The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "In fear," she burst out when the Potter insisted on knowing why.

  "Svetochka can't eat, Svetochka can't shit, Svetochka can't think straight because Svetochka is afraid"

  "Afraid of what?" the Potter pleaded with her. "We are safe here. The hotel is guarded. The top floor is sealed off. The Austrians, the Americans, they will not allow anything to happen to us."

  It was at this point that Svetochka became mesmerized by the headlights on the Ringstrasse, and then jerked closed the thick curtains, creating a night inside the room to match the night outside.

  "The Austrians, the Americans," she spat out, "can't protect Svetochka from you!"

  "From me?" The Potter moved toward her, intending to take her in his arms, fumble for a breast, apologize profusely for existing.

  Svetochka shrank back against a wall. She had always been aroused by the Potter's potential for violence; aroused even more by her ability to control it, tame him. But she had lost the thread of confidence. She stared across the room, imagining the Potter's hands molding themselves around her neck. Now that she knew they had been used to strangle someone, her skin crawled, her heart ached at the idea of being caressed by them. "Don't come near Svetochka," she whispered fiercely.

  "What do you think I will do to you?" the Potter demanded.

  Svetochka's breath came in short, desperate gasps. She fumbled for words. "I think maybe . . . you will . . . hurt . . . Svetochka."

  The Potter's voice filtered out of the darkness as if it were a faint suggestion of light. "Are you afraid of night, Svetochka? Are you afraid of death?"

  From the shadows along the wall, Svetochka moaned. "Aren't you?"

  The Potter felt for the wall switch, found it, illuminated the filaments in the tiny flame-shaped bulbs in the overhead chandelier. In his official capacity as novator, he had once asked Piotr Borisovich the very same question. I live by Jung's dictum, his last, his best sleeper had replied without hesitation. Jung's dictum? (The Potter hadn't been familiar with it, Jung being persona non grata in the Soviet Union.) That the second part of life is ruined, Piotr Borisovich had explained, his head cocked, his eyes studying the novator, unless we are prepared to welcome death. "I welcome death," the Potter told Svetochka now, "as another in a long line of possible solutions to my problem."

  After a while Svetochka calmed down, though she grew tense when he got up to turn out the overhead bulbs; the filaments of light had become linked to the filaments of Svetochka's sanity. Seeing the expression on her face, the Potter left the light on.

  Thursday rang up on the house phone to see how they were getting along.

  The Potter told him they were getting along nicely, thank you. Thursday asked if they lacked anything, anything at all. All they had to do was name it, he insisted, giggling nervously through the phone. You are too kind for words, the Potter responded in the tight voice that indicated he had taken an important decision. When Thursday hung up, the Potter announced he was going to shower, and beckoned Svetochka to follow him.

  In the bathroom he turned on the hot and cold taps full force to mask his voice from the microphones that were bound to be planted. He brought his lips close to Svetochka's ear. "I am leaving," he told her.

  "Leaving?"

  "Leaving you. Leaving here."

  Relief swept through Svetochka's body at the thought of being rid of him. "Where will you go?" she whispered back.

  The word emerged from the back of the Potter's consciousness.

  "Anywhere," he said.

  "You said the hotel was guarded," Svetochka said. She was desperate for him to be gone. The idea of being touched by him sent pulses of fear up her spine. "You think they'll let you simply walk out of here?"

  "I have a plan," the Potter confided, and drawing her closer to the water gushing from the ornate taps, he told her what it was.

  Her first screams, hollow shrieks that sounded as if they had originated in a tunnel, echoed through the corridor shortly after midnight.

  Thursday, barefoot, wearing a flowery silk ankle-length robe, scampered over from his room down the hall and pounded on the door. The Austrian squad leader and the four heavies on the night shift turned up moments later. All five had drawn their pistols. Svetochka, still screaming, threw open the door. She was stark naked. "We were making love," she gasped, flinging one hand modestly over her full breasts.

  Thursday's eyes bulged even more than they usually did. "Calm yourself,"

  he shouted excitedly in his Brooklyn-accented Russian.

  Svetochka, the amateur actress, got a grip on herself. "I went into the bathroom to perform an act of feminine hygiene," she said with dignity.

  "When I returned to the bedroom-" She began sobbing, abandoning her breasts and covering her eyes with her hands to hide the lack of tears.

  Thursday brushed past her into the bedroom. The Austrians crowded in after him. The bay window was wide open, the curtains billowing inward in the night air. "The son of a bitch jumped!" Thursday exclaimed. He gripped the sill and leaned over it. The gutter was illuminated by an old-fashioned curved lamp protruding from the wall of the hotel.

  Thursday stared at the street, trying to make out the spread-eagled body on the cobblestones. He wondered how the Sisters would take the news of the death of the Potter. The Austrian squad leader, leaning out of the window next to Thursday, muttered, "Est niemand unten," He's right, Thursday realized. There was no body to be seen in the street below. He and the Austrian squad leader turned back to the room to question Svetochka.

  Six floors below, the heavy front door of the small hotel on the quiet street opened, and a short, thick-set, dwarfish figure emerged. He was carrying a small American valise in his right hand. He appeared to hesitate for the barest traction of a second, angling up his face to the night as if it were tangible, like rain; as if he intended to quench a thirst from it. Then he turned on his heel and strode off briskly up the incline toward the all-night taxi ramp at the edge of the Kingstrasse.

  BOOK II

  Death

  Of course I can, Appleyard asserted. I can do anything, I can do snow falling. I can do smoke rising. I can do the sun setting. I can do someone dying. The last two are actually very similar. . . .

  The American agent known to the Cousins by the code name Khanda picked up his visa from the Mexican consulate in New Orleans the, last week in September, on the clay the newspapers first ran the item about the forthcoming visit of the Prince of the Realm to a particular city.

  Travelling, under the alias of Alek James Hidell, he set out by bus for Laredo, Texas, then strolled across to Nuevo Laredo and continued on in a Mexican bus.

  Once in Mexico City, Khanda made contact with his Cuban cutout, Normally all contacts between Khanda and his Merchant were handled by the Cubans.

  But because the assignment was so sensitive, the rule was ignored and the Cuban set up with the Russians. There were two of them. The first, named Vladimir Volkov, was the Department 13 man in Mexico. The other, the, younger of the two Cousins who ran Department 13, had flown to Mexico especially for this meeting.

  The first session took place in a seedy motel near the city's airport.

  The Cubans provided warm bodies to seal off the area. The Russians turned up with a bottle of decent Polish vodka and a five-hundred-gram tin of black beluga caviar. Khanda had grown particularly fond of caviar during the two years he had spent in Russia, so the meeting got off on the right foot.

  Khanda was five feet, ten inches in height, lean, wiry even, with a look of grim determination etched into the thin lines of his mouth. He impressed people ay being sulky, but the very few who knew him more than casually saw him as someone with a permanent chip on his shoulder, a score to settle.

  Speaking Russian, the three chatted about Khanda's life, in America. The Russians asked whether his wife had any idea of what he was up to. He assured them she didn't. She knew about the clip-fed rifle, fitted with the telescopic sight, that he had bought from a mail order
house in Chicago, but she believed his story that he used it for target practice.

  The Cousin broached the delicate subject of what had gone wrong the previous spring when Khanda tried to assassinate an outspoken anti-Castro military officer. "It was night," Khanda told them with a nervous shrug. "I couldn't see too well. I missed."

  The Russians, both of whom were experienced in handling Department 13

  field men, were careful not to bruise his ego. "It could happen to anyone," the Cousin said sympathetically.

  Khanda produced the article he had clipped from the newspaper, and they talked at length about the Prince's forthcoming visit. Volkov flattened a detailed map of the city on a table, weighing down the corners with ashtrays. The three of them pored over it. Experts had studied the situation, the Cousin said. They had decided that there were two ways for the Prince to reach the luncheon site from the airport. He traced the routes with his thumb. The Prince could go down Main Street, turn onto the boulevard and proceed directly to the site. Or he could jog, right off Main onto Elm Street, then head for the freeway and the site.

  "What you must do," the younger Cousin said, "is go there and study the two routes carefully."

  Khanda, who had been trained at Department 13's secret espionage school outside of Minsk, squinted at the map as if it were a landscape and he was a gardener. "I have to find work in a building that will give me a clean shot at him no matter which of the two routes he chooses," he said.

  They discussed, in very general terms, angles of fire, distances at which the Italian rifle fitted with the telescopic sight could be considered accurate, how many shots Khanda might reasonably expect to fire, escape routes from the scene of the crime and, eventually, from the country.

  The room grew dark as the sun disappeared behind the airport hangars.

  Volkov drew the shades and switched on several lights. The younger Cousin handed Khanda an envelope fitted with American money. "There's not too much in it because we don't want you to draw attention to yourself," he explained.

  Khanda smiled faintly. "I don't need much," he said.

  Volkov said, "you have two months to organize things."

  Khanda said, "That should give me enough time."

  The younger Cousin said, "We all know you're the best man for the job."

  "If anybody can pull this off," Volkov chimed in, "it's you."

  "I'll do my best to justify your confidence," Khanda said.

  The younger Cousin accepted this with an appreciative nod.

  It had been a long time since the Potter's last, best sleeper had been called by his Russian name; so long, in fact, that to his own ear it didn't seem to refer to him anymore. His papers referred to him as Raven, a name that the Potter hadn't liked at all (even though it had the advantage of being close to his real name of Revkin) when they were working up his legend back in the sleeper school in Moscow. I would prefer something more common, the Potter had said, by which he meant a name that filled several columns, several pages even, in the local phone book, and he had come up with half a dozen suggestions: Carter, Jackson, Livingstone, Parker, Taylor, Turner. But Piotr Borisovich had insisted.

  It's me who has to live with the name, he had argued, so it's important I feel comfortable with it.

  In the end the Potter had agreed reluctantly to "Raven," the name of the killer in Graham Greene's This Gun for Hire. To Piotr Borisovich, Greene's Raven had something of a fallen angel about him, which is roughly how he saw himself; like the Greene character, he fancied he came equipped with a sense of morality that belonged to another time, another place, which was a roundabout way of saying that he couldn't control what century he happened to have been born in, that it wasn't his fault if morally speaking he had to improvise.

  For a long time Piotr Borisovich had been delighted with his new name, and the fallen-angel status that went with it. "Peter Raven," he would introduce himself boldly to women, doffing his hat, cocking his head, smiling with his eyes until little fanlike wrinkles formed at their corners. In recent weeks, though, for reasons he had not yet put his finger on, he had taken to whispering his old name to himself when he was alone, like some high priest murmuring the sacred name of God in the holy of holies so that the correct pronunciation would not be lost to posterity.

  "Piotr Borisovich Revkin," the Sleeper whispered now, articulating each syllable.

  "What was that?" Kaat called down. She was leaning over the banister at the top of the stairs, a forefinger nervously curled through the necklace of worry beads dangling from her neck. The blue point with the gray nose and gray paws sprawled at her feet, peering down, looking from one to the other as if she could follow the conversation.

  "What are you doing here?" the Sleeper demanded. "You're supposed to be at work." He looked at her sharply. "Are you spying on me?"

  "I thought I heard you say something," Kaat explained. She began to nibble on a fingernail.

  "You're biting your nail again," the Sleeper told her.

  "I'm hungry," Kaat said.

  "You're nervous," the Sleeper corrected her.

  "Have it your way," Kaat said. "What were you saying?"

  "If it makes any difference, I said you were particularly imaginative last night," the Sleeper said. Again little wrinkles spread out from the corners of his eyes.

  "Liar!" Kaat shot back. Then, "You think so?"

  "I think so," the Sleeper acknowledged.

  "How did you find Millie?" Kaat challenged.

  "Millie I found . . . conventionally violent," the Sleeper replied thoughtfully.

  "You like violence, don't you?' Kaat commented in a melancholy undertone.

  "I like sex," the Sleeper corrected her, "and to the degree that violence is related to it, I appreciate violence."

  The Potter, too, probably because of his own relationship with that bitch of a wife of his, had several times, in his conversations with the Sleeper, referred to the relationship between sex and violence. It turns you on, he had once suggested. (He had arranged for one of the Center's female stringers to come up to the Sleeper's apartment the night before, and was surveying the damage the morning after.) You mean violence turns me on to sex? the Sleeper had asked. I mean sex turns you on to violence, the Potter had said. The Sleeper had nodded moodily, acknowledging the insight. I'd give my right arm to know why you recruited me for the sleeper school, he had said suddenly; it was not something they had talked about before. I recruited you, the Potter had informed him, because you are a man of strengths. The Sleeper couldn't restrain a snicker. I see myself as a man of weaknesses, he had said, surveying the apartment in disgust. But the Potter had only shaken his head knowingly. Your principal strength, he had remarked, is that you are aware of your weaknesses.

  "God knows why I go on living with you," Kaat called down from the banister.

  The Sleeper shrugged. "Nobody's forcing you."

  "Here's the thing," Kaat burst out. "I like the sense of mystery you convey. That's what drew me to you in the first place, the feeling that I could peel layers of you away, as if you were an onion, and never get to a center. But I admit it: sometimes you drive me straight up the wall." She started to bite a nail again, caught his look and stopped.

  Wearing Indian sandals, a copper-colored miniskirt and a tie-dyed Tshirt with the word "Maybe" stencilled across the front, Kaat scooped up her cat (which she called Meow) and came tripping down the stairs. "I'm off to the mortuary," she announced, massaging her forehead with her thumb and third finger as if she were keeping a migraine at bay.

  "Why don't you leave the cat home for once?" the Sleeper asked.

  Kaat shook her head. "She doesn't like to be separated from me. You know that."

  The Sleeper said, "I don't know how you do what you do."

  "It's a job like any other," Kaat said. "Setting the hair of dead people pays better than setting the hair of the living. And it's a great comfort to the relatives to see their loved ones looking lifelike.

  Besides, I d
on't consider dead people dead. They're just in passage between two incarnations. ' Kaat turned back at the front door. The cat, nestled in the crook of an elbow, purred with a dignified rolling of R's. "I almost forgot," Kaat said. "A letter came for you this morning.

  I left it in the salad bowl in the kitchen on top of Millie's birth-control pills." She smiled hesitantly in the Sleeper's direction. "I passed my ring over your horoscope again," she told him.

  "And?"

  "It's pretty much what I told you last night. From the twenty-seventh of this month until the thirteenth of October, you are particularly vulnerable to anaxiphilia-"

  "Another one of your A words," he moaned.

  "Millie gave it to me last week. She found it in a movie-magazine horoscope. It means the falling in love with a schnook by someone who ought to know better."

  "I don't see myself falling in love with anyone," said the Sleeper.

  You will never fall in love, the Potter had once told Piotr Borisovich after they had had a bit too much vodka at a private military restaurant. Falling in love is needing someone, and the only person you need is yourself.

  "I don't see you needing anyone either," Kaat told him now. He glanced quickly at her, but she was already changing the subject. "As for your physical safety, you should be particularly prudent on the ides. This month's are past, happily for you. October's come on the fifteenth.

  November's are on the thirteenth. Also, watch out for vicious circles."

  "How can you tell a vicious circle from a normal circle?" the Sleeper asked sarcastically.

  "All circles," Kaat snapped with a flash of temper- how could he be so thick as not to see it?-"are potentially vicious." Smiling vaguely at a fleeting thought, tucking the cat firmly under her arm, she disappeared out of the door.

  The Sleeper shook his head in frustration. She wasn't the easiest person in the world to live with, this catlike Kaat with her collection of words beginning in A and the sunken eyes that stared out with an almost mystical intensity at the world she could never quite get a handle on.