The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  As the plane started to taxi toward the end of the runway, the Potter reached into his jacket pocket to grasp his hook into the future-his potters wire. It wasn t there! He patted the other pocket. It too was empty. His body melted into the seat. In his hurry to board the plane he had left his signature on the Starets' body.

  At the end of the runway, the engines revved up. The plane's vibrations reached the Potter's bones. He gripped the armrest until his knuckles turned white. Looking out of the window, he caught sight of a red-and-white-striped wind sleeve dancing in crosscurrents of air. It looked obscene, first inflating and then going limp, then inflating again. He wished he could make love to Svetochka, and then was struck by the fact that each time in his life he had killed someone, his mind had turned to-taken refuge in-the thought of love-making. Perhaps murder and copulation were related in the same way that death and night were related. Perhaps they were sisters!

  The plane lurched down the runway, and the Potter had the terrible sensation that his presence on board would prevent it from taking off.

  Had the Russians invented the ultimate method of keeping people in the country? Their guilt at leaving made the plane heavier than air! Just as he convinced himself that it was scientifically possible (people who are very frightened, Piotr Borisovich once observed, usually experience a moment of madness), the Austrian plane groped its way off the runway, sank back again, then lifted off for good. Under his feet, the Potter felt the comforting crunch of the wheels folding into the fuselage.

  Now there was nothing left to do but watch the minutes tick by-and wait.

  The blind man examined the corpse with the tip of his thin white baton.

  "Strangled, you say?"

  "With a length of wire," the police officer said brightly. As the local Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD) man, he had been summoned by the janitor who discovered the body. Now he was more than a little awed to find himself in the presence of two directors of the KGB's Department 13.

  "So: strangled with a length of potter's wire," Oskar added pointedly.

  "How can you be sure it is potter's wire?" the blind Cousin inquired.

  "Because of the bamboo on either end," the younger of the two Cousins explained. "Potters use such pieces of wire to slice their pots off the wheel."

  The blind man tapped his cane against the MVD man's leg. "That should narrow the problem down considerably," he noted. "The killer is obviously a potter. Moreover, to strangle someone of this size, he would have to have incredibly strong hands."

  The younger Cousin saw what the blind man was driving at. "Potters have strong hands from wedging clay," he told the MVD man.

  The police officer said, "The airport doctor who examined the victim estimated that he had been dead about half an hour. We've had two planes take off during that time-one to the Crimea, one to Vienna.

  90

  THE SISTERS

  Our potter might be on one of them. The plane to Vienna is still in Soviet air space and subject to our orders. I suggest we recall both planes immediately."

  The blind Cousin snapped, "Out of the question." He offered no explanation. The MVD man knew better than to seek one.

  The younger Cousin asked the MVD man, "How long before the Vienna plane is out of Soviet air space?"

  "I would say-he made a quick calculation-"another hour and a half."

  "Here are your instructions," announced the blind man. "You are to lock up this room and forget about the corpse for another two hours. Then you will note in your call book that the janitor has just informed you of the presence, in his supply room, of a dead man. You will investigate immediately. You will issue a report saying that he was strangled with a length of potter's wire, and you suspect he was part of a ring of smugglers that had a falling-out. Only that."

  The local MVD man saluted the blind man and left the room.

  The stench was becoming overpowering. The blind man found the door with his baton and ducked through it. The younger Cousin and Oskar followed him out.

  Oskar quietly told the Cousins, "The Potter identified the victim as the flaps-and-seals man from the sleeper school. He was apparently booked on the Vienna flight, recognized Turov and became suspicious."

  "No matter how meticulously you plan an operation," the younger Cousin said philosophically, "you can't foresee everything."

  "It is precisely our business to foresee everything," the blind man snapped in irritation. His baton beat out an angry rhythm against a radiator. One year of planning had almost been ruined by a coincidence.

  "Still, this may work for us in the end," he said. He turned toward the younger Cousin. "I want you to make sure word of the crime appears in Pravda. Bury it in the middle of a story on the airport police so it won't be too conspicuous-a passing reference to a body found strangled yesterday in a storage room. Mention the only clue-a length of potter's wire." The blind man turned away and stared off into space with his sightless eyes. Revenge, the peasants said, was a dish that tasted better cold. He had waited long enough, and plotted care-hilly enough, and he would have his meal, "The fact that the Potter murdered a man in order to get out of the country," the blind man mused out loud, "will be useful to us when the time comes to go public."

  Under the silver wing, the high Carpathians gradually flattened into rolling bolthills. The plane banked and then levelled out over a vast plain. A meandering river came into view. The Potter pressed his cheek to the inner window; there had been moments right after the takeoff when its coolness against his skin had been the only thing that kept him sane. "That must be the Danube, he muttered.

  Svetochka free-associated. "The waltz," she said in an awed voice.

  "The river," the Potter corrected her.

  The plane banked again, manoeuvring into its landing pattern. Vienna tilted into the frame of the oval window like a lopsided photograph.

  Every time the plane banked, it slid back into view, nearer, more distinct: cathedral spires, university towers, Hapsburg palaces, the famous Rathaus; a potpourri of styles (neo-Gothic, Italian Renaissance, modern Gothic, Greek); and one or two prominent buildings that Piotr Borisovich, who always averted his eyes when he passed any of Moscow's seven grotesque Stalin Gothics, would have laughingly referred to as neoridiculous.

  Svetochka drank it all in over the Potter's shoulder- the terminal, its roof garden with people waving happily, the planes with exotic markings parked along the tarmac-as they touched down, taxied and then braked to a stop. Her eyes were misty with emotion, and she blew her nose noisily into a handkerchief that she plucked from the Potter's jacket pocket.

  "What happens when we get off the plane?" she whispered.

  "What happens when you go into the sea?" he replied cryptically. "You get wet."

  Svetochka tossed her head in exasperation. "Will we be met is what Svetochka wants to know."

  "We will be met," said the Potter, who knew the mechanics of things like this the way a watchmaker knows the inside of a timepiece, "by someone who will invite us to pay for our passage."

  Sensing a storm building up in him, Svetochka nestled close and said very softly, "Svetochka is very glad to be here. Soon she will show you how glad she is.

  The sun was sinking below the rim of the runway as they left the plane.

  The Potter spotted the welcoming committee the instant he stepped onto the top of the ramp. Any idiot could have. One was a little man who gripped a black umbrella by the middle and pinned his black homburg to his head with the curved handle so the hat wouldn't be carried off in the wind. The second, probably the junior of the two, judging by his position several steps behind and to the left of the little man, wore a long trench coat and black galoshes. The passengers filing off the plane were steered toward a waiting bus. When Svetochka and the Potter reached the tarmac, the little man with the homburg pinned to his head by the umbrella handle stepped forward. "Delighted you could come," he announced in an English thick with a guttural Bavarian drawl.

  "What do
es he say?" Svetochka asked, dutifully pronouncing her memorized lines. "With his accent, I can't understand-"

  "He wants us to follow him," the Potter whispered in Russian. Steering Svetochka by an elbow, he followed the little man toward a small pickup truck parked on the other side of the plane.

  The procession passed under the plane. Water glistened on the silver belly; to the Potter, it looked as if the plane was sweating. Two other Germans in trench coats were waiting next to the open rear doors of the small pickup truck. The Potter and Svetochka climbed into the back and sat down on a low metal bench. Outside, the man wearing the homburg and the two others talked in undertones. Ten minutes went by. Eventually Galoshes arrived and hefted the two American valises plastered with labels into the pickup. Then he and Homburg took their places on the metal bench across from the Potter. Nobody said a word. The rear doors were slammed closed and locked. The other two Germans climbed into the front scats. The motor turned over. The pickup was thrown into gear and began to crawl across the runway toward the other side of the airport.

  They rolled along for several minutes. They must have passed close to the end of the runway, because they heard the stutter of propeller engines revving up for a takeoff, and saw, through the small scarred rear window, the flashing green of a starboard wing light. After a while the pickup came to a stop. The Potter could make out men talking quietly in German, then the sound of an entrance in a chain-link fence being pulled back.

  Svetochka looked at him in bewilderment. "And Paris?" she asked plaintively. Inhibited by the silent stares of the two Germans, she shivered and drew closer to the Potter.

  The pickup stopped before the giant doors of an enormous hangar. The driver came around and opened the back door. Svetochka started to slide out, but Galoshes put a restraining hand on her arm. "Only him," he said. Looking the Potter in the eye, Homburg nodded toward the open door.

  "You will wait for me here," the Potter told Svetochka in Russian. He patted her knee on his way out of the pickup.

  "What is happening?" she called after him in fright. "Why can't Svetochka come with you?"

  Dusk was settling over the distant runway like soot. Some mechanics in overalls were working on the motor of an airplane nearby, but they didn't look up. The driver put his shoulder to the giant door and rolled it back enough for the Potter to slip into the hangar. Then he pulled the door closed with a resounding clang.

  The hangar- was empty; not a person, not a plane, not a vehicle of any kind was in sight. The Potter had a sudden urge to yell and hear his voice come back at him from a far corner. A narrow steel staircase climbed up one wall to a balcony with half a dozen small offices on it.

  The doors of the offices were made of frosted glass. A light burned in the second office. Mounting the steps, listening to his own footfalls echoing through the hangar, the Potter homed in on the light. He reached the door, pushed it open and entered.

  Hunched behind a metal desk, a thin young man with protruding amphibian eyes peered up at the Potter through round steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He seemed to be on the verge of giggling, which made the Potter wonder if he had somehow missed the humor in the situation. Beware of people who laugh in the wrong places, Piotr Borisovich had once quipped; they are more dangerous than those who don't laugh in the right places.

  "You will be the American," the Potter said in Russian.

  The thin young man was in fact the Sisters' man Friday. "What makes you think I am American?" he asked. He spoke fluent Russian, but with a pronounced Brooklyn accent.

  "There is always an American at the end of the line," the Potter said moodily. "Besides, Oskar spoke about his people collecting money for the information I would provide." The Potter lowered himself into a folding metal chair. "The only ones with money to spare these days are the Americans."

  Thursday didn't find this comment to his taste. "You miss the point if you think of this in terms of money," he observed. "We are fighting atheistic international Communism-"

  The Potter cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Spare me, if you please, your Sermon on the Mount."

  The skin on Thursday s neck reddened. "Your kind could do with a little bit of Sermon on the Mount!" He burst out giggling. "Suppose," he suggested in English, a gleam in his protruding eyes, "we talk turkey."

  "Suppose," the Potter agreed, though he was not quite sure what the expression meant. Reluctance welled up in him like bile. Betraying Piotr Borisovich into the hands of this giggling preacher who sat across the desk from him seemed . . . grotesque If he could stall long enough, he still had the package he had recovered from the old man's cottage.

  "As I understand it," Thursday continued, switching back to Russian, leaning across his desk, flicking his tongue over his lips in expectation, "you are to show your appreciation for your deliverance by giving me three items of information."

  "That is not the order of things I had in mind," the Potter said.

  "Before I pay my way, I will want some indication from your superiors"-

  his way of saying that he considered Thursday too junior to deal with-"concerning my and my wife's future." ("My future," Piotr Borisovich once exclaimed in a moment of intense depression-he had been quoting the poet Akhmatova at the time, and his words had made a deep impression on the Potter-"is in my past." Curiously, the old man had used the same expression the night he died.)

  Thursday started to giggle again when a telephone hidden away in a desk drawer rang. He yanked open the drawer and placed the telephone on the desk. It was one of those old-fashioned European models, black, with a second earpiece that you could unhook and hold to your free ear. "Yes,"

  Thursday said into the mouthpiece in English, staring all the time across the desk at the Potter with his goiter eyes. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, "I see," he said slowly. "Really,"

  he said. "With a length of potter's wire?" he said. He clucked his tongue. "I wonder who could have done such a naughty thing," he said. "I appreciate the call," he said. He dropped the receiver onto its cradle and hooked the earpiece back into place. "Well," Thursday observed,

  "that more or less changes everything, doesn't it?"

  There was a commotion in the hangar below. Svetochka's stiletto heels beat out a panicky rhythm as she raced up the steel staircase. Homburg and Galoshes pounded up the steps after her. All three burst into the room. Svetochka lurched into the Potter's arms. Homburg, his face beet red from exertion, said, "She started to scream something about wanting to see him. There were workers around. I didn't want to attract attention, so I let her come in. She saw the light and ran up before we could stop her."

  Thursday waved Svetochka to another of the folding metal chairs. She sat on the edge of it and crossed her legs. Thursday was distracted by the glimpse of thigh. "To pick up where we left off," he told the Potter, slipping into his Brooklyn-accented Russian, "you were on the verge of disclosing to me three items of information."

  The Potter felt as if the four walls were pressing in on him. voices suddenly reverberated. The bulb overhead seemed unbearably bright. These were things that happened in nightmares. If only this were taking place in a dream; in a nightmare even! "I am ready to cooperate," he replied carefully, feeling his way, "as soon as we have established the framework within which each increment of cooperation is compensated by an increment of . . ."

  Thursday was giggling excitedly. "You sound like a lawyer playing for time, but that is the one thing you don't have. Time, friend, is what you've run out of. An Aeroflot flight for Moscow leaves here in"-he peered at his wristwatch-"twenty-seven minutes. You and the young lady will be placed on that plane by my associates here unless you supply me with the information I want."

  It dawned on Svetochka that the young man leering at her through round lenses was proposing to send them back. "You know, Feliks, you must tell him," she whispered in the voice of a schoolteacher instructing a stubborn pupil.

  "Our Russian friends," Thursday continued, "wil
l be only too happy to get their hands on you. It seems that they are investigating a murder that took place in the airport just before the plane you were on departed. A man was strangled to death in a storage room near the toilets. The only clue was a length of potter's wire found next to the body. During the war, if I remember correctly, strangling was your trademark-"

  "Feliks!" Svetochka breathed. She sat back on her folding metal chair and stared at the Potter. She was very frightened. "If you go back," she moaned, "they will say that I was your accomplice. They will put both of us up against walls and shoot us!"

  Thursday sensed the moment had come to mix in a carrot or two. "As soon as you've given me the three items that were agreed upon," he told the Potter in what he thought was a soothing voice, "we will arrange for you to be taken to a small hotel in Vienna. You will be very comfortable.

  You will undergo the usual debriefing. At the same time, concrete arrangements will be made for your future. It is understood by everyone concerned that you will eventually want to settle in Paris." Thursday waved an arm at Homburg and Galoshes, and they backed out of the room, closing the door behind them. "Paris," Thursday added, as if it were the detail that could tip the scale, "is supposed to be beautiful in the fall."