by Earl Merkel
“Then you’re not having me tailed?” I asked, again. “Not even, say, for my own good?”
“A lot of people drive a Taurus, Davey,” he said, using my name for the first time. “It’s a very popular car.” Then he hung up.
As I pulled away from the convenience store, the three teens were standing together in their hip-hop finery under the bright sodium lights. One of them, possibly the same boy whose unspoken challenge had greeted me a few minutes earlier, watched me leave. He had the body attitude of someone nothing could really touch, someone convinced that life held no surprises except those for which he was already equipped.
He was wrong, and I knew it. Still, I envied him.
• • •
Once again, I left the lights off when I entered my apartment—but this time, not because I considered it soothing.
For a moment, I stood stiffly against the wall next to the door, but there was no sound except for the hum of the refrigerator’s compressor. A square of blue-white from the streetlamps outside, bisected into two distinct rectangles by the window frame through which it entered, lighted my way into the small bedroom where I spent my nights alone.
I put my hand under the folded underwear and rolled socks in the top drawer of my dresser and felt for the towel-wrapped bundle I had put there months before. It was heavy in my hand as I lifted it out and unwrapped the contents.
The leather smelled lightly of oil, and was worn smooth at the side loops where it threaded onto my belt. I unsnapped the thumb break and slid the stainless steel of a Smith and Wesson automatic from the holster I had worn during my time on the police force. As always, the compact weapon felt solid and warm in my hand.
I ejected the empty magazine and worked the action to lock the slide back. Then I thumbed round after round into the clip, pushing the shiny brass-and-silver hollowpoint cartridges in until the magazine was full. I pressed it into the pistol, and with my thumb released the catch that freed the slide to snap forward. The automatic, now fully loaded and with a powerful Silvertip cartridge chambered, was noticeably heavier in my hand.
On the nightstand was a bottle of vodka and a tumbler. I reached for it with my free hand.
No. Not tonight. Not until all this is finished, one way or another.
When I finally slept that night, my gun was on the nightstand and for a long while my mind would not surrender to sleep. Suspicions writhed and coiled back upon themselves.
When I finally slept, I dreamed of spiderwebs and fiery skies like the reflection of cities burning in the distance. I saw Ellen as she was when I first met her, and when I tried to go to her I realized my hands and legs were shackled. In the midst of it all, I could hear the low rasp of Sam Lichtman’s voice speaking the same sentence, over and over. I could not discern the words.
But in the way one possesses certainty during dreams, I knew the convict was speaking of trust and secrets and betrayal.
It might have been a nightmare; asleep or awake, I could no longer tell the difference.
Chapter 25
Despite the demands of an arson investigation, Gil Cieloczki still had a fire department to run. It was a fact that was brought home to him each time he returned to his office, the excitement of the chase slapped down by a nagging sense of guilt. Fires still ignited, alarms still rang. Firefighters still expected paychecks and, in general, the bureaucratic beast still demanded to be fed.
A large part of his job, Gil had told me in a rueful voice, was to stalk the beast of management routine that roams every organizational jungle. It was a quarry as wily as it was prolific, and throughout our investigation it left its spoor in ever-mounting piles on his desk.
During the two-and-a-half weeks since the fire chief had taken over the Levinstein investigation, Jesús Martinez had doubled up on his normal duties as line lieutenant. From my temporary desk outside, I had watched Martinez trying gamely to fill the administrative gap left by his boss’s preoccupation with arson and murder.
But even the best efforts of Gil’s right-hand subordinate only slowed the pace at which the work backed up, taunting and daunting the fire chief whenever he found a spare minute to stop by his own office.
It was there that I had reached him when I called from Stateville; he was still there hours later, thanking God for an understanding spouse at home alone.
The clock on his desk read 10:26; Kay would be watching the late news, then tuning in to the Letterman show. It was a ritual they usually shared, and that both of them had missed for much of the past month. Outside, through his office window, the night sky twinkled with stars. Gil mentally sighed and pulled another clipped sheaf of reports from the still-considerable stack of his in-basket.
Underneath was a videotape cassette.
Gil frowned and picked it up. There was no label or anything else to identify its contents. He riffled through the other papers in the box, looking for an accompanying memorandum or note. There was nothing, and Gil’s sense of puzzlement grew.
A tall, thin figure passed in the hallway outside his open office door, then doubled back.
“Working late, Gil?” Talmadge Evans stood in the doorway. He was in his shirtsleeves and carried a paper cup of coffee from the vending machine just off the center’s public lobby. “Remember, we’re management. We don’t get overtime for these kinds of hours.”
“A cup of coffee would help,” Cieloczki jibed. “But some penny-pinching bureaucrat on an economy drive ordered it all locked up after five o’clock. I think it was you.”
Evans laughed and gestured with the paper cup he held.
“Well, I’ve been punished,” he replied. “This is hot and it’s black, and it only cost me fifty cents. But I can’t call it ‘coffee.’ Not with a straight face.”
“This keeps up, I’ll start carrying a Thermos,” Gil said.
Evans looked at his watch. “Well, don’t stay too late,” he told the firefighter. “There’s better places to spend an evening.” The city manager nodded and turned toward his own office on the second floor. Gil could hear his footsteps echo in the deserted hallway. It was a lonely sound, almost heartbreaking in its solitary isolation.
Gil knew a little about Talmadge Evans’s personal life. The city manager’s wife of twenty-seven years had died a short time after Cieloczki had come to Lake Tower. It was common knowledge around the Municipal Center that Evans’s subsequent remarriage three years later, to a significantly younger woman from a socially prominent family, had been less than successful.
By all accounts, the city manager had buried that—and whatever other disappointments he kept locked away from gossip and innuendo—under the mountain of work that his job faithfully provided. It was a dedication or an obsession or simply a substitution that Gil found he both understood and dreaded.
There, but for Kay, go I, he thought to himself.
He sat still for a moment, looking at the papers on his desk. Then he abruptly picked up his phone and dialed.
Kay answered on the second ring.
“I’ve been thinking a little popcorn might taste pretty good,” he said. “Particularly if somebody’s sharing it with me.”
Kay laughed.
“Okay,” she said. “But I get to hold the bowl.”
• • •
Gil left the Municipal Center by the side entrance, the one closest to the parking lot. Under his arm was the remaining content of his in-box, scooped up in a sense of duty or guilt as he left. The hard plastic of the videocassette pressed into his arm.
As he crossed the parking lot to where he had left his car, Gil saw that he and Evans had not been alone in burning the late-night oil.
“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” Robert Johns Nederlander said, his keys in his hand. He stood in the section of the lot reserved for the personal automobiles of police personnel, next to a black Lincoln Navigator that flared expensively in the reflected gleam of the overhead lighting. The slot was marked with the words RESERVED FOR DIRECTOR - PUBLIC SAFETY.
Nederlander ran a hand over the vehicle’s smooth lines. He smiled with satisfaction.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Best damn car I ever had. This winter, all the snow and cold? I’d just drop her into four-wheel drive and plow through without a hitch. She’s a hungry beast—hell, filling the tank sets me back fifty bucks. But she handles great and the suspension’s soft as a baby’s hindside. You ought to get one for yourself, Gil.”
“Couldn’t even afford the gas,” Gil chided. It was common knowledge that Nederlander was a frequent visitor to the gasoline pumps behind the Municipal Center, the ones installed to fuel vehicles assigned to police, Public Works and other departments.
Nederlander looked at Gil and shook his head, though whether in sympathy or in disgust the firefighter could not tell.
“You’re a department head, and that means you’re on twenty-four-hour call,” Nederlander said. “When your phone rings in the middle of the night, you have to use your personal vehicle, right? Why do you think they give each of us our own fuel account code?”
“My luck, I’d be in trouble,” Gil said, sorry he had started the conversation. “It’s safer for me just to eat the cost myself, out-of-pocket.”
“They don’t give you points for being dumb around this place,” Nederlander retorted. “When I first started here, it was standard practice to check out a city car, fill it up and siphon the gas into your own car.”
“You’re kidding.”
“The hell I am. It was the only way to make up for what you paid out of your own pocket. Now we get to fill up our damn cars at the Municipal Center. Consider it a perk of your job.”
“I’d prefer a pay raise,” Cieloczki grinned. “How about it, boss?” He held up the papers he carried, the videocassette on top. “After all, I am taking all this work home with me.”
“Talk to Evans,” Nederlander responded, and his expression lost all measure of good humor. “The murder today in Chicago. The Butenkova woman. This is going way beyond an arson case. Are you certain you feel equipped to continue supervising it?”
Cieloczki pretended not to notice the chill in Nederlander’s voice.
“I think so,” he said, careful to keep all challenge from his voice. “We have good cooperation from the different jurisdictions involved. And our local team is continuing to develop what we feel are some solid leads of our own.”
Nederlander was silent for a moment, his eyes closely examining Gil’s face. Then he nodded and turned abruptly to his vehicle.
“Keep me informed,” he said without turning.
“I’ll be sure to do that,” he said. “See you, Bob. Drive carefully.”
“You, too,” Nederlander replied.
Later, when he reflected on the events that were already careening out of control, Gil Cieloczki would remember the comment.
It had sounded, he would tell me, almost like a warning.
Chapter 26
My eyes snapped open, and my heart was pounding. For an instant, I thought someone was with me in the dark of the room; without conscious thought, my hand groped for the pistol on the nightstand.
Then the phone rang again, and I knew what had broken into my troubled sleep was a different kind of intruder.
“I’m turning onto your street now,” the voice of Ron Santori said in my ear. “Get dressed. We’re going into the city.”
I started to rub my eyes and realized that I was holding the loaded automatic. The red digital numbers on the alarm clock read 11:48; I had been asleep less than an hour. I felt like hell, and half regretted my decision to give up vodka as a sleep aid.
“You there?” His voice was irritated. “Get it together, Davey. We’re meeting Charlie Herndon downtown.”
“Why?”
Santori laughed, once. “Apparently he stirred up a hornet’s nest. He says the Russians have landed.” From outside the window, I heard a car pull to a stop. “I’m parked outside. Hurry up, Davey. They’re waiting for us.”
I pulled on jeans and a turtleneck pullover and dragged a comb through my hair. The face in the mirror looked drawn, and there were dark hollows under the eyes. It was a face I had to work hard to recognize.
The only addition to my outfit was a light leather jacket I pulled from the closet. It would ward off the chill of the evening and had the advantage of hanging loosely just below my hips. It also had large side pockets, into one of which I slipped my tape recorder.
I zipped the jacket up halfway and glanced in the mirror as I went out my door.
I looked stylish, and there was no sign of the holstered weapon I had threaded onto my belt.
• • •
It is never really night in Chicago, at least not along the length of North Michigan Avenue that centers on the old Water Tower. Sodium-vapor streetlamps ally with the pearl-white necklaces of lights strung year-round in the branches of parkway trees, joined at each intersection with the tricolor of traffic signals. The effect is to forever banish the darkness of night to neighborhoods less favored by both fortune and fate. In the area around the Water Tower, the attitude is one of cheerful, arrogant invulnerability.
It has not always been that way.
The last serious attempt to level the city was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. As a schoolchild in Chicago, I had been taught the blaze began when Mrs. O‘Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern. Today, an increasing number of historians reject the bovine-arsonist legend that has prevailed for more than a century in favor of alternate suspects. One of the more intriguing of these focuses less on the cow than on the cosmos.
A handful of revisionists now theorize the Chicago fire was ignited by white-hot fragments of a meteor flung from the heavens at the sinful frontier metropolis. If true, either the meteor or the Hand that threw it was blithely nonchalant about inflicting peripheral damage: two hundred miles to the north, in the single largest conflagration history has ever recorded, the virgin Wisconsin forests around Peshtigo also burst into flames—suspiciously or coincidentally, depending on your point of view—on the same day, at about the same hour.
Whatever the cause, the limestone Water Tower was among the handful of Chicago’s structures to withstand a firestorm that reduced most of its largely wood and frame construction to smoking ash. When Chicago rebuilt itself—making millionaires of the well-connected businessmen who owned the limestone quarries and brickyards suddenly made essential by new building codes—the fanciful stoneworks of the Water Tower and its accompanying waterworks facility were at the center of what gradually became its showcase commercial section north of the Chicago River.
Today, luxury hotels glitter in their opulence, surrounded by famous-name shops and world-class restaurants; its ten-square-block area comprises some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Even at this hour, with the new day less than fifty minutes old, an endless procession of cars flows past sidewalks thick with pedestrian traffic both along the main drag and on the side streets that branch off the Boul Mich.
And presiding over it all is the now-antique Water Tower, a spotlighted survivor whose single stone finger still points toward the sky as if in some urgent but only vaguely remembered warning.
“Her name is Petra Natalia Valova, and she’s some kind of official at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow,” Ron Santori was saying, waving me ahead as they entered the Omni Hotel’s impressive lobby. “Fairly high on the food chain, from what I understand. Charlie Herndon’s already up there with her.” We stopped in front of a bank of elevators and Santori pressed the button. “I hope nobody’s declared war yet.”
We walked down the hallway to a suite.
“Since Cieloczki’s visit, Charlie’s been impossible to live with,” Santori said in a low voice. “He’s been burning up the phone wires talking to his sources all over the goddam world. He’s spent hours on the Internet, posting notes to news group
s connected to the Holocaust, art experts, military historians—dozens of ‘em. Next thing I know, we get a call from the Russian Consulate that this Valova woman is in town, needs to see him on an urgent and confidential matter. Believe it or not, it’s not the kind of phone call the FBI gets every day.”
He knocked on a door, which immediately opened. Even silhouetted, I had no problem identifying the figure whose bulk filled the entrance to the suite. Herndon looked at both of us with ill-concealed irritation.
“This whole thing is turning into one major rat-fuck,” he said, then looked at me. “Don’t even think of using that damn tape recorder of yours when I talk to these people. Understand me?”
“I don’t even have it with me, Agent Herndon.”
“Uh-huh.” He did not sound convinced, but stood aside to let us enter. “Come in, then. The Russian Mata Hari is waiting for us.”
Petra Natalia Valova was young to be a senior official anywhere, let alone at one of the premier art institutions in the world. I guessed her age in the mid to late thirties. Her center-parted straight black hair fell to her shoulders. She wore a no-nonsense business outfit of black wool that looked better suited for a colder climate, its skirt tailored to the middle of her knees. Red plastic glasses of a style that had been fashionable a few years before gave her an earnest, studious appearance. If she wore makeup, it was applied artfully enough to be indiscernible.
When Santori and I entered, Valova was talking in a near whisper with a trim, balding man of indeterminate age. From their expressions, it did not seem to be a casual conversation.
“Tarinkoff, from the consulate,” Herndon said to Santori. He did not whisper. “Cultural attaché, so he’s probably SVR.”
The man turned away from the conversation and approached with his hand outstretched. “Anotoli Tarinkoff,” he said with a practiced smile, “and no, Mr. Herndon—I am not with the Foreign Intelligence Service, though I suspect this matter will not long be without their most sincere attention. Nor was I with their predecessor, the KGB. I am that most rare of all specimens, a genuine Russian cultural attaché.” His chuckle was carefully self-deprecating, his handshake was firm, and his accent was of the American Midwest. He might have been the manager of a hardware store, greeting latecomers to a Rotary Club meeting.