Mugger Blood td-30

by Warren Murphy

  "Why?" asked Spesk, studying a map.

  "Because we will starve to death. Or be killed in the food riots."

  "You will not starve in America. Look at those shops. You can have all the food you want."

  "That's only for American generals," Nathan said.

  "No. It's for everyone."

  "That's a lie."

  "Why?" asked Spesk.

  "Because Pravda says there are food riots and the people starve in America."

  "Pravda is a long way away. Sometimes stories change at a distance."

  "No. It's in print. I read it."

  "What about American newspapers? They don't tell stories about food riots," Spesk said.

  "American newspapers are propaganda."

  "But they're printed too," said Spesk.

  This caused Nathan some confusion. His brow furrowed. His dark Russian face clouded with gloom as he thought, difficult and sticky step by difficult and sticky step. Finally, the pistol killer smiled.

  "It is Russian printing that is always the truth because you can read it right. It is American printing that lies because we cannot read it. It can say anything with those funny letters it uses."

  "Good, Nathan," said Spesk, but again his bodyguard bothered him with a question so Spesk said he would explain everything about the mission now, why he had come into America personally with an operative who was not familiar with the language.

  "But a good shot and a good Communist," Nathan insisted.

  "Yes," said Spesk.

  "So, may I have my gun?"

  "No," said Spesk. "Now listen, because you are getting a rare treat," said the youngest colonel in the NKVD. "You are getting to know what is going on. Even generals don't know that."

  Nathan said he knew what was going on. They were righting imperialism. From the borders of Germany where Russian troops were stationed and into Cuba, until Russia had conquered imperialism from one end of the world to the other, where no other flag flew but the hammer and sickle.

  "Good," said Spesk. "About ten days ago when you were called in from Vladivostok, a strange thing was happening in America. The CIA, our enemy, was tearing down a building piece by piece. This attracted attention. West German intelligence was interested, Argentine intelligence was interested. They did what we call overload an area and we knew that because we traced them moving large numbers of people-eight and ten, that is a lot in espionage-out of their normal duties to watch one building being torn down. To try to talk to the daughter of a woman who was killed."

  "Who killed her?"

  "At first we thought muggers."

  "What is a mugger?" asked Nathan.

  "A mugger is a person who jumps on someone, beats them up, and takes their money. There are a lot of them in New York City."

  "Because of capitalist oppression, there are muggers, correct?" asked Nathan.

  "No, no," said Spesk, annoyed. "I want you to understand this clearly. Forget everything you've read. In this country, there is no death penalty in many areas. Somehow they got the notion in this country that killing someone for a crime is not a deterrent to more crime. So they took away capital punishment and now they can't walk their own streets. So I have brought you along because now that this land has no death penalty, many people go around killing and you are to protect me. Worse still are the laws regarding those who are less than eighteen years old. They can kill without even going to jail and American jails are warm and give three meals a day, often with meat."

  "They must have millions committing crimes to get in," said Nathan in astonishment, because only when he joined the NKVD did he eat meat regularly. That was food for ruling Communists, not for the masses.

  "They have millions committing crimes," said Spesk. "But let me warn you about any idea of committing a crime to get into one of their jails. We can exchange prisoners for you and then you will go back to a Russian jail. And we kill, friend. And not all that quickly for defectors."

  Nathan said he had no intention of defecting.

  "Which brings up, Nathan, why I, personally am here. Now you must already be thinking how stupid Americans are. And this is very true. They are stupid. If you tell Americans something is moral, they will cut their own throats for it. Except, sometimes, certain people stop them."

  "Who?" demanded Nathan in the back seat of the car parked under a train that went above them on rails very high up. It was an American elevated train that some of their cities had. Every time a train passed, Nathan trembled because he thought the train might fall. Buildings fell down in Moscow so why shouldn't trains that rattled so much fall also?

  "We stop them," Spesk said. "You see, our generals do not want the capitalists to cut their own throats because that would make the generals look unimportant. They want it to appear as if their hands are on the razor. Therefore, they have to do something and every time they do something, they make the capitalists look smarter. Therefore, we come here to the Bronx in America. To this slum."

  "It looks all right to me," said Nathan, noticing the shops open, their windows crammed with goods and foods, and how well everyone appeared to dress, without great patches, and with shoes without rags holding them on.

  "By American standards it is a slum. There is worse yet, but never mind. I go here myself personally because they would, if I left it to the generals, they would write reports that said everything so no matter what happened, they would have predicted it. Our generals are as stupid as American generals. As a matter of fact, they are identical. A general is a general is a general which is why when one surrenders, he has dinner with his conqueror. They are all identical. So you and I are here to see what all this fuss is about and then we will figure out what we will do about it and when we return to Mother Russia, we will both be heroes of the Soviet Socialist Republics, yes?"

  "Yes," said Nathan. "Heroes." And he thought how nice it would be to shoot up between the railroad tracks and get a kneecap or the groin. The groin was a wonderful place to shoot people except that they died only sometimes. The colonel still held his gun. But he would have to give it back when they saw muggers.

  "Mugger," said Nathan happily, and pointed at a man with a blue cap and a blue suit who had a whistle in his mouth and wore white gloves and stood in the middle of a very large and wide street with high buildings all around. He would have made a wonderful target. There was even a shiny silver star on his chest. Nathan could hit that star.

  "No. That is a black policeman," said Spesk. "You are thinking of nigger, not mugger. Nigger is a word Americans who are black do not like to be called."

  "What do they like to be called?" asked Nathan.

  "That depends. It is always changing. Once it was Negro and black was bad, then it was black and Negro was bad, then it was Afro-American, but it is never nigger. Many of the muggers are black though. Most are."

  "But don't the racist police shoot black nigger Afro-Americans all the time? Negroes?"

  "Obviously not," said Spesk. "Or there wouldn't be the mugging problem."

  "I hate racists," said Nathan.

  "Good," said Spesk. As he calculated, the building they were looking for would be toward the main center of the city which was called Manhattan, yet still in an outlying district called the Bronx.

  "I also hate Africans. They are ugly and black. I want to vomit when I see something so ugly and black," Nathan said, and spat out the window. "Someday socialism will end racism and blacks."

  The first thing that told Spesk they were near the area was a yellow-striped roadblock. Instead of going closer, he veered off the large American street down a hill into a residential area. If all the reports were true, anyone turning into these roadblocks passed the very casual and very armed American lounging around, would be photographed, and perhaps even stopped and questioned.

  There were better ways to penetrate in America. One did not have to have expensive spies worming their way into the innards of the defense establishment. There were cheaper and easier ways. One did not h
ave to play spy all the time in America.

  So when Spesk saw the garbage stacked neatly in cans along the curb, he realized he was in a safe enough neighborhood to park. He found a tavern and told Nathan not to talk.

  Spesk himself had been one of the bilingual children. Right after the Second World War, the NKVD began nurseries where children learned English and Chinese almost as soon as Russian, so that they would not only speak without accents but would think in the foreign languages also. Children, it had been discovered, learned to duplicate sounds exactly, while grownups could only reproduce sounds they had learned in their childhood. All of which meant Spesk could walk into Winarski's Tavern, just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx of New York City, America, and sound as if he came from Chicago.

  He ordered a beer, fella, and wondered, fella, how business was, fella, and gee, golly, what a great looking bar the guy had here, and by the way what were all those yellow barricades doing on the other side of the Concourse?

  "Buildings. Tearing down. Niggers there," said the bartender whose English lacked Spesk's precision and clarity.

  "Why are they tearing down a building, pal? Huh? How come?" asked Spesk as if he had worked his way through Douglas MacArthur High School by delivering Chicago Tribunes.

  "They tear down. The politicians. They tear down, they build up."

  "That's going up?"

  "Nothing. Men there with guns. I bet drugs. They looking. I bet heroin," said the bartender.

  "A lot of men?"

  "Three blocks around. Cameras too. In apartments. You don't need to go there. Niggers over there. You stay here," said the bartender.

  "You bet I will," said Spesk. "Say, was there anything in the papers about it? I mean, that's sort of wierd, isn't it, tearing down a building with a lot of guys with guns standing around?"

  "Drugs I bet. Heroin. Does he want a drink?" asked the bartender, nodding to Nathan. Nathan stared behind the bar. Nathan drooled.

  "You have a gun back there," said Spesk. "Please put it out of sight." He slapped Nathan on the shoulder and put his tongue over his lips to indicate he wanted silence.

  Spesk spent the afternoon in the bar, buying drinks occasionally, playing a game of darts, and just chewing the fat with all the nice guys who came and went, fella, nice to see you, catch you again next time.

  There had been a wounding of a young black there and some black minister had made a fuss, someone told Spesk. Guy's name was Wadson, Reverend Josiah. Wadson had a police record for breaking and entering, procurement, assault with a deadly weapon, rape, assault with intent to kill, even though the police had orders from City Hall to keep it quiet.

  "I bet you're a cop, right?" asked Tony Spesk, alias Colonel Speskaya.

  "Yeah. A sergeant," said the man.

  Tony Spesk bought the guy a beer and told him the problem with New York City was that the cops' hands were tied. And they didn't get paid enough.

  The sergeant thought this was true. God's honest truth. What Colonel Speskaya did not tell the sergeant was that the municipal in Moscow felt the same way, as did the London bobby and the Tanzanian people's constable.

  "Wonder what all that stuff is over there? On Walton Avenue, is it?"

  "Oh, that," said the sergeant. "Hush-hush. They moved the CIA in, about eight days ago. It was a fuckup."

  "Yeah?" said Tony Spesk. Nathan eyed the little revolver in the sergeant's belt. He moved a hand out toward it. Spesk slapped the hand away and pushed him toward the door, motioning to their car. Spesk did not want to tell him to get out in Russian.

  Back at the table, the sergeant told Spesk that he had a friend who knew one of the CIA guys there and everything was fouled up. Everything. They had been too late.

  Too late for what? asked Spesk, Tony Spesk, Carbondale, Illinois appliance salesman. As with most rummies, an hour and a half of drinking had made Spesk a lifelong friend of the police sergeant. Which was how he was introduced as "my buddy, Tony" to another friend and how they all decided to go out for a night on the town because Tony had an expense account. And they took Joe with them.

  Joe-you had to promise not to breathe a word of it-was an operative for the CIA.

  "You're full of shit," said Tony Spesk.

  "He is," said the sergeant with a wink.

  They went to a Hawaiian restaurant. Joe had a Singapore Sling. He saved the little purple paper umbrellas they put in the drinks to make them cute enough to charge $3.25 for them. When Joe had collected five of those umbrellas with Tony paying, he had the damndest story to tell.

  There was this German engineer. Frigging Kraut. Did he tell everybody that the guy was a German? Yeah? Okay. Well, he invented this thing, see. Whaddya mean, what thing? It was secret. Like a secret weapon. Invented it right in his Kraut cellar or attic or something.

  Back during Double-U Double-U Two. Don't tell anybody because it's a secret. Now where was he?

  "What kind of weapon?" asked Tony Spesk.

  Joe inhaled the rummy fumes from the Singapore Sling. "Nobody knows. That's why it's a secret. I got to piss."

  "Go in your pants," said Spesk with authority. The sergeant had passed out already and no one noticed that Spesk wasn't really drinking.

  "All right," said Joe. "Just a minute. Okay. That takes care of that. Maybe this thing reads minds, nobody knows."

  "Did you find it?" asked Spesk.

  "Ooooh, it's wet," said the man earning thirty-two thousand dollars a year to protect America's interests around the world through his mental superiority, cunning, and self-discipline.

  "It'll dry," said Spesk. "Did you find it?"

  "It's too late," said Joe.

  "Why?"

  "Because I've gone already," said the agent for the most hooplaed secret service since Nero's Praetorian Guard.

  "No. Why was it too late for the secret weapon?"

  "It was gone. We couldn't find it. We only found out it existed because the East Germans showed up looking for it."

  "And they didn't tell," said Spesk. There would be some dues to pay for this treachery toward Russia. Obviously some of the old Gestapo working now with East Germany had remembered the dead man's name and told how he had invented some kind of device, and the East German secret police went looking for it, without telling the Russian NKVD, and the Americans saw the East Germans looking and they looked, and then everybody went looking.

  Of course, there was a possibility that America had planted something in that neighborhood to draw out spies from other countries, but Spesk dismissed that. If they caught you, they would hold you for a trade. Gone were the old Cold War illusions of being able to permanently keep other countries' operatives out of your own country.

  Why bother? There was just too much traffic. They would monitor it; they wouldn't stop it. No. The story about the device was real. At least the Americans thought so. But why so much fuss? Thirty years old, the machine could not have had much practical application. Thirty years ago, there hadn't been lie detectors, bio-feedback machines, sodium pentothal. A whole trip sneaking into America wasted for just a nonsense device. Spesk almost laughed. For what? To look into people's heads and see what went on? Usually it was just disconnected gibberish.

  Outside, Nathan slept in the back seat of the car. American traffic was inordinately heavy outside the restaurant. No. It was normal. Spesk was judging it by Moscow standards where there were few cars. Spesk was bothered.

  The CIA man, Joe, had had a night off. His operation had started only ten days before. This wasn't a night off. CIA tours went on for a minimum of twenty days and, as often as not, until a mission was completed.

  Joe had a night off because the mission was over. The Americans had not found what they were looking for and they were just pulling out the CIA.

  Spesk would have to look for himself.

  Spesk did not often worry but tonight he was worried. He woke up Nathan and gave him his gun.

  "Nathan, I am giving you the gun. Do not shoot it at anyone just yet
because you will have to use it soon enough. I do not want us hiding the gun because you shoot some stranger, when you may have to use it to save our lives very soon."

  "Just one, now?" asked Nathan.

  "None, now," said Spesk.

  As he thought, he drove his large smooth American car into the area that had been sealed off by yellow painted roadblocks. The roadblocks were gone now.

  It was one a.m. Black teenagers roamed the street. A few tried to break into their slow-moving car but Spesk had Nathan with him. And just showing the gun kept them away.

  Spesk slowed the car at the site where the building had been torn down. He noticed a large hole in the ground. He left the car with Nathan out behind him, holding the gun. They had excavated, these Americans. They had excavated and still not found it.

  Spesk's keen eyes noticed the small marks at the edge of the lot. They had excavated with chisels. Therefore the device was small. If it existed. If it was worth anything.

  And then there was the shot behind him.

  Nathan had done it. He had not fired to protect them. He had shot at an Oriental in glaring yellow kimono across the street and now, the white man who was with the Oriental was moving across the street.

  Spesk did not have time to wonder what another white man was doing in this neighborhood. The white man moved too quickly for that. Nathan fired again and it seemed as if it was aimed right at the oncoming chest. There was no way Nathan could have missed.

  And yet the thin white man was at him and virtually through him by the time the shot stopped ringing in Spesk's ear. The white man's hands hardly seemed to move, yet they were out and back and Nathan's dark skull collapsed beneath the man's fingertips and his brains went shooting out the other side as though popped from a cookie gun.

  "Thank you," said Spesk. "That man was about to kill me."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Anytime I can, I'm glad to help," said Remo to the blond man, who showed an amazing coolness for someone who had moments before feared for his life. The dark-haired man with a gun lay very finally on the sidewalk, his mind not troubling him because it was spread in a fanlike pattern of brain just beyond his head like a sunrise. The slum smelled of that same strange old coffee-ground flavor Remo noticed in slums all over. They all smelled of it, even in areas that didn't use coffee. A sticky early summer coolness blew down Walton Avenue. Remo wore his usual slacks, loafers, and tee shirt.