So yes, it had had to be something like this. Rather than arrest Tom Walker, Yanov had waited to see who would meet Gilbert.
“The room is bugged, of course,” Yanov said, smiling at his command of idiom. “But there’s no one in the listening room.”
“You have names?” Marley asked.
“Four people the DGI are running in the United States. One is a congressional aide. I want to leave Cuba.”
“It’s impossible,” Marley said.
“No, it’s routine. I travel to Mexico City often. In three weeks I will be there. I will leave the embassy at noon, and you will have a car and a plane ready.”
“Will we be getting your wife and children out as well?”
“My wife will be happy to remain here. We have no children.” Yanov’s smile suddenly revealed pleasure. “I have a good friend in Mexico City. She will come with me.”
When we get you to the States, Marley thought, how much will you remember? It was a stupid doubt, and he pushed it aside. Yanov would be in the agency’s hands for as long as it took to wring him dry. Four Cuban agents would be a down payment. There would be a lot to talk to Yanov about. Once they were done with the Latin beat, his earlier career would be gone over, every station along the way, the paint color on every wall in every room where he had conducted interrogations. If he was lucky, they would have everything they wanted in two years.
Why in the world does anyone defect? Marley wondered. Ideology couldn’t explain it. The woman in Mexico, perhaps. Perhaps Yanov was imagining the fresh California air and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
“I’ll need something now,” Marley said. “One name. The congressional aide’s.”
The Russian waved him off. “There is a financial writer who was here a few weeks ago. She’s not what we call a useful idiot. She is a full-time, committed intelligence officer who collects industrial information, which the Cubans pass to us.” He gave Marley a name that had already shown up in the CIA’s own research. Yanov stood up, collected the file he had carried into the room, said reflectively, “I don’t think we’ll need to have the Cubans beat you again.”
The Cubans, in fact, apologized deeply for the misunderstanding, assured him that certain overzealous junior officers would be disciplined, it was very embarrassing—but these Russians, you know? An East German car delivered Marley to his hotel less than thirty hours after he had been arrested. Apart from a split lower lip and several small bruises, he wasn’t physically worse for the experience. Part of him, though, knew with a cold certainty that he had brushed up against something that would break him if it were ever applied for real.
He learned that the visiting business group had been bused up to a beach for the afternoon. Passing through the hotel lobby, he saw nobody he knew. In his room, he showered and thought about getting a message to Tony Gilbert. But if the Englishman had survived this long, he must have known that the moment he had passed Yanov to Marley, his life was at risk from the Russian. Yanov wouldn’t leave people around who knew too much.
“What happened to you?” one of the women asked at dinner. She was with a Midwest agricultural conglomerate, cold eyed, indifferent to Mojitos, unimpressed with the Cubans’ ability to pay for anything they bought.
“I was bumped by a car,” Marley said. He fumbled a dinner roll, clattered a butter knife, tried to muffle his laugh. “I had too much rum.”
“No one seemed to know,” she said, not really concerned or curious.
Marley registered at a hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa that was suitable for a businessman with a modest expense account. He arrived three days before the rendezvous with Yanov was scheduled, stayed well away from the Russian embassy, but sat in a van with a technician from Mexico City station who had observation photos of the woman they were supposed to bring out. The woman appeared to be in her late thirties, more plain than attractive, an economist at a commercial ministry.
“Are you going to make contact with her?” the tech asked.
“No.” She would either be at the rendezvous or she wouldn’t. By the time they found out, Yanov would have no choice, he would be on the run.
He met Tom Walker twice for briefings. “We’ll have three cars,” Walker said. “We pick Yanov up outside the university. If the embassy has a regular tail on him, hopefully they won’t know which car he’s aboard. We’re going to take him about thirty miles south, use a small airport there.”
“And then?”
“Once he’s on the plane, you don’t need to worry,” Walker said.
“All right.”
“Wonder what they’ll do to his family?” Walker said. He wasn’t, Marley realized, a thug at all. The possibilities disturbed him.
“He’s left a wife, but I don’t think he cares,” Marley said.
He took a taxicab to the university. He didn’t admire mosaics, but he pretended to because a middle-aged tourist wearing a straw hat would admire them, or at least find them interesting. He arrived at eleven in the morning. By one thirty, he knew that Yanov wasn’t going to show. He stayed anyway. Walker broke cover at three. “What the hell?”
They stood watching the street. Nervous now, not about Yanov but for themselves. If Yanov had been broken, Marley was pretty damned obvious to anyone who was looking. So was Walker, now.
“See if he’s gotten a message to the woman,” Marley said.
Yanov hadn’t.
They didn’t bother going back the next day.
Charles Marley was in Washington for more than a month before an agency asset in the Cuban diplomatic service reported what he already suspected. Kiril Yanov had been arrested by the KGB sometime in March in Havana. The asset knew no more. He didn’t, in fact, know any of this. It was the story making the rounds.
Marley flew down to Panama and met Tony Gilbert.
“I’ve had to retire,” Gilbert complained, tilting a gin and tonic so the ice bumped his nose. They were on the terrace of a small, noisy hotel, where the two men seemed to be the only English speakers. Gilbert’s shirt was damp and sweat stained. His linen trousers were wrinkled. He wore no socks. “I’m officially a pensionado, but they keep coming around trying to steal from me with regulations and fees. I wish Winnie could see me, though. The young ladies in the building across the street think I’m interesting. I appreciate that, so I give them a few dollars.”
“It sounds as if you’re comfortable,” Marley said.
“I barely got out of Cuba, you know. Yanov had people around at my hotel first thing in the morning. I flew out with a group of tourists going home to Canada.”
Marley asked, “Did you burn Yanov?”
“Heavens, no, Charles. I wouldn’t do that to your people. Besides, I was at the game too long to hold a grudge. It was nothing personal with Yanov. The sod was just protecting himself. They shot him, you know. The day after they arrested him. Didn’t take him long to break. Not much intestinal fortitude, when it came to having the jewels crushed. Don’t suppose I’d do any better. What about you?” Gilbert lifted his glass as he asked.
“Probably no better,” Marley said.
“We’re all very brave until the moment, then cry for our mamas.”
Marley was feeling impatient. Yanov hadn’t told the interrogators everything, or there’d have been someone to meet him at the university, just to square accounts. Perhaps the interrogators hadn’t asked, and once the pain stopped Yanov hadn’t had a reason to tell them.
“They must have already been suspicious of him,” Marley said. “Did he have political views?”
“Not that I know of,” Gilbert said. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t political. I hear Yanov’s wife found out about a girlfriend in Mexico and denounced him. That was personal, wasn’t it?” Gilbert lifted his glass and finished his drink.
Copyright © 2010 John C. Boland
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FICTION
SMALL FAVORS
STEVE LINDLEY
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“You remember my daughter Amber.”
Kubiak didn’t, would have bet even money the two never had discussed her.
“My oldest.” Torasella shifted his weight, reached into his back pocket, extracted his wallet, opened it, and offered it to Kubiak, who had to lean forward and raise himself a foot off the couch to reach it. Its plastic sleeves were flipped to a photograph of a young woman who shared her father’s dark complexion. She was standing, bent, in the side yard or tiny backyard of a house or building, holding a working lawn sprinkler at arm’s length, aiming the spray of water away from her body. The wall behind her was brick. She was wearing a casual nothing of a summer outfit that carelessly showed off her figure, and her face might have passed for lovely had it not been for the look on it. She had been caught laughing, a goofy, unselfconscious, wide-mouthed, squinty-eyed guffaw that was full of little girl nonsense, and was probably the reason this particular photograph had been tucked into her father’s wallet. Kubiak passed the wallet to Denise, who was on the couch beside him. He noticed that his wife managed a quick flip to the surrounding photographs before handing it back.
“Amber’s in her sophomore year down at U of C,” Torasella said, taking the wallet and giving his daughter’s image one last glance before tucking it back into his pocket. “Doing it all on her own, on grants and scholarships. About all I have to spring for is the pizza.”
Even with the wallet tucked away, he continued to sit on an uncomfortable angle. The chair he was in was the favorite of most of the Kubiaks’ guests, as it had the deepest seat and the highest back. Joe Torasella, however, had gone only so far as to perch himself on its edge since being let into the apartment. Stocky, with a crew cut of thick, black hair under his cap just beginning to show gray at the temples, he was maybe a year or two younger than Kubiak, and a good half foot shorter. He had once been an amateur boxer, claimed that if not for his short reach he could have gone pro. He still frequented a gymnasium somewhere on the south side, lived in Cicero, had a family, worked the four-to-midnight security shift seven floors below at Park Tower’s front desk. That, and the fact he had been asking Denise about Kubiak over the last few days, was about as much as Kubiak knew about the man.
Kubiak seldom passed the building’s front desk. He found the garage entrance on the west side of the building more convenient, and the freight elevator dropped him closer to his apartment door. Denise had insisted that Kubiak call down tonight and invite Torasella up after his shift, as his inquiries to her about her husband were growing a little less casual each time she entered the lobby. Torasella evidently wanted something from him, probably something having to do with police business as it was well known throughout Park Tower that Kubiak, though retired, still had ties to the Chicago P.D. Kubiak had guessed that something might have had to do with the apartment building’s security. He hadn’t expected wallet photos.
“Amber’s workload is a little heavy this semester,” the security guard said. “She’s putting in a lot of time downtown. Staying down there late, too late for my liking.”
“The Hyde Park campus is about as heavily patrolled an area as you’re going to find on the South Side.”
“Yeah, so I’ve been telling myself, especially since the election and all. But the reason I’m concerned . . . Last summer, she met this kid. This punk.”
Torasella’s face darkened. Though he spoke softly, he couldn’t muzzle the natural characteristic of his voice, every word punctuated, every syllable a short jab to the ear.
“Amber’s a lot like her mother. As good as she is in school, she’s got more caring in her than common sense. Strangers smile at her on the street, she smiles back. They talk to her, she stops and listens. This kid glommed onto her at some porch party. They went out a few times, only because she had nothing else to do, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She says she let him know from the start that she wasn’t interested, and I believe her. But, at the same time, I can understand him thinking otherwise. You spend any time with Amber, you’ll know what I mean. People meet her in the laundromat or the grocery checkout line, they fall in love with her. And I’m not saying that just because I’m her father.”
No, of course not. Kubiak didn’t say it aloud. Still, Torasella paused, tried to read Kubiak’s face, considered, continued.
“Last August, he went back downstate to school, U of I, Champaign. I thought she’d seen the last of him, only I found out lately that all semester he’s been coming back up here every other weekend, showing up wherever she happens to be. And now he’s up here for a solid couple of weeks on his spring break. I knew something wasn’t right because she’s been acting different lately, all withdrawn into herself. She comes straight home after school, stays in on weekends. I’ve tried getting through to her, but she won’t talk to me about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve hated this kid since the minute he shook my hand and grinned at me, and I was dumb enough to let Amber know it. You’ve got a daughter, you know how that goes.”
Denise made a sound, something between a grunt and a chuckle. Kubiak ignored her, asked Torasella, “This kid have a name?”
“Harold. Not Harry, never Harry. He let me know that right off. Mr. Harold Walsh. Anyway, when all this became news to me, it got me thinking, and I remembered Amber was coming home from the beach one afternoon late last summer and I noticed a couple of bruises on her back and side. She told me she got banged up playing softball. That was good enough for me at the time. She’s nineteen. She treats her body like a suitcase. But the other day I noticed a little black and blue around her wrist, and my wife, Connie, tells me now that she saw some marks on her arm a month or so ago. So, we both got on the phone and started giving the third degree to Amber’s friends. To a man, they closed ranks and shut up. I don’t know if they think they’re defending this kid or Amber, but right now Connie and I are more in the dark than ever, and it’s driving us crazy.”
“What about Amber’s siblings? She hasn’t confided in them?”
“No. There’s just the youngest, and eight years between them. All her little sister knows is that there’s something wrong.”
“Are you at the point yet where you’re willing to bring the police into it?”
“We already have. We’ve called those hotline numbers out of the phone book too. Everybody gave us pretty much the same story. The cops gave it to us the straightest. Amber’s an adult, they said. Any time she wants to talk to them, they’ll listen. If she won’t, all they can do is wait until she comes home one day looking bad enough they’d have reasonable cause to believe this kid has . . . But you understand that there’s no way I’m going to sit back and let it get that far. I can’t stand to see what he’s done to her already.”
“What you think he’s done.”
“Yeah. I’d go over and put the fear of God into Walsh myself, only I know what he’d say back to me, the look he’d give me, the ‘What’s your problem, old man?’ The ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’ And I know what I’d do to his face. I just don’t know if I’d be able to let up before . . . It probably wouldn’t take much.”
Torasella glanced at Denise, lowered his eyes. Kubiak could imagine the pictures playing out in the man’s head, wondered if the images of what he might do to the boy helped him to sleep at night or kept him awake.
“Connie knows it too.” Torasella continued. “And she’s afraid that if we try to talk to Walsh’s parents and the conversation turns sour that it might push Amber even farther away from us. No, we both know at this point we don’t have any choice but to back off, but something has to be done to keep this punk away from our daughter. It’s why Connie asked me to talk to you. Walsh’s family lives in Oak Park. I’ve got the address here.” He reached inside his jacket, extracted a slip of paper. Kubiak took it, glanced it over, placed it on the table beside him. Torasella waited.
“Joe,” Kubiak said, “I’m not really sure what it is you think I ca
n do for you.”
Torasella glanced at Denise again. This time his look was different, as if he were wondering what turn the discussion might take were the boys alone in the room.
“You do realize that the cops aren’t just giving you a line,” Kubiak told him. “Short of fresh bruises, there’s very little anyone can do without your daughter’s cooperation.”
“Sure. Sure.”
“As for recruiting anybody else to put the fear of God into this Harold Walsh, especially anybody at any time involved with the Chicago P.D., the chances are pretty good it might backfire, and any complaint of intimidation, coming from him or his parents, would be about the worst possible thing that could happen to you in the situation you’re in.”
Torasella nodded, tried to hide his disappointment, waited for something more. When nothing came, the security guard, chin set, let out a soft sigh.
“Well,” he said. “That’s it, then.”
Kubiak asked, “How late does your daughter’s schedule keep her in Hyde Park?”
“Like I said, too late for my liking.”
“What I mean is, it wouldn’t take much to arrange to have a university patrol car swing around to keep an eye on her during her trek to her car or the subway.”
Torasella said nothing. No doubt he had been hoping for a solution that dealt directly with Walsh.
“I’d only have to make a phone call,” Kubiak added. “A couple of guys tweak their route a bit. She won’t even have to know she’s being watched.”
“She takes the 55 bus out of Midway, gets home pretty much the same time every night.”
“Just get a copy of her schedule to me, along with classroom buildings and room numbers. And, a good, plain photo of her. You own a car?”
“Sure.”
“It might be smart if you can find some excuse for her to use it until Walsh goes back downstate.”
“I don’t know how to manage that. How would I explain it making sense, her dragging the only car we’ve got through traffic just to leave it parked on campus all day?”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 2