Walking Back The Cat

by Robert Littell

  "Americans," Prince Igor continued, "must learn that Greater Russia, whether ruled by so-called Communists or ersatz capitalists, always was and always will be expansionist. And what better way to convince them," he added, unable to restrain a note of triumph, "than to have a bona fide Russian agent assassinate the president and then catch him in the act. Better still, kill him after the act. The assassin was slain, so the newspapers will proclaim, by a local policeman who gunned his motorcycle up the hill after the explosion."

  Robert Littell

  Parsifal appeared to breathe with difficulty. "It is not possible," he whispered. "How could you penetrate our network? How could you gain control of the identifying cryptograms?"

  "Do you remember the woman you shot in Dallas? Later you told Le Juif that she was Russian. She was, in fact, a deputy to the chief of the First Department of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, which controlled the old KGB's espionage activities on the North American continent." Click, click. "Everything and everyone is for sale in Moscow these days, so our consortium went shopping there for someone who could sell us a genuine Soviet network operating in North America. The woman nibbled at the bait. We arranged her defection through the Germans. One of my associates debriefed her in Dallas. When she had given us the identities —Parsifal, Le Juif, La Gioconda —and the cryptograms that would permit us to control you, we had you kill her." Click. "Although you couldn't have known it, you were not working for the KGB but for the consortium."

  It was almost as if Parsifal didn't believe the story Prince Igor was telling him. "You speak Russian without an accent."

  Prince Igor leveled the revolver. "I am a third-generation anti-Bolshevik, my dear Edouard Cheklachvilli. My maternal grandmother came from an old White Russian family. You may have heard of the Kus-michofs; they exported tea before the Bolsheviks sent them scurrying for their lives." Click. "As a young girl, my mother looked out a window on the bel etage of a hotel when the Red Army captured the town she was hiding in. She saw Budenny's cavalry trotting past on the street below." Click. "She remembered that each of the heroic cavalrymen carried on the tip of his lance a severed human head." Click, click. "It is an interesting phenomenon, and characteristic of this century—how the trauma of the parents ends up driving the children."

  Over Parsifal's shoulder Prince Igor could see the mass of joggers bobbing uphill through the heat rising off the asphalt. They seemed to move in a kind of unsynchronized slow motion. The target would be in the middle of the group, flanked by bodyguards who carried pistols strapped to their ankles under their sweatpants. Smiling slightly, Prince Igor said, "You chose your code name badly; Parsifal was never destined to find the Holy Grail. Once again the Siege Perilous has turned out to be fatal. Pity. The Grail was an interesting obsession." He expelled half the air from his lungs and blocked his breath and aimed the Smith & Wesson at Parsifal's chest and squeezed the trigger.

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  Parsifal never felt the bullet tearing into his body, or his body hitting the ground. He experienced a sharp pinprick under his left nipple and an instant loss of strength in his feet. Lying on the ground, his nostrils twitched as he smelled his own blood. He heard Le JuiPs ironic laugh echoing in his head: "A life's work . . . ne vozmozhna!"

  Stepping over Parsifal's body, Prince Igor retrieved the black box from the rock. He trained the binoculars on the stretch of road two miles away. He could make out the figure in the middle of the crowd of joggers; there was no mistaking him, husky, smiling, a baron bantering with the two young female subjects running alongside him.

  Standing at the summit of his career, smiling to himself, Prince Igor, known to his consortium colleagues as Swan Song, extended the antenna on the transmitter and waited until the Jogger came abreast of the green Toyota. Then he pointed the antenna at the car and flicked the toggle switch to the position marked Signal On.

  Walking Back the Cat

  handfuls of dry sage into the flames. Thick white smoke from the sage drifted across the Anasazi altar, purifying Eskeltsetle's body.

  When the death song was finished, Petwawwenin and Nahtanh and Alchise lifted Eskeltsetle's corpse off the litter, carried it to the Suma burial ground below the altar and lowered it on ropes into the pit. They abandoned the ropes in the grave and filled in the pit with earth and covered the earth with heavy flat stones to protect Eskeltsetle's corpse from wolves and coyotes. Returning to the altar, they stripped to the skin and wrapped their bodies in blankets and burned their own clothing in the ritual fire.

  "Following our Apache custom," Alchise announced as the flames consumed their clothing, "I will no longer respond to Alchise, which is the name by which my father, Eskeltsetle, knew me. Alchise is reserved for when his spirit wants to summon me. From this time, I will be known as Paradeeahtran, the Contented."

  "From this time," Nahtanh said, "I will be known as Natchinilkkisn, the Colored Beads."

  "From this time," Petwawwenin said, "I will be known as Tatsah-dasaygo, the Quick Killer."

  Turning, the three Apaches, Paradeeahtran, Natchinilkkisn and Tat-sahdasaygo, hurried down the mountain.

  Shenandoah took out a pair of shears. Reaching back, she cut off a tuft of hair above the nape of her neck and dropped it onto the flames as a sign of mourning. "Here's the deal," she said. "From this time, I will use the name Sonseeahray, the Morning Star."

  "From this time," Doubting Thomas said, struggling to control his voice, "I will use the name Sonsinjab, the Great Star."

  Then Sonseeahray and Sonsinjab and Finn stripped naked and drew Apache blankets over their shoulders and fed their garments into the flames. Finn retrieved a worn paperback from the back pocket of his jeans before he tossed them into the fire. "This here was written by Mr. F. Fitzgerald," he said, turning to the last page. "I think Skelt would have smiled at it."

  The valleys below the altar were already lost in shadows. Holding the book up to the last light of day, Finn read from the text. " 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' " He closed the book and dropped it into the flames. "The past is where Skelt always wanted to get to," he said, "so I got to think it's where he's at now."

  "Metaka Oysin" murmured Sonseeahray, the Morning Star.

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  Robert Littell

  "Metaka Oysin," echoed Sonsinjab, the Great Star.

  In the west the disk of the sun silently embedded itself in the horizon. A breath of wind stirred in the still mountains. Carried on the wind from a distant hunting ground, the proud hoot of an old owl reached the ears of the mourners.

  Robert Littell

  in the neighborhood of thirty billion dollars a year. It's overpriced and inefficient and messy, and it makes big mistakes —it never alerted us to the possibility that the Soviet Union could collapse like a house of cards, to give you a for instance. But it happens to be the only intelligence industry we have. You need to think of the CIA as a moat. It maybe isn't as deep as we'd like it to be, or as wide, but we can't afford to face the world without a moat between us and it. We can't afford to dismantle our intelligence industry because a handful of its former employees went off half-cocked."

  Finn downshifted going around a curve. "It wasn't a matter of a handful of employees," he said.

  "I'm not sure I follow you."

  "The Medici who was supposedly pensioned off from the CIA ran his consortium out of an old Spanish fortress called the Adobe Palace. The second floor of the Adobe Palace church had been turned into a fancy communications center. There was a dish antenna up in the steeple, there were two computer consoles in the room itself, and file cabinets stuffed with traffic. There was a red telephone on one of the filing cabinets. You had a phone just like that in your holy of holies, so I picked it up. It was the kind of phone where you didn't have to dial."

  "Adobe Palace had a hot line?"

  Finn glanced at Pilgrim and nodded. "A voice came on the phone. It said, 'Federal Bur
eau of Statistics, demographic section. Duty Officer Phippen speaking.' "

  For a mile or so Pilgrim stared at the scrub oaks along the side of the road without seeing them. Drawing a deep breath, he turned back to Finn, his expression grim. "Remember what I told you back in the Saudi desert the day the horse you were riding stepped on a mine? Everyone needs to have a philosophy. Mine is: I don't want to know what happened. But I want to make damn sure it doesn't happen again. My white congressman, the other members of the committee I work for, they all come at this problem from the same direction. That's why they sent me to New Mexico—so they wouldn't know what happened, so they could be goddamn sure it doesn't happen again."

  Finn said quietly, "It's kind of late to be sticking your head in the sand—there are too many loose ends."

  "There are no loose ends, friend. Two dead bodies were found on a hill in Santa Fe. Big deal. The local law-and-order whizzes say there's

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  no connection between the deaths and the passage of the president. Every single car parked along the Jogger's route was opened and searched. No explosives were found. The bodies on the hill were unidentified and are going to remain unidentified. The detectives investigating the case are leaning toward the theory that it was a homosexual murder and a suicide; one guy was shot dead, the other blew himself to pieces when a homemade bomb stuffed in a box he was holding exploded in his hands."

  Rounding a bend, Finn could see the Rattlesnake Casino at the bitter end of Sore Loser Road up ahead. "You can't cover all the tracks."

  "Wrong again. I can and I will. That's what I'm here for. Early and Lahr have disappeared back into cracks in the walls. I'll lay money nobody you know ever hears from either of them again. As for the Adobe Palace, it's true there were five bodies found. The state troopers up north think there must have been some kind of a showdown between the Mafia and the local Apaches —something to do with the Mafia shaking down a casino. That's the story that's going to appear in tomorrow's newspapers. In the back pages. The church up at Adobe Palace has been scrubbed clean; there's no dish antenna, no communications consoles, no file drawers filled with cable traffic, no telephones, no nothing. The joint is just an abandoned Spanish fortress with crumbling walls. There are Jicarilla Apaches who are Catholic who'll swear they've been going up there for Sunday services as far back as they can remember and never saw a white face." Pilgrim gestured toward Watershed Station as they bumped onto Sore Loser Road. "Your Suma Apaches will be quietly reimbursed for the money they lost paying Mafia protection. No questions will be asked. No answers will be offered."

  Finn pulled around the side of the general store into the field filled with Eskeltsetle's used pickups and cut the motor. "What about me?" he asked.

  A woman with short-cropped hair and a fringed skirt that stirred up dust around the painted toenails of her bare feet was directing an Indian boy and several Apaches who were spreading out a yellow-and-black air bag on the ground. Pilgrim looked at the wicker gondola with The Spirit of Saint Louis painted on a thin copper plaque bolted to its side. "There are people over at the Bureau of Statistics who want to have a word with you," he said. "I'd be lying if I said otherwise. They say you're a loose cannon, the only person who can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Right

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  now I'm going to get one of these Apache warriors to drive me up to Adobe Palace for a last look around. When I get back, if I was to see that balloon of yours gone" —Pilgrim started laughing; he laughed so hard he had trouble finishing the sentence—"I'd have to tell the folks at the Bureau of Statistics you flew the coop, wouldn't I?"

  Robert Littell

  tracked it with his good arm as the yellow speck drifted across the blue of the sky. "I sure hated to see Finn fly off like that," he announced to everyone within earshot. "Cut into strips, the nylon in his balloon would have made great banners for our feast day."

  Squinting at the sky, Sonseeahray, the Morning Star, came over to stand next to Finn. The back of his hand brushed against the back of her hand, but she pulled it away. "Don't rush me," she said. "I need to mourn my Apache Gatsby."

  Finn touched the spot where she had sheared a fistful of hair off the nape of her neck. "I got all the time in the world."

  She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. "Are you really finished turning in squares?" she asked.

  "You bet."

  Sonsinjab, the Great Star, joined them. "What you got to do," the boy told Finn, his eyes wide and serious, "is get yourself a new name like everyone else round here. That way Finn will have disappeared with the balloon and the bad guys'll never find you."

  "If you're gonna go hog," Sonseeahray, the Morning Star, reminded him, a hint of a smile playing on her lips, "you might as well go whole hog."

  Finn caught a last glimpse of The Spirit of Saint Louis disappearing into a cloud bank. He remembered what Eskeltsetle had told Sonseeahray when she was still called Ishkaynay. "You are who you think you are," Finn murmured. He could hear the old Apache's voice in his ear. "All you got to do is invent yourself over again."

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Littell is the bestselling author of The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, The Sisters, The Amateur (which was made into a feature film), The Once and Future Spy, An Agent in Place, and, more recently, The Visiting Professor. Littell, who lives in France and writes novels full-time, has been published to critical acclaim in fourteen countries.

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Pages

  Back Cover