He went quiet again. Looked down.
“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.
He looked up.
“It wasn’t me,” he said.
I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say It wasn’t me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.
“You’re going to have to prove it,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“You’re going to have to. Or they’ll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren’t going to let Brubaker slide.”
He said nothing.
“Start over,” I said. “The night of January fourth, where were you?”
He just shook his head.
“You were somewhere,” I said. “That’s for damn sure. Because you weren’t here. You logged in and out. You and your gun.”
He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn’t speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.
“The night of January fourth,” I said. “Did you commit a crime?”
His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.
“OK,” I said. “Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head?”
He said nothing.
“Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president’s ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll give you a clue,” I said. “Where you’re sitting, that would be about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head.”
He said nothing.
“Tell me.”
“It was a private thing,” he said.
“What kind of a private thing?”
He didn’t answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had been, chances were it wasn’t Columbia, South Carolina. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“That depends on what you did,” I said.
“I got a letter,” he said.
“Getting mail isn’t a crime.”
“From a friend of a friend.”
“Tell me about the letter.”
“There’s a man in Sofia,” he said.
He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed it, he made it sound like he thought there was something uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn’t, really. It was a story that could have been told by any of us.
There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States. She had gotten married to an American. She had become a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters. There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation. The sister’s life was hell. The communist censors had passed the letters, because anything that made America look bad was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town who knew his way around the city’s dissident network. The friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who bought machine parts in Austria. The machine-parts guy had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January second, early in the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.
He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.
His next available free time was the evening of January fourth. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centered around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.
“Still got the letter?” I asked.
He nodded. “But you won’t be able to read it, because it’s written in Bulgarian.”
“What were you wearing that night?”
“Plain clothes. I’m not stupid.”
“What kind of plain clothes?”
“Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. American. They’re all the plain clothes I’ve got.”
“What did you do to the guy?”
He shook his head. Wouldn’t answer.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s all go to Cape Fear.”
We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn’t remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.
And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn’t remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.
It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as a historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left toward a place called Southport.
“Cape Fear is off of Southport,” Summer said. “It’s an island in the ocean. I think there’s a bridge.”
But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn’t even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle. Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double-wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.
“Here,” Trifonov said. “Make a right.”
There was a wide center track with narrower tracks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar-paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.
“Her name is Elena,” Trifonov said.
We left him locked in the Humve
e. Knocked on Elena’s door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin housedress and men’s shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.
“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” Her accent was like Trifonov’s, but much higher-pitched. It was quite appealing.
“We need to talk to you,” Summer said, gently.
“What about?”
“About what Slavi Trifonov did for you,” I said.
“He didn’t do anything,” she said.
“But you know the name.”
She paused.
“Please come in,” she said.
I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion. But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody else in it.
“Your husband not here?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Where is he?”
She didn’t answer.
“My guess is he’s in the hospital,” Summer said. “Am I right?”
Elena just looked at her.
“Mr. Trifonov helped you,” I said. “Now you need to help him.”
She said nothing.
“If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to know which it was.”
She said nothing.
“This is very, very important,” I said.
“What if both things were bad?” she asked.
“The two things don’t compare,” I said. “Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?”
She didn’t answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” she said. “Mr. Trifonov just came here and took my husband away.”
“When?”
“The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia.”
I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy.
“How long was he here?”
“Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.”
“And that was it?”
She nodded.
“What was he wearing?”
“A leather jacket. Jeans.”
“What kind of car was he in?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.”
“OK,” I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved toward the door.
“Will my husband come back?” Elena said.
I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.
“I seriously doubt it,” I said.
We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.
“Where did you leave the guy?” I asked him.
“On the road to Wilmington,” he said.
“When?”
“Three o’clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911. I didn’t give my name.”
“You spent three hours on him?”
He nodded, slowly. “I wanted to be sure he understood the message.”
Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north toward Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-story and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.
“What was the guy’s name?” I asked him.
“Pickles,” he said.
The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is, it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.
“Early morning of January fifth,” I said. “Sometime after three o’clock, there was an admission here.”
The guy riffed through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.
“Male or female?” he said.
“Male.”
He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.
“John Doe,” he said. “Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.”
“That’s our guy,” I said.
“Your guy?” he said, looking at my uniform.
“We might be able to take care of his bill,” I said.
He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking, One down, two hundred to go.
“He’s in post-op,” he said. He pointed toward the elevator. “Second floor.”
He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.
“Pickles,” I said.
She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.
“Five minutes only,” she said. “He’s very sick.”
Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by himself.
I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.
“You two wait outside,” I said.
Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.
“How are you, asshole?” I said.
The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.
“That was the man,” he said. “Right there. He did this to me.”
“Did what to you?”
“He shot me in the legs.”
I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.
“Front or side?” I said.
“Side,” he said.
“Front is worse,” I said. “You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky.”
“I
didn’t do anything.”
“Didn’t you? I just met your wife.”
“Foreign bitch.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. Watch.”
I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.
“He is very sick,” I said.
We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.
“I apologize,” I said.
“Am I in trouble?” he said.
“Not with me,” I said. “You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different.”
He smiled, briefly. He was calm.
“I trained five years with GRU,” he said. “I know how to kill people. And I know how not to.”
sixteen
We gave Trifonov his Steyr back and let him out at the Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and then legged it to his room and picked up his book. Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We parked the Humvee and walked back to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log. It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.
“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They were the only other people who left the post that night.”
“They went north,” I said. “If you want to say they threw the briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north. They didn’t go south to Columbia.”
“OK,” she said. “So the same guy didn’t do Carbone and Brubaker. There’s no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.”
“Welcome to the real world,” I said.
The real world got a whole lot worse when my phone rang twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort Jackson. She put him through.
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