Bannerman's Promise

by John R. Maxim

  “Next telephone you see,” he said to Lydia Voinovitch, “pull over once more, please.”

  She made a face. “And waste so much time? Zurich from here is only thirty minutes.”

  “This call is not to Moscow. Takes five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Who now? Mama's Boy?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  She let out a sigh. “World is changing very fast,” she said. But she did not protest.

  He had not intended that Lydia know so much. But as they drove out of Bern in Aldo Corsini's car, facing an unproductive ninety minutes of driving time, it bothered him that he still did not know what the Italian had said to himself on that tape recording. The receiver kit was still under the passenger seat where Corsini had concealed it.

  On an impulse, he had asked Lydia if it happened that she spoke Italian. She said no, only English and Spanish. A little while later, however, she remarked that although she had no training in that language she found that she could usually communicate with Italians. Give or take an extra vowel, she said, Spanish and Italian are similar.

  He thought about this for several kilometers. Then he decided. She would make what she could of Aldo Corsini's tape from the garden party. The parts in which he talked to himself.

  “Reach under you,” he said. “You will find a briefcase.”

  She played the tape, listening through earphones, making notes, and then she played it two more times. It was true that her Italian was not so good. Her translations were fragmentary. But by the third playing she felt sure that she had the sense of Aldo's remarks. Yuri asked her to drive as he studied her notes.

  Very strange handwriting for a woman, he thought. No graceful loops or swirls. Only tiny little letters all cramped together. He wondered what the KGB psychologists had made of that, but he put the thought aside. This was looking gift horses in the mouth.

  ”I do not understand this,” he said to her.

  “What part?”

  “If a man is talking only to himself, what is the point of talking aloud?”

  “Only in the beginning is he talking to himself. Interesting part begins later but read it in sequence. This man is not right in the head.”

  This remark put Yuri in mind of another English proverb that warned of pots who call a kettle black. But he soon understood her meaning.

  She was right about the beginning. There, Aldo is only repeating the names of people he meets so that he will not forget them. This is sensible. Next, speaking to others, he begins asking why Elena chooses Russia for a honeymoon. He learns it was not for honeymoon.

  Several guests, all Bruggs, tell him that this trip was wedding present from General Belkin but trip was to be taken later, next year, after baby. They say it was Elena who decided to go now, take advantage, while she can still travel. General Belkin, they say, argued against this. Too much confusion now. Go later. But Elena, always the adventuress, has made up her mind, has already talked to Lesko. She's very curious about Russia. Wants to meet Leo's family in St. Petersburg.

  Now Corsini is alone again. Talks to himself in Italian. “See, shitface? You worry for nothing.”

  “He calls himself shitface?” Yuri asked.

  Voinovitch shook her head. “Reference is to name from computer file. You see down below. Shitface is this Borovik.”

  Yuri realized why the name had seemed familiar. He must have heard it, although it did not register as a person's name, when he first tried to listen to the tape. Too much babble around it.

  He read further. He saw the name. But Lydia had not spelled it as it was on the screen. Here it is Boriavik.

  “What is BoriavikV he asked. “Why this spelling?”

  “Is Corsini's pronunciation. Is contempt, I think.”

  “Contempt?”

  She nodded. “Boria, in Spanish, is slang expression. Means like ... ‘puffed up.’ Italians, I think, have same word, similar meaning. Is like ‘arrogance.’ Corsini calls him other names as well but these I cannot translate. Meaning is clear, however, from inflection. Words are insults.”

  Yuri grunted. He turned the page.

  Now Corsini appears to have lost interest in the purpose of the trip to Russia. He says two more names of people he sees at the party. Yuri recognized those names. They are contract agents who have worked for Bannerman in the past but who have now been retained by the Bruggs. As Corsini moves on, he speaks of them with admiration. But suddenly, Lydia writes, his tone becomes sullen.

  ”I could have been as good,” she quotes him saying. ”I could have been as good as any of you.”

  Now comes a long pause, says Lydia.

  To himself he says, “You think I could not?”

  Now he says, “You think there is no more to me than what you see? Two others in my life have made that mistake. My wife made that mistake.”

  More silence. Indistinct mutterings. Then, “Bare hands. Both times. Not so easy as you think.”

  Yuri blinked. He turned another page but this line of thought was not developed further. Aldo's thoughts had turned to Mama's Boy.

  “What does this mean?” he asked Lydia. “Two others. Bare hands.”

  “From context,” she told him, ”I think he has killed on two occasions.”

  “Bare hands? This means he choked them?”

  “He is not specific.”

  “You think one was his wife?”

  She nodded. “From inflection, from choice of words, I think that both of these were women. He would like to boast that he has killed but he is afraid that these two agents would not consider killing women to be such a great achievement. Is why he says is not so easy.”

  Yuri saw Carla in his mind. And Aldo with his necktie. No, he thought. It is not so easy.”

  He returned to Lydia's notes, holding them under the map light. Now Aldo says, ”I could still be as good. I could be as famous as Bannerman.”

  Next, someone says hello. He says nice to see you again. He takes a bite of something, chews, and swallows.

  “More famous,” he says.

  He whispers these words. He says them again and again as if he is tasting them. There is the sound of a smile in his voice. Now he says, “And you, dear Carla, will help me.”

  “Carla,” he says. Still is whispering.

  A woman approaches. Not Carla. She introduces herself. Another cousin of the Bruggs. Aldo is polite, says the note by Lydia, but he is distracted. The politeness is forced. He excuses himself. Now he is alone again. More whispers.

  “Carla?

  “Will you be my wife? No.”

  “Will you honor me by becoming…”

  All this to himself. It has the sound of rehearsal, says Lydia.

  ”I offer you all that I have, all that I am, all that I may become.”

  This one amuses him.

  ”I think you will say yes, perhaps. I think now you are ready.”

  He is humming. Lydia says melody is Toreador song from Carmen. Maybe not such an irrelevancy, thought Yuri.

  Now Aldo says, “Borovik.”

  “How much will you pay?

  “Twenty thousand?

  “Fifty thousand?

  “No.”

  The voice becomes firm. “Not for twice that amount. No more crumbs from your table. What I make, from now on I keep half. That is my price.”

  This, says Lydia, is followed by some private musings. Very disjointed but there is the sound of glee. Westport is mentioned. Something about cutting off a head.

  She is not sure about this last, she says, because the context is confused. Might be used in the sense of eliminating leadership. Might mean Mama's Boy. But then there is the word “brother” and the phrase “head for a head.” Reference is very unclear. Finally, word “head” is used in the context of pride. General Borovik, says Corsini, will at last be able to hold up his head and stop pulling himself.

  “Pulling himself?”

  Lydia shrugged. “Reference is probably to masturbation. Corsini and Boro
vik...this is not a respectful association.”

  There were only a few more notes of her translations. More references to Borovik, all of them unflattering. One reference to himself. He says that one day they will be “telling stories about Aldo Corsini for a change. About Barca.”

  Now he approaches Carla. Speaks English. She asks how he is enjoying the party. She asks is something wrong.

  “Marry me,” he says to her.

  She is stunned. Lydia's assessment.

  Then, ”I love you. In this I am helpless. You are the most beautiful woman ...”

  Here the microcassette runs out of tape. Yuri closed Lydia's notebook. He had heard this part. Carla had told him all the rest. How they would live for part of the year in Westport. How he would get to know all her friends. In his mind, he could see her dragging him from the garden party. Aldo had not found time to insert a fresh cassette.

  “This cutting off of heads,” he said to Lydia, “is it a figure of speech?”

  She had no idea.

  “He speaks of being rich. How does he accomplish this by marrying Carla Benedict?”

  A shrug. “He becomes a spy in Westport? He reports on Mama's Boy?”

  “Almost everyone reports on Mama's Boy,” he told her. “Almost always is a waste of time.”

  She took a breath as if reluctant to speak. “He assassinates Mama's Boy,” she suggested.

  Yuri frowned. There might be that inference, he realized, in Corsini's words. Get close to him through Carla. Choose his time, then strike. But for what purpose? Just to be famous? Man who shot Billy the Kid?

  There was a time when he might have tried it himself if so ordered. When he was young, fresh from training, eager to test himself. But Yuri would have handpicked a team and they would have trained together for weeks. Even then, even if successful, retribution would have been terrible. Also, that was different world, different Bannerman. Now even hardline KGB agrees. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  “You say he is not right in the head. Why?”

  Yuri had his own opinion based on Carla's account, but even she had questioned her own recollection. He wished to hear the insights of a woman who was considerably more detached.

  “You ask why?” Her chin came up.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “This man who boasts of killing women?”

  “Every man who kills a woman is not crazy.”

  Lydia sputtered.

  Uh-oh, thought Yuri.

  “This . . . this wop decides, 'I will marry Carla and then this will happen and that will happen and I will be. rich.’ Does it occur to him that she might not swoon at his proposal? That she might say no? Does he consider that she might see through him as if he were glass?”

  “Urn ... he deludes himself, you are saying.”

  “He thinks with his big Italian cock, is what I am saying.”

  She was glaring at him, not watching the road. Yuri groaned inwardly. In her mind this was less an observation about Aldo Corsini than a universal truth that embraced all men since Adam. Yuri foremost.

  He could only surrender. Next time he was tempted to take a woman home with him, he would first get a sample of her handwriting.

  It was at this point that he decided to look for a phone and try to catch Bannerman. He could use the reprieve. More than that, he wanted the answer to a question. The trouble was that it had not yet formed. But he could feel the pieces of it, in the back of his mind, trying to come together.

  He had an odd sense that Lydia had almost asked it before she remembered that she hated men.

  Hatred.

  There it was again. One of the pieces.

  And once again, it floated away.

  31

  The Krasno-Presnensky district, like all of Moscow's districts, is cut in the shape of a pie wedge. The crust is formed by a section of the Outer Ring Road. The wedge comes to a blunted point at a tiny section of the Kremlin Wall.

  There is no practical reason for this configuration. It exists because every party boss of every district wanted some part of it to touch the Kremlin. He also wanted the main road through his district marked with a special lane through which he could speed in his limousine on his way to and from meetings at the seat of power. The police in the glass-enclosed traffic stations at each major intersection would stop all other traffic until he had passed.

  All this was changed now. No more party bosses, not so many limousines, no more pedestrians scrambling out of the way. Even the district boundaries were scheduled for restructuring in order to reflect some measure of administrative efficiency.

  For Captain Alexei Levin of the Moscow militia, this restructuring could not come soon enough. If it had been done already, or if the body had been found at the other end of GUM, it would have been in someone else's district and he could have been home having dinner by now.

  But here he was and there was the dead man, just as the caller had described him. Flat on his back. Skull smashed. Three photographs on his chest. Two men and a woman. The caller had not mentioned a woman.

  Captain Levin had already confirmed that the name the caller gave was false. This came as no surprise. The surprise was that he called in the first place. In Moscow, no one gets involved with the authorities if they can help it. Even now. And especially if the dead man was heard to say that he was KGB.

  A lot about this was already beginning to stink. The caller, in the first place, said that he was frightened. But to Levin he sounded more like a man who was pretending to be frightened. A man who is genuinely frightened not only does not call but, if he does, does not give so much detail.

  He does not walk into a dark alley, strike a match, and stand there making mental notes of a dead man's injuries and how he is dressed. In fact, if his nerves are really that steady, he likely helps himself to that expensive shearling coat and those good leather boots and that Japanese watch.

  He does not report that the dead man's right ear has been nearly torn from his head. The report was accurate, of course. Both ears had been battered. But the caller would have had to turn the man's head in order to see the right ear. It could not be seen looking straight down at him.

  A sergeant was taking flash pictures. He took two from a distance to record the position of the body. Now he was taking close-ups of the injuries.

  “Look here,” said the sergeant. “The left arm and hand.”

  Levin squatted at his side. The sergeant guided his eye toward two bloody imprints on the sleeve of the shearling, each circular in shape and about six centimeters in diameter. He pushed the sleeve up to the elbow, revealing matching yellow bruises on the forearm.

  “Here he fended off blows,” said the sergeant. “Weapon was round like a hammer. Wide head like a shoemaker's hammer. Maybe a mallet.”

  Levin shined his torch on the dead man's skull. “Mallet,” he said, nodding. “Edges are blunt.”

  “And see here. See the fingers.”

  The hand was caked with blood, especially the palm where it had probably been pressed against the torn ear. Several long dark hairs were matted to the fingers. They could not belong to the victim. Nor, he thought, did they belong to either of the three in those photographs unless we are to believe that it was the woman who beat him to death.

  “Roll him over,” said Levin. “Let's see who he is.”

  The sergeant found the dead man's papers in the back pocket of his trousers. He carried the green, cloth-covered pasporta and the gray trudovaya kni{hka, the labor book that detailed his history of employment. He was a sausage-maker, it said, at Abattoir #6 out on Kutuzovsky. That fact and the name were enough for Levin.

  “Sergei Kerensky,” he said to the sergeant. “Better known as Sasha. He's one of the Kerensky brothers.”

  The sergeant raised an eyebrow. “Chicago Brigade?”

  Levin nodded.

  He remembered when this gang was just the Kerensky brothers and a few of their cousins breaking heads for the Lubertsy Brigade. Then there was a falling
out. Two of the Kerenskys were beaten up. Then, next day, five members of Lubertsy are lined up against a brick wall down at the Varshavsky car-service station and machine-gunned. Like famous Valentine's Day massacre in America. No proof against the Kerensky brothers, but the rumor is that this one and his cousin Yakov did it. More than rumor. They boasted of it. Soon they are calling themselves the Chicago Brigade.

  More machine-gun killings follow. Both sides have losses. Kerensky asks for a peace conference on neutral ground. Havana Restaurant. KGB shows up in place of Kerensky. Suddenly there is no more Lubertsy Brigade. Suddenly Chicago Brigade is running all prostitution, used-car sales, porno shops, and most burglary in the whole northwest quarter of Moscow.

  “The man who called,” said the sergeant. “Perhaps he was correct about hearing KGB.”

  Levin shrugged. He doubted it. He doubted that the man who called had heard or seen anything at all. Levin was now convinced of that. He was calling to say what he had been told to say.

  But who told him to say it? The KGB? He doubted that as well. It was no big secret that the Chicago Brigade had enjoyed KGB protection for years. That they were certainly informers. That their small army of ex-convicts was used to break up demonstrations from time to time, with clubs and brass knuckles, while Levin's men were told to busy themselves elsewhere.

  Tell the Jew policeman to look the other way if he knows what's good for him. Tell him to go arrest some drunks.

  But that KGB is now lying low. It would hardly want attention called to itself through this tipster. More likely, the caller was trying to deflect attention from someone else. And onto that big, hard-eyed man in the photographs.

  Levin took another look at them. He had to smile.

  “We are asked to believe,” he said to his sergeant, “that Kerensky was following this one.” He held up Lesko's photograph. “This one notices Kerensky. There is a confrontation. Kerensky claims to be KGB. This one is not impressed. He and a younger man then drag Kerensky down here and beat him to death with the mallet he carries for just such occasions. Next, so that you and I would not have to tax our brains, he leaves his photograph on Keren-sky's chest.”