Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

  “I think she just asked me because—because my baby died.”

  “Even if that’s true, she must also think you’d be good for her child. I wouldn’t mess around picking a godparent for my kid.”

  “I think she’s just trying to be nice.”

  “Nothing wrong with people trying to be nice. They keep trying, they might even succeed.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “I don’t know. I just—well, I can’t back out, now, I guess.” She sounded as though she hoped she might be wrong.

  “Not unless you secretly hate this Sharon Piluski. Or is it you don’t feel worthy to be godmother to a white baby?”

  Tina was shocked. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Not a great thing to think, either.”

  “Well, it’s not true. And I like Sharon.”

  “Then I don’t see any way out of it.”

  “I’m jealous, Joe.” Tina’s eyes were wet. “I don’t want a piece of somebody else’s baby. I want my own baby back.” She looked down at her hands, fascinated, apparently, by the way her fingers bent.

  Joe knew that words wouldn’t do it just now. He got up, walked around behind Tina, and gave her fatherly pats on the shoulder.

  “Joe,” she said at last, looking up at him. “The christening is next week. At the Northside Church.”

  “Mr. Nelson doing it?”

  “Yes. Sharon’s husband was raised Catholic, but he doesn’t care. Sharon was Methodist, but she switched to the Northside when she moved here, I think maybe because of Mr. Nelson. Anyway, it’s next week, I’ll let you know just when—will you come with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’ll probably be business hours.”

  “That’s okay, I’m self-employed.”

  Then the phone rang and made a liar out of him.

  Tina said, “I wonder who that could be.” She picked up the phone and listened for a second. “It’s somebody named Rines,” she told him with her hand over the mouthpiece. “Says it’s important.”

  It damn well must be important, Joe thought as he took the phone, not only to call me here, but to use his right name.

  “I take it you can’t talk now,” Rines said.

  “That’s right,” Joe said.

  “Okay, then, listen. Find Trotter. Tell him the clock has slowed down.”

  “The clock has slowed down.”

  “That’s it. The sooner the better. He’ll know what to do.”

  “He’d better, ’cause I sure don’t.” He said at least the last three words to a dead phone.

  “What’s wrong?” Tina said.

  “The thing that’s most wrong is I’ve got to go. A friend’s in a jam, and I’ve got to go help him out.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  Joe felt the sudden urge to kiss this woman, hard. He was able to whittle it down to a peck on the tip of the nose before he succumbed to it. “Feed me again tomorrow and don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it later.” After I’ve had a chance to come up with a good lie, he thought. The longer he stayed on this assignment, the less he liked it.

  Tina said, “Be careful.”

  Oh, Joe thought, to hell with it. He kissed her again, a good one this time, apologized (though, to tell the truth, Tina did not seem offended), then went out into the night to look for the mysterious Mr. Trotter.

  Chapter Four

  WES CHARLES DROPPED MRS. Hudson at the executives’ entrance of the Hudson Group Headquarters and took off for the hills. Mrs. Hudson was doing it more and more lately, coming back to work after dinner and staying late. Okay—she’d always be there late Friday night, in case there were any late-breaking stories for Worldwatch, and she was needed to decide what was in or out of the magazine before it went downstairs to the printer. And she’d be around on Wednesday, before they locked up the soft-news stuff, fashion and movie reviews and stuff like that. But this was Monday, for God’s sake, and as little as Charles knew about this business, he’d picked up enough to know that there wasn’t a goddam thing that needed to be done on Monday night—this week’s issue would be on the stands, and nobody would worry about next week’s until tomorrow at the earliest.

  But there she was, ringing for him twenty minutes after he’d taken her home that afternoon. Charles finished chewing his sandwich on the way up to see her. He knew she hadn’t eaten anything.

  It was as if she couldn’t bear to be away from that place, like someone would blow it up on her if she didn’t keep an eye on it. Or, Charles admitted reluctantly, the fact that her son’s fiancée had been spirited away from her as if by pixies made her nervous about staying home.

  He supposed he couldn’t really blame her. Charles had a long association with the outfit who’d installed the security system, and he had personally approved their plans. The problem was, he was too professional. Or at least he had approached that problem too professionally. After all that time protecting rich Americans overseas from Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof types, and Mafiosi, he’d forgotten that someone could come at your defenses with something other than force. So all the sensors and alarms had been made irrelevant by sweet talk; by someone just persuading that girl to sneak out at night so she could be killed.

  No wonder Mrs. Hudson didn’t want to be there much anymore. The reminder of defeat, plus James Hudson, Jr.’s, floating around the place like a ghost, had killed any feeling of comfort Charles had ever felt there too.

  He was supposed to drive back by the building at ten o’clock, although if previous nights were any guide, there was no guarantee she’d be ready to leave then.

  Charles guessed he didn’t really mind. Inside the building there were security guards carrying .357 Magnums. She’d be safe enough.

  In the meantime, his time was his own. More and more he’d spent it driving up the country road to this spot, halfway up what in New York State passed for a mountain. It was nothing compared to the Alps, of course, but it gave a nice view. It was a good place to think.

  One thing he thought about frequently was the fact that Hannah Stein hadn’t been much older than Charles’s own daughter, who was at a private school up in mountains of her own out in California. One of the reasons he’d taken the job in the States had been the idea that he could see Janie more often. It hadn’t worked out that way. This was the worst of all possible jobs—boring, but still urgent—and he couldn’t get away. And the one time he had, he and Janie had spent the time staring at each other, trying to think of something to say. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a good kid, or a friendly kid, it was just that she was now her stepfather’s kid. Not his. All he had to talk about was the service, killers and kidnappers.

  Looking back, he could see every link in the chain of decisions, all of them his decisions, that had made it happen this way. It was a shame you couldn’t see it so well from the other end. He supposed some people did. Guys who hadn’t made strangers of their daughters, for instance.

  This was the time to take a deep last drag and crush the butt out brutally against the palm of his hand. It almost made him sorry he’d given up smoking.

  He could feel the grin on his face, the one that grew there when he embarrassed himself with his maudlin stupidity. He took a look at it in the mirror. Aversion therapy. If he could see how big a fool he made of himself, he might stop doing it.

  He saw something else in the mirror. Someone was coming down the road.

  On foot. On this road, that was ridiculous. On a cold, humid, late October night, it was ominous. Still watching the mirror, Charles reached for his shoulder holster. He held the grip but did not draw the gun.

  Whatever the walker was up to, it wasn’t stealth. He crunched the gravel alongside the roadway so loudly, Charles could hear it through the rolled-up windows. As he got closer, Charles could even hear him whistling.

  He could, of course, start the engine and pull out, but he was curious. Besides, everybody k
new this was Mrs. Hudson’s car, and if the walker was a motorist in trouble, he’d be making a PR problem for his employer.

  The more he thought about it, the more he figured that it was more than likely a motorist in trouble. But long shots were what a security man was in business to protect against. He kept his hand on the gun.

  The walker was closer now. Charles could hear him whistling. The walker stopped about ten feet from the car and stopped for a second, then moved toward the front window.

  “Mr. Charles? Mr. Charles, is that you?” He walked up to the window.

  Charles thought he’d recognized the voice; one look at the face told him he was right. He pushed the button and the glass rolled down. “I thought it was you. What are you doing here? Walking, no less?”

  “I’m not sure. My engine stopped running. I wonder if I could trouble you for some help, or a lift back to town ... ?”

  Charles looked at his watch. More than an hour before he had to head back. He’d look at the car; it would make a change.

  He hit another button. The electronic lock popped open; Charles unlatched the door and started to get out.

  Roger pushed the hypodermic needle through the thick serge of Charles’s uniform trousers into his meaty thigh. A look of surprise, then anger passed over the man’s face before it lost all expression and the eyes drooped closed. Roger placed a hand on the driver’s chest and guided him back into the seat.

  Roger had thought long and hard about the assignment before deciding to use the hypodermic. The dossier on Charles showed that the man would have to be rendered unconscious before being killed. He was a trained professional. He’d put up a struggle. Roger had perfect confidence in his ability to handle Charles or anybody but—and this was the important part—not without leaving a trace.

  And Roger would leave no traces. Not only did the nature of his current employment call for it, his own sense of the Tightness of things wouldn’t allow it. Azrael left no traces.

  None that would be noticed, in any case. The Medical Examiner would find an extra puncture in the man’s thigh, if he were conscientious enough to look for them in the very red face of the cause of death Roger would provide for him. It would be lost among the other punctures from the man’s twice-daily vitamin shots. No one would look for a drug. The death would be a suicide.

  Roger pushed a button with a gloved finger and unlocked the front door on the passenger side of the limousine. Then he took hold of the ignition key and twisted it, pressing Charles’s foot on the accelerator as he did so. He left the foot where it was.

  Next, he closed the door. He took a length of garden hose out from under his coat. He stuck one end in the tailpipe and the other in the window. He walked around the front of the car to the passenger side, opened it, and slipped in. He reached across the unconscious Charles to work the power-window button. He worked slowly, careful to close the window enough to hold the hose in place without pinching it closed and shutting off the fumes.

  It was quite close inside the car by the time he was satisfied. He backed out hastily and took deep breaths of the cold air. But there was still one thing he had to do that would send him back inside the car, so the sooner he got to it, the safer it would be.

  Stepping only on rocks or frozen patches of ground (Azrael left no traces) Roger climbed from the road up the slope to where a patch of week-old snow clung to the side of the hill. He took off his right glove, scooped up a cold, gritty handful and, moving just as carefully, returned to the car. He opened the passenger-side door, took a deep breath, and leaned in.

  Roger thought he could see pinkness already in Charles’s face, a pinkness that would ultimately deepen to the cherry-red of carbon monoxide poisoning. The man was asleep. He would simply stay asleep—forever.

  Roger, however, had places to be. And God’s clean air to breathe. He held his fistful of snow over Charles’s thrown-back head and squeezed. Drops of water ran down the man’s face and back through his hair. When the snow was gone, Roger gave a nod of accomplishment. He backed out the open door. He began breathing again and replaced his glove. Then he set the door to lock automatically and pushed it closed. He walked quickly back up the road, got in his car and drove home.

  Chapter Five

  SMOLINSKI RETURNED TO HIS cottage after his nightly four laps of the university pool. He saw that Mrs. Szczeczko had let herself in and out and done her usual marvelous job in between. She’d also left him fresh flowers, which she got from her son, who had a flower shop in downtown Sparta.

  It occurred to Smolinski that he should arrange things so that he could spend more time talking to Mrs. Szczeczko. Not only did she openly worship him (coming out of retirement to clean for “such an educated man and a hero”), but she was garrulous about her brother’s activities in what, after forty-five years away from it, she persisted in calling “back home.” Since these activities consisted in large part of sedition, if not actual subversion, Smolinski owed it to himself to hear more about them. It would give the old woman a chance to speak fluent Polish, of which she was proud, instead of broken English, which embarrassed her, and it would give Smolinski the chance to find out just how her brother was getting this news to her in the face of postal censorship and radio jamming. At the very least, he wanted to find out if she was making it all up in an effort to impress him—then he could just ignore her.

  Smolinski smiled half affectionately at her peasant loyalty and naïveté. He hung up his jacket, then returned to his desk, lifted the small vase, and smelled the flowers. They were yellow things, like daisies. Smolinski did not know much about flowers.

  He checked the telephone machine for messages.

  “Jersey,” a taped voice said, and even if he hadn’t recognized the voice itself, he would have known it was Mrs. Department Chairman. The woman was a Doctor of Philosophy, yet was unable to grasp that the name should be pronounced “Yairtsy.” No sounds alien to the American tongue. He wondered what Mrs. Szczeczko had suffered all these years.

  He let Mrs. Department Chairman drone on. They were having a party. So soon? Smolinski thought. Oh. This time they would be getting drunk to benefit starving children in Ethiopia. It was amazing how Americans managed to feel guilty about that. The children in Ethiopia were starving because the revolutionary government wanted them dead—they would not fit ethnically in the Ethiopia the leaders envisioned. It was an effective and time-honored technique. Stalin used it in the Ukraine in the twenties. A man who must spend all day looking for a few grains of wheat for his family cannot spare the energy for insurrection.

  He became tired of the woman’s voice and punched a button. A student from his seminar, with a complicated reason her paper could not be in on time. This voice was much pleasanter. He had allowed her in the seminar solely because of her voice. He used it now for background music as he prepared a sandwich.

  Smolinski was much happier with himself than he’d been after the phone call from Trotter. Then, he had been distraught. His first real test in the field, and he had met it with panic, running (figuratively) to Borzov over nothing.

  For what could Trotter do to him? Who would believe him if he said Jerzy Smolinski had tried to have him killed? No one. And if there were danger of retaliation, Borzov would learn about it, and Borzov would protect him.

  So. The thing to do now was to forget about it, put it behind him. He would redeem himself at the next opportunity. Borzov would be proud of him.

  Smolinski returned to the phone machine in time to cut off the next message, a recorded message designed to sell him life insurance. That was as good an example as any of the American culture—one machine talking to another, trying to sell it something.

  “This is the laundry,” the next message said. “Your cleaning and pressing are done. They can be picked up immediately.”

  Smolinski dropped his sandwich on the floor. A slice of too firm tomato rolled under the chair. His mouth shaped no five times before he had enough breath to say it.

&nb
sp; It wasn’t fair. Not for one mistake. Or, he thought desperately, perhaps this is the mistake. I must have heard it wrong. Smolinski rolled back the tape and played it again.

  “... laundry. Your cleaning and pressing are done. They can be picked up immediately.”

  No mistake. He was being called back. They—Borzov—had given up on him as a field agent and were ordering him to return so that they could cash in his propaganda value at a press conference in Warsaw, announcing his disillusionment with the hypocrisy of Americ—

  Even thinking about it made him sick. His new resolve would be all for nothing. He would have to leave now, make his way north, cross the border, and contact the cell in Montreal, who would take it from there.

  If only he’d had more presence of mind when the damnable Trotter had called him. If only that fool had succeeded in killing him. Then he might never have gotten this message, the message that ended the dream and work of a lifetime.

  Ten minutes ago, he was a man whose life was focused on a purpose—

  Ten minutes ago he hadn’t heard the message. He hadn’t been here. What if he’d never come home tonight? More importantly, could he make it seem as if he’d never come home tonight?

  He decided he could. Then he could carry his new plan forward, Trotter would be dead, and Borzov would see his worth. The plan was ready to go; his men were standing by. It would take one word in a telephone to set things in motion.

  But not from this telephone. He hadn’t been home.

  Smolinski dropped to his hands and knees and found the fragments of his sandwich on the floor, each of which he ate. He would leave no food in the garbage that would show someone checking up on him by its state of freshness that someone had been here this evening. With his napkin, he wiped traces of mustard from the floor. He put the napkin in his pocket. He returned the answering machine to the record position. He got his coat from the closet and left through the back door. He climbed over a neighbor’s fence and left on the other side of the block. He made his way to the nearest pay phone and put his plan in motion. Then he walked to a nearby shopping center where an automobile no one knew he had was parked, and drove toward Kirkester to see the plan unfold.