“They got on last night after dinner. All present and accounted for, except for the mysterious Mr. Kosev.”
The door to the bar opened and a man came in. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt, and a pair of heavy gloves was tucked into his back pocket. He said something to the bartender, who jerked his head toward the back. He picked up a chair along the way and put it at the end of the booth and sat down. His name was Hellman, and he was a blond, corn-fed Midwesterner with the bland, open face of an innocent, or a skilled, liar. Susdorf offered him a drink or coffee. He refused them.
“Thank you, sir. I don’t use them.” He looked around the table. “What do you want to know?”
“Have you ever seen the Russians bring someone to the ship who looks like he might be a prisoner, might not want to go?”
“Yeah. Sure. A couple of times. Different ships. Not this one, but still, yeah, I’ve seen them. I mean, I don’t know for sure they were prisoners, but there was something about it.”
“How do they do it?”
“A couple of times they brought them in an ambulance and took them up the gangplank on a stretcher. They were asleep, like they gave them something to knock them out. A couple of times they came in a car. Pull right up to the bottom of the gangplank. Two guys helping another guy, you know, and him nodding off, but he could walk with the two guys helping.”
“Who owns the pier, us or them?”
“Venezuela Lines, actually.”
“Yeah, but whose territory is it?”
“Ours,” Susdorf said. “United States territory. The ship? That’s theirs. Once he’s on the ship, he’s in Russia.”
“So we take him on the pier between the car or the ambulance and the gangplank. I’m betting it’s an ambulance. They know we want him. They’ll have him knocked out.” Cassidy lit another cigarette he did not want. He had to do something with his hands.
“Jesus, I don’t know. I mean, what’s our excuse?” Susdorf complained.
“A broken taillight on the ambulance, loitering with intent, interference with an officer, spitting on the sidewalk. We take my father and argue about it afterward.”
“I better call Mr. Tolson.”
“Mr. Tolson doesn’t want to know. He wants to be able to deny he had anything to do with it. Once we get my father, it’s over. Then it’s politics. Mr. Tolson’s good at politics. Let him do what he’s good at.”
“Fucking Russkis. Let’s just do it. I’d love to stick it to them once.” Cherry, an unlooked-for ally.
Susdorf did not like it. “Okay. But you’re out front in this. The Bureau’s backup. If things go wrong, we’ll try to get you out, but we can’t afford to be the primaries.”
“I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
41
The SS Bakunin was a battered tramp freighter of about three thousand tons. Its black hull was a patchwork of rust chipped off and paint reapplied. The sodium loading lights on the pier made the white superstructure brilliant in the surrounding dark. Two tugs from Moran Towing, black hulls, dark red bridges, black funnels painted with a large white M, were butted up against the ship, one at the bow, one at the stern, waiting to herd her out into the stream.
The brightly lighted pier swarmed with longshoreman loading crates and bales into cargo nets with forklifts and muscle. A deck crane hooked the nets and swung them up and over the ship’s rail and lowered them into the hold. Occasionally longshoremen rode the outside of the net to work the unloading. Winches squealed, forklifts rumbled and clanged, and the men shouted instructions and warnings over the mechanics. Cassidy could smell the diesel from the forklifts and the salt of the tidal river from where he watched in the pier foreman’s office, a glassed-in cube under the pier’s high metal roof. Susdorf and Cherry waited in the shadows at the back of the office. The foreman, a big Polack named Kolwitz, had looked at Cassidy’s badge and then shrugged and gone back to his paperwork. “As long as you don’t shoot one of my guys.” Cassidy wasn’t the first lawman to watch a Russian ship loading.
Three big men in raincoats and fedoras stood near the bottom of the gangplank smoking cigarettes and talking to each other. Cassidy watched a Russian crewman come down from the ship and swing wide to avoid them.
“Who are the heavies by the gangplank?”
“Amtorg officials,” Kolwitz said.
“What’s that?”
“American Trading Corporation. They do the buying and selling, American goods for Russia, Russian stuff for here. It’s a Russian outfit.”
Cassidy gestured to Susdorf, who came and stood at his shoulder and looked out at the three men.
“The Soviets use Amtorg as a cover for some of their operatives. The one in the middle is named Ipatiev. We have him ID’d as a colonel in the KGB. He worked with the occupation forces in Vienna under that name in 1947. The other two are low-level hoods traveling under work names.”
“Does he usually pull this duty? Watching a ship load at oh dark hundred?”
Kolwitz raised up from his seat to look out the window. “The middle one? Never seen him before. The other two, yeah.”
“He’s here to make sure there’s no hiccup getting my father on board.”
Cassidy checked his watch. Six o’clock, an hour until the ship cast off.
Ten minutes later a taxi stopped a few yards from the gangplank. The three hoods put their heads together and then turned and watched the cab. The white lights overhead cast the interior of the cab in shadow, and it was impossible to tell how many people were inside.
“I’m going out,” Cassidy said. “If it’s my father, I’m taking him before they get up the gangplank.” He went to the office door and eased the knob.
“Go easy, Cassidy. Just take it slow. We don’t need an international incident over this.”
“Sure.”
Fifty feet to the cab. It would take him five seconds at the most to cover it. Another twenty feet from the cab to the gangplank. They’d be moving slowly if Tom Cassidy had been sedated. He had enough time. Why hadn’t they pulled right up to the gangplank? He opened the door and stepped into the shadows of a steel pillar that supported the pier’s shed roof. He took his gun out from under his arm and held it down along his leg.
One of the cab doors opened. A man got out. He turned and reached back into the dark interior to help someone. From where he stood, Cassidy saw a man inside the cab throw an arm over the first man’s shoulder. There was a struggle. The first man pulled back, dragging the second man with him while a third followed from inside and put his arm around the second man’s waist to support him.
Cassidy moved, his gun in one hand, his badge in the other. Play it straight. Show them the badge. The voice of authority. That’ll freeze them for a moment until he was close. Then, if he had to, show them the gun. That’s when it could all go bad. That’s the moment when they’d give it up or start to fight. Five of them, the two from the cab, and the three Amtorg men. Bad odds. Who do you take first? Ipatiev, the KGB colonel. Would he have a gun? Probably. They’d look to him for the lead. If he made a move, they’d go with it. If he moves, shoot him.
He was ten steps from the pillar when the three men began to sing in Russian. They staggered a few steps from the cab, then stopped and shouted something. They took a few more steps toward the ship and paused to elaborately bow to the Amtorg men at the gangway, who watched them impassively. Then they staggered up the incline to the deck.
Drunken crewmen at the end of liberty.
Cassidy took a few deep breaths and rolled his shoulders to shed the tension. He holstered the gun and turned back to the office. Susdorf looked at him and shrugged. He went back to his place at the window.
They waited.
Ten minutes later a small flatbed truck drove onto the pier and pulled up near the gangplank. It carried a single crate. Six longshoremen manhandled the crate off the back of the truck and laid it on a cargo net. The winch on the Bakunin ground to life. The cable tightened. The net and crate rose,
swung in over the rail, and disappeared into the hold.
The pile of crates and bales on the pier diminished until there was little more than a net full left.
Twenty to seven.
A six-year-old Chevrolet sedan pulled onto the pier and parked in the shade of the shed roof. The man who got out wore a canvas jacket, gabardine pants, and rubber-soled work boots. His face was shaded by an old fedora. He carried a worn leather briefcase and walked toward the ship with a rolling gate as if matching the toss of a deck.
“Who’s that?”
Kolwitz looked up from his desk. “Damon Hodge, the harbor pilot.”
Hodge nodded to the Amtorg men and went up onto the ship and disappeared behind the deck rail. Moments later he reappeared climbing the ladder to the bridge.
Six forty-five.
“They can’t get him from the consulate to here by seven.”
“A ship’s not a train,” Kolwitz said. “Sometimes they leave as late as an hour.”
“Call your guys watching the consulate,” Cassidy said to Susdorf. “Find out if they’ve seen anyone leave.”
“They could be caught in traffic,” Susdorf said.
“At six thirty in the morning? Call.”
Cassidy lit his fortieth cigarette of the day. It burned his mouth and throat, and he stubbed it out. He scrubbed his face with the flat of his hand, but it did nothing to chase his tiredness. He could hear Susdorf on the phone behind him. Through the window he could see the three Amtorg men talking. The leader, Ipatiev, nodded to his men and turned and walked away from the gangplank.
“No one left the consulate,” Susdorf said.
“No one? Nothing?”
“A truck went out from the back.”
“What was in it?”
Susdorf asked into the phone. “A crate. A driver.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
Ipatiev got into a car at the end of the pier and drove away. The other two Amtorg thugs leaned against the gangplank and lit cigarettes, relaxed now that the boss was gone.
If he was there to supervise Tom Cassidy’s arrival, why had he left?
Longshoremen loaded the last of the crates into a cargo net.
Cassidy shucked his jacket and threw it toward a chair. He snatched a canvas windbreaker off a hook near the door and scooped a pair of work gloves and a cargo hook from the windowsill. “He’s already aboard. They brought him in the crate.” Then he was out the door and running.
The winch whined. The cable tightened. The last cargo net rose from the pier. Cassidy reached it as it cleared. He stuck a foot through one of the net openings and grabbed a handhold and rose with it.
One of the longshoreman said, “Hey,” but he did not look back. He watched the Amtorg men as he rose. They glanced up at him, assumed he was a worker, and went back to their conversation. The net went up until it was twenty feet above the dock, and then it swung in over the deck toward the black rectangle of the open hold.
Cassidy rode the last load down and stepped to the deck as the net went slack over the crates it held. The hold smelled of coal smoke, fresh-cut pine from the crates piled two stories high, and the swamp of bilges. Work lights in cages ran the length of the overhead, leaving the alleys through the cargo stacks packed in shadow. The steel walls sent a constant murmur as water brushed the hull.
Russian crewmen looked curiously at Cassidy as they unhooked the cable. They saw the windbreaker and the gloves and cargo hook and accepted him as a longshoreman. One of them pointed up toward the deck and said, “You go now. We go. Ship go,” and made a gesture with his hands to show the ship sailing.
Cassidy nodded and stepped away as the men dragged the net aside and swarmed the crates it had carried. Near a bulkhead door, he found the single crate that had been brought on the flatbed. One end had been pulled off and left on the steel deck. The crate was empty. Heavy staples held canvas straps that had been used to steady its cargo. There were black marks on the wood floor. The rubber wheels of a gurney, Cassidy thought. Some of the crewmen watched him. Their faces were closed and sullen now. They did not like him examining the crate that had carried a prisoner on board. The one who had spoken before jerked a hand toward the deck overhead and shouted, “Go. Go.” Tom Cassidy had refused to speak Russian to his children while they were growing up. It was the language of his past, not his future, and his American children would never need it. Cassidy needed it now; he did not even know the word for father.
“Where’s the man they brought in this?”
“No man here. You go.” They lived where questions brought trouble, where if you raised your head, someone was sure to hammer it down. Better just to do your work, to see and hear nothing. He was trouble, and they wanted no part of him.
Cassidy stepped through the bulkhead door and climbed metal stairs that zigzagged up past metal grid landings to the deck. He stepped out into the new day as four crewmen shipped the gangplank and lashed it to the inside of the rail. A glance at the shed roof of the pier showed him that the ship was moving slowly out from land. A blast of the bridge horn was answered at the bow and the stern by hoots from tugs. The deck under his feet throbbed with the beat of the engines, and he could hear the suck and wash of water at the stern as the screws churned.
Crewmen on deck whispered together and watched him, and he stepped quickly through an open door into the ship’s castle before they could confront him. They would tell an officer he was aboard. There would be a search. He would have to find his father before they found him.
Cassidy had traveled to war in a ship not much different from this one. He knew the castle held the living quarters and control centers of the ship. On this deck and the deck above he would find a mess hall for the crew, a galley, a wardroom for the officers, cabins for the officers and passengers, and probably a small dispensary. Above that would be the bridge with the navigator’s station, the radio room, and a captain’s day cabin behind the bridge. The deckhands would bunk forward in the forecastle. A long corridor ran toward the stern, and halfway down it two short corridors cut to the port and starboard sides. The galley, wardroom, and mess hall were forward of the short corridors. All three were empty. The crew was making the ship ready for sea. Breakfast would have been served before the loading started, and lunch was still hours off. Cassidy stopped at the corridor intersection. The door to the starboard side was open at the end of the short hall, and Cassidy saw the end of the pier slide by as the tugs backed the ship out into the stream.
The first door opened into the captain’s cabin. It smelled of tobacco smoke and was big enough to hold a bunk, a desk and desk chair, a leather sofa, and a matching leather armchair, green, faded, and cracked with age. There was a rack of pipes and a canister of tobacco on the desk, and a small bookcase was pinned to one wall. Wooden slats held the books in against the roll of the ship. An oilskin jacket and a gold-braided hat hung on the back of the door. The next two cabins were officers’ quarters, smaller than the captain’s but with the same well-lived-in look. Cassidy was wasting time. Unlocked doors would not lead him where he wanted to go. His father, even sedated, would be behind a locked one.
A speaker fixed high on one of the corridor walls crackled and then spoke: “Here Captain Versikov speaks. An American longshoreman is on the ship in mistake. Please to come to the bridge and will go to shore with pilot when pilot disembarks. Longshoreman, please to come to the bridge.” The speaker crackled again and then went silent. When he did not appear on the bridge in the next few minutes, they would come looking for him.
The last three cabins on that deck were unlocked and unoccupied.
Cassidy went up a narrow stairway to the next deck. The second door he tried was locked. He reached in his pocket for his lock picks and realized that he had left his jacket in the pier office, that he was wearing someone else’s windbreaker. The doorframe was steel, and the door fitted tightly to it. The ship worked and creaked in the river current, and he could hear nothing t
hrough the door.
“Longshoreman. American longshoreman. Please come to bridge. Come to bridge at once.” The speaker crackled and went silent.
In a tool closet at the end of the corridor, Cassidy found a three-foot-long pry bar. He took it back and jammed the claw in between the wood of the door and the steel of the frame and levered back hard. The wood crushed under it, and he pushed the claw in deeper and wrenched the bar again, and the door gave with a loud splintering of wood. He pushed it open and found himself in the ship’s dispensary. Glass-fronted wooden cabinets held medical equipment. A wooden chest of drawers was bolted to one wall. The cabin was high enough above the water so that it had two square windows rather than portholes. The buildings at the lower end of Manhattan slid by as the ship slipped downriver.
Tom Cassidy was strapped to an examining table screwed to the floor in the middle of the cabin. Cassidy tossed the pry bar aside and went to him and undid the straps.
His father was in a sedated sleep still dressed in the detention center jumpsuit. His breathing was regular and his pulse was slow but strong. His skin was almost colorless in the morning light, and the stubble on his face was gray in places, a sign of age that surprised Cassidy. His father, with whom he had so often butted heads, who could ignite his anger with a flick, was shrunken, diminished, helpless.
“Dad. Dad. Wake up.” Cassidy shook his father’s shoulder, but there was no response. He did not know how he was going to get Tom Cassidy’s two-hundred-plus pounds off the ship, but he knew he could not carry him. He had to wake him.
He retrieved the pry bar and broke open the locked pharmaceutical drawers. Most of the drugs were marked in Cyrillic and he could not read them, but he did find ammonia ampoules from an American company, and in another drawer he found a package of small brown waxed envelopes that held Benzedrine tablets from an army medical kit like the one he had been issued during the war. He filled a glass at the small copper sink in the corner of the cabin and carried everything back to the examining table. He snapped an ammonia capsule under his father’s nose, and his father groaned and rolled his head away. He broke another, and the sharp vapor cut the sedative and his father rolled his head again and said, “No.”
Night Life Page 32