“Shit,” he said, looking at the room-service menu. “I was going to have the prime rib.”
“Have it. I’ll eat for Ramsey tonight.”
He opened his briefcase, taking out a half-gallon bottle of whisky and Tatty’s pistol. “Where?”
“Put it in the Tampax box in my suitcase.”
“Tampax?”
“A good place to hide things. Very off-putting.”
“We should both use the bed tonight.”
“Yes, but not much.”
He poured whisky and knocked it back. So formal a suit looked odd on such shoulders.
“You didn’t ask why I was late.”
“I presumed that being a proper Westchester gentleman, you’d tell me.”
He sat down in a chair and removed his shoes, which were brand new and appeared to pain him. Soldiers were kindest to their feet.
“I followed Ramsey Saylor.”
“You what?”
“I made only two passes. Once when he went from here to the U.N., and later, when he took a cab from the U.N. to the Upper East Side. It dropped him within five blocks of the Russian consulate.”
“He has an extraordinary memory for faces, for everything.”
“He didn’t see my face.” Paget rose, and went to the window with his drink. “I went to the Times and bought some back issues. I found only one story about Gwen.”
“Was there any mention of me?”
“Nothing at all. It was only five paragraphs long, three or four pages into the metropolitan section. ‘School Teacher Found Hanged In Bridgeport.’ The police suspect a sex criminal or burglar.”
“I reached my sister-in-law. Gwen will be buried in Greenwich. Did you really love her?”
“Yes. With a real passion, once.”
“Her mother wanted someone really rich for Gwen, someone old line. She wanted Gwen’s engagement picture in the Sunday New York Times.”
“That architect she married; he was old line.”
“Massachusetts old line. And the family had no money anymore.”
“Gwen got into The New York Times.”
They stopped talking. They drank, not looking at each other. He went again to his bottle.
“Call room service,” he said. “And order a bottle of wine with dinner. I intend to get just a little drunk tonight. Want to join me?”
“No, David. After this, I don’t want anything more to drink tonight.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“I mean it.” She went to the phone and dialed room service. Before picking it up she looked at him and said, “I really do. For the first time, David, I believe that we can do what we mean to do.”
Black wig in place, wearing lavender-shaded sunglasses and the most sporty and Southern of the four outfits, Tatty strolled through the gate outside the United Nations Secretariat building and then turned to the uniformed guard in the adjacent booth. She took a letter from the huge handbag, typewritten on the stationery of a North Carolina newspaper they had obtained by stopping by the paper’s advertising office to take out a spurious classified asking a reward for a lost, nonexistent dog.
“Can y’all direct me to where I go to pick up press credentials?”
The letter identified her as Selma Peabody, a reporter for the paper, and said she would be at the United Nations for a week, gathering material for some feature articles, and asked for temporary credentials to cover the period. It was signed, fraudulently, with the name of the paper’s managing editor.
The guard sent her in to a reception desk just inside the lobby of the Secretariat, where a rude English woman glanced at her letter, made a telephone call, and sent her up to the second floor. Following a long corridor past some news offices, cable desks, and some of the weariest and most jaded-looking people she had ever seen, she came to a large press bullpen where more of these people were shuffling along endless bins, all stuffed with sheafs of paper. A French girl at a nearby counter directed her to the office of the deputy press officer, an ebullient little man with thick black hair whose nameplate identified him as Greek.
He glanced at her letter, dropped it in a file box, then, humming merrily, filled out a temporary pass for her that was good for an entire month.
“That’s all?” she asked. That’s what they had told Paget, posing as the editor, when he had called, but it seemed odd.
“That’s all,” he said, smiling generously. “Just so we have something on a letterhead.”
Penetrating U.N. security was as easy as that. The pass was good for access anywhere in the complex, even to the top floor where the secretary-general’s offices were.
“If you have a moment, would y’all mind showing me around a little?”
He indicated that doing so might well prove to be the very best part of his day.
Tatty knew nothing about the news business except what she had learned from Jack Spencer, but the press corps here, most of them foreign, all behaved so strangely she had no fears of standing out. She quickly fell into their routine. The endless bins were full of press releases and official reports, and were combed through at least twice a day. There were briefings every morning, usually followed by press conferences. She interviewed an English undersecretary general in his office on the top floor, asking him rather recklessly about Marshal Kuznetzov’s visit. He replied charmingly but with some rather stock remarks about the Russians being incompetent and not really quite the threat they seemed. She interviewed an equally charming Irish ambassador who, over lunch, offered the most eloquent argument on behalf of a United Nations she had ever heard. In another interview, this with a Latin American ambassador, she was treated to a passionate villification of the United States.
She covered meetings of the General Assembly and Security Council, which were attended by only a scattering of press, and the open sessions of the Trusteeship Council and the various U.N. committees, which were covered by no press at all, the labyrinth of storage and workrooms and mazelike corridors to the rear deserted and echoing. Riding all the elevators in the Secretariat, she discovered those that went to the basement and subbasement, and that the floor buttons to them could only be worked by an operator with a key. Prowling the lower levels, she found easy access out to the public areas and their gift shops and crowds of tourists. In the press room, she spent hours typing up meaningless notes and making useless telephone calls. She found out, as most of the other reporters apparently knew well, that most of the real work at the U.N. was done in the huge and extravagantly furnished delegates’ lounge, which had an extraordinary view of the East River and an excellent bar. An African delegate made a pass at her there, but retreated before her quickly thickened Southern accent.
On her fourth day, she went to the Greek and announced almost tearfully that she had lost her pass. He quickly wrote out another, which that night she gave to Paget. The Greek’s scribble was such that the name on it could have been Sidney Porkbelly.
The day before Marshal Kuznetzov’s visit, she felt bold enough to take a front-row seat in the press-conference room for the Soviet briefing, bold enough indeed to ask a question.
“Mr. Ambassador, will the deputy premier’s news conference be before or after he meets with the secretary general?”
“Press conference will be at ten o’clock. Meeting with secretary general at eleven. Private reception at twelve o’clock. Private luncheon at twelve thirty o’clock. Speech to General Assembly at two o’clock. Afterward return to Soviet embassy.”
He stared at her after answering, but was quickly distracted by an English reporter who had a long sonorous question about arms control that the Russian ambassador declined to answer.
She felt pleased with herself for her audacity, but her nervousness returned as she paused in the delegates’ lounge for her mid-morning Bloody Mary. She had just sat down with it at a table by the window when Paget strolled in. He walked nonchalantly past her, briefcase and New York Times in hand, and bought a bottle of beer at the bar. Ret
urning, he took a seat at the empty table next to her, facing away from the window. After a sip of the beer, he opened the newspaper wide.
“I thought I’d find you in here,” he said, quietly.
“Why did you come?” She put her hand up in front of her mouth, resting her face against it as though in thought.
“Dress rehearsal.”
“They accepted your pass?”
“Didn’t even ask for it. If you wear a pin-striped suit, carry a briefcase, look bored and tired and act insufferably arrogant, they let you past as one of the boys.”
She gulped down most of her drink.
“This is crazy,” she said. “I’m going to go.”
That afternoon, long after Paget had gone away again, her nervousness abruptly became terror. She was walking down the long, wide, carpeted and high-ceilinged corridor that led from the Secretariat escalators to the General Assembly, when her eyes suddenly filled with the sight of Ramsey Saylor walking toward her.
He was dressed in exactly the same sort of suit as Paget, but looked much more natural in it. His hair was uncharacteristically mussed in front, as though he had simply forgotten to comb it. His mouth, more typically, was slightly open, tongue against the tips of his upper teeth. His heavy-lidded, feminine eyes were vacant and staring, but straight ahead, not at her. He seemed totally absorbed by thought, as though pondering some great and frightening truth about the universe that had just been revealed to him.
She was clutching a sheaf of press releases, as she had taken to doing while walking about the complex, an effective badge to ease the suspicion of any of the pale blue-uniformed security guards. She pulled one release out quickly and, head down, began to read it. She and Ramsey passed. Her cheeks were moist with sweat. Proceeding on twenty or so feet, she glanced quickly back. Ramsey kept on at the same pace, unfazed, still transfixed by his thoughts, looking as though he might walk on and into the wall at the far end of the corridor, as though he might walk through it.
“You’re absolutely sure he didn’t notice you, didn’t notice anything about you?” Paget asked that night.
They were lying in bed, both in their underwear, late-night street traffic filling the quiet between their words. Paget was drinking whiskey.
“Yes.”
“You said he’s very observant.”
“He’s the most observant person I’ve ever met, but we all have our lapses. He looked extremely preoccupied.”
“We’ll have to be maximum careful leaving the hotel tomorrow morning. If he sees you again, here in this hotel, he’ll notice.”
“I understand. We can take the service stairs.”
“He probably uses the service stairs. We’ll just be careful.” He drank. “You’re not drinking again tonight?”
“No.” She was staring up at the gloomy ceiling. He was sitting up on one elbow, his powerful arm muscles delineated by the window light.
“I suppose I could observe that, if we were to ever make a thing of it, this would be our last opportunity.”
“You could.”
“You’re not interested?”
“No.”
“I’ve fallen a little in love with you.”
“I know. I’m flattered.”
“But no.”
“Perhaps we’ll meet again sometime, Captain Paget.”
“You’re all cold inside.”
“David. I am absolutely nothing inside. I keep telling you, this is not rejection. It is impossibility. If we did it you’d feel even more rejected.”
He finished his drink, sighed, then after a long silence set his empty glass on the night table.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“I am thinking about a great many dead people.”
“Why?”
“It helps.”
He rolled over onto his stomach, his head turned away from her.
“Never think of dead people,” he said. “They’re not worth it.”
16
They rose very early, washing and dressing quickly, then setting about arranging the room as planned. Ramsey’s dirty laundry was dropped in a corner of the closet, on the floor beneath the neatly hung clothes of Golda Isaacs and Selma Peabody. Ramsey’s blood-pressure pills, the prescription label with name and address turned to the fore, were set on the bathroom’s marble sink, next to an assortment of make-up jars. The stack of anti-Soviet leaflets Tatty had taken from the girl by the subway were put as though carelessly on the dresser top. Nearby were the copies of Commentary and the New York Review of Books, along with a paperback edition of O, Jerusalem! In a dresser drawer were put the stacks of press releases she had collected from the bins, along with the notebooks and tape recorder.
Paget set a museum catalogue from an exhibit of turn-of-the-century American painters featuring John Singer Sargent on the night table, and in the drawer beneath, a half-dozen Ramses condoms.
“You don’t think we’re being a little obvious,” she said.
“The Russians are not a subtle people.”
She was dressed in Selma Peabody’s tackiest Southern outfit, the one she had worn when she had first gone to the Greek for her press pass. In the large handbag, folded tightly, she had clothes more suitable for a Smith girl—a Diane von Furstenburg wrap dress, a pair of stacked-heel Gucci loafers, and a Burberry raincoat. She had hidden the pistol in a storeroom in the U.N. building in case people were being searched this morning.
There was nothing left to do.
“Do you want a last drink?” he asked.
She shook her head. He stood looking at her.
“May I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
The touch of his lips was surprisingly gentle. When her body did not respond to him, he stepped back.
“Perhaps we’ll meet again sometime,” he said.
“Perhaps, David.”
“You want to go through with this?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. All the way.”
There was a large number of New York City police outside the U.N. compound, but the security personnel inside, if more alert, were no more numerous than usual. There were no searches, though she was twice asked for her pass.
She went through her usual morning routine, stopping to chat briefly with the Greek. He would wonder why she didn’t attend the Kuznetzov press conference, but she dared not appear. She told him she had to write a story about the Law of the Sea Treaty her editor wanted sent off that morning. He said there’d be a summary of the news conference and he’d be happy to give her a fill, but that it would all be in The New York Times the next morning anyway. She smiled sweetly.
As the other reporters rushed down the hall to the conference room, she sat at a typewriter and banged away until the Greek and the Asian girl were also gone and the only one left in the press-room area was a swarthy young man behind the counter collating press releases. She picked up her coat and bag, and walked quietly away.
As Tatty had observed all week, the girl who operated the elevator assigned to the personal use of the secretary general customarily took a coffee break at 10:20 every morning. Her habit was to take the elevator down to the first basement, leave it open and locked, and walk through the basement and a lower-office-level corridor to a coffee bar in the bottom of the General Assembly building.
She was there, though less relaxed than usual, gulping her coffee and glancing frequently at her watch. An Anglo-Saxon with dark brown hair, though not so dark as Tatty’s Selma Peabody wig, she was slightly shorter and heavier than Tatty, but not so much that her clothes would look noticeably ill-fitting, or so Tatty hoped.
When the girl finished, Tatty waited only until she had turned her back and started for the corridor. Once she was in it, Tatty brushed past her, walking briskly along the curve of the hall until she reached a metal door to the right. Opening it, she looked back down the corridor beyond the girl. There was no one in view. Standing back against the open door as the girl drew near, Tatt
y contorted her face into a look of horror, and said, “My God, look at this!”
The girl hurried up and looked in, whereupon Paget yanked her inside as he might pull a fish from water. He gripped her mouth with one hand and her arms with the other, pulling her up tight against him. Tatty shoved the muzzle of her pistol into the girl’s throat.
“What is your name?” she said. “Tell us your name!”
The girl’s face was bathed in sweat. She was shaking. Paget relaxed his hand.
“Sondra Hochmeister,” the girl said.
With that, Paget reached into his pocket, took out the chloroform-soaked rag he had prepared, and put it over her nose and mouth. In a moment, she slumped.
“Now,” he said, “up the stairs.”
The short flight of concrete steps took them up to another empty corridor off which were a number of press and broadcast workrooms. Like the meeting chambers they overlooked, they were dark and deserted. Lugging the girl’s inert form to the farthest of the rooms, they set her down on the floor near a closet. As Paget began taking off her pale blue uniform, Tatty removed her clothes.
“Hurry,” he said, once she had put on the uniform.
Her eyes lingered on his a brief moment, then she darted away.
The elevator was there, dark, open, and waiting. Taking the key from a uniform pocket, she activated it and turned on the lights. Then she brought it up to the second floor, biting her lip as the doors opened. There was a cordon of half a dozen U.N. security men waiting outside. The nearest one looked at her, startled.
“Sondra took sick in the coffee shop,” she said. “They sent her home and asked me to take her place.”
As though still unsure, he studied her a moment, then turned away. He was a Latin, probably South American, not much disposed to see threat in a woman. And she was in the same uniform as he. She had brought the elevator at the right time.
She looked at her watch. It was ten minutes to eleven. The trip from the press conference room to the secretary general’s floor could take no more than two to three minutes. Kuznetzov would want to arrive exactly on time. So she had five or more minutes to stand here and wait.
Leaning back against the wall of the elevator car, she looked at her nails, assuming as bored an expression as possible. A minute passed. The Latin guard stood straighter. The others stiffened as well. Anyone could come around the corner, into the elevator. Another minute. There’d be nowhere for her to go.
Blood of the Czars Page 29