The Man in the Microwave Oven

by Susan Cox

  Valentina stood in the doorway, a foot or two behind one of her guests, who shifted slightly to keep her in view even as he leaned back in the chair next to mine and crossed one leg over his knee. It was a casual pose, but he didn’t look relaxed. “Anthony,” he said to me, holding out his hand.

  I took it in my own. It was cold and dry. “How do you do?” I said formally. I looked at the other two people in the circle, but they said nothing, so I kept quiet, too.

  “How did you get in touch with us?” he asked pleasantly enough, although his eyes were as cold as his hand.

  “My grandfather left me Valentina’s telephone number. I didn’t know her name and I don’t know anything else.” I was anxious to establish that fact before our conversation went much further.

  “But whatever you told Valentina caused her to reach out to us, I see.” He pursed his lips. “And what was that?”

  “That my grandfather was taken up by the police yesterday under suspicion of murdering a priest by the name of Sergei Wolf. Or possibly Sergei Viktor Wolf.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Ah?” He looked back at Valentina, who nodded.

  If this was Grandfather’s social club, it was terrifyingly unlike any I’d ever come across before. They were all practically rigid with displeasure; my head actually started to ache from the atmosphere.

  Ruby and Joseph exchanged a glance. She had long bangs and a cap of glossy chestnut hair crowned with a purple beret. She was wearing a thin sweater with a tightly cinched belt over a wool skirt. His shoulders were round inside his green sports jacket, and he had salt-and-pepper hair with a side part. Neither of them was smiling.

  “She will need to speak with Jacob,” Valentina said. Anthony pursed his lips and then nodded. The other two, after a slight pause, also nodded.

  “Can any of you tell me anything about an orphanage in Kiev?” I blurted out.

  He looked back at Valentina, who nodded again. “Why is this orphanage your business?”

  “It’s possible Father Wolf was investigating them and was killed for it. I’m worried that a friend, Gavin Melnik, may be in danger, too.”

  If anything, the tension in the room ratcheted up a couple of notches.

  “Melnik,” Anthony said flatly.

  Ruby stood and began to put on her outerwear, pulling on leather gloves and finishing with a large scarf worn like a shawl, knotted around her shoulders over her coat. Unexpectedly, she took her phone from her coat pocket, aimed it at me at arm’s length, and took a photo before I realized what she intended. Then she casually picked up her purse and left without saying goodbye to anyone. I heard the door close quietly behind her. Valentina followed her out, and I heard the locks being engaged.

  “I’d like to be sure,” Joseph said quite suddenly, revealing a broad Southern accent of some kind, and the other two nodded. He held out his own phone to me. “Please take this and press your thumb and index finger to the screen.”

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I suppose I intended to ask him if he were serious, but his expression answered that question for me. I did as he asked.

  “The child knows nothing,” Valentina said, in her harsh voice. “We will need to find out what we can, and do what we can, without her assistance.”

  “I can help!” I said. “Just tell me what to do, and I can do it.” I was met with blank stares. I rubbed my hands on my jeans. “Okay, maybe not. What do you know about Gavin?”

  “We know the name,” Anthony said. “The boy is the son of a former colleague from Kiev.”

  “A former colleague—of yours?” Were there only a dozen people living in Kiev at any given time?

  No one said anything. Anthony and Joseph stood and started to pull on coats and gloves. They took turns exchanging very Russian-looking cheek kisses with Valentina, then she followed them to the front door and locked it behind them. Neither of them said goodbye to me.

  “Come with me,” she said when she returned. “Have you eaten? I was about to make myself a sandwich.” She walked out of the room, taking her drink with her. For a couple of stunned minutes, I stayed where I was, trying to make sense of what she’d told me and what the spies hadn’t told me. I was turning the kaleidoscope to see the new pattern, but it still just looked like chips of colored glass.

  I picked up my scotch and followed her, glancing at the side of her seat cushion on my way past. I could see the handle of a knife.

  The kitchen was small, with a pale green and cream tile counter, cream painted cabinets, and appliances that could have been original to the 1940s-era building. There were no decor items—no chicken-shaped egg baskets on the counter or little framed pictures on the walls, no flowered tea towels hanging in front of the sink, no souvenir magnets on the fridge. Everything was immaculately, almost clinically clean. She snapped on an honest-to-goodness radio tuned to NPR, raised the volume, tossed a couple of heavy pot holders over it, and turned it to face the wall, which muted the sound on our side, but must have given the people next door ringside seats to Terry Gross.

  She opened the refrigerator and rustled inside it before looking over at me. “Do sit down.” She nodded at the built-in table and benches on one side of the room. “I’m having Havarti cheese with sliced tomatoes, but I also have bologna.” She pulled out a plastic bag of bread, jars of mayonnaise and mustard, a tomato, a small lettuce, and something—the cheese presumably—wrapped in plastic, and assembled all of it on the counter. She opened a drawer and withdrew a small knife, which had been sharpened so much its blade was almost worn away, and efficiently used it to shred a pile of lettuce leaves. “I always have an early lunch,” she said. “Usually a sandwich or sometimes soup.” She looked at me.

  Even though thirty seconds before I’d been about to say I didn’t want anything to eat, I found myself saying, “A cheese and tomato sandwich would be lovely. Thank you.”

  “Good. It will take me only a jiffy to put this together. A jiffy. A jiffy is a real thing, you know, in chemistry, in physics.” She waved her knife. “But it is a very, very small thing. It will actually take me many jiffies to make our sandwiches. English is a very imprecise language,” she said seriously.

  I felt like apologizing for my mother tongue. And then wondered if it was also her mother tongue. On balance, and thinking of her name and her painstakingly correct grammar, I thought probably not, although she had no accent that I could discern.

  I watched her preparations very carefully, unwilling to blink in case I missed the addition of something untoward in my sandwich. I wasn’t certain, but I thought it likely that I was about to eat lunch with an ex–Soviet spy. Or, I suppose, she could be a current one, but surely she’d be unlikely to join a club for ex-spies if she were still a working agent. Unless that was a sophisticated double bluff, double cross.

  She sliced the tomato into slices so thin I could almost see through them and arranged them on a small plate she took from a stack at the side of the sink. She put bread on two more plates, and added two slices of cheese on each slice of bread. “Mayonnaise or mustard?”

  “Mustard, please.”

  “Pepper?”

  “Just a little salt on the tomato.”

  She efficiently built two sandwiches, piling the shredded lettuce on top and, maybe it was just me, but slicing the tomatoes so neatly seemed redundant, since she divided all of the thin slices between the two sandwiches. She cut them in half diagonally and put each one onto its own plate, put everything else back in the fridge, and brought the plates over to the table. She went back for two sheets pulled from a roll of paper towels, and went back again and filled two glasses with ice and then with water from a jug in the fridge. I would have preferred individual, unopened bottles, but at least we were drinking from the same container.

  “I have ice cream for dessert.” She sat down and raised her scotch in a mock salute. “Alla vostra,” she said, “and death to our enemies.”

  “Oh, um, right. Same here.” I took a mouthful of water and
picked up half of my sandwich. “Um—have you known my grandfather very long?”

  “For more than forty years, my dear. Cambridge.” She swallowed most of her drink.

  It was having no obvious effect on her.

  “Oh, er—”

  “No. Not like that.” She made an unladylike snort. “Your grandmother would have skinned me alive.”

  “You knew my grandmother.”

  “I did. And now your grandfather and I are friends with benefits, isn’t that what you young people say?”

  I blushed and she laughed. It was an uninhibited, joyful sound, which was oddly alarming coming on the heels of her coldness minutes before. I remembered Sergei having a similar on-off switch, Maybe it was a professional asset in certain lines of work.

  “Are you Russian?”

  “I was born in Ukraine, as a matter of fact, but yes, I lived in Russia for most of my childhood.”

  “Did you … are you … I mean, who did you—”

  “Which service did I work for?” I nodded. “I think that’s need-to-know, and you don’t need to know.” She wasn’t kidding.

  I munched my sandwich. I wanted to know why she’d been following me. And what else she knew about Katrina and Sergei. And I was practically alight with curiosity about her relationship with my grandfather.

  I took another bite of my sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “So you and my grandfather met up again when he moved here?”

  “At a meeting of our former colleagues, yes.”

  “Where does the group—?”

  “That’s need-to-know, as well.”

  “Right.” I looked uneasily at the radio, then around the kitchen, through the archway leading to the living room. “Um—”

  “Sometimes here, and sometimes at his home on Telegraph Hill,” she said.

  “And, er—”

  “About twice a week.” Now she wasn’t trying to hide her amusement, and I suddenly didn’t want to know any more. Twice a week bettered my own record, in any case. I finished my sandwich in silence, and when she served up small bowls of vanilla ice cream, without asking me if I wanted any, I ate that, too.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “Your grandfather didn’t kill our friend,” she said suddenly. “We were not, in fact, together every night for the past three weeks, but that is for you alone to know.”

  I swallowed. “Do you think this terrible history of Sergei’s past might explain his death?”

  “I do not know,” she said flatly. “I knew her, you know,” she added in a different tone.

  “Who?”

  “Katrina Demchyshyn, the woman who was killed. I knew her cousin, the young Gavin, too. Or, at least, his father.”

  “Her name was Dermody.”

  Another shrug. “Perhaps she married; perhaps she just changed her name.”

  “Anthony said Gavin’s father was a colleague. He meant of yours?”

  “Yes, of mine. Dead now, of course, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. His son was a shy little thing.”

  “I think he still is.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. Is there any thought of him having killed Katrina? Family is often involved in sordid cases like this. They lived together in close quarters; often emotions are heightened.”

  “Close quarters” being relative, considering the size of Katrina’s apartment, I thought. “They seemed friendly and he was … proud of her, I think. At the moment, all the attention is on my grandfather, who I know didn’t kill her, and a young friend of mine. It’s ridiculous to think they conspired to kill Katrina. I mean, why? And how, for that matter?”

  “I agree that it is unlikely.”

  I wish she’d said it was impossible.

  “It’s odd that Sergei, and his wife, and Katrina, and this priest who hated him are all dead.”

  “Odd. Yes.” Suddenly, as if she’d just made up her mind about something, she said, “You should consider the priest at St. Christopher’s. He was in love with Katrina. If she spurned him…”

  “Surely—”

  She snorted. “You might consider the young St. Augustine’s wayward prayer: ‘God make me chaste—but not yet’!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The man who answered when I rang the number I received in the form of a text later that afternoon also refused to speak on the phone. We met in Sutro Park in the Outer Richmond. Even though I was early, he arrived before me and was sitting on a bench, stroking the head of a big yellow dog, as he’d said he would be. The dog was an improvement on a red carnation or an Eton Ramblers tie, anyway. He stood and offered his hand when I approached—I was holding an empty Starbucks cup, as instructed—and the dog wandered off.

  With a mild shock, I realized he was another one of the people who’d been following me. I recognized his coat, of all things. “Call me Jacob,” he said, and I wondered if that was really his name. He was tall, dark haired and rosy-cheeked, wearing an overcoat and gloves, with a scarf neatly tucked around his neck. His faded blue/green eyes were almost hidden in pouches and folds, his face mapped with deep wrinkles. I sat next to him on the bench and wondered what on earth to say. After a couple of silent minutes, I decided the only way forward was to take the first step.

  “Your colleagues seemed to think I should talk to you, but they didn’t explain why.”

  He shrugged. “I am the president of our small club; there’s probably no other reason.” We were on a small stone-and-grass viewing platform, facing a long, sloping lawn in one direction and some steep, rocky stairs leading to a lower pathway in the other. A harsh, wet, and salty wind was blowing rags of fog past us and gradually filling the park.

  “Great little park, this,” he said, peering over the low balustrade into the murk. He assured me that if the day were sunny, we could see a panoramic view of the wide sands of Ocean Beach. He pointed into the completely opaque curtain of fog. “You can see the windmill at the edge of Golden Gate Park, too. I don’t know why more people don’t come here.”

  “It’s a puzzle.” I hugged myself with both arms and wished I’d worn my new leather jacket. Pretending my hoodie was a fur-lined anorak wasn’t helping.

  He snapped his fingers to call his goofy dog, who’d wandered away and was already invisible. The dog galumphed back, with a squeaking animal about the size of a young rabbit between his jaws. Jacob pried it from between his teeth, to the dog’s obvious annoyance, then efficiently twisted its neck and dropped the little corpse over the balustrade. “Gophers,” he said with a shrug. “They’re a scourge.” The dog, tongue lolling, sat down and leaned up against his leg.

  It took me a minute or two to refocus. “My specialty back in the day was teenagers,” he was saying. “Of course it’s been a while since I could make that believable.” He chuckled and I tried to smile. “For years, most of the work has been electronic surveillance and the analysis of the data. Now the post-Soviet Russians are poisoning their own agents in their new homes in the West. It is so—so 1973,” he said, with a small, wrinkly frown, from which I inferred that he wasn’t joking.

  “Was Sergei Wolf a member of your organization?”

  “He occasionally attended meetings in”—he hesitated—“somewhere in South America. Our chapters have reciprocity. Your grandfather is a member of the London group, of course.” He chuckled. “Some of our members find rubbing shoulders with an earl a new experience. But it’s true what they say: everybody loves a lord.”

  “He’s not actually—”

  “But I owe your grandfather a great debt. We will put out feelers and see what we can find out. Is there anyone who you feel might be the guilty party?”

  “I just know Grandfather didn’t do it. They’ve also got a young friend of mine in custody—his name is Davie Rillera.”

  “And he didn’t do it, either?”

  “Definitely not,” I said firmly. “I’ve met several of your members now, and they’re all—mature. Do you have any younger members—I mean, people who would be capable of chas
ing someone through the city streets and shooting them?”

  “The retirement age in our profession varies.” He smirked, as if at a familiar, oft-told joke.

  “So yes, then?”

  He waggled his hand in a “maybe yes, maybe no” gesture.

  “Very helpful,” I said crossly. “How many members does this group have?”

  “Eleven now. We have some rather exclusive membership criteria.” He rearranged his rubbery face into another clown-like grin.

  “How does someone join?”

  “By personal invitation from another member, who provides us with the details of his or her career. Then we all meet with the candidate individually, and then we vote.”

  Thinking of Valentina, I asked, “How many women members do you have?”

  “Two lady members, at the moment.”

  I had a feeling their “lady” members were, as one of my noir movie characters might put it, no ladies.

  He went on. “We lost one of our ladies a few months ago. Of course she was in her nineties, so not entirely unexpected. She was our chapter’s last World War II agent. Brave girl. Parachuted behind enemy lines and slit the throats of some highly placed SS officers.” He stroked his dog’s head, and I thought of the casual dispatching of the dead gopher and wondered if Jacob had slit some throats, too. Or perhaps cut off some fingers.

  “Do you know anything about Sergei’s personal life?”

  “He has a son who lives in Northern California, I believe. Mendocino, perhaps.”

  “And there was a mistress?”

  He shrugged and didn’t answer me.

  “Tell me about this village where he’s supposed to have killed everyone.”

  “Ah, you’ve been speaking to V.” He stroked his dog’s head again. “Her losses prevent her from seeing that the deaths she still mourns were caused by nothing more or less than a tragic accident. The nineties were a terrible time in that part of the world. The entire decade was filled with war, revolution, and vicious ethnic cleansing.” He shook his head. “Such a bloodless phrase to describe the bloodiest of war crimes. Even today, we feel the repercussions. There is a straight line from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in ’99 to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The new Cold War, they’re calling it, with Russia and America mistrustful and antagonistic.” He sighed, and I tried to look as if I knew what he was talking about.