Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  Tatty sighed. “They strangled her. They hanged her from the bannister in her house. It was arranged to look like suicide, except they put the suicide note in my handwriting.”

  “They?”

  “Ramsey, or his friends. He’s very perverse. He’s very clever.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t suicide? You’re sure she didn’t write the note?”

  “Yes. Even if the handwriting had been hers, it wouldn’t have sounded right. It was, it was a love note. It wasn’t written the way she said things.”

  “A note to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you lovers?”

  She was angry, but hid that. “No. Of course not. I knew Gwen had problems, but I had no idea they had gone that far.”

  He slammed his fist down hard on the table, causing his glass to jump. Whisky sloshed over its sides, but the glass did not fall over. He stood up and went to the window, standing with legs spread stiffly apart in military fashion, his hands gripping each other tightly behind his back.

  “I could have stopped what happened to her. I could have prevented it. She told me that. But she wouldn’t let me. She used to say she loved me, you know, but she always kept me at arm’s length.”

  “She was extremely fond of you. You were the only person, the only man, except for her husband, she ever felt kind about, concerned about. She used to worry about you, especially when you went into the army.”

  “She didn’t write much.”

  “She wanted to write you, but she didn’t want to answer your letters. They were full of so much anger and violence. She could never understand why you joined the army. She used to say you were the most sensitive, caring man she ever met. You used to write her poetry. She kept some. She had a few of your poems in that house in Bridgeport. She showed me one. It was called ‘Song of the Reveler.’”

  “Did you know her mother had me and my family investigated? To see how much money we had? When she found out that my father’s income came mostly from a military pension, she tried to stop Gwen from seeing me.”

  “Her mother’s been dead a long time.”

  “She was worse than you people, her mother. You were born what you are. Her mother wanted to become that, above all else. She used Gwen to do it.”

  “Gwen kept seeing you anyway. It just threw her when you joined the army. Especially when you wrote that long letter about killing a Viet Cong. She was very upset when she got that letter.”

  “What she never realized was that I joined the army because of her.”

  “And did you kill that man for her? She thought you did. Your letter sounded like some Hemingway story. A hunting trophy.”

  He swore, quietly. “No. I killed that one for me.”

  She stared at him. There seemed nothing left in this man capable of creating poetry, or weeping, or treating anyone or any thing with gentleness. But that was all to the good.

  He was thinking. She waited, watching him, then looked away.

  “What about Gwen’s body?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I was going to call my stepsister, but I ran into trouble in the city. There was another killing.”

  “Call your sister. I’ll get you to a safe phone. I want Gwen taken care of. I want her buried decently. The best.”

  “Yes, certainly. But we have to be careful. Ramsey is very dangerous, very ruthless. It’s going to be hard for us …”

  There was an odd touch of a smile in his grim face.

  “Us,” he said.

  “Will you help me?”

  He looked at her very steadily.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  Anger, fear, and hopelessness—helplessness—beset her at once. She sank back in her chair, her mouth slack.

  Now he smiled. “I’ll help you. Of course I will.”

  “But you said …”

  “I wanted to see how serious you are about this. I see you are very serious.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I said yes.”

  “Why? Because of Gwen?”

  “I’ll explain while you drive me back to the post.”

  “I don’t have a car. I have no driver’s license with me.”

  “You can use my car. And I want you to move to a motel closer to the fort. I’m going to stay with you until we go to New York.”

  “All right. As you wish.” She frowned.

  “It’s not that, Tatty. No sex. Not unless you want it. But if your Mr. Saylor makes a move on you, I want to be there.”

  Paget owned an old Ford Mustang convertible, bright red with a black top, dating back perhaps to 1965. The steering wheel felt oddly large in her hands. The engine sounded strong, as though it had been rebuilt. She drove too fast on the expressway leading to Fort Bragg. Remembering the need for caution, for anonymity, she slowed. They passed through the front gate to the fort without being halted. Apparently traffic flowed through all the time.

  “Here we are at the fort and you haven’t explained a thing.”

  “We’ve got a long way to go, yet. Take the next left.”

  She obeyed. “All right. Now tell me.”

  “In a month, I’m going to be thirty-five.”

  “Midlife crisis.”

  “I’m only a captain. Haven’t you found that strange? I’ll make it even stranger. I went to West Point. Veterans of the Corps of Cadets are guaranteed colonel. I should be a lieutenant colonel by now, in time to get my eagle by forty. I was a captain ten years ago, in Vietnam.”

  “All right. Why are you still a captain?”

  A huge green army truck lurched around a corner into her lane. She swerved around it.

  “I left the army in 1975, after Saigon fell. My work after that was highly extracurricular.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gwen didn’t tell you anything about me?”

  “A little. That you’ve killed people.”

  “I’ve killed a lot of people. Free-lance and government service. In Zimbabwe. In Namibia. In Central America. You say you’ve done work for the CIA, for Saylor? I’ve bumped into a few of those people myself.”

  “You’ve worked for the CIA?”

  “No. I’d never do that. Hate the bastards. Ivy grads and all dirty. But I worked with some free Cubans who were financed by the CIA. We went beyond our brief a few times. Shot up a couple of Castro police stations. Finally, the CIA got tired of me messing around in South Florida. They pushed the right buttons and I was activated from the reserves. My only way out would have been to resign my commission. And I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was at the Point. Because I have this thing about making major. I want to make major before cutting loose. My father was a major. Mike Hoare’s a major. I should have made major in Vietnam. I would have if I hadn’t been court-martialed.”

  “What for?”

  He paused. “For killing some people. In an unauthorized way.”

  She would not ask further. “You’ve been back in the army for some time, now. Why haven’t you been promoted?”

  “They know I want to make major. They dangle it over my head. They use it to make me be a good boy.”

  “You still haven’t explained yourself.”

  “I’m getting tired of being a good boy.”

  “And?”

  “And it would please me very much to make the Russians mad.”

  “And?”

  “And it would please me for them to kill Ramsey Saylor.”

  “Because of Gwen?”

  “No. Because of you.”

  She followed his directions onto a dirt road. It took them deep into the piney barrens. When he finally told her to stop, she was amazed they were still on the post. He got out, then hesitated, resting his foot on the door frame.

  “Something I’d like to know,” he said. “Last Labor Day, the night we raided that beach party, I got the idea. Well, you …”

  “I was interested
in you, Captain Paget. I thought of trying to borrow you from Gwen, which I didn’t think would have been all that difficult. I had a need for someone like you. But not now. For now, this is strictly business.”

  “D’accord. I just wanted to have that, to be able to keep it in my mind.”

  Paget picked a rainy afternoon, a cold and miserable one for Washington. Early spring was usually nicer to the capital. He seemed pleased. Such weather kept people inside, and away from their depressing windows. He said he needed ten seconds to get over the rear patio wall and up to the sliding doors. Ten seconds in his business was a long time, he said.

  “Why daylight then? Why not wait until dark?”

  “In neighborhoods like Georgetown, daytime is burglar time. People are gone. At night, there’s too much going on.”

  “We’ll be going into the house of a CIA officer. There could be some nasty surprises.”

  “I’ll be looking for them. I’ve been up against most. He has a roommate, or did I tell you? He’s not a CIA officer. He’s a football player who arranges flowers in the off-season.”

  “Flowers?”

  “I don’t know how he ever made first string at Notre Dame.”

  Pondering this, she dropped him at the corner, driving on to find a parking place, having to go almost all the way down the hill to M Street. He said to give him fifteen minutes. The walk back took almost all of that. She paused before turning down the walk to the front courtyard. According to the State Department locator in Washington, Ramsey was on assignment in New York. He had to be, with Marshal Kuznetzov coming to the United Nations. As the third-ranking man in the agency’s Soviet section, he would be needed to help coordinate surveillance and analysis. Kuznetzov might want to talk to him, too.

  She strode forward quickly and rang the doorbell three times in rapid succession, as planned. There was no response.

  They might have miscalculated. New York was just a short air shuttle flight away. Ramsey might have come back, might have been called back by Langley. The football player could be home, and not at his nearby flower shop. They had telephoned just a few minutes before, but in a few minutes much could change. Paget might not have been able to get through the back door, or even over the patio wall.

  She was about to turn and run when the door opened, no one in view. “Get inside, Tatty. Stop looking so nervous.”

  She hurried within as he slammed the door shut. He was holding what looked to be a small pile of laundry, and something else.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was in so quick, I went immediately upstairs.”

  “You had no trouble?”

  “He has an explosive device attached to his upstairs safe, but we’ve no interest in that. Otherwise, it was easy shit. One burglar alarm, rather cheap, not activated. I had the door lifted out in a few seconds.”

  “You sound like a professional burglar.”

  “I was, for a time, in Florida.”

  She stared at him and he stared right back.

  “You tell me too much.”

  “We can go now,” he said. “I have everything we need.” She glanced at the laundry. “I went into his dirty clothes. Shirt, under-drawers, and socks.” He opened his other hand. “And prescription medicine with his name on it. Your friend Mr. Saylor has high blood pressure.”

  “You’re right. That’s as convincing as we need.”

  “I’ll put the door back in place, and we’ll go.”

  “No. There’s something I have to do, something I promised myself at a bad point in Russia.”

  When Paget, unhappily, left her and went downstairs, she proceeded to Ramsey’s sitting room. She stood in the middle, staring at the enormous, wonderful John Singer Sargent painting. There was nothing she had done in her life that was as terrible as this would be, not even killing those two men.

  Tatty sought courage, but found only anger, just as good. She stood defiantly a moment more, then moved to the fireplace, and grabbed a poker. She climbed atop the plush sofa, bit her lip, then rammed the poker through the fabric of the canvas. She hesitated. The hole she’d made was large, but could be repaired. She pulled down and to the side, violently. The canvas made a sickening ripping sound.

  “Did that do us any good?” Paget said, when he rejoined her.

  “Probably not. It did me a lot of good.”

  “It was a beautiful painting.”

  “Yes it was, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Now I hate Ramsey even more for making me do that.”

  “You could be wrong. It could do us some good. Sun-tzu.”

  “What?”

  “Sun-tzu. He was a Chinese philosopher of war. Fifth century B.C., I think. He was the father of guerrilla warfare. He wrote a book called The Art of War. Clausewitz read it. Mao Tse-tung read it. There’s a passage in it about a jar of urine.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sun-tzu was once military advisor to a king at war with a rival warlord with an enormous ego. Before their first battle commenced, Sun-tzu had the king send the enemy general a gift to honor him, an expensive jade jar of wine. Only it was not of wine. Sun-tzu had it filled with urine. When the warlord drank it, he flew into an insane rage and ordered an immediate attack. Sun-tzu’s army was waiting for it. The warlord’s force was annihilated.”

  “And?”

  “You’ve given Ramsey Saylor a jar of urine.”

  They arrived in New York separately, she on an Eastern Airlines shuttle; Paget, back in uniform, riding the Amtrak Metroliner as just another military man. Tatty wore a dark red wig, very large designer sunglasses, a drab black sweater and wool skirt, expensive but drab sensible shoes, and a nondescript trenchcoat. The clothes in her suitcase were much the same. Paget carried her pistol.

  She was traveling under the name of Golda Isaacs, speaking with a discernably Jewish and slightly foreign accent. She carried a copy of the New York Review of Books and Commentary magazine, which as usual had a cover line about Soviet Jews.

  At LaGuardia, she pushed past other passengers in the cab line to snatch a cab. She snapped at the driver, and demanded he turn off his radio. Checking into the Beaton Place Hotel, she was rude to the desk clerk and paid for her room for the week with a deposit of eleven brand new hundred-dollar bills. She snarled at the bellman and tipped him only a quarter. She wanted to be remembered.

  As soon as the bellman left, she called the front desk and, exaggerating her accent, asked to be connected to Ramsey Saylor’s room. The clerk icily informed her she would need room information, and transferred her. She was rude to the room information woman, and to the hotel operator when she asked her to ring Ramsey’s room. Listening to his phone ring four times, five times, six times, seven, she feared he might still walk in and answer. That connection, followed immediately by her hanging up, would create very much the wrong impression. Finally, after the fifteenth ring, the operator returned.

  “There’s no answer,” she said, much as she might have said, “There’s a leech on your cheek.”

  “Did you dial the right number?” Tatty demanded. “Ring again.”

  This time the operator let it ring on into infinity. After another twenty times, Tatty hung up. She stood up, stretched, and went to her suitcase, taking out a bottle of vodka—Polish vodka. She forgave herself for that. Vodka was nearly odorless. It would not do to be reeking of Scotch or gin these next few days. Golda Isaacs wasn’t like that.

  She filled half a glass and went to her window, her eyes darting over everything and everyone moving in the street not far below. She was home, and yet the view seemed as magically alien as the one from her window in the hotel in Leningrad. Alien and forbidding.

  One drink was all she allowed herself. It was time to create Selma Peabody. She took the stairs the four short flights to the lobby. She had reserved a room on a lower floor so she wouldn’t have to use the elevator. Ramsey’s room was on the ninth floor. She had no interest in stepping into an elevator car in which she would be greeted by him
.

  Once out on the street again, her anxiety eased. As she walked along, moving north and west past so many well-remembered places, glimpsing, through windows, hair dressers and sales clerks who would have recognized her in an instant but did not, she began to feel a surge of confidence. She was invisible to these New Yorkers, much as Greta Garbo had been for so many years.

  Invisible, perhaps only a ghost.

  Selma Peabody would not be merely a ghost.

  Paying cash, she began to assemble Selma—a long and quite necessarily expensive black wig from a shop up on Madison Avenue, a wardrobe of four very sporty outfits and one large brown leather handbag from Lord and Taylor’s, a Sony tape recorder and reporter’s notebooks from stores on Sixth Avenue. Except for the tape recorder and notebooks, she had everything delivered to the hotel. The wig shop, catering to the wealthiest of Upper East Side ladies, would remember that. As Golda Isaacs, she had made quite a point of making the salespeople there not like her.

  On the way back, as a test, she stopped in an Italian restaurant on Second Avenue she used to frequent on nights between plays when she was not up to preparing dinner for herself. As Golda, she ordered fettucine Alfredo, her favorite dish. The waiter, who had occasionally borrowed money from Tatty, showed no recognition. She was perhaps being excessive with Golda’s bad manners. He slammed the plate down on the table and left the bottle of wine on the table without pouring it.

  When she returned to the hotel, the wig had been delivered but the clothes had not. She had paid an extra charge, to assure delivery, but New York was New York, not London.

  Paget didn’t arrive until after eight P.M. A three-piece, pinstriped, dark blue suit, Burberry trench coat, and Hartmann briefcase had transformed him. An Irish walking hat covered his too-short hair.

  “You’re extremely late,” she said, slightly annoyed. She had taken off the dark red wig and sunglasses. “I was about to go out and eat without you.”

  “Wouldn’t do. We need room service tonight. Establish that you have a male visitor. Is the food any good here? What does Ramsey usually eat?”

  “Ramsey enjoys caviar, snails, lobster, truffles, and the paté at Fortnum and Mason’s.”