Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  Cossack, nothing I ever saw or did in Afghanistan came close to the nightmare of that night in Khabarovsk, running back through a blizzard in my shorts, then lying down on the freezing floor beside the naked corpse of poor Eva and you, with the damn stove out, shivering like a madman, waiting for you to wake up and find Eva, and then to wake me.

  We both nearly died that night with Eva. Maybe we should have. Except for one thing.

  We became friends. And our friendship was not a lie, even if I did not dare tell you the truth of what happened to Eva. You were the only true friend I have ever had, Cossack, far more than old man Marchenko. And I almost did tell you the truth one night in Kandahar, when we got roaring drunk? Do you remember? But I was afraid it would cost me your friendship. So now that I have lost that, I have told you. And only you.

  I’ve got to get ready now for Potsdam. I hope you’ll be there too. In fact, I just thought of one more enticement, to make sure you’ll come. But I’ll let you discover that.

  Dasvidanya,

  The Jolly Cowboy

  Taras threw down the letter, reeled back against his chair. The room seemed to be spinning and tilting like a carnival wheel, and he was clinging to this desk to keep from being hurled off.

  Oh God! Evushka, forgive me!

  He remembered how he had frightened her, how the terror had invaded her beautiful eyes, how she had spurned him and turned to Marcus. And he would never forget the frozen naked horror of the next morning.

  An accident, Marcus said. He hadn’t meant to strangle her. How sorry he was. But Taras had seen the ghastly empurpled marks on her neck. And he’d seen something else, too, before he’d covered her with the blanket. There had been tiny crystal droplets—frozen fluid—beading the golden fuzz between her thighs. The militia pathologist had later confirmed she’d been violated. The bastard! The fucking bastard!

  Taras’ rage now engulfed him till he nearly blacked out. It left him shaken and drained. Then it returned, unabated. The chrome-steeled .45 was in his bag. The one he was to have thrown away. He took it out, popped out the clip, saw the Cowboy’s grinning face, pulled the trigger again and again, murder in his heart.

  Marcus would get his wish. Taras would go to Potsdam. He would go not to save Rybkin. He would go to kill the Cowboy. For Eva. And for his own delectable pleasure, to end the duel and show once and for all who was the better assassin.

  The phone rang. It was John Tully, the foreign editor.

  “Taras, Charlie called in this morning, before I got in. One of the interns took the call and didn’t press her for detail dammit. All he got was the South of France, but also says he got the impression she’s still on the move. Look, I’m sure she’ll contact me as soon as she lands somewhere. Sorry I can’t do better.”

  “I understand. Thanks, John.”

  Taras hung up. Fifteen minutes earlier he was going to throw away his gun and go after her, beg her to take him back. Now, after Marcus’ letter, he wanted to hold on to it for one more kill. Kind of hard to explain that one to Charlie, if he could find her. There’s this guy I gotta kill, a dear old friend who turns out to have been a sociopath. I’ll be a much more loving husband after I put a couple bullets through his brain, and a few more through his heart.

  But suppose he went after her, found her in the South of France, made his plea. If she said yes, that would be the end of it. But if she said no, he would be free to go after Marcus. It would be a way of keeping his options open, hedging his bet.

  Only it wouldn’t work, and he knew it. Emotionally. He had to choose. He could go hunting one or the other, not both.

  Both courses of action beckoned him; two women—one alive, one dead—claimed him, paralyzing his will.

  But he must decide. The secretary looked in again and did not enter during the anguished half-hour it took him to reach his verdict. It was: Let the madman go. Eva is gone and mourned. Find Charlie and open your heart to her. Then let her choose. But leave your vengeance here, with the gun she despised.

  The decision made, still a long struggle remained, he knew, to fully accept it, to subdue the rage and turn away from Marcus’ provocation. But he could do it, had to do it. For starters, he tossed the automatic into a desk drawer.

  Fifteen minutes later the secretary popped back in, saw improvements. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee, Taras.”

  “Love some, thanks.”

  “Kind of a tough morning, huh?”

  “You might say that.” Taras made a chuckling sound, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “Charlie’s somewhere in the South of France, and I’m going to find out where if I have to call everybody in this whole damn town. And when I do, I’m going to go to her as fast as I can.”

  *

  About the same time, several thousand miles to the east, Marcus Jolly was pursuing the same objective in the same way. As Canadian journalist Byron Landy, he was making trans-atlantic phone calls. And ultimately he, too, reached Charlotte’s foreign editor.

  “The thing is, John, she asked me to get back to her on something, for a piece she was writing for you, I imagine. She wanted to quiz some of my contacts in North Sea oil, how all that affects European energy plans after 1992, and how it might impact the Potsdam Conference. Fairly convoluted stuff, I’m not sure where she was going with it, but I’ve got some answers for her, and she promised me some sources in return.”

  “Mr. Landy, I’d like to help you.”

  “Call me Byron.”

  “Okay. The thing is, Byron, she asked me not to tell anybody.”

  “I understand. But I know she wants this stuff I got, and I’d sure hate to wait till Potsdam to give to her. It’ll probably be too late then, and anyway the place is going to be a fucking loony bin.”

  “Tell me about it. We’re already buried alive in wire copy, and we got two weeks till play-ball. Okay, you can stop twisting my arm. Hang on a minute. She just called in, as a matter of fact. Cheryl, have you got that address Charlie just gave us? Thanks. Okay, Byron? Here it is. She’s going to be there only a week. It’s in the South of France. Place called Le Lavandou, just east of Toulon. L’Auberge de la Calanque. Here’s the number.”

  Marcus took it down.

  “I owe you one, John. Thanks.”

  “Do me a favor in return, Byron. When you talk to her, tell her to stay off those damn topless beaches. I don’t want my star soothsayer sunburning her nipples.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Twenty-Six

  Charlotte Walsh lay supine on the beach of Le Lavandou, surrendering herself to the Mediterranean sun. She wanted it not only to bronze her body, but to cauterize certain emotional wounds and to burn the insidious Washingtonian fog out of her brain. It was the Fourth of July, not a red-letter day in the South of France, and certainly not here. She had deliberately bypassed her favorite spots along the Côte d’Azur—Villefranche, Nice, Antibes—and come farther west to this less than trendy resort unfrequented by American tourists.

  But Le Lavandou was far from deserted. French holidaygoers flocked to the place, staking out early claims on its fine sand beach and staying past sundown. Windsurfers dashed back and forth across the sparkling bay. From the adjoining marina, boatloads of tourists were ferried out to the offshore islands, the Iles d’Hyères. And the beachfront boulevard teemed all day with a bright, motley parade. Little cars and motor scooters snarled endlessly around the corners from the perpendicular access streets, dueling for parking places. An open-sided tram snaked routinely through this melee, blatting its horn, flashing its red roof light, stopping at all the bayside hotels. Half a dozen tacky carnival booths along the harborside did a steady business, as did the sidewalk T-shirt, souvenir and snack shops. Teens and preteens clattered by on skateboards, older townfolk in shorts and sandals were pulled past by straining poodles and shepherds.

  Charlotte found it all refreshing. The erstwhile sleepy fishing village had turned itself into a bustling beach town devoid of glitzy pretense or cultural c
achet. As far as she could glean from the tourist brochures, neither Picasso nor Matisse had ever loaded a brush in Le Lavandou, Maugham and Fitzgerald had neither one written a line, and Mick Jagger didn’t have a villa in the vicinity. Further isolating the spot from the hordes of Eurailpassing wayfarers, the train entirely disregarded the Massif des Maures, this petite bulge in France’s celebrated southern littoral. Charlotte had arrived on a bus from Toulon. She had preferred not to rent a car. Once here, everything was walkable.

  She had settled in a white and pastel blue room whose private tiled terrace overlooked the marina and afforded a grand view of the beach and the circling Bay of Bormes all the way to Cape Bénet. On her second full day she still knew no one except the startlingly attractive young people who staffed her hotel. And so far, even John Tully was being très sympathique about not disturbing her.

  The deluge would come soon enough, as she joined the legions of the fourth estate converging on Berlin and Potsdam, all in the earnest guise of Delphic Oracles for their respective constituencies. In fact, the hype and handouts were already clogging Charlie’s in basket and the mainframe’s foreign wire queues the day she’d escaped her desk in DC. Well, she’d survive Potsdam, and maybe even find something worth writing about it—and inflicting on the readers of her home paper and the eighty-three others which, her syndicate assured her, subscribed to her twice-weekly columns. But it was increasingly obvious that, like Super Bowls, these international conferences had become almost incidental to the surrounding media event, serving only to provide the initial spark for self-feeding firestorms of reportage and punditry. Of course, she knew she’d enjoy herself once she got in journalistic harness, but she wasn’t eager to be off just yet. Another few days of sunshine, salt air and tranquility would do her just fine.

  They would also give her a chance to shape up her psyche along with her physique, to unwind her nerves as she tanned her hide and toned her muscles with a daily seaside jog. The day after Taras left, Charlotte had gone back to the gym and repped herself ragged. She had chickened out on a further angry resolve—to spread the word among selected friends that she just might—deep breath—be back in the market for any available—and marriageable—males. There was no point in kidding herself. She was still hung up on her dark-eyed Slav. She wanted him back, dammit! But a week had passed without a word from Taras, and now anger and frustration were building up again. She deserved a hell of a lot better, and if Taras couldn’t see that, maybe she’d have to find somebody who could.

  Her body, approaching forty, was still damn good. Tall, long-legged and hyper, Charlotte had never succumbed to sedentary spread. And her intermittent exercises manias over the years had maintained her assets with a certain buoyancy. Not that she could compete with the crème of the jeune filles who habituated the Lavandou seaside, abundantly or boyishly topless, and some wearing only le minimum below. Charlotte had seen several girls who were breathtaking, and when one of these tawny young lionesses rose up from the sand to prance toward the water for a splash, all eyes followed—and not infrequently a zoom lens or two from the bordering sidewalk.

  But Charlotte definitely held her own with the older ingenues. She had, for instance, bravely abandoned her trusty one-piece in favor of a skimpy black bikini from a local shop suggestively called Kocaïne. She still hadn’t summoned the nerve to unfasten the tiny halter while sunbathing, or to frequent the sidewalks without her extra-large T-shirt coverup. But she might yet. The resort atmospherics were definitely uninhibiting. Under no circumstances, however, could she see herself entering the pageant being advertised by a beachfront nightclub to select “La Plus Gros Poitrine de la Région”—a title which Charlotte translated succinctly as “Biggest Tits in Town.”

  Of course, she wasn’t really trying to draw the focus of local males. She was only on reconnaissance, not combat maneuvers. Anyway, she couldn’t quite get used to European men in bikini briefs—what one woman friend, who did fancy them, playfully called “banana huggers” and “marble bags.” However, Charlotte’s morning jogs took her past a pair of appealing hunks—rugged-looking Swedish windsurfers day-camping out of an old VW microbus farther down the beachfront toward Port de Bormes-les Mimosas. Had she been seriously stalking, they would certainly have merited consideration. But so far her passages had elicited no signs of interest; the blue-eyed squints of both young men remained fixed seaward.

  She turned onto her tummy, checking her watch to make sure she didn’t overdo and burn her back, especially those tender derriere portions newly exposed by the bikini. She gave herself a half hour more and picked up the paperback she’d bought that morning in a beachside librairie. It was an Agatha Christie in French, something to while away the sun-dazed minutes while refreshing her grammaire and vocabulaire. After fifteen minutes she made the vexing discovery that she’d read the damn thing in English under a title that bore not the slightest resemblance to the one on this French edition. She shut the book with an expletive, which she quickly emended to merde; there was no point in wading through pages of Gallicized British chitchat when she knew damn well who’d done it!

  She’d just have to put up with her own thoughts for a while.

  But merde squared! She didn’t want to be stuck with them.

  She snatched up her beach things, stuffed them in her tote bag and hiked across the sand to the little card- and bookstore on the tamarisk-lined Avenue Général Bouvet. The proprietress would happily exchange it, and Charlotte could be back in her spot in five minutes with her nose in a fresh paperback.

  As she was browsing, a tanned, fair-haired man was suddenly beside her at the paperback kiosk. For an instant, gathering a peripheral blur of rugged features, blue eyes and muscular, blond-thatched forearms and legs, she thought it was one of the Scandinavian windsurfers—and was embarrassed how girlishly her pulse quickened. Then, as the kiosk squeaked around and they moved in opposition, she got a good look at him. He was older than the Swedes, but her heartbeat didn’t diminish. On the contrary. He was terribly good to look at. She traced a sensual curve that repeated in the line of his jaw, in his cheekbones, at the corner of his mouth and feathered eyebrow. He seemed to emit a kind of constant, low-intensity masculine assurance even when, as now, he was obviously unaware of doing so. He’s always gotten whoever and whatever he wanted, she thought. The star athlete. No wonder he looks arrogant.

  What nationality? she mused further. In what language was he thinking behind those Arctic eyes? If not Scandinavian, perhaps German or Austrian? A Teutonic name would definitely fit him, something harsh like Horst or Gunther. The rotating book titles blurred as she browsed him further—his hands, tanned and veined and covered with golden hair like his forearms; strong legs swelling under mid-length khaki shorts; well-shaped feet in Mexican-style huaraches; a sculpted, pectoral slab visible through a half-unbuttoned Madras shirt...

  Let’s stop right there, shall we, Charlotte? she told herself.

  The man turned to the woman behind the counter, who was reading a Maigret. “Excuse me. Don’t you have anything in English?”

  “Ah, dommage, mais non, monsieur. Very sorry.”

  “They don’t seem to get many English or American tourists here,” Charlotte said.

  “Thank God, a fellow American!”

  They exchanged names. His was Jack Sanderson. And he, too, just wanted something to read on the beach. “They got plenty of American authors, I see, only in the wrong language. Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. Harold Robbins is still big over here, I see.”

  Charlotte laughed. “What about Martin Chuzzlewit?”

  “I’m kind of partial to thrillers and westerns. What’s he write?”

  “He doesn’t. It’s one of Dickens’ novels. I’ve got a copy back at my hotel you could have. I finished it on the plane.” Christ, that just came out, didn’t it? What adolescent subtlety was she going to blurt out next?

  “Thanks, but I’m kind of a hopeless lowbrow. Move my lips when I read, you know what I me
an? Got any Alistair Maclean, Louis L’Amour, Mickey Spillane type of thing, about a hundred fifty pages, big type?”

  Sanderson was grinning, enjoying his self-putdown.

  She shook her head. “No, but I think there’s a place on Avenue de Gaulle where you might find something.”

  “I don’t know the layout yet. Could you, uh, maybe point me in the right direction?”

  “Better let me show you. It’s not far. Come on.” She gestured toward the door, her Agatha Christie exchange utterly forgotten. Dear Diary, am I imagining this or is something starting to happen here?

  Sanderson had fallen in beside her, and they followed the curving sea frontage past the little town hall with its tricolor flag and bunting, then turned up a narrow walkway to Avenue du Général de Gaulle, one of the main shopping streets. The bookstore had some British paperbacks, including a couple of old James Bonds that Sanderson hadn’t read. Charlotte picked out a Delderfield saga. On the way back to the beach they detoured into a glass-enclosed brasserie with a view of the bay through palms and parked cars. Sanderson ordered a Beck’s, then switched to join Charlotte in her choice of a local wine, a Côte de Provence.

  “So what do we toast?” he asked.

  “For starters,” she suggested, “how about happy birthday,

  America?”

  “Christ, it’s the Fourth! I completely forgot!”

  Their eyes met as they touched glasses, and Charlotte felt slightly flushed. Which was, of course, absurd. It had been a while, perhaps, but she’d had more than her share of affairs before Taras. She could certainly handle this without getting the schoolgirl wobbles. Be in control of it. She glanced deliberately away from Sanderson, watching the sunlight gloss the edges of the swishing palm fronds, the same sun that was bathing the bay beyond. The tension wouldn’t go away.

  “So, what do you do?” he asked. She told him, and he brightened. “I’ve seen your by-line. Doesn’t the Herald Tribune run you sometimes?”

  “On occasion. Which one did you see?”