The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "Here's the thing, W.A.," she said when she could get a word in, and she went on to tell him why she had called. For reasons she couldn't explain just now, she and a friend were trying to track down another friend in a hotel somewhere in Pennsylvania. The only clues they had came from a woman who said that the hotel was in Holland, that they were in seventh heaven with birds flying through the corridors.

  W.A. let out a howl at the other end of the phone. "Heck, I played that joint three, four years ago," he cried. "The owner is a certified maniac about birds. He has got dozens of them zooming around the halls. One of them even shat on my guitar while I was singing. Got me such a laugh I tried to incorporate it in my act, but I couldn't get the goddamned bird to shit twice in the same place."

  "(You actually know where this hotel is?" Kaat asked.

  " 'Course I know. Holland is the nickname of a county outside of Lancaster, in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. The hotel is called Seventh Heaven."

  "Can you do someone going to a refrigerator for a glass of milk?" asked Sergeant Major.

  "He can fucking do anything," Ourcq, in a sour mood, muttered under his breath.

  They had arrived at Seventh Heaven just as the Sleeper was checking out.

  Ourcq took one look at the birds perched around the lobby and the birdshit stains on the carpets and announced he was ready to follow the Sleeper. Appleyard had to remind him of the pertinent rule in the standard operating procedures for sweepers: when you are sweeping someone's wake, you have to linger twenty-four hours after he leaves to make sure he is clean.

  Appleyard took a sip of his Scotch on the rocks to moisten his lips.

  Drumming the balls of his fingers on the top of the bar, he produced footsteps approaching the refrigerator. With a sharp cluck of his tongue he made the sound of the door being opened. He snapped his fingernail against the whiskey glass to duplicate the sound of the milk bottle being taken out. Blowing through puckered lips, he imitated milk being poured into a glass. Sucking in air, he produced the sound of drinking.

  And he capped it all with a genuine belch of pleasure.

  Sergeant Major and a young couple at the bar applauded. "He's really good," the woman insisted to her husband. "He could be on television."

  Ourcq looked at the time on the woman's watch on his wrist, then glanced through the arch into the lobby and spotted the girl at the front desk.

  She had a pussycat tucked under her right arm as if it were a rolled-up newspaper. "Imitate the sound of a rucking pistol with a fucking silencer attached going off," Ourcq instructed Appleyard, and he gestured with his eyes toward the lobby.

  Appleyard peered over Ourcq's shoulder-and with a spitting sound produced the effect Ourcq had asked for.

  In the lobby, the desk clerk brushed away a bird that had landed on the register and shook his head. Are you sure? the girl seemed to be saying.

  Even at this distance, it was evident that she was disappointed. The desk clerk shook his head again. He was probably telling her that the person in question hadn't left a forwarding address. Ourcq laughed to himself. Some people didn't like pussycats following them.

  The cat, surveying the world from under the girl's arm, stared wide-eyed at a bird that planed past its head. The cat's tail spiraled up playfully. The girl snapped at the cat and turned back toward the front door.

  "It is time for us to leave this fucking Seventh Heaven," Ourcq told Appleyard. He peeled off some bills and deposited them on the bar.

  "Can you do a deep-sea diver surfacing?" the woman at the bar asked Appleyard.

  "Can you do a bird pulling a worm from its hole?" asked Sergeant Major.

  "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. Only I don't maybe have time right now." With that, he gulped down the rest of his Scotch, set the glass back on the bar and trailed after Ourcq toward the door.

  The Potter, not Kaat, happened to be driving, which is what saved their lives, He had been watching the headlights overtaking them in the rearview mirror. For some reason it made him think of Oskar's taxi worming its way along Zubovsky Boulevard from the Krimsky Bridge. When the car that was overtaking them pulled abreast on a straight stretch of road, and then stayed abreast, the skin on the back of the Potter's neck crawled; once again his body knew before he did. He glanced sideways and noticed it was a black Dodge with two men in the front seat. One of them was pointing at him, and then the Potter knew what his body knew.

  "Sweepers!" he muttered as his foot shot out and jammed down on the brake.

  He never heard the shot. The only evidence that one had been fired was the neat hole that appeared in the window on the Potter's side of the car, and an instant later a second hole that turned up in the window on Kaat's side, inches in front of the Potter and Kaat. The Potter, behind the Dodge now, swerved to the left just as a second bullet drilled a small hole in the front window and buried itself in the rear seat above the head of the sleeping cat.

  Kaat gasped and brought a fingernail to her lips. "What's-" (Later, when she recalled what had happened, she would comment on the Potter's ataraxia- utter calmness.)

  The Potter accelerated and brought the Chevrolet hurtling up to the Dodge, and into it. The man twisting in the passenger seat trying to squeeze off a shot through his own rear window was flung sideways against the door. The driver spun his steering wheel to the right and braked in order to skid his car to a stop and block the road. He would have succeeded, except that he skidded half a yard too far. The Potter spotted a gap between the back of the Dodge and the nearest trees and drove his Chevrolet through it. The left wheels climbed up onto a shoulder, the car teetered, Kaat screamed. In the back seat the cat landed on all four feet on the side window. Then the Chevrolet sank back down on its four wheels and hurtled away from the Dodge behind them.

  The Potter, leaning forward, peering into the night, gripping the wheel intently, tried desperately to sort things out. He had a short lead on the Dodge, but they would back and fill and start after him in a matter of seconds, and he had no doubt that the Dodge could outrun the Chevrolet, Ahead, on the farthest edge of his high beams, he caught a glimpse of a narrow bridge and a highway marker indicating that an intersection was coming up right after it. The next instant the Chevrolet was rolling over the bridge, and the intersection was looming ahead. In his rearview mirror the Potter caught sight of two dancing pinpoints of light. His hand shot out and pushed in a knob, cutting his own headlights. Night enveloped them, shrouded them, smothered them.

  Kaat whimpered some words, but the Potter didn't try to understand what she was saying. When he judged that they were almost up to the intersection, he braked and spun the wheel to the right and then speeded up again, expecting any instant that the Chevrolet would come crashing to a stop against the trunk of a tree. Through the front window he could make out a faint ribbon of grayness stretched ahead; under the wheels he could feel the smoothness of a road. He cut the engine and braked, more gently this time, and brought the car to a dead stop.

  "Don't make a sound, don't move, if you please," the Potter whispered fiercely, and flinging open the door, he plunged from the car. He tugged his Beretta from his jacket pocket and pulled back the slide on the top of the barrel, chambering a round, and started back up the road toward the intersection. Thoughts, plots, plans, possibilities raced through his mind; his life, Kaat's also, would depend on his calculations being correct. Ahead, the Dodge squealed to a stop at the intersection. So far, so good. The two men in it would cut their engine and turn off their own headlights and get out of the car, each on his side, and peer in the three directions the Chevrolet could have gone for a glimpse of a taillight, the sound of a racing motor.

  Suddenly a single powerful beam stabbed out into the night from the Dodge, and the Potter realized with a start that the car was equipped with a spotlight. It swept the road ahead, t
hen swivelled past nearby tree trunks and bushes and leapt forward to illuminate the road to the left of the Dodge. The Potter knew he had only a few seconds left before the spot stabbed down the road he was on and pinned him in its beam. He lurched forward a few paces, then sank heavily to one knee, and gripping the Beretta with both hands, aimed. The spotlight began to swivel past trees in his direction. Squeeze, don't jerk the trigger, he shouted at himself in his head, and he willed his muscles to go through the motions slowly. Just as the light blinded him, he fired two quick shots. Glass shattered. Light ceased to exist. The Potter fired twice more at the part of the Dodge's silhouette where the front wheel would be, and heard a soft hissing sound. At the front door of the Dodge, several small sparks, as momentary and as bright as flashing fireflies, speckled the darkness, followed by spitting noises, and there was a scratching in the road just to the Potter's left, as if someone were trying to strike a safety match against it. The Potter leapt to one side and lumbered back along the soft shoulder away from the Dodge and its fireflies, toward the Chevrolet. Behind him doors slammed. Someone kicked a tire and cursed. The Potter could hear footfalls as two men started trotting down the road after him.

  Winded, the Potter came up to the Chevrolet and dived into the driver's seat and hit the starter. The motor coughed into life. Grinding the Chevrolet into gear, the Potter let the car leap forward. Something punctured the car's trunk compartment with a whine. Then the Potter was in second gear and the car was rolling smoothly and the gap between the fireflies in his rearview mirror and them widened. The Potter sucked air into his bursting lungs and looked at Kaat to see if she were all right, but she was trembling and staring back over her shoulder with an infinitely sad look in her eyes. Following her glance, the Potter caught sight of the small bloodstained body of Kaat's Meow lying like a discarded fur mitten on the rear seat.

  "I wonder," Kaat said in an almost inaudible voice, "what she will turn up as in her next incarnation."

  Khanda slid into the booth across from the portly man whose name was Rubenstein. They were about a mile and a half from the downtown wart, in a zone where an ordinance was in force banning liquor that was paid for by the drink. Hence the charade that this was a private club, and the people in it regular members. In fact, anyone could buy a membership at the door for an evening, and the price translated into a certain number of free drinks. The police gave the club a wide berth (except when they changed into civilian clothes and turned up for some drinks on the house) because Rubenstein had a reputation for being generous when it came to slipping small envelopes into jacket pockets at police headquarters.

  Eyeing Khanda across the table, Rubenstein mumbled something about his not being at all what he expected.

  "What did you expect," Khanda asked.

  "Considering what you are going to do, someone a bit older, more worldly," Rubenstein admitted.

  Khanda shrugged. Rubenstein asked how much progress he had made. Khanda told him about the job he had gotten in the warehouse. He had scouted the upper floors, he said, and he thought he had found the perfect sniper's nest, one that would give him at least three shots at the target as the limousine was moving almost directly away from him.

  "What about the getaway?" Rubenstein inquired.

  "What about the getaway?" Khanda shot back. "That's supposed to be your bailiwick."

  "If you can get out of the building, I can get you out of the country,"

  Rubenstein promised.

  Khanda said he thought there would be enough confusion after the shooting for him to make it down a back staircase to the street before the police could figure out where the shots had come from and seal off the building.

  "Have you timed it?" Rubenstein asked.

  "Not yet," Khanda admitted. "But I figure if I abandon the rifle instead of trying to hide it, I can be out of there in a matter of minutes."

  "You have to walk out so you don't attract attention to yourself,"

  Rubenstein cautioned.

  "I'm not stupid," Khanda said.

  Rubenstein asked what kind of rifle Khanda planned to use. He had been associated with the Chicago underworld before he was recruited by the Russians, and knew a thing or two about firearms.

  Khanda told him about the rifle he had bought through a mail-order house. "At the distance I plan to shoot from," he said, "I'll have trouble missing."

  Rubenstein nodded. "In the right hands the rifle should be deadly," he agreed. He pushed aside the Scotch glasses and unfolded a small map of the city on the table. "After the shooting, you board a bus here," he said, pointing to an intersection not far from the assassination site.

  '"You get off here. Then you walk toward my apartment, which is here.

  I'll pick you up in my car and drive you to a private airport outside the city. Our mutual friends will have a small plane waiting to take us to Mexico. I've dealt drugs in Mexico. I know my way around there. From Mexico, our Cuban friends will get you by boat to Cuba, and from there, by an Aeroflot flight, to Moscow."

  Khanda studied the map. "It looks good," he said, nodding. "It looks very good."

  "It always looks good," Rubenstein said moodily, "until something unexpected happens. The main thing is for you not to panic. If you can make it to where I can find you, I can guarantee I'll get you to Moscow."

  Khanda sipped his drink. Rubenstein asked Khanda if he had any other questions. "This is the moment to ask them," he said, "since it would be wiser if we never met again."

  "When I was in that school of theirs in Minsk," Khanda ventured, "we learned that assassins always work in pairs. Have you heard any talk about someone else having the same assignment as me?"

  "As far as I know," Rubenstein assured Khanda, "you're all alone in this."

  Khanda seemed relieved. "Well," he said, "I guess that covers just about everything," and he smiled boyishly and spread his hands.

  To Rubenstein he looked like a traveling salesman who had wound up his pitch. "Good luck and all that sort of thing," he told him.

  They shook hands. Khanda slid out of the seat, and hiking up his trousers, strode through the semidarkness of the club toward the street door. Rubenstein stared after him. He had to admit it, he didn't much like the look of him. There was an arrogance to his eyes, an iciness to the set of his lips that disturbed Rubenstein, left him with a bad taste in his mouth. Well, so much the better. It would only make carrying out his instructions that much easier.

  If for some reason he couldn't organize Khanda's escape, he was under orders to organize his death.

  G. Sprowls was not a happy man. Normally his superiors left him with a free hand when it came to conducting interrogations. He set the pace: he delivered the goodies. This time, however, they were putting pressure on him. Nobody came right out and told him to speed things up. Rather there were subtle hints- delivered almost daily-that speed was essential.

  Various highly placed people would phone to see if progress had been made. There would be pregnant pauses on the other end of the line when G. Sprowls hedged. The impression would then be conveyed that time was of the essence. If, as the superficial facts seemed to suggest, the Sisters had set in motion an operation on their own, the aristocrats in the Company's front office wanted to know about it, and fast. The point being that they could then exercise the option of either cancelling it-or taking credit for it.

  Which is why G. Sprowls decided, several days before he was as ready as he would have liked to be, that the time had come to hook Francis up to a lie detector.

  "I thought you said you wouldn't get around to this until the end of the week," Francis remarked absently as the technician inflated the rubber tube around his chest that would measure his breathing rhythm. Francis might have been getting his annual electrocardiogram for all the attention he paid.

  G. Sprowls disregarded the comment, as usual. "Is that too tight?" he asked, his half-smile frozen on his face.

  "Not at all," Francis said politely.

  The technici
an, a man in his early sixties, hovered over the black box so that he could read the trace produced by the three styluses. "Anytime you are, I am,' he told G. Sprowls.

  "For what it's worth," Francis said pleasantly, "I am ready too."

  G. Sprowls turned to the first page in his loose-leaf book. He studied what he had written for several minutes, then nodded at the technician, who threw a switch setting the styluses in motion. "We'll begin with some control questions, if you don't mind," G. Sprowls said. "Would you be so kind as to state your full name as it appears on your birth certificate."

  "Francis Augustus," Francis said, and he added his family name.

  "State your marital status."

  Francis adjusted the knot of his mauve bow tie. "Happily, blissfully, single," he replied.

  "State your age, your home address, the model of the car you drive."

  II am, at last count, forty-four years of age. I live at-" He gave the address of his downtown residence hotel. "I am the proud owner of a rather beat-up but serviceable fifty-nine Ford."

  The technician looked up from the trace and nodded.

  "We will turn now," G. Sprowls said, "to the details surrounding the defection from Russia of Feliks Arkantevich Turov, known also as the Potter."

  "By all means," Francis agreed heartily.

  "Will you tell us where the idea that the Potter might want to defect originated?"

  "Either Carroll or I, I forget who, noticed an item in one of the West German Y summaries that mentioned that Turov had been put out to pasture. We had more or less followed his career; we were, you might say, fans of his. We knew he had suffered a series of setbacks in recent months."

  "Can you he more specific?" G. Sprowls ordered,

  "I can try to be," Francis agreed, flashing an innocent smile. "Three of the sleepers that Turov had trained had bitten the dust, as they say in the wild west. Turov was bound to be blamed for their loss."