The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  The Potter stepped out into the street to see the time atop the brick warehouse at the end of Elm Street.

  "Thirteen minutes to twelve," he said when he returned to the sidewalk.

  He made a quick calculation. "I am counting on the car to get the Sleeper to safety," he told Kaat. "Go back in and tell them you are in a hurry. Tell them you will give them twenty dollars if they will change the tire and get the Chrysler down quickly."

  Kaat ducked back into the garage. The Putter paced up and down the sidewalk in front of it. Every once in a while he would step into the gutter and glance nervously at the time atop the brick warehouse. At one minute after twelve, Kaat appeared at the entrance of the garage. "They say they're bringing it down any minute," she called. She hunched her shoulders in frustration and returned to the garage.

  On the side street that led to Main Street, the police were starting to drag wooden barriers over to block cross traffic. The Potter looked at the clock on the roof of the warehouse again. He had just made up his mind to go on foot and let Kaat follow him in the Chrysler when she dashed out of the garage. "It's on the elevator," she called, and raced back in.

  It was twelve-seventeen when Kaat gunned the Chrysler out of the garage into Elm Street. The Potter jumped into the passenger seat. Before the door had slammed shut, Kaat had thrown the car into gear and started north so that they could come around behind the warehouse to the parking lot where, according to the Potter, the Sleeper would just be taking up position behind the hedges.

  Khanda felt as if time were trickling away in a kind of suspended slow motion. When he held his wristwatch to his ear to check if it was stilt working, the spaces between the seconds seemed to be abnormally long,, as if the moment were so exquisite it had to be drawn out. He glanced back at the cartons he had dragged over to form a wall so that anyone who happened to mount to the sixth floor wouldn't catch sight of him sitting in front of the partly open window, the homemade sling of his Italian military rifle wrapped around his left arm. The act of entwining himself in the sling had created the final intimacy between the shooter and the rifle-from that moment on, there had been no turning back.

  He had decided to stay well away from the window when the motorcade appeared out of Main Street and headed directly for the warehouse, to reduce the possibility that any of the security people accompanying the Prince might spot him up ahead. Only when the limousine turned under the warehouse and started toward the overpass and the freeway, when the security people had their backs to the warehouse, would he move into firing position. He had placed three cartons on the floor next to the window, one on top of the other, and he planned to brace the rifle on the top box when he shot.

  Outside, the canyons of Main Street formed a giant echo chamber.

  Somewhere up this echo chamber, people were cheering. It sounded to Khanda like surf beating against a distant shore. He worked the bolt of the rifle, throwing the first round into the chamber. Then he brought his wristwatch to his ear again. The spaces between the ticks seemed even longer than before

  No matter. In a minute or two he would speed time up. He would accelerate it into chaos.

  Slipping through the open parking lot behind the line of hedges, his viola-da-gamba case tucked casually under one arm, the Sleeper sensed the wave of excitement approaching, like a groundswell, from Main Street. From his experiences in the war, he knew that he would soon reorder reality. When you looked at someone with the naked eye, you automatically put him into context; you related him to the world around.

  But when you observed someone through a scope fixed on top of a rifle, you detached him from the world around you, you isolated him; you created a very special relationship between the two of you, even if only one of you was aware of it.

  The first vehicle in the motorcade emerged from the Main Street canyon.

  The Sleeper, alone at the edge of the parking lot, crouched and rested the viola-da-gamha case on the ground and undid the catches that held the lid. Cheers welled up from the crowd as the Prince's limousine came into view, then slowly jogged right toward the warehouse.

  Moving with the deliberation of a sleepwalker, the Sleeper prepared the instrument that would detach the Prince from reality.

  The Potter and Kaat had been delayed by the traffic backed up on Houston Street. It was twelve-twenty-nine by the time Kaat maneuvered the Chrysler into the parking lot behind the warehouse. "Wait here, if you please," the Potter instructed Kaat with unaccustomed sharpness, and he leapt from the car and darted between the parked automobiles toward the row of hedges at the far end of the lot.

  On the street below, the Prince's limousine jogged left underneath the slightly open window on the sixth floor of the warehouse and headed toward the freeway. The Prince lifted a hand and waved at the people lining the route, and the crowd cheered back.

  Crouched amid the hedges, the Sleeper worked the bolt, throwing a round into the chamber. Then he raised the sniper scope to his eye and sighted on the jugular of the target coming into view.

  Breathing heavily, the Potter came around the front of a pickup truck and saw the familiar figure crouching in the hedges ahead, the right knee on the ground, the left elbow braced on the raised left knee, the rifle extended in the classical firing position used by the Red Army.

  "Piotr Borisovich," the Potter gasped, and then he filled his lungs with air and opened his mouth and cried out the name of the son he had always wanted with all the force he could find in his body. "Piotr Borisovichr But even to his own ear his voice seemed lost in the roar of the crowd saluting the passage of the Prince.

  At the mouth of the Main Street canyon, on the steps of the old sandstone courthouse, G. Sprawls was about to turn to the Sisters and make an ironic comment about the best-laid plans of mice and men when the sharp crack of a rifle, a dry twig snapping in a forest, echoed over the heads of the crowd. On the roof of the warehouse, several hundred pigeons nesting in the abandoned boiler swarmed into the sky in panic.

  A second twig snapped.

  And then a third.

  And the world was accelerated into chaos.

  "It came from the warehouse,' Carroll blurted out excitedly. His cheek muscles went on a rampage. "I knew in my bones he would pick the warehouse."

  On the street, the crowd spilled away in every direction. Several people fell to the ground screaming. A policeman pointed toward an upper floor of the warehouse.

  "The first shot came from the grassy knoll," G. Sprowls said matter-of-factly. "I spotted the smoke from the cartridge." As if to prove his point, a motorcycle policeman skidded his machine onto the sidewalk below the hedges, and drawing his pistol, charged up the incline.

  "My God," Francis said, "that means that there must have been two people shooting!"

  For once, there was not the faintest trace of pained innocence on his face.

  The moment was electrically charged. No one seemed quite sure what role to play. There was a father and a son, a teacher and a pupil, a betrayer and a betrayed; even a savior and a saved.

  The Sleeper stared out of the window of Combes's Retreat at the prairie.

  "So you told them what they wanted to know," he was saying.

  It had never occurred to the Potter that he would have to justify himself to the Sleeper when he caught up with him. "Please put yourself in my shoes," he pleaded. "I had no choice. They would have loaded us on the next plane to Moscow. Aside from everything else, there was the body at the airport to answer for." Fie lifted an empty coffee cup, unconsciously measuring the thickness of its walls between his thumb and third finger. "I had Svetochka to think of," he added plaintively.

  "And yourself," the Sleeper answered harshly. "Let us not forget yourself. '

  "Since when is it a crime to think of yourself?" the Potter retorted.

  The Sleeper turned on his teacher. "It is a crime for a teacher to betray his student."

  "And what do you call it when the student betrays his teacher?" the Potter demanded. "Yo
u who are so offended by betrayals-tell me that if you can."

  "So you found out about me and Svetochka," the Sleeper said wearily.

  "Everyone was sleeping with her, Feliks."

  "I knew that everyone was sleeping with her. I didn't know that you were."

  The Sleeper drifted across the room, and then back to the bay window.

  "One thing has nothing to do with the other," he said finally. "Sleeping with Svetochka was an act without consequences-for me, for her, for you as long as you didn't know about it. But betraying me to an enemy service was pregnant with consequences. ' He turned his back on the Potter and breathed on the windowpane, fogging it. "If only I had known my father was dead . . ."

  "I was trying to catch up with you to tell you," the Potter whispered.

  "He was dead, and you were free."

  "Here's the thing," Kaat said. "It is frustrating enough to listen to the two of you argue. But to hear you argue in Russian is pure torture."

  "Even if we spoke in English," the Potter told her, his eyes glued on the Sleeper, "there are things you wouldn't understand."

  "He is not the hero he makes himself out to be," the Sleeper informed Kaat. "He betrayed me to get himself and his wife out of Russia."

  "Then he crossed the Atlantic and trailed after you across America to try to save you," Kaat said. She looked from one to the other. "Don't you see, you're turning in circles." She stared the Sleeper in the eye.

  "Vicious circles! What's done is done. The important thing is to look ahead, not back."

  The Potter shook his head sadly. "You have it wrong. Piotr Borisovich has it right," he told her. "In order to look ahead, we must first look back." And he quoted Akhmatova's line, " 'My future is in my past.' "

  The Sleeper nodded grimly. "We must settle the business of the betrayal before we move on," he insisted. He turned to the Potter and switched into Russian. "You expect me to fall on my knees and thank you for saving me." The Potter started to interrupt, but the Sleeper cut him off with a snap of his hand. "Don't deny it-it is written on your face. None of this would have happened if you hadn't betrayed me in the first place. That's what I can't swallow, Feliks. In my mind's eye, I try to put myself in your shoes, I really do try. But I don't see myself betraying you to get myself out. I would have killed myself first."

  "You say that now," the Potter murmured- He held both hands to his stomach as if he had cramps. "But you can't be sure whose back you will climb on until you are at the foot of the wall."

  "I had faith in you," the Sleeper said. "You let me down."

  "I let myself down," the Potter observed acidly. He tried to muster a smile, but it only distorted his face more. "That's something else we have in common now," he added bitterly.

  "I may not understand a word you say," Kaat told the Sleeper, "but you are hurting him very much. He doesn't deserve that."

  The Sleeper eyed the Potter, then nodded. "I am willing to concede that you did try to undo the damage."

  The Potter moaned. "I did try,' he agreed, "but I failed."

  "Maybe not entirely," the Sleeper said. "You are absolutely sure that it was the Americans you betrayed me to?"

  "I was contacted by someone who called himself Oskar. He was probably German, and everyone knows the Americans have the Germans in their pocket," the Potter recounted. "In Vienna, I was debriefed by someone who spoke Russian with an American accent. In any case, the lengths they went to get me out, to get access to a sleeper, only make sense if you assume the Americans are behind the whole thing."

  "I might understand," Kaat announced in an exasperated voice. "If you spoke English, I might pick up a word now and then that seemed familiar."

  "Your theory," the Sleeper told the Potter, "is that the Americans awakened me and sent me on a mission so that I would be caught, and the Russians would be blamed."

  "That is what I thought," the Potter agreed.

  The Sleeper walked across the room and sat down at the small bridge table facing the Potter. "Do you still think it?" he asked.

  "I am less sure than before."

  "Because of the sweepers?"

  The Potter looked up sharply. "So you spotted them?"

  "I had a good teacher in such matters," the Sleeper said grudgingly.

  "The technique they used-lingering twenty-four hours-was straight out of the KGB sweeper manual."

  "We ran into them several times also," the Potter said. "The first time they killed her cat. The last time I shot one of them in the foot. That was in the storage room of a hotel." The Potter frowned. "I recognized the man I shot. I had seen him once before. In Moscow."

  The Sleeper's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Tiny wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Someone who didn't know him would have thought he was amused. "If the Americans were controlling me, as you say, how is it that the Russians were sweeping me? How did they know my route?"

  "That," the Potter said, "is what the Americans call the sixty-four-dollar question."

  "Go on speaking Russian if it gives you pleasure," Kaat snapped in annoyance. "To me it's all the same."

  "There's another thing," the Sleeper said. "When you arrived in Vienna, you gave the American who spoke Russian with an American accent the line of poetry from Walter Whitman. But how could the Americans know where I was? How could they know where to deliver the line of Whitman poetry?"

  "I told them," the Potter admitted morosely.

  "How did you know?"

  "From the picture postcard you sent me."

  "What picture postcard?"

  Now the Potter was staring at the Sleeper. The one showing the Walter Whitman plaque on the door of a house in Brooklyn Heights."

  The Sleeper said quietly, "I never sent you a picture postcard. It was against regulations to contact people in the homeland while on a mission. You know

  that.”

  "When you have finished with the past, Kaat muttered from the bed, "be sure to let me know."

  "You never finish with the past," the Potter told her. "You take it with you, like baggage."

  "Who did send me on this mission?" the Sleeper asked the Potter. "Who am I working for?"

  "Do you think it is important to find out?” the Potter asked.

  "If we don't find out' the Sleeper said, we risk going on without baggage."

  "If you don't talk English," Kaat said suddenly, "I'll scream!"

  The Potter smiled faintly at his last, his best sleeper. "I think I know what we can do to find out," he said,

  Kaat screamed.

  The building, lighted up like a Christmas tree, could have passed for an ocean liner in mid-Atlantic, a fact that several hands arriving late from various corners of the world would have commented on if they had had time. Which they didn't. The Prince of the Realm was dead. There was a suspect in the hands of the local police. There were rumors, fueled by vague reports of an entry wound in the throat, of a second shooter still at large, though cooler heads tended to discount this possibility-Sandwiches, beer, were ordered up, delivered by a downtown caterer with a security clearance. The bottoms of barrels were being scraped for leads, theories, coincidences, pieces out of place, people who had dropped from sight, others who were too conspicuously in sight. Anything and everything was being fed into the hopper.

  Except telegrams that weren't addressed to anyone or signed by anyone.

  "What you make of this?" the communications assistant, fresh from the Company's Farm and eager to be useful in a crisis, asked. The night watch, his head swimming from the message load, plucked it from the board. It had the look of a normal telegram; had in fact come in over the Western Union printer. " The hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly wash again comma and ever again comma this soil'd repeat soil'd world stop,' " the night watch read out loud.

  "Maybe it's a cipher." the communications assistant offered eagerly.

  "Sounds more like the ravings of some crank," the night watch said. He was about to throw it into the burn ba
sket when it occurred to him that the Company had in its employ two esoteric types known in the house as the sisters Death and Night. Could it be that the telegram was meant for them? "Listen up," the night watch instructed his communications assistant. "There are two guys up in Planning. Both have girls' first names. Carroll something, Francis something. The one who is named Francis always wears loud bow ties. Find out where they are and read this over the phone to them. Maybe they'll know what it's all about.

  Now, what else do you have on that message board of yours?"

  At first Francis assumed he was imagining things. Only when he lifted a tentative finger to his cheek did he realize what was actually happening. He had seen it often enough on Carroll's face to know what a twitching muscle looked like. Now he knew what it felt like.

  What it felt like was exaltation rising, like a bubble in a still pond, to the surface of his imagination.

  Thank goodness some idiot in Washington had had the good sense to try the telegram out on him. Francis had phoned Carroll immediately to share the good news, but Carroll was off God knew where with G. Sprowls. So as not to waste any time (who could say how long the birds would remain in the nest?}, Francis had contacted Western Union and, citing urgent government business, had gotten from the supervisor the phone number from which the telegram originated. Flashing his laminated credentials in the general direction of a nearsighted telephone-company official, Francis had gotten the address that went with the telephone number. At which point he had put in a call from a pay phone to the special number in Washington reserved for extraordinary circumstances. "The Potter has caught up with the Sleeper," he told the person on the other end who lifted the receiver without a word of greeting and simply listened.

  There was a long, awkward silence on the line. Then a voice, pronouncing each word meticulously in an effort to suppress an accent, said, "How can you know this?"

  Francis explained about the telegram that had arrived in Washington containing, word for word, the line from Whitman that constituted the awakening signal for the Sleeper; explained the coincidence of him and Carroll being known, within the Company, as the sisters Death and Night; explained how because of this coincidence the telegram had been routed to him. "If the Potter and the Sleeper have put their heads together."