Rainy Night To Die

by Caleb Pirtle III

  She grew cold at the memory of his ragged-edged fingertips on her bare skin.

  But when the Major fell asleep, a spent and wasted man, she would ease out of bed, take a small songbook from her music stand and carefully write down every word, every secret, she knew he must never tell her.

  It was as if she had a front-row seat at a closed-door, inner-sanctum, meeting of the Russian General Council.

  What would happen to Ukraine?

  When would it happen?

  Where would it take place?

  How long would it last?

  Her dignity was a small price to pay.

  The Major opened the door to the Frapelli Hotel and walked in behind her.

  Every head turned.

  Some watched the Major with fear in their eyes.

  The brave watched Pauline’s curves as they swayed slowly toward the stairs.

  Major Petrov squared his shoulders, took her hand in a vice grip, and pulled her closer to him.

  For a moment, he was as tall and as dashing as he thought he was.

  Poor bastard, she thought.

  The Russians would kill him if they knew what he confided in the darkness of a sultry, sexual night.

  She turned, leaned down, and kissed the Major while she stood above him on the first step of the staircase.

  What if he knew she knew what she must never know?

  Would she be shot and left to the cold waters of the river?

  Would he be her executioner?

  Would the Russians blame her?

  Or would they cast the blame on Petrov?

  Would they be shot together?

  Would the river claim them both?

  She shuddered.

  What if Petrov found the tape recorder quietly humming beneath her mattress?

  But he wouldn’t, of course.

  The Major and Pauline were nothing alike.

  He would never realize it was there.

  Pauline didn’t talk in her sleep.

  Rainy Night 5

  ALASTAIR REAGAN CHECKED his watch just before the Ukrainian Railway train from Warsaw ground its way to a stop at the beautiful and grandiose Odessa railway station in the southern part of Old Town.

  The terminal resembled a monument to war and peace, fashioned roughly in the historic Stalinist style of Soviet architecture.

  The concrete dome glistened white even in the gray mist of a new day.

  The architecture was rigid and sober.

  Larger than expected.

  But in some eyes, not quite large enough.

  The terminal was, if nothing else, a massive monument to symmetry and power, form over function, force over fear.

  It was cold.

  It was intimidating.

  Trains arrived from all over Europe.

  They usually came at night.

  They sped through the darkness to beat daylight to Odessa.

  .But only one railroad line was the umbilical cord that connected Ukraine to the width and breadth of Russia.

  It was the railway line that ran straight to Moscow.

  Roland Sand glanced at the clock on the wall.

  It was thirty-two minutes after six.

  Day had descended on Odessa, but splinters of sunlight had not yet reached its streets.

  A thick mat of clouds hung low across the town, dark and foreboding, gray streaked with black, a chilled rain doing its best to cleanse Odessa from those sins left behind by centuries of wars and rumors of wars.

  Sand stepped from the train as a cold morning settled with an icy fog down around his shoulders.

  He wondered if night was still lingering in the alleyways like the regrets of the damned and the deranged who still clung to the last remains of a guilty conscience.

  Scattered passengers hurried from trains and toward trains, their heads down, bundled in heavy woolen coats with scarves wrapped tightly around their necks.

  Sand studied their faces.

  Average faces.

  Weary faces.

  Ordinary faces.

  Burnt red by the November winds.

  There was nothing unusual about any of them.

  No one looked Sand’s way.

  No one smiled.

  He heard the muffled shuffling of footsteps.

  But no voices in conversation.

  No bursts of laughter.

  “It’s not a happy place,” Sand said.

  “Everyone in Ukraine has a guilty conscience,” Reagan told him.

  “Why?”

  Reagan’s smile was without humor.

  He pulled his sheepskin Ushanka hat down lower over his ears. “Everyone is guilty,” he said.

  Sand mulled the facts over in his mind.

  Russia had ruled the Ukraine.

  Ukraine tore the union apart.

  Ukraine had its independence.

  Russia wanted the country back.

  Freedom fighters died in the streets.

  Freedom fighters disappeared.

  Who would be next?

  No one knew.

  Too many had simply dropped off the edge of the earth.

  Sand laughed to himself.

  Or maybe the Russians pitched them off the edge of the earth.

  No courts.

  No justice.

  Only those to grieve – those to grieve and those to die.

  Was life better then?

  Or was it better now?

  No one could decide.

  The young couldn’t remember.

  The old were in the fields, their graves plowed under like wheat, and their spirits wandering like chaff and dust in the wind.

  “I sometimes hear them in the night,” Reagan said, his face drawn.

  “Who?”

  “The cries and curses of the damned.” Reagan’s voice faded for a moment.

  His shoulders trembled.

  His eyes paled.

  “The vagabonds, the poor bastards, who have returned from the edge of the earth,” Reagan said.

  “You drink too much,” Sand said.

  “If you hang around this god-forsaken place long enough,” Reagan told him, “you will hear them, too.”

  Russian soldiers walked in pairs, shoulder to shoulder, down each side of the terminal, holding their 7.62 caliber Kalashnikov machine guns across their chests.

  They stared straight ahead.

  The heels of their boots clicked a steady rhythm against the tile floors.

  Only two passengers from Warsaw had departed the train: Roland Sand and Alistair Reagan.

  They were dressed as businessmen and carried only briefcases with them.

  Sand’s gray suit was too large for him, his red tie too long. His brown tweed topcoat was threadbare.

  The collar of his shirt was stained yellow, the mark of a workingman who took a couple of hundred dollars home each week while his superiors often left on Friday nights with less.

  Maybe Ukraine had the right idea, he thought.

  The superiors were as a poor as the workingmen.

  Some would cut a man’s throat for a loaf of bread, provided it came with a bottle of Russia’s Baltika Dark beer.

  “Don’t worry,” Reagan whispered. “The Russians seldom bother the poor.”

  “What causes you to believe that?”

  “The poor can’t be blackmailed.” Reagan shrugged. “If you threaten to kill a man if he doesn’t hand you a pair of rubles to rub together, you might as well go ahead and kill him.”

  Sand watched the soldiers out of the corners of his eyes.

  They looked the other way when they passed.

  Were they beginning the day?

  Or ending it?

  Who would return tomorrow?

  And did any of them have that long to live?

  Sand saw a gentleman wearing a tailored black suit.

  White shirt.

  Starched.

  No wrinkles.

  A black tie.

  Thin.

  A year or t
wo out of date.

  His back was pressed against a far wall.

  He watched them with intense black eyes as they headed toward the exit.

  His jaws were clenched.

  He could have been a statue.

  He was probably a GRU intelligence officer, Sand figured.

  He stood gun barrel straight, both hands shoved into the pockets of his dark gray long coat.

  A faint smile played across the gentleman’s face.

  He was the cat who had his rats caught in a trap.

  The man took time to straighten the collar on a dark blue topcoat, step slowly away from the wall, and march crisply toward them.

  Sand could tell by looking into the well-dressed man’s eyes that he was quite familiar with and seldom disturbed by the ways of death.

  He was close enough now for Sand to smell burnt bacon grease and coffee on his breath.

  Sand read his face.

  He didn’t like the story he read.

  The gentleman’s face didn’t have happy endings.

  Sand’s eyes hardened.

  His hand rested on his belt.

  He was only a faint twitch away from killing a man, a twitch away from dying.

  Reagan stopped and placed a hand on Sand’s shoulder.

  “It’s a formality,” he said.

  Sand tensed and his hand tightened on the Walther PPK jammed just inside his brown tweed coat.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Reagan said.

  “Maybe he needs a couple of more kills to move up the ranks.”

  “Let me talk to him.” Reagan smiled broadly and bowed slightly.

  “Valery Dernov,” the gentleman said. “Your papers, please.”

  He was tall.

  He was slender.

  His face reminded Sand of the lethal blade of a dull hatchet.

  Reagan reached inside his suit coat pocket and withdrew a long, black leather wallet.

  He removed two passports and handed them to the officer.

  “I believe you’ll find these in order, Mister Dernov.”

  “You are from Great Britain.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “That I am.”

  “And your friend?”

  Reagan glanced at Sand and shrugged. “He’s a man of the world, I guess.”

  “His passport says he is American?”

  “Born in Alabama.”

  “What is your reason for a man from Britain and a man from America to be coming to Odessa?”

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “The Ukraine government is in the market to buy steel.” Reagan knelt down and opened his briefcase. He picked up a full-color, glossy brochure and handed it to the Russian. “My partner and I manufacture steel.”

  “It can be very dangerous to be in Odessa,” Dernov said.

  “It’s very dangerous in the steel mill.” Reagan chuckled.

  The intelligence officer did not break a smile.

  He checked the faces inside each passport, his eyes shifting from Reagan to Sand, before handing them back.

  “We will be watching you while you are here,” he said.

  The gentleman shoved both hands in the pockets of his dark blue long coat.

  Sand’s smile was cutting.

  What was the officer holding?

  A pistol?

  A pipe?

  A cigar?

  It must be a pistol.

  He was looking down on them as if he were ten feet tall.

  Why was Sand so suspicious?

  One crooked flick of the finger, and the officer was a dead man.

  Why did such a thought cross his mind?

  Valery Dernov seemed decent enough.

  He was simply caught in the crossfire of time and circumstance.

  He was just a man doing his job.

  Sand kept watching the hand.

  One flick of the finger was all it would take.

  The officer might as well be counting his breaths.

  He was running out of them.

  “Will you be here overnight?” Dernov asked.

  “That is not our intentions.”

  “You have return tickets?”

  “We do.”

  “Which train?”

  “It leaves for Warsaw at five-thirty.”

  “The train is always late.” Valery Dernov forced a smile that fell far short of his eyes. “Sometimes it does not come at all. Perhaps you will take an earlier train.”

  “We can try.”

  “Don’t be here after dark,” the officer said. “After dark, the Ukrainian street fighters will kill you for your hat, then take your coat because you no longer need it.”

  He turned sharply and marched away.

  “We will see him again,” Sand said.

  “Only to say goodbye if we’re lucky.”

  Reagan’s voice was overcome with a curious sadness.

  Sand glanced at the big board that announced the arrivals and departures of the trains.

  No train was leaving for Warsaw at five-thirty.

  No train was leaving at all.

  He frowned, then walked through the exit door and out into a cold, gray mist.

  “We’re not that lucky,” Sand said.

  Rainy Night 6

  PAULINE BELLEROSE WAS seated on a gray gaberdine sofa beside her desk, drinking a cup of black, strong coffee from a pale white porcelain cup when she heard Nikolay Petrov climb out of bed and begin staggering toward the door.

  She was dressed in a ruffled pink robe, the color of her lipstick.

  Her long, black hair fell across her shoulders.

  It was all she could do to smile when he burst through the doorway.

  A bulbous stomach hung out over his gray, military issue shorts.

  They were stained.

  Harsh water.

  Lye soap.

  He had a six-inch scar above his left nipple.

  Said he had taken a bullet during the early days of the war.

  It takes more than a single bullet to stop Petrov, he had said.

  He laughed about it.

  He wore the ragged scar as if it were a medal handed out for bravery in the midst of battle.

  Pauline’s contact, the one the Russians knew as Daemon, told her a young Ukrainian school girl had shoved the slender blade of a kitchen knife into Petrov’s chest just before he cut her throat and stood waist deep in muddy water, watching her body float down river and toward the sea.

  Daemon lived in the shadows.

  She said she didn’t exist.

  She worked for the Ukrainian underground.

  A spy?

  Maybe.

  An assassin?

  Perhaps.

  A savior?

  Always.

  Daemon was Pauline’s lifeline.

  Daemon tried, but she couldn’t save everyone.

  Thus far, she had kept Pauline alive.

  But both knew that life and time were little more than grains of sand running through the same hourglass.

  Daemon had no last name.

  No telephone number.

  No address.

  No family, at least none that Pauline knew about.

  But she came long after the witching hour on those nights when Pauline had taken the cognizant bits and pieces of information gleaned from Nikolay Petrov and worked them into a special and coded arrangement of sheet music.

  There would be a knock on the door.

  Four raps.

  Never more.

  Never less.

  No hello.

  No goodbye.

  No thank you.

  Daemon simply took the music, tucked it under her arm, and walked away into the night.

  Few words were ever spoken between them.

  This time might be the last time they would see each other.

  Last time was already forgotten.

  Next time wasn’t promised.

  Secrets were for sale in Ukraine. />
  There was a new bidder on every street corner.

  So was death.

  Nikolay Petrov was growling as he stomped across the floor.

  He stopped beside a glass-topped coffee table, swaying back and forth from one foot to the other.

  His thick body loomed over her.

  He grabbed the neck of the pink robe and jerked Pauline to her feet.

  He slapped her.

  Hard.

  Then again, the second time with a closed fist.

  He stepped back to let her fall at his feet.

  Pauline looked up with blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

  Her right eye twitched.

  She knew it would be black by nightfall.

  She bruised easily.

  Pauline watched Nikolay the way a rabbit watches a hawk circling quietly above the tree line and tried to ask, “Why?”

  But no words spilled out of her mouth.

  “Do you think I am a fool?” Petrov bellowed.

  Pauline shook her head.

  She felt a tremor in the pit of her stomach.

  Her heart was racing.

  Was he only toying with her?

  The cat?

  And the mouse?

  The mouse never has a chance.

  She had no idea what the end would look like but decided it would be similar to the drunken anger flashing in Petrov’s eyes.

  His pitted face had turned maroon, the pupils of his eyes an eggshell white.

  His fists were clenched.

  His big hands could snap her neck as easily as they could a matchstick.

  “You have betrayed me.” His words were seething.

  “No,” was all she could say.

  It sounded like a moan.

  “Where do you go when I am not here?”

  It wasn’t a question.

  It was an accusation.

  Pauline pulled herself to a sitting position, her back pressed hard against the sofa for support.

  “I go to the club,” she said. “I sing. You hear me sing. I come back here when you come back here. You leave in the morning. I am alone until I go to sing again.”

  “You are lying to Nikolay Petrov, and nobody makes a fool out of Petrov.”

  The words came rolling up from deep inside his gut.

  “What’s wrong, Nikolay? What have I done to make you so angry?”

  “We have no secrets, you and I. I trusted you, but someone else learned of your dastardly little deeds. And now I know. And it’s such a sad and tragic thing for me to know, little Pauline.”

  My God, Pauline thought.

  What does he know?

  What does he think I know?

  Has he found the tape recorder?