by Bill Granger
He was going to kill the black in the house. That would be the first thing.
The old woman would see the body, understand that Stolmac was capable of killing; then she would tell him where November was, this agent who had upset the cell, who had pierced the network, who had escaped a contract against him for nearly a year.
That would be information worth giving to the embassy.
He had been cautious. He knew that Malenkov had disappeared. A man named Rocca, a gangster, had taken the house under his protection. The people from the embassy had turned down Stolmac’s suggestion to question the old woman. It was—what had they said?—“not productive” to question her while they were still involved in the operation to get Teresa Kolaki back. Bureaucrats.
She was only an old woman. With a blackie to guard her. And a cheap gangster to watch the house.
He had taken care of the gangster first. Two shots through the side window of the gangster’s car, both hollow-point, Teflon-coated 9-millimeter shells. The Italian’s head had exploded, as though someone had put a bomb in his brain and set it off. The body of the Italian was still in the car, parked in the alley behind the house on Ellis Avenue.
And still Stolmac had waited, to see if there were others. But no one had ventured out; the house was dimly lit and still. It was time.
John Stolmac emerged from the entryway and crossed the street, down a gangway separating the old woman’s house from a three-story apartment building that faced 46th Street. He went around, through the alley, to the bare back entry. He climbed the stairs to the back door. He fumbled with a dozen keys on a chain, found one, pushed it into the lock and turned. The back door did not budge. He shoved and felt the door give slightly. He pushed again and burst the second lock. The woodwork splintered. He was in the kitchen.
Stolmac removed the pistol from his coat and unlocked the automatic safety.
He took a second step into the room. It was dark. A thin light came from the front hall.
He took a third step.
“Stand there,” she said. He saw the old woman framed in the light suddenly. She held a pistol in her hand.
Stolmac turned, hesitated. He hadn’t come to kill the old woman. Not at first.
“Where’s the black man?”
“Who are you?”
“Put down that gun. That’s dangerous.”
“Who are you?”
He took a step toward her. The old hand trembled. He reached for the pistol.
She fired.
John Stolmac could not quite believe it. He stood still, staring at the old woman. It was absurd to think he would be frightened of an old woman, waving a pistol.
“Give me the gun,” he said. And then he felt the sudden rush of pain in his belly. His own pistol felt too heavy for his hand. He dropped the gun, felt a rush of nausea; was he going to be sick?
When he fell, his head struck the side of the kitchen table, but he was beyond feeling.
When Peter returned, she didn’t ask him what he had done with the body.
Peter was amazed at her. She wasn’t even shaking. Tough old bitch blew that dude away just like nothing. Tough like the other dude, the nephew or whatever he was.
She had a suitcase and some papers in a small box.
“We finally going?” Peter said.
“Yes. I never thought it would come to it.”
“Shoulda gone before this.”
“He brought this—when he came to the house.”
“You was the one wrote him.”
“I didn’t want him to involve me. I told him that.”
Peter said nothing. She was jiving him now, the way she’d go on about something that happened only she’d suddenly decide to remember it differently. When he first met her, Peter thought she was crazy. Old. But then he saw through her, saw right through those gray eyes, saw she knew exactly what was going on, what had gone down, but wanted to jive. Jive herself or someone else, just try out a different version, see if anyone would believe it. See if she would believe it.
“Where we going?”
“It doesn’t matter. It should be someplace warm.”
“California.”
“No. I think it rains there this time of the year. Or something. It should be someplace warm.”
Peter waited. She already knew where she wanted to go; she was just jiving again.
“Well, it doesn’t matter.” Said lightly, as though it really didn’t. “I suppose we’re going to have to wait until morning,” she said.
“Ain’t no planes at three A.M.”
“We’ll find someplace,” she said. “Then I’ll have Monsignor O’Neill get my mail, send it along. And I’ll sell the house. I’ve got all the papers here.”
He waited as though she was leading up to something.
“You’re taken care of, Peter.” She glanced at him sharply. “If you don’t want to go, I can make a settlement. Or there’s a will.”
He stared at her blankly before he spoke. “I got no particular place to go. It don’t matter that much.”
“All right.”
“’Sides, the hawk is biting, cold goes right through me. I ain’t young neither. Got old waiting to get outta the place.”
“All right,” she said again. “In the morning.”
“That all you gonna take? One suitcase, that box?”
“Papers. The lawyer can take care of the house, not that it will sell for much. But it suited me.”
“They ain’t necessarily coming again. You might give it time,” Peter said.
“No. I killed a man here.”
“He was gonna kill you.”
“But I killed him.” She looked through him. “That’s what Red brought me to.”
“But when he comes back—”
“No. He won’t be back. They… they’re hunting him. And they’ll find him and kill him. I knew it when I looked at him, before he left, before…” She blinked. Her eyes were wet. She frowned and turned. She wouldn’t cry. Tough old bitch.
27
ZURICH
Denisov stepped off the number 6 tram from Paradeplatz and waited for it to go on. The streetcar clanged farther up the street, turned a corner, disappeared. Denisov pulled his black homburg firmly down until it rested above his ears. He put his bare hands in his pocket and felt for the piece Devereaux had given him. It was a Walther PPK, reliable at close range but without high impact over distance.
Devereaux had said, “If you want distance, buy a rifle.”
Denisov crossed to the entrance of the zoo and shoved coins across the counter to an old woman. She stripped off a single ticket from a roll and pushed it over the counter. Denisov took the ticket to a gate, paid, and entered the enclosed zoo grounds.
The afternoon was lost in fog on the Zürichberg. The mountain was full of trees and old homes and sports facilities and a cemetery where James Joyce was buried. And the zoo.
He started along the paths.
The zoo was halfway up the mountain. It seemed remote, distanced from the world by fog and an eerie quiet broken only by the restless roar of caged animals and the cry of caged birds.
Denisov walked slowly, stopping now and then to peer at an animal peering back at him in the gloomy light. He smiled slightly, sadly, at the brown bears sitting patiently on rocks, waiting for sleep or darkness or a feeding.
Denisov thought: Why is he arranging this elaborate farce?
Denisov did not believe Devereaux would surrender himself for the release of a Polish child, or for the release of anyone, even the American journalist. Devereaux had not survived so long to surrender so easily.
What other reason existed for this charade? To trap Denisov? Trap him in what? If Devereaux wanted him dead, he would have killed him long ago, at his convenience. Instead, he released Denisov, gave him a passport, money, even the Walther PPK he fingered in the pocket of his coat. In the gloom, somewhere ahead, a tiger growled.
Perhaps Devereaux intended to trade Denisov to K
GB for the Polish child. That thought had come more easily to Denisov. KGB would like the return of a defector, even a reluctant defector. Trade a spy’s life for the life of a child.
Denisov had decided this must be the truth. Denisov had decided to meet with Glosser, keep the game alive, arrange a meeting with Devereaux. And kill Devereaux. This time without words between them, this time without any subtlety.
He would not go back to California, of course. That path would be closed. And he would not go back to Moscow.
Denisov had nearly three hundred fifty thousand Swiss francs. They were at the Hauptbahnhof, in a Swissair travel bag. A case full of neat hundred-franc notes in Locker B112. Enough to begin a new life. Perhaps in Marseilles. He had once had connections there when the heroin trade was flourishing between France and the United States. It would be a warm place, away from KGB if they were to look for him. Away from the Americans.
He would meet Glosser in the zoo, arrange the matter of trading Devereaux. He would report to Devereaux, a second meeting would be arranged. And then he would kill both of them—Glosser, who knew him and could betray him, and Devereaux, who had betrayed him before.
Perhaps having Devereaux’s body in Zurich would satisfy KGB. At least until Denisov made good his escape. A train to Geneva, a transfer to the fast train to Lyon, always watching his trail, giving himself time. A car from there down to the Côte d’Azur. There was money to be made still in the drug trade in Marseilles; not enough to become greedy but enough to live comfortably.
For a moment, he stood in the swirling fog, lost in thoughts of his escape. Then he saw movement in front of him. He smelled sweat, the stench of foul breath. He wrapped his hand around the pistol in his pocket. The shadow in the gloom shifted.
Denisov took a step forward. The fog shifted again in the strange, yellowish light.
A tiger. It was a tiger crossing from rock to rock carelessly in the cageless preserve surrounded by a deep, rocky trench which defined its prison. Denisov smiled then.
He turned, read the sign in French that said this carnivore was among the endangered species in the world.
So were we all, he thought.
Another step. His hand relaxed its grip. Then he saw the other man.
Rimsky held a pistol pointed straight at Denisov’s chest.
“Where is your master?” began the other man in harsh Russian.
Denisov’s saintly eyes blinked in surprise. His hand tightened around the pistol in his coat pocket but the distance was too far to be certain, even if he could remove the pistol in time. A fine line of sweat formed on his face, above the black eyebrows.
“Where is your master?” the other man repeated.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Rimsky. I understand from Glosser that you wanted to meet me.”
Ten feet. The two men could see each other clearly, as though a space in the fog around them had been cleared for this little drama.
“Where is Glosser?”
“As dead as you will be, Dmitri Ilyich Denisov. It was Major Denisov before you became a traitor to your section, to the Directorate, to our—”
“Yes,” Denisov said calmly. “And you are a politician then, making a speech?”
It was absurd, he thought. He heard his own flat voice as though hearing the voice of a stranger. The flat tone was a matter of training, of having learned never to reveal himself. The complete secret agent. Yet it was an illusion, like everything else. He was afraid. Terribly afraid.
“I was not a traitor,” Denisov lied softly. “I bring you November.”
“Your master.”
“I led him here. I was going to kill him.”
“Well, that’s no concern for you anymore, Dmitri Ilyich.”
“He wanted to arrange a trade—”
Rimsky smiled. “For what?”
“A child. In Poland.”
“Teresa Kolaki’s child,” Rimsky said. His voice was almost eerie, catching its tone from the flatness of the fog, from the flat, fading yellow light of a still afternoon.
“You know this; then you know I tell you the truth—”
“We have Teresa Kolaki’s child taken care of.”
He waited. The pistol in Rimsky’s thin hand did not waver. Someone would come along in a moment, someone would intrude on the melodrama. I beg your pardon, is that a pistol? What is going on here between you? I’ll call the police.
“He is dead,” Denisov said.
“We do not kill children,” Rimsky said. “He is safe, in America, with his mother.”
Denisov blinked again. His clothes felt damp beneath the layer of heavy coat, and the homburg held the dampness of his scalp.
“Then why arrange this… absurd thing?” Denisov asked the question not of Rimsky but of himself. He was an innocent extra in an opera of the absurd who had been pushed onstage with a spear and costume and who had no idea what was going on.
“Where is November?” the Russian asked suddenly, sharply.
“Here,” Devereaux said, standing behind him. Rimsky felt the black barrel of the .357 Colt Python revolver pressed against his right ear. He did not turn.
“Pistol,” Devereaux said.
Rimsky opened his hand and the weapon clattered to the pavement.
Denisov stood stock still for a moment, his mouth open, sweating freely now, adrenaline surging through him, his heart racing, his hands trembling. All control in his body was loosed. He felt like retching.
Devereaux pushed Rimsky down on a wooden bench behind them. He slapped the Russian across the bridge of the nose with the barrel of his pistol. It was a gesture so casual it seemed an afterthought. Blood dripped from both nostrils, spreading across Rimsky’s upper lip, dripping onto his coat.
Denisov took two steps forward and bent down for the pistol. He put it in his pocket. He walked to the men.
“You wanted me, Russian, and now here I am,” Devereaux said in English, in a flat, calm voice lazy with intended violence, the purring voice of a great cat pacing in the foggy half-light of a winter afternoon.
“You’re dead,” Rimsky said. As simply as a child stating a lesson. “and you, Dmitri Ilyich—” He switched to Russian. “Death to spies.”
“Beginning with you,” Devereaux said. “I hit you to get your attention. This is a pistol and I have a question: Where is Stefan Kolaki?”
“You are a dead man,” Rimsky said.
“No. That’s not the answer,” Devereaux said thoughtfully. His back was to Denisov. He was very close to Rimsky’s face. He hit him very hard across the nose again. This time a bone cracked and Rimsky blinked with pain. He did not cry out.
“Not hard enough,” Devereaux said with the same concern. He hit Rimsky a third time. Even Denisov winced at the casual infliction of pain. He understood pain; he knew it was necessary; he had used it as a surgeon uses a scalpel to cut open the belly of a patient. An instrument only. But he winced anyway.
This time, Rimsky groaned. He wept, not in sorrow and not in repentance, but in reaction to bodily pain.
“You understand now?”
“I’m not afraid to die,” said Rimsky. That was a lie, Denisov thought; that is training.
“It’s not a question of that. Not yet,” Devereaux said. “There is death as easy as going to sleep and death that’s hard. You know the difference, don’t you?”
Rimsky said nothing for a moment. Then he groaned again. His face was soaked with blood.
The single shot was muffled in the fog. It might have been a stick rapped sharply against a log, it might have been anything but what it really was.
Rimsky’s head exploded. Brains splattered Devereaux’s coat, blood streaked Devereaux’s face. He was not aware of it. He was down already, beneath the bench, and Denisov was flat on the ground beside it.
“There,” Denisov said. He pointed across the cages to a hilly walk near the section where they kept the bears.
Devereaux rolled once onto the walk, his pistol c
ocked, got to one knee and waved with his hand to the Russian.
Denisov was already running along the fence.
Devereaux disappeared up a second walk. It circled an oasis of cages and outdoor exercise areas for the animals, rose through a gardenlike setting toward the other path.
Two old men stood ruminating, staring into the sad eyes of a water buffalo. Devereaux brushed past them. Later—when he got home—one of the old men would notice that grayish matter had fastened to his coat. And the next day, in the Zeitung, he would read about the man found shot to death in the zoo, near the outdoor cages of the great cats.
Devereaux, in the half-light, saw the man running up the path. A thin man without a hat, holding a pistol.
Devereaux fired low, his own pistol cracking sharply against the muffling fog. The figure seemed to stumble, then fell. The pistol clattered away. The man reached for it. Denisov hit him then like a fast train slamming through a country crossing.
Devereaux was out of breath when he reached them. He picked up the pistol. Smith & Wesson .45. Welcome to America.
“Who are you?”
“You’re in trouble, shithead,” Morgan said, clenching his teeth. “That was a Soviet agent you were dealing with. Selling out to—”
“We’ve got to get this asshole out of here,” Devereaux said. “Pick him up on that side.”
Denisov and Devereaux raised the man between them.
“You shot me, you son of a bitch,” Morgan said. “You shot a goddam agent of the government, you son of a bitch.”
“I want to know about Zurich, about Krueger,” Devereaux began.
“I don’t have to tell you. You have to tell me what a goddam R Section agent that we’re supposed to be reprocessing and—”
“You’re NSA,” Devereaux said.
“And you? What have you become? A KGB stooge?”
“Why did NSA know about Krueger? And about Rimsky—”
“We are talking secrets, asshole,” Morgan said. “You don’t seem to appreciate the seriousness of the situation any more than your girlfriend did.”