A large black leather briefcase lay on the seat between us. Cramer reached out and tapped it with a finger the size of a bratwurst.
“Your Chameleon ran up quite a score,” he said. “In addition to Schachter, he is almost certainly responsible for the deaths of two medical students who were working part-time for the St. Petersburg coroner. The young man had been strangled. In the case of the young woman, her killers were satisfied merely with blowing her up in her car. There was also another girl, a maid at the Three Crowns Hotel. They found her in an empty house about ten miles outside of town. She’d been shot once in the abdomen. And, of course, Bruno and Karin Fessler.”
I took a long slow drink of Scotch, letting it trickle down my throat a drop at a time therapeutically. It bore as much resemblance to the stuff I usually drank as real football does to arena football.
“Presumably it was Bruno who killed Lori?”
“Correct. He’d been careful, but their forensic personnel were lucky. They found just enough to positively put him at the crime scene.”
“Luckier than Lori,” I said. The image of room 416 that Sunday morning was one I wouldn’t forget for a very long time. If she hadn’t bumped into me, maybe nothing would have happened to her. And even if it did, I wouldn’t care, because I never would have met her…or grown to like her. Something occurred to me.
“Did they find…”
Cramer anticipated the question. His voice softened. “No, they didn’t, my boy.” He looked at me, then hid behind a cloud of cigar smoke. “I don’t suppose it really matters, does it?”
“No. It doesn’t matter at all. Is there any clue as to who this guy really is? Was?”
“None. His fingerprints are in no database anywhere in the world. Nor are his dental records. Nor his DNA. The Russians are significantly behind the curve in that department.”
“What about the Antarctica story he told me?”
“What about it? The story itself checks out. There was an explosion at Bellingshausen in the time frame he mentioned; it did kill three doctors. And, as with most Russian disasters, the story never became public knowledge and never will, which means either that he was there or knew someone who was there.”
I drank some more Scotch.
“Or knew someone who knew someone. I see what you mean.”
“Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” Cramer agreed, astonishing me with a sudden and more than passable impression of Yul Brynner in The King And I. “Not including the three doctors, all of whom were women, of the eleven men who were at Bellingshausen, nine are dead from assorted causes. Two are missing to this day and presumed dead. None was older than fifty-two years of age. No criminal charges have been filed in any of these cases. It’s a dead end, son. Literally.” He drew on his cigar, then let out more smoke than the Indian Signal Corps used at Little Big Horn. “Anything else?”
“Maria,” I said.
“Who the devil is Maria? Oh, Rakosi. Do you mean why did I send her to hold your hand after I said you had complete autonomy?”
“Something like that.”
“Is the name Bob Carradine familiar to you?”
“No.”
“He used to work for me until recently. Disappeared while on assignment in El Salvador, and turned up in the Straits of Florida one week from the time of his last contact. Body had been in the water for days, they said. Impossible to tell how many.” Cramer looked at his Scotch for a long time, then at me. “Had your desk, in fact. Dead man’s shoes, my boy. How do you feel about that?”
I felt sick was how I felt. For a change, I avoided his question. “What does that have to do with Maria coming to Russia? Not exactly part of her portfolio, is it?”
“Her portfolio is what I say it is,” Cramer snapped. Then he softened. “To make a long story short, they insisted on it—she and her sidekick, Felicity Carter. Back in May—before your time—they came to me about Carradine and their feeling that he was in some sort of, what was the word they used…oh, yes. Trouble. I told them there was no such thing; that only kids get in trouble, and that Carradine could damn well look after himself. Well, as it turned out, he couldn’t. Bad luck, but he knew what the job entailed.”
Cramer drained about four ounces of unadulterated Scotch from his cut crystal glass, swallowed, looked away, looked back. He reached for the decanter and gave us each a refill.
“Then they had the impertinence to come to me with the same damned story about you. I set them straight. Told the young fools if they were so worried, they could handle the job themselves.” He chuckled. “And damned if they didn’t. Just as well, I suppose. To lose one special assignment correspondent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”
“Oscar Wilde,” I said.
“In…”
“The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell said it to Mr. Worthing.”
Cramer lifted his glass to me. “You do seem to have a penchant for minutiae.”
I ignored the compliment—if that’s what it was.
“How did our guy work switching Karin’s identity with Lori’s? The kids in the coroner’s office?”
“No,” Cramer said. “It seems he had someone in place with the German Federal Police. The man, one Franz Koppel, accessed their master database and switched the names; then switched them back some twelve hours later. A shift supervisor doing a random check saw the activity, and the unfortunate Herr Koppel is even now being vigorously interrogated by his former employers. All of which does, as you alluded to, beg the question of what happened to the interns and why. Perhaps one or both of them noticed something at the morgue that tipped them off.”
“One,” I said. “The girl noticed; the boy informed.”
Cramer stared at me.
“Indeed? How do you arrive at that remarkable deduction?”
“From the way Borzov told me they died. The Chameleon was a Grade A misogynist, and blowing up a woman would have a certain appeal for him—he was ready enough to blow up Karin Fessler’s airplane—but at least it would be an instant death. On the other hand, to strangle someone with a wire that saws into your victim’s neck—well, you don’t do that unless you’re teaching him a lesson. Someone like a recalcitrant employee. I think the kid was working for him. Maybe he screwed up; maybe he just had a smart mouth. I know from experience that the man couldn’t take a joke. I made some kind of crack to him, and for a few seconds there, I thought it was going to be my last.”
“Your brain seems to have emerged from Russia unscathed,” my boss said grudgingly, “even though I can’t say the same for its container.”
I’d seen the bruise behind my ear before I left the hospital. The swelling was down—some—but there was a four-inch splotch of black and yellow and purple back there that was going to be there for a good long time. The doctor said I’d sustained only a mild concussion—but then, it wasn’t his head. I hoped Bruno’s death had been a long and painful one.
“And there really was a bomb at the arena? Borzov wasn’t clear on that.”
“There was indeed,” said Cramer. “Some hybrid version of Semtex—a few ounces attached to each of the beams. Made without taggants. Radio-controlled detonators. The sniffer dogs missed it completely. The press box would have collapsed and rolled all the way to the floor. Nasty business. Took you and Rakosi to save the day. I suppose some sort of raise for the two of you might be in order, but that’s not important. As I say, it’s all in here.” He tapped the briefcase again. “Take a day or two and look it over.”
“Look it over? What for?”
Cramer raised an eyebrow at me.
“Because you’ve got a story to write, my boy. I should have thought that much was obvious.”
“But I was the story,” I said. “Someone else will have to write it up. The ethics of the situation—”
“Silence!” he roared. “The ethics of the situation are what I say they are.” The windows shook, and I could only think that the chauffeuse di
dn’t wreck the car because she was accustomed to the odd seismic shock or two from the limo’s passenger section. “Your job is to observe and report. Everything else can be safely left to me. Answer one question: can you write the story exactly the way it happened?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Then write it. Ethical dilemma solved. Really, my boy, this tendency of yours to make things more difficult than they have to be is something that I hope you’ll keep a careful eye on. Ah, here we are.”
The big Fleetwood pulled into my apartment complex and rolled to a stop in front of my block.
“I don’t see my car anywhere,” I said.
Cramer produced a set of keys and tossed them into my lap. “There,” he said, pointing.
I followed his finger and saw the sky-blue 6-speed Audi he had rented for me in Russia.
“Oh,” I said. Nothing surprised me any more. “Thanks.”
“Heard you liked it. In any event, couldn’t have you pedaling that monstrosity of yours to the office every day. Bring down property values. Here. Take this with you as well. I can’t stand a cluttered automobile.” He reached behind him and handed across two boxes of H. Upmann Chairman’s Reserve. At least three hundred dollars worth of cigars. I took them.
“Um,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No man is an island, my boy,” he said, switching from Oscar Wilde to John Donne. “Except for me. Remember that. Now get out of my car.”
I got out. The chauffeuse and I lugged my stuff inside. There was plenty of room: almost everything I moved in with was still in boxes and plastic totes in a distant out-of-the-way corner. It took us each a couple of trips. During the second trip, the door across the hall opened to reveal a tall—nearly as tall as I was—and attractive blonde woman. Cooking smells wafted out into the hallway. The woman stood in the doorway and watched with an amused expression as we dropped off the last of the luggage and the driver (I’m tired of saying “chauffeuse”) walked out and got behind the wheel of Cramer’s limo. For something the approximate size of a battleship, I was astonished at how quickly it seemed to disappear. The woman and I looked at each other.
“That was quite an entrance,” she said.
“It doesn’t happen every day.” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Paul Mallory.”
“Lisa Martin.” We shook hands and she smiled. It was a smile that belonged in a toothpaste commercial; an “after” smile. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Paul.” Then her expression changed to one of slight concern. “Forgive me for saying it, but you look exhausted. Did you have a long day?”
“Yes and no. I’ll tell you about it sometime, if you like. But not today.”
“I’ll take you up on that. Oh, have you eaten yet?”
I shook my head.
“I wasn’t hungry before, but whatever you’re cooking does smell very good,” I admitted. “Chili, isn’t it?”
She smiled again and nodded. “Specialty of the house. I just got home from work myself. Think you can stay awake long enough to eat a bowl or two?”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to—”
“Nonsense! Come on in.”
So I did.
What the hell, I figured. It wasn’t a school night.
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