by Craig Thomas
She sniffed with exasperation. ‘How many guests are in and out at that time? Look, we know you’re on the take from the whores, do you want me to come around and ask you about that? Right. You remember …? Good. Taxi. You know the driver — what? Noskov. Address? Cab number?’ She scribbled in the notebook perched on her knee. ‘What? Yes, I see. Don’t leave town, someone will be around this evening to take a statement.’
She put the receiver down loudly. Expelled an angry, mucusthick breath at the ceiling.
‘Well?’
‘I’ll check on the driver, sir — after I’ve had a couple of aspirin and a lie-down!’
‘Was there anything else?*
‘Antipov said he thought Rawls was going to get into a limousine.
A black Merc. It had been waiting outside the hotel for half an hour or more. But it wasn’t for Rawls. It just drove off in the same direction, following the taxi.’
TWO
An American Tragedy
‘You know what’s wrong? You guys from State — and there’s no offence in what I’m saying, nothing personal — but you should all butt out and let guys like me and Billy Grainger go in there with a free hand!’ The CEO of an oil exploration company had Lock backed into a panelled corner of the vast dining room, so that his head was almost resting against the large splash of a Jackson Pollock. ‘I mean — you guys with your handouts and your Harvard outlook, where’s that going to benefit us or the damned Russians either?’
The man’s tall, blonde, decorously glamorous wife, a lump of polished diamond on her ringer glittering at him like the eye of a snake, appeared bored, hanging on the man’s arm like a cloak to be wafted enticingly in the face of all the bulls in the world.
Lock tried to smile disarmingly, but the woman was proof against everything unordained by her husband.
‘I know what you mean,’ he offered, ‘but it’s just not as simple as that’
‘Simple, hell! It’s not any real problem/ the man replied, and Lock witnessed his tame lobbyist sidling unobtrusively towards them, calculating the worth in nanoseconds of a conversation with a roving junior executive from the State Department. ‘Just let us in there, with a free hand!’
At once, before he could adjust his governmental mask. Lock snapped: ‘I remember a whole bunch of Indian agents used the same argument, Sam.’
The wife’s eyes flickered, momentarily, with amusement.
Before the man could respond, Lock smiled affably and said:
‘Sorry, Sam, we’ll have to debate capitalist ethics some other time. I think my brother-in-law needs me.’
The lobbyist was assuring Sam that Lock was unimportant even before he was out of earshot. Sam seemed to think that Lock had been infected by some of the crazy ideas over there, and then they were gone, and his enjoyment was undisturbed. Any Washington party was a swim in the open ocean where one encountered the expected sharks and suckerfish and octopoid residents of the political deep. He assured himself he had gotten used to it, without any more longing for pot parties where Frank Zappa or The Grateful Dead blared from the hi-fi system, and the world seemed simple, its problems easily solved.
That past life was something still fondly remembered. He recalled parlies in other parts of the world, from his time with the Company as well as his time with State. They marked his gradual maturity with their increasing glamour and formality.
Until the only parties he ever seemed to attend were grand black-tie occasions like this, beneath high ceilings and surrounded by jewellery and painting-cluttered walls. The parties and the world’s problems continued, unchanging.
The noise in the dining room, voices above cutlery and crystal, dinned around him; a coterie. Every Washington party was the same, people came just to find themselves in a coterie, among the familiar, inhaling the incense of power and money. He sidled through lobbyists, businessmen, the occasional hemmed senator or congressman. He queued behind plump, bare shoulders at the buffet, and smelt expensive perfume and cigar smoke as he was helped to caviar, prawns, salad, quiche, salmon and a glass of good claret, before the caterers turned away to the next customer.
Then he moved towards his brother-in-law and Turgenev, after checking Bern’s whereabouts automatically. Her slim arms waved above her head and the heads of those who surrounded her. The pleasure was genuine, not fuelled by drink or coke, the extroversion her own and not implanted by an analyst.
‘John-boy!’ Billy was his effusive self.
He turned to his brother-in-law, whose gaze flinched away momentarily, as if he always remembered Lock’s angry, violent Words when they had finally quarrelled about Billy’s infidelities and the havoc they were wreaking in Beth. While she was having her stomach pumped at Walter Reed, Billy had confessed that Beth was too hard to live with and too hard to live without. Billy had never really held that night against him, but there was always this fleeting shadow of it whenever they met.
The chandeliers dripped diamond glass. Real diamonds on pale, dark and black throats were offered up towards those peculiar, vast, imported ikons suspended from the ceiling. The dining room had a cupola of stained glass.
‘Billy — Pyotr.’
‘It’s Pete here, surely,’ Turgenev retorted with a smile.
‘Fora lot of these guys, Pyotr would require a brain transplant,’ Billy offered as Lock shook hands with the Russian.
‘You’ve been in Phoenix?’
‘Let me tell you, John-boy. We had a presentation to major stockholders — what Grainger-Turgcnev is doing, how we see the next five years, the whole bit.’ Billy had been drinking, though not heavily, and his broad hand patted regularly on Lock’s shoulder.
‘How’s Vaughn?’
‘Dad’s just a little tired. I guess Beth told you, uh? No need to worry, John-boy — he’ll outlive both of us!’
Sharks and smaller fish nibbled at the edges of their group.
Turgenev, who was CEO of GraingerTurgenev in the Novyy Urengoy field, had three or four other Russians with him, vaguely known to Lock. There were two of Billy’s executives, one a youngish woman wearing a stunningly peeled-away black dress sparkling with diamante, as well as himself and Billy.
Billy’s party had moved with the eddies of favour and debt, money and influence, back and forth along the dining room’s length during the last hour and more. Beth performed circles and pirouettes with her friends or amid audiences more academic or more impressed by academe. The activity around her was less intense than that which followed and surrounded Billy like the debris of a comet. For Billy was into Russia, had congressmen and even the occasional senator in hand; Billy had government funding coming out of his ears. Billy was a buzzword.
Turgenev was taller than Billy, less powerfully built. They might have been a double-act for a buddy movie — which, in a way, was what they were; Billy short, dark, broad, Turgenev slim, pale-skinned and pale-eyed.
‘How are you, John? Sorry I wasn’t in Novyy Urengoy when you were last there. But Phoenix is warmer at this time of year — any time of year!’
The tide of the room was already beginning to eddy Billy and Turgenev away from him, and Lock was prepared to let them go. As they moved, away, Turgenev’s face became suddenly intent, as if a mask of affability had been removed, and he bent to say something to Billy; something peremptory and demanding.
There was shock on Billy’s face, as if he had been informed of Vaughn’s death or the collapse of Grainger Technologies’ stock on the Dow. It was the kind of disquiet he had seen on Billy’s slowly comprehending features when he had finally confronted him on Beth’s behalf; as if he had been shown something unacceptable, even despicable, about himself.
‘Something wrong, Billy — Pete?’ he called.
‘No — no,’ Billy replied,waving the matter aside but unable to remove it from his eyes.
It couldn’t be Rawls’ murder. Billy had told him of it earlier, and had been surprised, even shocked. But not moved in the way he was now. He’d just said
, The guy spent all those years in Washington only to get himself murdered in God-forsaken Siberia … eaten by a wolf, maybe, but mugged to death? Rawls was replaceable, he wasn’t family.
Billy had still not recovered from whatever he had been told, but Pete Turgenev was smiling and there couldn’t be anything really wrong. Their party, shepherded by pilot fish towards other sharks, drifted amenably, knowing its power.
‘Catch up with you, John,’ Turgenev called.
The noise of the party gusted against Lock as he was left, for a moment, on his own tiny area of carpet. Food had been trodden into it, near his shoe. Beth wouldn’t worry; this was the party carpet, after all, the one put down for such functions.
Normally, the long dining, room gleamed with polished wood blocks, flared with huge old Persian rugs.
Hurriedly, he picked at the caviar and the salmon and sipped his claret. Red wine with fish, dear me, he observed. But it was room temperature and best French. Billy-boy, you’re throwing one hell of a party for my sister’s birthday! Even if it was maybe a kind of belated apology for fooling around and ignoring her for years …
A colleague from State drifted past with a small wave. A lobbyist and his client had the man from State between them like prisoner and escort. Lock grinned back, acknowledging the wave with a waggle of his fork. This was Indian country for civil servants and politicians.
Billy and Turgenev, on the other side of the room, were in close counsel with a Democratic senator who had ambitions to head the Senate Committee that overlooked the administration’s assistance to Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. Turgenev was affable, as always, while Billy’s face was still clouded with some new and worrying knowledge. Lock realised that he might require a bolthole — preferably in the shape and glamour of a young woman with brains — before he was summoned into the dialogue as the State Department’s resident expert on Russia.
But he could not turn away from the image of the taller Turgenev and the somehow reduced and shrunken Billy. The unflurried, relaxed Russian looked as if he’d been moving in Washington circles for most of his life.
But then he had, in a way. He’d been a young but already senior KGB officer in Afghanistan during the ‘80s. He and Billy had met Turgenev during the last days, when the Russians were about to get out. They’d helped supervise the withdrawal, the prisoner exchanges, obtained guarantees of safe passage from the mujahideen commanders. They’d found themselves comrades-in-experience, the two men from the CIA and the KGB colonel. They’d all liked each other, under the strangest circumstances and in the most unlikely place. He had a snapshot somewhere of the three of them, posed against snowcapped mountains like good ol’ boys on a hunting trip.
It had been the beginning of Billy’s association with Turgenev, and when the Russian had appeared in Siberia, reincarnated as an entrepreneur, he and Billy had set up what had become the behemoth of GraingerTurgenev, the largest exploiter of the vast Urengoy gasfield.
They drifted purposefully out of the dining room, leaving the senator in their wake — just Billy and the Russians; as if fleeing the party. Business? Beth would not be pleased; her liberal credentials did not extend to excusing a lack of etiquette in herself, Billy or anyone else.
His claret was refreshed by a murmuring waiter, moving smoothly as a machine about the room. There was a desultory exchange of greetings with a journalist, but no real conversation.
The man was after bigger game. Russia was unfashionable this month in the Washington Post. Bosnia had the inside track on international news. A department junior introduced his girlfriend, a small-faced young woman hiding behind huge spectacles who gushed her awe of Beth. She’d been one of the students his sister had taken to the UN.
Then he was alone again for a moment, surveying the guests, before a hand touched his arm. His delight that it was Beth was at once tempered by her clouded expression.
‘What’s the matter with Billy?’ she demanded, as if Lock were responsible.
‘What’s up. Sis? Great party ‘
‘Billy’s locked in the study with Pete Turgenev and some other Russians. I want him out here, not ignoring his guests.’
‘Sis, it must be important ‘
‘John, go and drag him back in here, please!’
She smiled at a passing compliment on the buffet and her hair from a blue-rinsed matron who was a congressman’s wife and a member of the same country club, then the affability was gone in a moment.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Sis,’ he soothed. It was as if her new confidence was the merest facade. She would not interrupt Billy herself, just in case a chasm yawned in an angry or impatient refusal. He nodded. ‘OK, I’ll go roust him out.’
“Thanks, thanks-‘ And at once she plunged into a conversation regarding the current production of La Forza del Destino at the Washington Opera, the young woman from her class nging on her every pronouncement. He was relieved to miss hanp that discussion, because Beth would inevitably want to show him off as her musicologist brother — which he wasn’t, not unless he eventually did finish that damn’ book on Monteverdi …
Beth was severe when he excused it as a good reason to spend time in Mantua and Venice, Sis, nothing more … all of which reminded him he had to return the call on his answerphone from the lady at Washington Musica Antiqua tomorrow.
Tomorrow, definitely — just as soon as he thought up a good enough story for the delay with the performing version of the opera.
There wasn’t too much wrong. He wandered to the broad, dark doors of the dining room and across the hall. At the foot of the staircase, seated on the bottom step of the sweeping flight, an aspiring painter Beth was patronising was insinuating himself with two senior executives of a bank. Like the bank’s profits, the price of his paintings was set to rise. Maybe the bank should invest … hustle, hustle. He smiled, then knocked at the study door.
He could hear raised voices on the other side of the door which was locked, he realised. He knocked again, sipping at his claret. He could distinguish nothing of the conversation — quarrel, was it? Then Billy eased the door open like someone afraid of the cops or the landlord.
‘Oh — John.’ He was sweating and he had been drinking bourbon by the scent of his breath. He was in shirtsleeves, his black tie loosened and dangling on his chest, which heaved as if he had been running. ‘Beth sent you, uh?’ Lock could see Turgenev seated in a leather armchair, long legs stretched confidently out.
The Russian turned his face towards the door. He was smiling, untroubled. ‘Well, did she?’
‘Yes. You know what a stickler’
‘I’m busy, John. Just get lost, uh?’ He manufactured a disarming, reassuring smile. His eyes were drunk, tired and unnerved.
‘OK, OK, I’m just the messenger.’ Lock raised his hands in mock surrender, and Billy nodded, closing the door and relocking it at once.
Even before he had moved away from the door, he could hear Billy’s raised voice again; protest, anger, defiance. He shook his head. A disagreement over profits, what else? He’d have to soothe Beth.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He had an early meeting with the Secretary of State, who wanted his face-to-face impressions of the Russian situation. He’d leave soon.
He looked back at the study door, as if drawn to the disturbing eddies and waves of emotion he had sensed as vividly as static electricity during the. moments that the door was ajar.
He yawned. Not your business, he advised himself. Just soothe Beth, nod in the direction of the faces that were important, talk to the people he liked, then make tracks. Pete Turgenev was a hard-nosed bastard, but then so was Billy. It would be an interesting contest It was like the most undeserved and repressive surveillance, glancing through the small square of window in the door to the ward. He could make out only the shape of the wife beneath the bedclothes, her features hidden by a mound of pillow.
Dmitri Gorov sat motionless on a chair beside the bed, staring at the hand that
lay unresponsively in his own. It was a scene, Vorontsyev guessed, identical to every other visit Dmitri made. A tableau depicting the aftermath of a tragedy. His wife was evidently sedated on this occasion. There were more awful visits, he gathered, when she wept uncontrollably, when she was conscious but did not know him, when she was a girl again.
He could not understand why Dmitri came so regularly. Was it self-flagellation for the dead daughter? Was it memory, love?
Vorontsyev turned away, ashamed, his boots echoing in the hospital corridor. He had come to collect Dmitri, but the man was evidently not yet ready to abandon the silent, unconscious madwoman.
The pharmacist had confirmed that he had.prescribed sleeping pills for Rawls — four days ago. The executive from GraingerTurgenev had identified the body in the mortuary. Vorontsyev had the autopsy report in his pocket. It told him nothing he did not already know. Rawls had been dragged into the copse, but had not walked any distance. The taxi must have dropped him and headed back to town. He must have been meeting someone he knew — at least, someone he had no cause to fear would do him harm. There had been no sign of a struggle, no physical damage to Rawls other than the single wound to the back of the head. The Russian who’d identified him had no explanation.
He had expected Rawls to leave on the morning flight to Petersburg.
Why would’ he have been killed, except to rob him? the Russian had asked.
Agreed — except … why was he out there, in the icy darkbeforedawn without even overshoes and not a suspicion in his head?
Vorontsyev looked al his watch. Turned back towards the ward and Dmitri. It was time to leave. Rawls was a larger matter, like a drama seen in the shapes of clouds; it was perhaps significant, but also illusory, a trick of the mind. The drugs shipment they were expecting that night was real, part of the world of facts which was all that should interest the chief of detectives in a raw town in Siberia. He tapped on the door, then pushed it slightly ajar. Dmitri, roused from his empty contemplations, nodded, then released the expressionless hand, folding it back under the bedclothes. He stood up, picked up his fur hat, paused for a moment, then hurried to join Vorontsyev.