associates. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. When you came right down to it, the Legat did not seem like a stand-up guy.
“Y’know,” Burke said, “I’m just gonna wait until I see him. It’s kinda complicated, and…Tell Mr. Kovalenko I’ll be in touch.” And with that, he hung up.
Falling back on the bed, he watched the lights fluttering across the ceiling. He thought about going back to Dublin. That would be the easiest thing. He could give the information to Doherty. But what was the point of that? This was Kovalenko’s show.
And Kovalenko had left the house.
The best thing he could do, Burke decided, was find a way to improve his hand. Pick up as much as he could so that when it came time to sit down with Kovalenko, he’d have more to trade than a name.
He could fly back to Dublin that same night. But there was nothing for him to do there. If he returned to Ireland, he’d just sit around, missing Kate, and drinking with the old man.
But if he went to Lake Bled, he might actually learn something. D’Anconia—Wilson—was no doubt long gone. But this notebook guy, Ceplak, might know where he is. If Burke could find that out, Kovalenko would have to be more accommodating.
He reached for the three-by-five card that Milic had given him, and dialed the 386 country code for Slovenia. The phone rang and rang, and then a man’s well-lubricated voice answered: “Zdravo?”
Uh-oh, Burke thought. And took a flyer. “Mr. Ceplak?”
“Jeste?”
“I’m looking for Yuri Ceplak’s son…?”
“Yes! That’s me!”
CHAPTER 27
SLOVENIA | APRIL 13, 2005
Lake Bled was only sixty miles or so from Ljubljana, but once Burke passed the city of Kranj, about halfway, sleet began to tick at the windshield of his rental car. Traffic slowed and the road grew slick as it twisted into the foothills of the mountains. Fog bleached and thickened the air. Two hours later, he skated into Bled, white-knuckled behind the taillights of a black Mercedes.
The setting was spectacular. A small town at the edge of an emerald-green lake, Bled rested in the shadow of an eleventh-century castle perched at the edge of a steep cliff. The Julian Alps loomed in the background.
The town was crowded with skiers so it was more than an hour before Burke found a room at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a faded white elephant that looked as if Agatha Christie had spent her summers there.
The room was more expensive than he would have liked, which reminded him that he was going to have to do something about money. He was running through his savings fast. Though he’d been the beneficiary of Kate’s life insurance policy, he’d given it all to Doctors Without Borders.
In his room, he pulled aside the drapes that covered the French doors, and gazed through the falling snow at a gauzy sprawl of lights across the lake. He knew from an in-flight magazine that a seventeenth-century church was out there in the snow, standing on Slovenia’s only island. In the campanile was a legendary bell. Ring it, and your wishes came true.
Burke took two miniature bottles of Dewar’s from the minibar and emptied them into a tumbler. Going out to the balcony, he brushed the snow from a wicker chair, sat down and gazed across the lake.
Wishes were funny things, he thought, pulling his coat closer. To begin with, they were always in limited supply. No one ever had a thousand wishes. From the fairy tales that he’d read, you only got one—unless you were lucky, and then you got three. Either way, you didn’t want to waste them. You didn’t want to wish for something you could get on your own—like Lakers’ tickets—or something you could do on your own.
Like bitch-slap Kovalenko.
Neither were wishes prayers. Prayers were for possibilities, however unlikely (Dear God, let her get well).
Wishes were for lost causes, or outright miracles.
He sipped the Dewar’s and squinted into the wind, which was blowing toward him off the lake. In the distance, he could just make out the rough shape of the church, with its campanile. Kate would have loved it here, he thought. Then, looking toward the church, Wish you were here.
The morning was sky-blue, cold, and clear, sunlight knifing off the snow. To Burke’s surprise, the road to Luka Ceplak’s house was plowed, so it took only a few minutes to get there. Lugging two bottles of vodka in a Duty Free bag, he bounded up the neatly shoveled steps and rapped on the door. The air was fresh and redolent of woodsmoke. Beside the house, in an open-air shed, was a wall of wood so neatly stacked that it formed a flower at its center.
The man who answered the door looked like Geppetto. He was short, with a wiry physique and a pixie’s face that went nova when he saw the Duty Free bag.
“Ahhhh,” he said. “Mr. Burke? I see you come bearing gifts.” He rubbed his hands together. “Always welcome. Please to come in.”
A woodfire crackled in a limestone fireplace as the old man removed the bottles from the bag. Discarding the tissue paper that enclosed them, he revealed, first, a blue bottle of Skyy (“Ahhhh”), and a bottle of Grey Goose, which he kissed. Grinning, he lifted one bottle, then the other, several times, as if doing biceps curls, then finally held the Grey Goose forward. “Just a taste,” he said, “to warm up our conversation—yes?”
Burke didn’t drink in the morning. He was about to say no, when he thought better of it. “Great.”
While Ceplak disappeared through a doorway, and puttered in the kitchen, Burke studied a phalanx of framed photographs, sitting on top of the mantel. The pictures were black-and-white, and obviously quite old. In one of them, an elegant man in a three-piece suit stood in the foreground of what appeared to be a potato field. In the background was a structure that looked as if Eiffel had collaborated with Frankenstein to build a s
kyscraper. Rising above a low-slung brick building was a wooden tower that might have been about a hundred feet tall, capped by a gigantic metal hemisphere that would have gladdened the heart of Buck Rogers.
“So! Already, you’ve met the maestro,” Ceplak brayed as he reentered the room bearing the bottle of Grey Goose, two glasses, and a plate of crackers and cheese on a painted metal tray.
“The maestro?”
“Tesla! At the Wardenclyffe Tower, of course.” Ceplak handed him a glass, and raised his own. “Na zdravje!”
“Cheers!”
The old man tossed back the vodka in a single gulp. Burke followed suit. Ceplak took a deep breath, sucking the fumes into his chest. “Good, eh?”
Burke nodded. His throat was on fire.
“So!” Ceplak gestured to a Barcelona chair in front of the fireplace. “Sit.”
It was a beautiful room, Burke thought, an eclectic mix of gleaming wooden antique and modern pieces. One entire wall was an expanse of glass with a view of the lake. Burke could see the island now, just off to the right. Tiny figures, blatant against the snow, moved between the shore and the island.
“Pilgrims,” Ceplak told him. “Last year, in April, they row out. But this winter, I don’t think it ever ends.” He gazed at the scene for a while longer, then turned back to Burke. “And you! You’re a pilgrim, too!”
Burke cocked his head. “How’s that?”
“You come to see the notebooks.”
“Actually…”
“My father, Yuri—maybe you know—for thirty years, he’s Tesla’s assistant. Is funny, this pair! The maestro, he’s two meters—this is like basketball player! My father, he’s like me: one point six meters! Practically a dwarf.”
Burke laughed, and loosened the collar of his shirt. The vodka within, and the fire without, were making him warm.
“You’re probably wondering how they met, am I right?” Ceplak asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. My father comes to New York, it’s 1885. He’s fourteen years old, has maybe two dollars in his pocket. English, he has nothing. No words! Hello, good-bye, yes, no—this is tops! No friends, no relatives. But he knows about this famous Serb, right there in New York. So he goes to see him. Is Tesla, of course! And together, they’re speaking Serb. For thirty years, my father’s working for Tesla, they’re speaking Serb.”