by Paul Moomaw
A young girl who appears to be eight or nine years old rides next to her. The girl has fine, golden hair that flies loose behind her, and skin of the same off-white shade as the woman’s. I wonder if Katherine Danner, if that is who the woman is, has a daughter. As we pass each other the girl gives me a wary look with large, dark eyes, but the woman nods and smiles tentatively. Now I can see her eyes, and they are dark, and large like the girl’s; but what strikes me most is a sad, wistful quality that touches me in a way I am not used to. I stop running and watch her until she and the young girl pass around a curve and out of sight. Then, chiding myself for my adolescent behavior, I go on, but I am pensive and distracted as I run.
I have seen that sadness before, in the eyes of a small boy named Daniel. I have three pictures of him—one as an infant, one as a toddler, perhaps the same age as the girl who just passed me on her bike, and one as an almost teenaged youth of twelve or so. The baby smiles, lying in the arms of the woman who is surely his mother, and a man, my father, stands behind her shoulder and looks as if he wishes he were somewhere else. The twelve-year-old stands aloof and distant, staring at the camera and through it. It is in the eyes of the toddler that the sadness appears, even though he smiles. He stands alone, barefoot and sloppily diapered, in a dusty yard, leaning against a truck tire that hangs by a rope from an unseen tree branch. I know that all of those boys are me, but I cannot identify with them or find them in me. Once in St. Petersburg, when they still called it Leningrad, I met a woman who told me one night, as we sat on the sea wall at the Prebaltiskaya Hotel and watched the fog roll in from the Baltic, that my eyes seemed sometimes to have someone else looking out through them. Perhaps it is that boy. I do not know.
Katherine Danner’s house is small, tucked between two giant spruce trees, and almost swallowed by a hedge of rhododendrons. Years and weather have turned the cedar walls a silver gray, and the yard is unkempt but welcoming, filled with flowering plants. The lake peeks through the bushes, and a gravel path leads to the water. The houses on either side, both visible through the trees, tower over this one. They are cedar as well, but one is new, still raw looking, covered with a red stain and so heavily protected by some sealant that it looks shellacked. The other has been added to, with a high, pitched roof and cathedral window that does not fit the original building. I prefer Katherine Danner’s house to the others. Grandeur is fine to look at, but uncomfortable to live in.
I circle the house and see no sign that anyone is at home, although a tan Volvo sedan, several years old, stands at one side of the house. I check the driver’s door of the Volvo, expecting it to be locked, but it is not. I open the door and peek inside. The interior is well kept and has a recently cleaned smell. The keys rest in the ignition. The odometer shows close to a hundred thousand miles. Katherine Danner does not seem to have a need for new things. It is an admirable trait, one I share, and I am oddly pleased to think that we have this in common. She also seems very trusting, or perhaps indifferent to risk, and I wonder which.
The windows of the house are small, meant for privacy, not views, and reveal little of the interior. It does not matter. Sooner or later I will go inside, as I penetrate more deeply into Katherine Danner’s life. I walk to the front door, and on impulse I turn the knob. The door opens with a loud squeak. I am tempted to enter, but I do not know enough yet of Katherine Danner’s schedule. Satisfied that I have learned what I can for the time being, I turn back up the driveway to the road.
The woman and girl on bicycles are riding toward me. I take a few steps, then stand and wait. They glide from the road into the driveway, and stop, looking at me. The woman’s gaze is quizzical, the child’s almost baleful.
“I was admiring your house,” I say. “I hope you don’t mind.” I smile. I have an ingratiating smile, one that seems to disarm people easily.
She returns the smile. “It’s just a house.”
“I like it. Not pretentious. I’m hoping to move into this neighborhood, and so I’ve been scouting around on my runs.” We have not exchanged a hundred words, and already I tell my first lie. I toss her a little salute and begin trotting up the drive. “I’m sorry if I intruded.”
She nods, still smiling, but says nothing. At the first turn in the road, I glance back. She she and the girl still sit on their bicycles and watch me.
As I start south on the Burke-Gilman I have an image of her etched in my mind, and it stays there for the rest of the run. Something about her has attached itself to me and will not be shaken loose. It is not lust, although she is very attractive. The psychologist I saw used to harp on what she said was my need to get in touch with my unconscious. I told her I had enough on my plate dealing with the things I already know about myself. If I have an unconscious and it knows something I need to know, I assume it can tell me. Otherwise I leave it to itself.
Chapter 9
The space that Arden Frost surrounds himself with lies three hundred miles and a universe away from Katherine Danner’s home. He has realized a gaudy version of the American dream, twenty or so acres of rolling woodland surrounding a large pond. His house stands at the edge of the water. It is too big, and clashes with the land. It has the remarkable ugliness of a custom house whose architect gave the owner too much say in the design, a sort of post-modern Southern plantation house, the walls of brilliant red brick, the roof of cobalt tile, and a veranda that stretches all across the front behind an array of columns that broaden at the top, reminiscent of the pillars from ancient Minoan palaces. A three-car garage extends from the left end of the house. A cottage lies about fifty feet from the main building. It is a tenth the size but mimics the bricks, tiles, veranda and columns. Frost is at least consistent. Your taste is all in your mouth. The words pop unbidden into my mind. They are my father’s words. I hate it when that happens. It reminds me that he has had more of a formative impact on me that I want to believe. And even as I think that, he is there again. I just hate to death having to listen to that crap. Then he laughs, and is gone.
A private road leads from the highway, through trees, and butts up against a steel gate. The two closest acres of land around the house are completely fenced. The fence itself, of tall metal posts and steel latticework, could be elegant except for the regularly spaced signs, bright yellow with red lettering, warning trespassers that the barrier is electrified and lethal. Eventually I may have to call that bluff.
I have parked in a public rest area half a mile from where Frost’s road enters the highway and walked to the house, moving through the trees on one side of the road. I am still in the trees, a hundred feet from where the land opens up, park-like, around the house, when I hear a car approaching. A dusty, silver Mercedes Benz station wagon comes into view. It slows briefly, then the gate swings open and it proceeds towards the house. It stops in front of the veranda, the driver’s door opens, and a woman emerges. She is blonde and attractive, with the burnished gloss of money, but she looks worn and moves with little energy. As I move closer to the edge of the trees, she opens the passenger door and two children bounce out, a girl with the beginnings of a woman’s figure, and a boy who looks to be ten. The children grab brightly colored back packs, no doubt full of school books, and march up the steps to the front door. The girl opens the door and they go inside. The mother—I assume she is that—gets back into the car and drives to the garage. She stops in front of the leftmost door, waits for it to open, and drives inside, then emerges again as the door begins to close. She walks to the front door of the house and lets herself in.
The stories about Frost did not mention a wife and children. They complicate things. I will have to adjust logistically to their existence, and psychologically as well. Unless it cannot be avoided, I will arrange for Frost’s ending to be nowhere near his family. It still troubles me a little. For all I know he may be a perfectly good father, and the children may love him. I shake my head and comfort myself with a thought from Niccolo Machiavelli. In The Prince, he writes that if you kill a man�
��s father he will forgive you, as long as you do not steal his inheritance.
A second car comes up the road, another Mercedes, big and black. It barely slows before the fence, and slips through as soon as the gate has swung wide enough to give it space. The driver pulls up in front of the house and gets out of the car. He is a big man, more than six feet tall, with a thick neck growing out of shoulders and a chest that stretches the fabric of his sports coat. He opens the back door of the car and Arden Frost climbs out. He is smaller than I thought from his pictures, and looks older. I suppose death threats age you. He walks to the front door of the house and stands for a moment, hands on hips, as if he expects it to open. Then he grabs the door handle, opens the door, and strides in. He slams the door behind him loudly enough that I can hear it from where I stand. The driver, who has been watching this, shakes his head and slides back into the car. He drives to the garage door nearest the house, waits for it to open, and drives in. He comes back out quickly, but still has to duck slightly to get past the descending door because he is so tall. He begins to walk quickly toward the cottage. As he passes the front door of the main house, it opens and Frost steps onto the veranda. He yells, “Clarence,” and the driver stops, wheels, and goes up the front steps. The two men speak briefly and inaudibly, and then Clarence heads again toward the cottage. I guess that the driver is also the bodyguard.
I stand in the trees and watch the house a while longer, then turn and retrace my steps to the highway and my car. I find myself thinking about the woman and two children. They complicate things, but that makes the job more challenging; and there is no rush. I am on my own schedule, and I can afford to take things one at a time.
Chapter 10
The woman who told me someone else looked out of my eyes, who was called Irina, had a child. His name was Pavel, and she called him Pasha. She liked me, as women often seem to. I have never been sure what attracts them to me. I am not bad looking, but nothing special. Maybe they sense that I am dangerous, and that excites them.
We met in Leningrad, during that chaotic time between the fall of the Soviet Union and the changing of the city’s name back to St. Petersburg. She lived with her father, a man named Andrei Vyshenko. We drank cheap Spanish champagne and made love three times, once under a tree and twice in her father’s house, where she lived. Then I killed her father and went away.
A man who introduced himself as Boris Maskov hired me to kill Vyshenko. Maskov said he was a defector who had been allowed into the United States in return for providing names and facts to CIA. I believed him, because the man who introduced us was a CIA officer whom I recognized from a previous job, and because the false passport and other documents that I traveled to Russia with were of Agency quality. He said they owed him a favor, and this was his payment. We sat on a bench on the outskirts of Washington, watching the Potomac river glide past, gray water under gray winter clouds, while Maskov, bundled up in a heavy coat and scarf, explained to me why Vyshenko deserved to die. I told him I did not need to know, that it made no difference whether someone deserved to die or not, as long as the money was good; but he felt a need to tell the tale, and I humored him. Vyshenko was his brother-in-law, he said, a mid-level member of the Soviet nomenklatura who sat at a desk pushing papers during the day and made good money trading on the black market at night. He had offered to let Maskov in on one of his deals, something involving drugs, contraband paintings, and the Russian mafia. The deal went sour, and Vyshenko fingered Maskov to the gangsters. Maskov slipped away to Finland, where he connected with our spooks, and the gangsters took out their pique on Maskov’s wife, cutting off her ears and nose before they slit her throat.
I knew I would take the job long before Maskov finished his tale. Languages are a hobby, and Russian is one of those I am reasonably proficient in. I studied with a Russian native teacher who taught me the language, and Russian sayings like, “He who lives with the wolves must learn to howl.” She taught me to howl, as well, and was sad when I ended my studies, and our howling.
Maskov provided me with the documents, a round trip ticket from New York to St. Petersburg, and a large amount of money in hundred dollar bills. It was more than twice my usual fee, and I wondered how big a favor CIA had owed him. He also gave me a picture of a pretty blonde woman with large, dark eyes. He told me her name was Irina Denisova, and that she would open the door to Vyshenko, who was her father.
“His legal business is as an art dealer,” Maskov said. “Those documents identify you as the same, but one with channels for pieces he has that he can’t sell in the open. He will want to see you.” He told me that Irina worked with the Russian Tourist Bureau, and had an office at the Hotel Prebaltiskaya. The envelope with my ticket also contained a reservation at that hotel, he said.
I took Maskov’s money and flew to Leningrad. I found Irina where Maskov said she would be, and she, as Maskov had promised, led me to her father. Maskov said he had lived well, if illegally, during the Soviet era. He was doing even better now. He lived in a grand house on Artekarskii Island, across the Neva River from central St. Petersburg, and had a view of the Admiralty with its gleaming gold spire, and the Botanical Gardens that lay a stone’s throw away. The house had belonged to a member of the nobility before 1917 and been converted to apartments during the Soviet era. Vyshenko had torn down the apartment walls and restored the place to its old splendor. It had cost a fortune, he told me, “but if you make a fortune, it’s good to spend it, because that motivates you to make another.”
Two large rooms on the ground floor contained dozens of paintings, which Vyshenko assured me was the best collection of Russian art, from the 16th Century to the present, in the country, “better than the Hermitage.” One wall in the second room was almost bare, except for a large shadow box that contained a necklace of gold filigree imbedded with rubies and emeralds, from which a large, tear-shaped diamond was suspended. He told me everything in the room could be purchased for the right price, “except the necklace. That has sentimental value. My grandfather ripped it off the neck of a duchess just before he shot her. My uncle, who sadly had no respect for his elders, cut my grandfather’s throat and stole the necklace. My father took it back, although first he had to break my uncle’s neck and throw him in the Neva, on the other side, close to Nevskii Prospekt.”
I was taken by the necklace in a way that I am seldom drawn to material objects, especially jewelry, about which I know almost nothing. It may have been its lineage of violence and death, but whatever the reason, I was filled with the desire to take it and hold it, keep it with me.
I think Vyshenko believed I was a marriage prospect for his daughter. He opened his house to me. In fact, I moved from my hotel to a room on the second floor, adjoining Irina’s, and ate and drank more than I am comfortable with. Then, one evening when Irina had taken the train for a business trip to Moscow, and Vyshenko and I were talking about the possibility of a deal that was a little shady, I killed him. I was careful not to do it in the house. That would have been too great a violation of his hospitality. Instead, I told him I would rather talk out of doors, because I understood that Russian security, however reformed, still behaved much like the KGB, and I was afraid of hidden microphones. He laughed at my concern, but humored me, and we spend an hour walking along the shores of the Neva until we came to a suitable spot—right on the water next to the concrete wall that protects the island from the river’s periodic floods, and shielded from observers by large shrubs. As we stood there I commented on the view across the water. He turned away from me to look for himself, and I broke his neck and rolled him into the river. Then I went back to the house, packed. and went back to the Hotel Prebaltiskaya. I had already prepared for this evening by confirming a flight out of Pulkova Airport early the following morning. I wondered how long it would take for Irina to discover that her father and I were both, in our separate ways, gone for good. I hoped that he had remembered her in his will. The next morning I took a taxi to the airport and flew
away, the necklace tucked away in my luggage.
I still have the necklace. I do not really know why I took it or why I have hung on to it. Some day I will find a thing to do with it. Until then it stays tucked away in a steamer trunk, out of sight, out of mind.
Chapter 11
Arden Frost sits in the outdoor section of Cucina, Cucina, a restaurant in downtown Spokane. I have eaten there. It is just so-so, and I am a little surprised to find him there. I thought his taste for opulence would take him someplace grander. Maybe he likes to show the common touch now and then. Or possibly he doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on Clarence, who sits across from him, digging into a pile of ravioli buried under oily-looking tomato sauce and a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese. Frost toys with a glass of white wine. It is a house wine, clearly from the liter carafe that sits to one side of a half-finished plate of what looks like linguine with clam sauce. Clarence has satisfied himself dutifully with a mug of coffee that steams in the cool evening air. A wrought iron fence separates the table area from the sidewalk. I followed them into town from Frost’s house, and managed to park right next to his Mercedes in the parking garage on Sprague, a couple of blocks from the restaurant. Then, getting out, I tapped the edge of my door against the side of the Mercedes, not hard enough to mar the paint, but loud enough to get Clarence’s attention. I looked down at the side of the car, then raised my hands and put my face right into the bodyguard’s. “No damage,” I said and walked toward the elevator. Its door opened as I got there and a couple stepped out. I turned back to make sure Clarence was watching me. He was.