by Bill Granger
Henry stared at the back of John Mozart’s neck while he figured it out. Skarda. Where the hell had Devereaux come up with Skarda? Someone had put Skarda on Henry McGee’s back, and Devereaux wanted to pound it out of him. Skarda was buried sixty feet down an abandoned mineshaft of memory, and now they were digging for it again.
The thought crossed his mind almost casually. He looked at the face on the hack license attached to the dashboard. John Mozart. Should ask him if he played the piano, Henry thought.
He knew what he had to do a moment before John Mozart knew it.
“Is this a stickup?” Mozart said, his eyes on the rearview mirror.
“Yep,” Henry said. His hands were below the back of the front seat.
“Jesus. I thought it was.”
“You guessed right, son.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pull off this road and find a quiet street and pull over. Then give me your money and I go away.”
“I swear to God I will, but don’t hurt me. I got a wife and two kids.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Henry said.
John Mozart believed that almost to his last moment.
5
MALMÖ
It began with a series of mistakes on the day after the officials ended their conference.
The conference had taken an unusual turn on the second day, and the public agenda was replaced by a secret agenda.
The public believed the U.S. secretary of state and the Soviet foreign secretary were discussing freedom of the seas as it related to the shallow, frigid waters of the Baltic Sea.
Sweden had alleged abuse of that freedom by the Soviet Union when a T-class Soviet submarine grounded itself on a rocky shoal six hundred meters off the city of Stockholm. It had taken two Soviet trawlers three days to pull it off while the Swedish navy watched from Stockholm harbor.
The incident had led to an American show of strength on the eastern Baltic, off the Latvian coast, that consisted of two older frigates and a destroyer. The gray ships had sailed up and down for four days in the gray sea, shadowed all the time by Soviet submarines. The dangerous game had been called off when the conference on the Baltic was agreed to by the American president and the Soviet president.
That is what the demonstrators who gathered in Malmö on the Swedish southern coast believed. There were no more than sixty demonstrators, but they were very colorful and the city tolerated them.
They urged the Soviets to free Lithuania.
They urged the Americans to sever relations with South Africa. They sang folk songs, and their eyes were sad.
The negotiators ignored them. Nearly everyone ignored them. They were mostly Swedes and still wore long hair and jeans. They were very sincere and passed out buttons and petitions, even in the rain.
It rained all that Saturday morning after the conference ended and the principals had gone home. The rain came straight down for a time, and the demonstrators gathered in the pedestrian street behind the Savoy Hotel and tried to attract the Saturday shoppers. But the rain was very cold, and the tolerance of the Malmö residents did not extend to catching cold. The shoppers hurried on.
It was just after eleven in the morning. At noon, Michael Hampton would collect his things—his tapes, his equipment, his translation books, which helped him look up the precise word in a precise context—and carry them down to the train station. The train for Stockholm left Malmö’s old red station on the waterfront at 1340 hours. There was plenty of time.
Because of the rain, the immense room in the rear of the Savoy Hotel was colored in gray light. The room made them feel sleepy. They lounged on the wide, soft bed and held each other. They were naked. The rain made them feel dreamy and romantic and very tired of the rest of the world.
Outside the hotel, the demonstrators chanted for Lithuanian freedom and South African censure.
Rena Taurus, whose parents had fled Lithuania after the war and after the Soviet Union had swallowed up that Baltic country, pushed her hands above her head so that he might better see her nakedness. Her hair was so intensely black that it was almost blue. Her body was pale, and her eyes were deep, blue ponds. Her mouth was formed by generous, pouting lips. Sometimes, in a moment of pleasure, her lips formed a circle that made her look vulnerable, and yet the vulnerability was belied by the voluptuous touch of those glistening lips.
She drove him crazy at times, those times when she stretched her arms above her head, times when she looked at him in a certain way when they were both in a crowded room and could do nothing about her look. It pleased her to excite him, and it pleased Michael Hampton. He was blond and large and, she thought, clumsy. He spoke in a soft voice, even when they drank too much together in one of the noisy bars and it would have been better to shout.
Now her lips, wetted by her tongue, pouted to be kissed. He bent and kissed her, lost his lips in the hunger of hers. Her lips sucked his lips as her body relaxed to yield to him, to draw him on her lap.
There was a knock at their door.
He waited, poised above her, holding his breath.
“Oh, answer it,” Rena said. She smiled. The moment did not pass, it was merely suspended. “I’ll wait here for you.”
He grinned. “I’ll have to put my clothes on.”
“Not too many,” she said.
He pulled on his robe and went to the door. It was Rolf Gustafson, the equipment man from the temporary news bureau that had been set up in the Malmö city hall. He was some sort of employee of the town. He pretended to know all the secrets of Malmö and where the women could be found and what the price of dinner was in a particular place. He was annoying, but he was useful to the journalists who had attended the conference, as well as useful to people like Michael and Rena, who were translators and interpreters. Rolf stood in the doorway. He had two small equipment cases that belonged to Michael Hampton.
“I didn’t expect this,” Michael said in fluent, if not unaccented, Swedish. “I was going to pack up myself.”
“It was my pleasure, Mr. Hampton,” Rolf said. He had packed up everything for everyone from the journalist’s lockers—he had the master key. He had earned himself several tips as a result.
Michael fumbled for a tip and held out a twenty-kronor note. The equipment man said thank you and tried to look around Michael at whoever was in his bed. Michael said thank you again and closed the door.
“That saves you time,” Rena said from the bed. “We have more time.” Her eyes looked curiously at his bag.
“I wish you could come to Stockholm,” he began, untying his gray robe. He let it fall to the floor. Rena pulled her eyes from the bag and looked at Michael. The room was decorated in the permanent, old-fashioned style of so many provincial hotels. The Savoy was somber, gray, formal. From the front windows, you could see the blustery waves of the Kattegat that extended across to glittering Copenhagen on the other shore. “I wish you didn’t have to go back.”
“It’s only six weeks until the winter break,” she said. She was thinking of Brussels and the European Commission, where she worked as a translator. Like all legislative bodies, the European parliament had frequent holidays. The EC was slowly accumulating a bureaucracy with real economic and political power, and she was an apparatchik there, translating the Dutch demand for free trade into French, and the French demand for wine controls into English, and the English demand for open butter markets into German. She spoke every language well and was paid a good salary for her talents. Michael did not make as much.
After they made love again, they slept a while.
Then Michael awoke through instinct. He never set an alarm but he was never late. It was nearly one. He went into the bathroom, which was as large as some modern hotel rooms. He took a quick bath in the large tub and washed himself, remembering her scents. He was so in love with Rena that it made him helpless to think of her. If he thought of her eyes—azure and deep, innocent with all the world’s secrets behind them—it broke his heart
because she was not there to be touched in that moment.
He dressed, and she still slept.
He opened the two equipment bags, just to make sure everything was in order.
He discovered the mistake almost at once.
He had five tapes from the official summaries and the official “final statements” of the conference. The tapes were routine, because it was a way to double-check the accuracy of his typed translations for the various press associations he worked for. Everything was routine. His principal client had wanted him to attend this conference; his principal client had paid for information that was so inconsequential that Michael could not believe it. His principal client was a cardinal of the Vatican who demanded information on many things from time to time. Money was money, and his principal client was generous and always paid promptly. His language skills were not as rich as Rena’s, but he had more range in some of the lesser languages used around the Mediterranean rim.
His hand trembled.
He picked up the sixth tape.
He knew he had had five tapes, but now there were six.
“The damned fool,” he said aloud.
“What is it?” Her voice was low, full of shadows. She was on her naked belly on the bed, and she raised her shoulders slightly, and those cloudless eyes held him in a sleepy embrace. Her lips pouted the question to him, and he saw her lips were wet again. He desired her again in that moment, desired to feel her breasts beneath his fingers.… He looked at her and said nothing.
The rain was beating against the tall windows now. There was some anger to the sound of wind and rain. The demonstrators in the mailed streets had gone away, and Lithuania was not free and South Africa was not censured.
“Six tapes,” he explained.
She propped herself on one elbow in the bed and stared at him with those incredible eyes. Even if she were not attractive in face or body, her eyes would have made many men fall in love with her.
“Now I have to find out where it goes,” he said, not looking at her but looking at the tape.
“What are you talking about?”
“Should I miss the train?”
“What are you talking about?” Rena seemed anxious. “You can’t miss your train.”
“I’ll take it with me,” he said, still talking to himself. He dropped the tape into the case and closed it. “Busybody Rolf packing up everyone and getting it screwed up. What if I can’t return the tape?”
“It’s only a tape, Michael. Don’t worry about it.” She sighed. “Give me a kiss good-bye, okay?”
He kissed her a long time and smelled her passion and felt her moist mouth open on him. He wanted to lie down with her again, just to hold her against him and to feel her lips on his flesh. It was ten minutes after one. The train station was just across the street.
He said, “I miss you more every time we have to split up.”
“I miss you more, Michael,” she said in that wonderful low voice. But her gaze was focused over his shoulder on the equipment case.
The countryside was flat and thick with pine trees. The train rocked along through the narrow valley formed by the right-of-way. Raindrops drizzled on the windows, forming patterns before they blew away. The cars were brightly lit and the warmth of the train made everyone feel a little sleepy. Michael closed his eyes and slept a while, leaning his head against the window frame. The conductor awoke him to take his ticket. They gossiped a while about the various soccer teams. When the conductor went on, Michael rose and stretched and went to the next car ahead to get a sandwich and a beer. He took them back to his compartment. He ate the sandwich slowly, staring out the window at the bleak, chill countryside. Winter was so long in Sweden. It began with the last breath of summer—even while the children were still at the beach—coming one morning and blowing on the leaves of the trees to begin their brief time of blushing and dying. It made the summers so much more precious to know how brief they were.
Michael fell asleep again, lulled by the warmth of the car.
He dreamed of Rena. He always dreamed of her when he left her. He knew she treated him at times like a pet, but it didn’t bother him. She was the reward. She had come to the Malmö conference from Brussels, for certain unnamed clients, funded by this or that European Commission payroll. She was so vague that Michael dropped it. He wasn’t interested anyway. Rena was always mysterious, perhaps deliberately. She would speak of Lithuania—a place she only knew through the experience of her father and mother—and she would be annoyed if Michael did not understand her deep patriotism.
Lithuania…
Michael woke with a start. He shook his head slowly. He felt bad and did not know why. He had been dreaming of Rena of the black hair and skin like alabaster.
Michael opened the paper and saw the photograph in which the American secretary and the Soviet foreign minister shook hands and smiled for the cameras of the world. Michael made a face. Frauds. They were all frauds. What had his principal client in Rome warned him?
Cardinal Ludovico had been a father to him these past few years. They had sat in the great brocaded room in the tomb of a building on Borgo Santo Spirito and ordered cappuccino and ate the little, dry cookie-breads and talked of Malmö. Of the conference. Of being aware of secret agendas by great powers. “You are God’s spy.” The cardinal had smiled at him, and it embarrassed Michael because his Catholicism, which lingered in guilt, had long ago fallen away from the skin of his soul.
“Watch, Michael,” the cardinal had said, resting a bony finger on his wrist. “Try to see those things at the conference that are left unsaid. Hear their silences, Michael, and judge them for me.”
He was not a spy, but he would not protest to the old man. The old man was kind, not like the fools who had tried to run him into the CIA from Army Intelligence.
Michael stared at the photographs. Secret agendas.
Yes. Rena had said that night in bed, after love, after the city was asleep and they were awake… something.…
“Michael, would you love me if I had secrets?”
“Do you have secrets?”
“Would you love me if I must keep secrets from you?”
“Do you, Rena?”
“But answer.”
“I love you.…”
Secrets. He hated the thought of them.
Michael closed the paper in disgust. He stared out the window at the dusk. There was nothing to do and ninety minutes to Stockholm Central. And then he thought of it.
He took out the sixth tape.
Stupid thing. One tape too many. But perhaps it was merely a copy of the other tapes.
He put the cassette in the black Sony machine and closed the opening.
He connected the earphones and slipped them in place. He pressed Play.
For a moment, there was nothing but silence, and then he heard the clear and careful voices.
The train rushed through a dark forest as Michael listened.
6
BRUSSELS
By the time Rena Taurus left Malmö, it was nearly six in the evening. She took the hovercraft ferry across the gray, choppy Kattegat to Copenhagen and then transferred to a cab for the ride to the airport. She need not have hurried. Kastrup International, outside Copenhagen, was filled with travelers delayed by the bad weather that had blown across the North Sea from Scotland. It was a terrible time of day, and Rena felt miserable. She thought of Michael and felt a pang of guilt. She should have clung to him, given him another day together; she should be with him now beneath the sheets.… It was his fault as much as hers. She did what she had to do, just as Michael served his principal client, and Michael’s client knew very well what this was all about, didn’t he?
She smoked two cigarettes and drank a very spicy Bloody Mary while she waited in the lounge.
Sabena Air’s flight back to Brussels finally took off an hour late. The 727 bucked in the headwinds on takeoff and then gyrated dangerously side to side as it struggled above the clouds. The pilot spoke
in French, Dutch, and English and tried not to sound frustrated. They all wanted to go home and be safe on earth again.
The plane was full of the clammy humidity of tired people jammed together in plastic and vinyl seats. Every seat was taken. The flight attendants seemed cross as they dished out food and drink. Rena Taurus had the ability in such situations to withdraw from her surroundings and wrap her thoughts in a tight, dark cocoon that would not let mere discomfort interfere.
She did this now. The blue eyes closed for a moment and then focused inward so that she really did not see the interior of the cabin around her. She thought of a song she had sung when she was young, a song of infinite sadnesses that always moved her to tears. Her mother had taught her the song one afternoon. It was from the old country and her mother had learned it as a girl living in one of the flats in the old part of Vilnius. The song linked her to her dead mother, to the dead country she knew so little about, to the idea that her blood was Lithuanian and that the beauty of her skin, her eyes, the perfection of her mouth were all due to the beauty passed through her mother and her mother’s mother and so on, back through ages when Lithuania had kings and warriors.… She smiled, eyes closed, seeing the connection that pleased her almost sensually. It comforted her. Had she used Michael? Yes. But she had not harmed him. She could never harm him. She was smiling but didn’t realize it.
The man across the aisle was watching her, and she didn’t realize that either.
A woman sat next to the man across the aisle, annoyed with him for watching Rena.
The authorities had discovered the mistake in Malmö at four in the afternoon. There had been a security alert, and the Russians and the Americans blamed each other for the missing tape. Both sides had rushed to put their agents in place. Everyone was suspect, and the interrogations had begun in the Malmö city hall. The great honor given Malmö to host the meeting of the superpowers had turned into an annoying fiasco. What was on the one tape that was so important anyway? Ah, at that question, neither side answered the confused Swedes. It was just important to put an agent on anyone who might have it, for KGB and R Section to work to solve this mystery. The man across the aisle from Rena Taurus was such an agent.