“Do you have sons?”
“Two.”
“Ah, then you’ve succeeded in perpetuating the line. Well deserving of any reward.”
“You are being insulting,” he said coldly.
She rose. “Do you mind if I slip away again? This is where I came in twenty years ago. Perhaps we could make a date to fight again in another twenty. At least we understand each other this time.”
“Do we?” He took her hand.
“I’m not going to let you run away again.”
“I hardly think you can prevent me.” It struck them both that he could prevent her very easily. They grinned again. They had slipped back quickly into the kind of easy companionship they had had before. They sat back down at the table, still holding hands. “Jessica, what happened last night?”
She looked at him, frowning slightly, then said slowly, “I don’t know. I think I came in during the second act. We played a set, I went to the dressing room and there he was. I don’t know how he got there; I don’t think he died there. He must be someone pretty important.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Do you investigate every homicide in Sofia?”
“When it’s a foreigner, I do. I don’t know whether he’s someone important or not. What makes him interesting is that he disappeared in Varna. And there has been a crime wave there since. He was not killed in the club, we have found marks in the alleyway behind, which indicates he was dragged in. Your dressing room is the first door down the hall. It might have been a coincidence.”
They smiled. Neither of them thought it was.
“Obviously he was put there to call attention to that room or to the occupant. Was there anything in the room?”
He shook his head. “Only you. Which is why you are here.”
“Yes, I can see that.” He didn’t seem to know she had been in Varna; he hadn’t known who he was coming to question.
But Ilya was more interested in their personal situation. Did she remember this? She countered with incidents, related with such outrageous humor that finally he stopped her, laughing ruefully.
“I’m beginning to miss that language barrier. You seemed so docile when I couldn’t understand you.”
She gave a shout of laughter. “I thought you were the docile one!”
He was trying hard to stand on his dignity…and failing miserably.
“I was just a boy with very little experience…”
“You mean you got better? That’s hard to believe.” She began to laugh. “A case of practice making perfect. I thought you came pretty close to perfection in what you are pleased to call your youth. Do you know one of the first things I said to you? Which, of course, you did not understand.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘I don’t think this is the first time you’ve done this!’”
His voice was choked. “It’s a good thing I didn’t understand you! Do you always make jokes in bed?”
She was laughing again too. “Don’t hand me straight lines like that!”
There was a knock on the door. Ilya strode over, opened it. “Yes?”
“There is a telephone call, Colonel. Shall I wait with the prisoner?”
“No, tell them I will call later. Who is it?”
The man in the doorway hesitated. “It is Major Borov.”
“Tell him I will get back to him within the hour unless it is urgent.”
Still the man lingered. “I believe it has to do with the prisoner.”
Ilya’s voice was impatient. “Miss Winter is helping us with our inquiries. She is not under arrest. Tell Major Borov I will call him when I have taken Miss Winter back to her hotel.”
The man stared at him. The transportation of witnesses was not generally the task of the Chief of State Security. Jessica had moved to get a look at the man who spoke. It was the same man who had been in the room before Ilya came.
“Is there anything else?”
“No.” Still staring, the man backed away. Ilya closed the door. He was laughing again as he turned to Jessica. “You have done nothing for my reputation as a ruthless interrogator.”
“Do you want a letter of recommendation?”
“I think not.”
“Ilya, who is that man?”
“At the door?”He shrugged. “One of the guards. I don’t know his name. Why?”
She tossed a coin, and made the wrong decision.
“Nothing. He behaved rather oddly.”
He grinned. “We don’t usually get people who look like you sitting in these rooms.”
She smiled back and said ruefully, “I didn’t get the impression he was bowled over by my feminine charms…”
They went on to other things.
*****
“I’m telling you they are in there laughing.” He listened to irate sounds at the other end. “I couldn’t get to her any faster, and he came before I was able to do anything. Shall I keep trying? He says he’s going to drive her back to the hotel.” More irate sounds. “I’m just telling you what he said. Do you want me to try at the hotel? Anything she hasn’t told him already, she’s not going to tell him.” He winced as sounds at the other end increased in intensity. He put down the phone. It wasn’t his fault. He had done his best.
*****
Ilya dropped her at the hotel around two-thirty. For the second time within twenty-four hours, she slumped into the chair in her room and stared unseeingly out the window.
“You are old, Father William,” she murmured finally. Was it only last night she had prayed for a deliverer? Heaven must be easier to contact in the Balkans. Cue the Chief of State Security, who in an earlier life had been, wait for it, a lowly cab driver. Seems just like a fairy tale, don’t it?
She rose wearily and walked around the room, four paces north, six south, turn. She stopped at the mirror and jeered softly at the reflection. “Is he angry, betrayed, vindictive? None of the above. Overjoyed is the word which fairly leaps to mind. Where have you been all my life?” Sounded like a singles bar. She sighed. She was doing him an injustice. But this added complication was not going to help. All afternoon, as they bandied pleasantries and relived those brief shining hours (how brief, how shining, how long ago!), she had been conscious of one overwhelming fact. Ilya did not know why she was here. Micha Borov did. She was sure of that. If Ilya didn’t know, why not? “All I need is another incompetent. Now I’ve got a matched set. Him and me.”
She ran down her accomplishments in the four days since she had come to Bulgaria. Two deaths, three, if you counted Ray, although in fairness she could not blame herself for that. She did blame herself for the two old people, innocents both, caught in something they neither knew nor cared about. She had managed to become enmeshed with the Bulgarian security apparatus, an honor she would have been happy to forego; she had discovered she was a damned good singer; within a short span of time, four strangers had become her friends; and last, but hardly least, she had found Ilya. Or he her, depending on how you looked at it.
A mixed bag at best. And in her most important task, getting Ray’s information and getting out of the country with it, she had certainly not shone so far.
From the moment she had stepped off the plane, events had been controlled by outside forces. She had initiated nothing. It was time she tried forcing some action on her own.
She stared into the mirror, aware suddenly of the dark circles under her eyes, the drawn look.
“God,” she thought. “Makeup is not going to take care of that.”
She took off her clothes, drew the curtains, and crawled wearily into bed. A few hours sleep was going to be necessary if she was going to sing all night.
She awoke as the sun was setting, showered and dressed. She had eaten dinner the night before in the rooftop dining room of her hotel, with its view of the rear of the liberator’s horse and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on the hill. It had been quite pleasant, but she had a shrewd idea that word of last night’s excitement at
the club would have penetrated to the hotel staff. She wasn’t sure she could face being a celebrity. Especially under the circumstances.
She walked out of the hotel through the crowds of Japanese businessmen and headed in the direction of the club. She had noticed several restaurants in the area, any one of them would do. She finally settled on a bare, brightly lit cafeteria-style room. Service was not a specialty in socialist restaurants. She always came home with a very different view of tipping after one of these experiences. She was musing idly on the virtues of capitalism, when Karl appeared in the door and headed toward her.
“Welcome to the automat.” She smiled as he pulled out a chair and sat down.
“May I join you?”
“Of course. Do you come here often?” She was sounding like a singles bar herself.
“No. I’ve been looking for you.”
She glanced around the bleak looking room, a little dismayed that it should seem an obvious place for her to be. He chuckled as he followed her gaze.
“I met Stefan near your hotel and he said you had come this way. I just looked in the window, and there you were.”
He didn’t think it necessary to tell her that Stefan had been keeping watch on the hotel since she had returned from the police interview in the afternoon.
“Was Stefan looking for me? Did he need something?”
“I believe he wished to rehearse some more. He is very excited about the country music.” He paused, weighing his words. “Stefan is not always easy to work with, but he is a very talented boy and we are fond of him. You have been very good for him. When you asked him to sing and encouraged him, it pleased us all. The last singer who came in was constantly reminding us that she was a star and that things must be done her way.” He smiled. “She was not very good. She tended to be shrill, but she had a very strong sense of what was due her. No one opposed her, but,” he winked, “You may be sure she got very little cooperation. She said Bulgarian audiences were unsympathetic! But you have made yourself a member of the group from the first minute and we are all grateful. You are who you are, with no need to pretend, so each of us can do our best and everyone benefits. Each of us feels as Stefan does, each of us wants to be better than before so we can show you off to best advantage.”
It was a long speech for Karl and he was suddenly aware of it. He waved his hand in embarrassment. “I have said too much. You are a dangerous person, Jessica. You make every place feel like home, one is always mentally taking off the shoes and letting down the hair.”
She searched his face for some sign of irony; please, God, she said to herself, let it be sarcasm. He was quite sincere. She looked at him helplessly.
“Now,” he said briskly, “That is not what I came for. My wife is going with a group of her friends to Istanbul tomorrow. Just for the day. They fly down and have a little escorted tour and come back in plenty of time for you to sing. She wonders whether you would like to come along. She thinks you must be very bored at the hotel all day, and this is a very safe way to see Istanbul. They have done it before and enjoyed it.”
“Really?” she said rather faintly. “Well,” she paused, thought furiously, then said, “Yes, I’d like that very much. Tell her I’ll come.”
“Unfortunately, they leave rather early. They will pick you up at the hotel at nine-thirty.”
“I’ll fake it. That will be nice, Karl, thank you very much.”
He got up to go. “I’ll tell her and she will set it up. I’ll see you later.”
She finished her dinner and strolled on to the club. She forced herself to use the dressing room, even finding a vestige of comfort in the fact that Ray had been there. The club was crowded, word having gotten around. Sofia was a small city, and the grapevine was even more effective there than usual. People who had come to gawk stayed to listen, however, and the evening went very smoothly.
*****
It was three-fifteen before Jessica got to bed, leaving a wake-up call for 8:00 A.M. She had the inevitable Turkish coffee and dressed in her Mrs. Crimmins knit. She decided against the wig, but wore the shoes.
The ladies were all atwitter at having an American among them. Jessica had worried that they would expect a more glamorous figure, but her fears were groundless. What had looked mundane at Macy’s, looked very chic, indeed, in Bulgaria. She set out to charm them with a combination of her own personality and a soupcon of Mrs. Crimmins. She was almost too successful. At one point she found herself exchanging pickle recipes with a black-draped matron. “I hope she doesn’t try that before I leave the country,” she said to herself. That had been her grandmother’s recipe, and she knew for a fact that her grandmother hadn’t touched anything but Heinz for fifty years.
They flew into Istanbul and were met by a pleasantly brisk young woman who announced that she was to be their guide for the day. “You will be quite comfortable,” she said as they settled into the modern bus manned by a Turkish driver in a short-sleeved white shirt and several gold teeth.
A large sign on the outside of the bus trumpeted the promise: AIRCONDITIONED. “I will point out some of the sights as we go along,” the guide continued, “And tell you something of the history of Istanbul.”
The bus maneuvered nimbly through the airport vehicular crush, and the guide tapped the microphone gently with her finger and began.
“Istanbul, like Rome, is built on seven hills…”
Jessica’s mind began to drift. She’d heard it all before. The guide’s voice washed over her like a warm bath, but she was suddenly aware of a cold breeze. Several cold breezes, in fact. On her feet, her shoulders, blowing straight down from a fixture in the ceiling, an arctic blast directly over her head. She looked around her and realized that the Bulgarian women were bundled against the onslaught. Each of them had a woolen scarf tied around her head, a sweater over her dress, and many of them had woolen shawls over the sweaters. They had taken this trip before. Jessica reached into her bag and pulled out the large woolen square Mrs. Crimmins always travelled with, but even as she wrapped it around her shoulders she knew it wasn’t going to be enough. She thought fondly of Mrs. Crimmins’ wig, resting quietly on the closet shelf in Sofia, the wig she had often cursed for its density. No breath of air ever penetrated those Dacron polyester curls. How she had cursed the blessed thing in the un-air-conditioned buses of Kuala Lampur. Her mind drifted off blissfully for a moment to the un-air-conditioned buses themselves. Instruments of torture she had thought them. It just showed how wrong you could be.
“…the fourth longest suspension bridge in the world,” the guide was saying, “After the Golden Gate Bridge in California, the United States, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York, also the United States, the Mackinac…”
The women glanced shyly at Jessica, the possessor of multiple suspension bridges. She smiled modestly. Surely, they would be stopping soon. She looked out the window. The streets were narrow now, barely wide enough for the bus to pass. Pedestrians were forced to step into doorways or flatten themselves against walls to allow the bus room. It was apparently their responsibility to do so, since the driver never gave an inch in what was clearly a matter of honor. Somewhere out there were smells of Istanbul, space and dirt and raw meat and unwashed humanity, but they were passing through it in an antiseptic refrigerated capsule. Outside there was noise and movement and color, inside only the drone of the guide’s voice and the hum of the air-conditioning. She took out her compact and looked at her hair. Just as she thought. Either she had turned white on the way from the airport, or ice crystals were forming in her hair. It could only be Freon gas. James Bond, eat your heart out! She was interrupted in these meanderings by a stir as the women gathered their belongings to get off the bus at the Topkapi Museum. While she had been woolgathering (what a cozy sound) they had arrived. She moved her feet cautiously, listening intently for the sound of breaking ice, but they seemed able to function. She edged her way out into the aisle behind the last Bulgarian and inched her way forward. Just
as she reached the driver and turned to get off the bus, he sighed and turned the key, stopping the motor, and with it the air-conditioning. He turned and gave her a brilliant smile showing the four gold teeth and several spaces, waiting, apparently, to be filled with gold from future tourists. She stretched her numbed cheek muscles as far as she could in a travesty of a smile and stepped into the cool but infinitely warmer outside air. She thought fleetingly that it was unwise to freeze the geese that laid the golden teeth, but she shrugged, happy she could still move her shoulders, and entered the museum. She took up a position at the edge of the group surrounding the guide. She had been here before, both alone and with guided tours and she followed the guide’s remarks with scant attention. Looking around her, however, she discovered that she was not the only one, and it suddenly occurred to her that this was a strange trip for this group of women to be taking. According to Karl, they had done it before. Wasn’t it odd that they would elect to cover the same ground again? Because, she remembered, now that she was pulling the threads together, that, in fact, this was a duplicate of their first trip. They had been to Topkapi, and the Blue Mosque, and even, if she remembered rightly, to the same hotel in which they were to lunch.
They moved to another case; and she concentrated briefly on the largest pink sapphire in the world, looking like a lump of plastic, which it probably was, but her mind wouldn’t let go of the puzzle. Why were these women here? Many of them had grandparents who could remember the Turkish occupation, they were all Bulgarian patriots, they were hardly driven by a strong admiration of the Turkish character, the churches and museums they were seeing were certainly no more beautiful or interesting than the churches and museums in Bulgaria. On the contrary, the church at Boyana had been held up to her on the flight down as the most beautiful church in Christendom, if not the world.
The guide reclaimed her attention as they moved to the display of celadon porcelain. Each time she saw it, it gave her a physical sense of pleasure. “…Buried in deep wells,” the guide was saying, “The special clay was left for ninety to one hundred years. Then, the son or grandson of the potter would take it out, sprinkle it with jade dust, and bake it. The process has been lost. Many have tried to copy it, but no one is willing to wait so many years.”
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