“Wake up. Come on, Dad. Wake up.” Cassidy got an arm under his father’s shoulders and levered him to a sitting position. He heard a shout from somewhere outside, and heavy feet ran on the deck above him. The search had started. “You have to wake up.” He leaned his father against his shoulder to hold him up and ripped open one of the envelopes and took out two of the familiar pills. “Open your mouth. Open your mouth.” Tom Cassidy’s jaw went slack. He put one of the pills on his father’s tongue and poured in water from the glass, and then tipped him back so the water washed the pill down, and his father swallowed reflexively. Cassidy swallowed the other pill himself with the rest of the water. He had been awake too long, and he needed the jolt. He shoved his father’s legs off the table. “Come on, get up. You have to get up. You have to walk.”
“What? What are you doing?” His father’s voice slurred and mumbled.
“Get up. Walk.” Cassidy pulled one of his father’s arms over his shoulder and put an arm around his father’s waist and dragged him off the table. For a moment he had to take all Tom Cassidy’s weight, and his knees buckled, and then something in the older man’s brain clicked, and he took a step. “Keep walking.” They staggered the length of the cabin.
“Michael?”
“Yes, Dad. Me.”
“What?”
“You’re on a Russian ship. We have to get off. You have to wake up. I can’t do it alone. Walk. Walk.” They stumbled to the opposite side and turned.
Pounding feet on the deck outside. Two men ran past the windows. One of them glanced in, but Cassidy and his father were in the corner, unseen.
They staggered back and forth the length of the cabin. His father mumbled sometimes in English and sometimes in Russian. Cassidy felt the hot wire of the amphetamine working his nerves and knew it must be working in his father too. The older man took more of his weight and his steps were surer.
“Let me stop. Let me rest.” He leaned against the examining table.
“What do you remember?”
Tom Cassidy shook his head to clear it. “I don’t know. I was asleep. Two men came in with the guard. They spoke to me in Russian. At first I thought it was a dream. One of them gave me a shot. They got me out of bed and I could do nothing. I remember walking out of my cell with them, and then, I don’t know.”
“Let’s walk.”
“No. Let me rest a minute longer. Did you give me something? My head feels funny.”
“Benzedrine to knock off the sedative they gave you.”
“Ah. And how are we going to get off this ship? Have you thought of that?”
“They have to drop the pilot. If we can hide until then, we can get off when he goes.”
“Do they know you’re on board?”
“They think I’m a longshoreman who stayed on by mistake. They’ve used the loudspeakers to tell me to report to the bridge.”
“And when you don’t, they’ll look for you.”
“They’re already looking.”
Tom Cassidy looked around vaguely. “I can’t think. You’ll have to tell me what to do.”
“We’ve got to get out of this cabin. I had to break open the door. It won’t close all the way, and the wood’s damaged. Someone will notice.”
Tom Cassidy stood. He lurched, and his son reached out to steady him. “I’m all right. I’m fine. Let’s go.”
Cassidy listened at the gap at the broken door. He heard nothing in the corridor. He nodded, and when his father moved up next to him, he opened the door.
Dylan stood in the doorway of the cabin across the corridor. She held the .32 automatic from her bedside table in a steady hand.
42
“I knew it was you when they said there was a longshoreman on board by mistake. How does a longshoreman make that mistake? They load the last load. They blow the whistle. They make announcements, ‘Everybody ashore who’s going ashore,’ and he’s getting on? No one’s that careless.”
They were in Dylan’s cabin across from the dispensary. She had locked the door and the gun was still in her hand. His gun was under his shoulder and the borrowed windbreaker was zipped up, and he knew there was no way he could get it out before she shot him.
“Then I thought, no, not careless. Someone who won’t let go. You knew your father was here. You had to come for him.”
“I take it you two know each other.” Tom Cassidy was lying on the bunk.
Cassidy leaned against the wall near the small window that gave out on the deck. Dylan had shut the curtains, but when he glanced through the gap, he saw a Staten Island ferry passing toward Manhattan. They were moving downriver to the sea. “Yes.”
His father heard something in his voice. “Ah, like that, huh?”
“I thought so, but I wasn’t getting all the information.”
“If you didn’t know how I felt about you, you weren’t paying attention.”
“Your whole life’s a lie from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, on up, and I fell for it. You were on the job the whole time. You fucked me to get the photographs. No other reason. What a sucker I was.”
Their anger brought them close together. The gun in Dylan’s hand dangled. Cassidy snatched it. Dylan pivoted and drove her free elbow into his neck. His hand went numb and the gun fell. As he went down, he reached out and swept her feet out from under her. She kicked him in the head, rolled over, and found the gun.
She got to her feet, the gun steady on Cassidy. “Get up against the wall. Put your hands in your pockets.”
Fuck it, he thought. Let her shoot. A little thirty-two like that, it won’t stop me. The rage talking.
“Don’t, Michael. Please.” The gun was rock steady. “Lean your forehead against the wall and back your feet out.” He did as he was told. “More. Cross your ankles.” Much of his weight was on his forehead, and with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed there was no way to move fast. Part of his brain, unoccupied with anger, admired her technique. He felt the cold barrel of the gun against the base of his skull. She reached around and unzipped his windbreaker and lifted his gun from its holster. She backed away. “All right. Stand up.”
He turned. She was at the door. For a moment she looked as if she wanted to say something. Then she shook her head, unlocked the door, went out, and relocked the door from the outside.
“That went well,” Tom Cassidy said.
Cassidy crouched to look at the keyhole. She had left the key in the outside at a half turn so it could not be dislodged. He checked the window. It did not open, and it was made of thick glass to withstand the occasional high sea. He did not think he could break it.
Cassidy prowled the cabin looking for a weak spot, but he found none.
“I always wondered what she would be like, the one you fell for. I expected she would be strong. I did not expect Russian.”
“She was born in America.”
“What does that have to do with anything? I was born in Russia and I am American. She was born in America and she is Russian. Maybe something in your blood that calls out to that.”
“Something in my dick.” He was looking for a weapon. He tested the chair to see if he could break off a leg, but it was made of welded metal.
“Don’t be a child. You’re angry. But that anger does not come from your dick, Michael. It comes from your heart. And I am glad to see it. I was afraid you were going to drift coolly through life uncommitted.”
Cassidy looked at his father in surprise. Did he know him so little or so well? “Let’s talk about this later. We have to decide what we’re going to do.”
“I’ve already decided.”
The door opened. Rudi Apfel came in first. He was as Cassidy remembered him, colorless, featureless, except for the black automatic he held in one hand. Dylan came in behind him.
“Detective Cassidy. I did not expect to see you again, but I’m happy you’re here. You gave some photographs to Miss McCue. I’d like the real ones.”
Cassidy glanced at Dylan. She was ho
lding herself stiffly.
“Those are the real ones.”
“Please. I developed those photographs. I saw them. They were perfect. Every detail was clear. I trained Ingram. He knew how to shoot pictures. He’d done it before.”
“You should have trained him not to store microfilm negatives near something hot. He had them hidden in a locker backstage where he was dancing. The locker was up against a steam pipe. Those were prints from those negatives.”
“You’re lying. First of all, Ingram stole five negatives. You only gave her four prints. She, of course, was taken in. Women have their uses in our business, but sometimes they let emotion govern thought. It is one of the weaknesses of the sex.”
“She got what I had. Maybe Ingram figured out he only had one good one so he hid that someplace else.”
“No. You have them. Tell me where they are. I’ll have someone retrieve them. If you do this, things will go better for you when you get to Russia.”
“Did you kill Ingram?”
“What does it matter now?”
“Did you?”
“He died. It was inconvenient. He was stubborn when he should have been helpful.”
“And Stanley Fisher in the alley outside Lord & Taylor? Perry Werth?”
Apfel shrugged. “Loose ends.”
“And Victor Amado?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not going to Russia,” Tom Cassidy said.
They turned to look at him. He was standing by the bunk.
Apfel barked at him in Russian.
“I do not speak Russian,” Tom Cassidy said.
Apfel barked again.
“I do not speak Russian. I have forgotten all my Russian. I have put it behind me. I almost died getting out of Russia. I will die before I go back.”
“I will kill your son. And then I will have you sedated. You will go back to Russia. And you will make a great noise about how happy you are to be back in the Motherland, how you loathed everything about America.” He swung his gun toward the detective. “You two have to make some choices. The photographs. I can use the radio, patch to a phone, have someone pick them up in fifteen minutes. Your father, who does not want to go home, can be released on the pilot boat.”
“There are no photographs.”
“Well, then—”
Dylan stepped over to Apfel, put the barrel of her gun against his skull, and shot him. His head jerked. His eyes bulged. His knees gave, and he crumpled. The gun bounced away from his slack hand.
Cassidy’s ears rang from the shot. The cabin stank of cordite. Apfel lay on the floor, his ruined head leaking thick dark blood.
“Hurry,” Dylan said. “The pilot’s boat should be alongside. Hurry.”
Cassidy stooped to pick up Apfel’s gun.
“Leave the gun. It won’t work if you take the gun.”
“What do you mean?”
“Leave the gun and go.”
“You’re coming.”
“No.”
“Dylan.”
“No.”
Cassidy gestured to the body on the floor. “You have to.”
“No. I can’t.”
“I can protect you.”
“Just go.”
“Come with me.”
“No. If I come, one day you’ll wake up and look at me and wonder. You’ll want to know where I’ve been. You’ll wonder why I’m late, or who I’ve been with. You’ll start hearing lies where there are no lies.”
“You can’t go back to Russia. You killed a KGB officer. They won’t let that go.”
“Apfel failed. His mission blew up. He was careless. His own operative went into business for himself. They don’t like failure. The best he could hope for was some leniency because he brought back your father. Maybe they would decide the propaganda offset his failure. Maybe not. I will tell them that I discovered that he decided to defect, that he made a deal with you, a member of the New York Police Department. He would help you get your father ashore, and you would get him asylum. They’ll understand that. They always fear that their operatives will be seduced by America. I discovered the plot. I shot him. You overpowered me and escaped.”
“They’ll never believe that.”
“Yes, they will. It’s how they think. Now hit me.”
“Hit you?”
“Yes. How did you overpower me, with a kiss?” Did she smile?
“Do as she says, and do it fast. Someone will have heard the shot.” His father’s voice was cold, and when he looked at him he saw the iron of the teenager who walked out of Russia surfacing through the well-fed New York businessman. “Make it good. If they don’t believe her, they’ll kill her.”
He punched her hard near an eye and cut her, and then hit her again as she sagged, splitting her lip. She went down hard and moaned in pain, and he started to bend to her. “Go,” she said. His father grabbed his arm, and they went out into the corridor and down it to the door to the deck.
The ship’s horn blasted above them. It was answered by the toot of a motor launch as it pulled away from the ship’s side. Cassidy could see the pilot standing, legs apart, on the launch’s deck.
* * *
“Come on.” As they started down the ladder to the main deck, one of the Amtorg thugs swung around the bottom and started up. He saw the Cassidys and reached for the gun under his coat. Cassidy went down the stairs fast and kicked him in the face, and the man fell back to the deck. Cassidy jumped the last few stairs and kicked him in the head.
The pilot boat was fifty yards from the ship, and no one on it was looking back.
Someone shouted from the bridge. The second Amtorg man put his hands on the rails of the ladder on the bridge deck and slid down without touching his feet to the steps.
Red cork life rings hung on brackets at the rail. Cassidy jerked two out of their brackets and gave one to his father. “We’ll have to jump.”
Tom Cassidy nodded. His eyes were bright and he seemed to be enjoying himself, and not for the first time the vagrant thought, Who is this man? slipped across Cassidy’s mind.
Cassidy opened the gate in the rail. The water was twenty feet down. He could hear the Amtorg man’s running feet and the shouts of crewmen. Someone fired a shot, and the bullet whanged off the ship’s rail. Tom Cassidy showed him a tight grin and then ran through the gate and into space.
Cassidy followed him. The fall seemed to take forever, and the water was a cold shock. The cork ring wrenched at his arms when he plunged under and then brought him quickly to the surface. The black iron cliff of the ship’s hull flowed past. He spun to look for his father and saw him clinging to the other life ring ten yards away. He thrashed and kicked toward him while he shouted. “Dad. Dad. Kick away from the ship. Get away from the ship.” A wave slapped him in the face and he choked.
His father kicked his life ring away from the passing ship and toward Cassidy. The rings bumped. Tom Cassidy coughed up water.
“Are you okay?” Cassidy asked. His father nodded and waved a hand, but he was gulping air and did not speak. The stern swung toward them as the ship ran on. Behind it the water churned white. “We have to get farther away. We have to get away from the propellers.”
They kicked hard, dragged by their clothes, slapped back by the waves, blunted by the wind. The stern swung closer. The water around them foamed, and Cassidy could feel the thump of the props as they thrashed. The stern loomed high above them and Cassidy saw men on the rail looking down at them. The churning water sucked at him and hauled him down, and he hung on to the life ring and struggled against the pull.
His father went under and his life ring popped to the surface.
Cassidy let go of the life ring and dove. The water was white around him and he could not see. It threw him one way and then the other. He felt something solid below him and grabbed cloth. He fought toward the surface with his lungs burning. A current pushed them upward, and they popped
out of water that thrashed as white as milk. His father was slack. His head lolled, his mouth hung open. Cassidy put his arms around him and squeezed hard. He did it again and again. He put his mouth to his father’s and blew in hard and then squeezed. “Come on! Come on!” and heard his father take a shuddering breath. The stern of the ship slid past, and the men at the rail pointed to them. One of them pointed farther off, and Cassidy turned and saw the pilot’s launch headed toward them, a white bow wave like a bone in its teeth.
43
Cassidy met Clyde Tolson late in the afternoon in the Federal Building at Foley Square. The office was sparsely furnished, with a large wooden desk, four wooden armchairs, a sagging sofa, and four standing ashtrays. The only decoration was a large photograph of J. Edgar Hoover looking like a bulldog with a bad stomach.
Susdorf and Cherry were in the outer office when Cassidy arrived. Susdorf nodded. Cherry pointed a finger like a gun and grinned and said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” They were not invited when a steel-haired secretary in a severe gray dress showed him into the inner office. Clyde Tolson turned from a window that looked out into the harbor from which Cassidy had recently been fished.
“All right, let’s get this done. Where are the photographs and the negatives?”
Cassidy took the envelope from his pocket and slid it onto the desk. Tolson picked it up and slit it open. “Is this all of them?”
“Yes.”
“Any copies?”
“No.”
Tolson examined the contents. He held the one clear print of Hoover in the red dress, heavily made up, smiling at Victor Amado like a deranged coquette.
“I don’t think red is his color.”
Tolson flushed. “Careful.” He looked in the empty envelope. “Where are the other prints?”
“There are no other prints.”
Tolson examined Cassidy for a lie. He picked up one of the negatives and held it to the light from the window and then put it down on the print. He picked up the next one and held it to the light and then turned it and tried it from a different angle. What he saw puzzled him. He picked up another and went through the same process, and then quickly looked at the last two. He took a viewer from the desk and put one of the negatives in and turned on the light while Cassidy waited for the explosion. What came was a mild, “What the hell?”
Night Life Page 33