The Fourth Courier

by Timothy Jay Smith

  “I could say the same for you.”

  “Let’s get some coffee.”

  They took a pot from the hotel restaurant and found a table on the mezzanine balcony. Jay reported Tommy’s murder as he poured coffee. “Nice clean shot right between the eyes. Left his brains all over the floor.”

  “He wasn’t under protection?”

  “Kulski pulled surveillance because it had been there only to report if Tommy came home. He’d taken Tommy’s passport to keep him from running.”

  “You’re sure Kulski’s a good guy?”

  “Do you know something?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Yet.”

  “Quit looking. You’re wasting your resources.”

  “So in Tommy’s case, who do you notify as next of kin? Wife one, two, or three?”

  “Beats me,” Jay said. “What do you figure when the only witness turns up dead?”

  “That the murderer knew he was a witness, and that points back to the police, too. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “I’m thinking Basia Husarska,” Jay replied and told him about the cigarette butts. “It’ll be another three or four days for the DNA results.”

  “You don’t have to wait. She’s guilty,” Kurt said, and described his night with Mladic at the baths.

  When he concluded, Jay said, “You play rough, don’t you?”

  “My motto is caveat amator. Lover beware. If God made me gay, why not use it? It’s a tool, and I might as well have fun while using it.”

  “What do we do now?” Jay asked.

  “Do you want to go to Kulski?”

  “And say what? ‘I’ve got three cigarette butts and a confession from a deranged narcissist?’ Plus, what if Kulski is involved? Then we’ve exposed ourselves and we’re dead.”

  “It’s all linked, isn’t it?” said Kurt. “PENZIK and the murders. Mladic and the weapons. Langley’s always assumed some of the supposedly good guys are involved, it makes sense it’s a minister. It would take someone with authority to get trucks carrying weapons across borders without being searched, and with Husarska as a helping hand, that’s a winning team.”

  “Almost foolproof,” Jay agreed. “For her, it might’ve been, except for smoking too much.”

  They heard a ruckus and leaned over the rail. In the lobby, two luggage carts had collided, and the bellhops argued as they realigned their loads. “I sure would like to get my hands on those suitcases,” Kurt remembered.

  “Yesterday at the train station, I counted at least a dozen suitcases with leather straps and brass finishes.”

  “Yeah, but they haven’t ended up in your girlfriend’s apartment or Mladic’s hotel room. I have a hunch about these suitcases. And I have a hunch that Rypinski is the man with the beard, and that he’s connected to Mladic.”

  “How?”

  “Through Husarska. Probably her connections.”

  Jay laughed. “A nice little package if we could prove it. The only problem, we’ve no evidence that they know each other. We don’t even know if Rypinski has a beard.”

  “Lilka’s never said?”

  “Nothing about a beard.” Then Jay told him about the bearded man at Billy’s shack. “The locksmith said that Husarska frequents Billy’s Bar. If Rypinski uses Billy’s garage to work on his van, maybe that’s the connection between her and Rypinski.”

  “I’d like to tail her, but that’s your call,” Kurt said.

  “She’ll probably recognize your regular spotters.”

  “She’s never seen me before.”

  “You don’t exactly blend in.”

  “I can put my elbows next to hers at a bar. It’s a great place to pick up information if you stay tuned. Do you know where she lives?”

  Jay described her pink apartment building and made an effort at directions before Kurt left to find Basia Husarska.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  JACEK HAD NOT COME HOME the night before. Lilka woke up to a blessedly peaceful apartment. She treated herself to a bubble bath and a lingering breakfast, though she still jumped at every sound, fearful of an ambush. When she emerged from the bedroom after getting dressed, he was there, his back to her and dancing a step or two.

  “Zip zip zip!” he said and whirled around to face her. He was sweating. With the knife in his hand, he made a slashing motion, as if carving a Z across her chest. “Zip zip zip!”

  Lilka screamed and fell back.

  “I told you not to go in there.”

  Zip zip zip.

  He broke into a lunatic’s grin.

  Zip zip zip.

  “Leave me alone, Jacek,” she pleaded.

  He lunged at her and pressed the knife to her cheek. “I should have done this a long time ago.”

  “I’m not the one who cut you.” Lilka whimpered, certain this time he would do it. He laughed and pushed her away.

  Trembling, Lilka gathered her things to go to work. Purse, coat, hat: she was ready to flee.

  “I’m going away,” he told her.

  She started to open the door. He slammed it closed and leaned on it. “You answer me when I talk to you.”

  “You didn’t ask me a question.”

  “Ask me how long I’m going away for.”

  “How long are you going away for, Jacek?”

  “Forever.”

  She glared at him.

  “Isn’t that the answer you want to hear?”

  “Let me pass. I’ll be late.”

  “Answer me, isn’t that want you want to hear?”

  “I don’t believe you, you’re drunk.”

  “Answer me!”

  “Yes, it’s true, it’s what I pray for every day. Now are you satisfied?”

  He stopped her from opening the door. “We aren’t finished talking. I’m answering your goddamn prayer, you can give me two minutes.”

  “What’s this about? Has something happened to Aleks?”

  “This is about you and me, not Aleks!”

  “You are going away, aren’t you?”

  “Forever starts today.” He laughed bitterly. “You and I haven’t talked, Lilka, for a long time. Almost never. Not since before Aleks, and before this.” He ran the knife down the side of his face.

  “You know that never mattered.”

  “It mattered to me, and it did just what Daddy wanted, to turn me mean like him. I know it. I’m not so stupid that I don’t know it.”

  Jacek stumbled to a cabinet and brought out vodka. He took a long pull from the bottle. Lilka knew his temper too well and shuddered as he drank more of its reliable fuse.

  “I was handsome, wasn’t I? You remember?”

  “That never changed.”

  “Daddy took that from me. People started looking away from me. I had nothing left, only what was inside, and that wasn’t good enough.”

  “You had me.”

  “You hated me from the start. Blaming me for Aleks, blaming me for this.”

  “I blamed me for what your father did,” said Lilka.

  “That’s the only reason you stayed. Love didn’t count for anything.”

  “I’m going to work,” she said.

  Jacek crossed the room to block the door again. His swift steps echoed the younger man he had once been, earnest and self-assured. He had been full of swagger, even obnoxiously so, but that didn’t detract from his staggering good looks. Every girl wanted him except Lilka, whose lack of self-confidence prevented her from imagining that any man, and certainly not the handsomest boy in school, would desire her. But Jacek ultimately pursued her. A last conquest. His flattery, exploiting her low self-esteem, led to the one night that changed everything that followed. He was right. Love had never entered into their relationship.

  He said, “Sometimes I see with a clarity, do you understand that?”

  She nodded.

  “Answer me! I can’t hear a fucking nod!”

  “I think I do.”

  “That’s better. I’ve waited seventeen years fo
r you to start talking to me. I’m trying to say goodbye, but you’re not listening, and suddenly I realize, that’s been our big problem. You talking and not listening for seventeen years. That’s one of those moments of clarity. I’m seeing lots of things for the first time, because maybe it’s the last time.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “I’m going away, Lilka, that’s all the sense you need to know. I’ve been waiting for a break and I got me one. One last delivery and then I’m gone. I’m disappearing down the escape route. It’s your break, too, and Aleks’s. You want to know another moment of clarity? I see my father and I see me and I see Aleks, and I see the same man. Aleks is in trouble all right. I got him there and I can’t help him. I don’t want my boy cut like me, and I’m bound to do it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Now you’re asking too many questions.”

  Lilka tried to get past him. “May I leave, please? I’m already late.”

  “That’s your goodbye?”

  Suddenly furious, Lilka lashed back. “You expect me to miss you, ask you to stay, cry? I’ve cried every night for seventeen years, sometimes for you, mostly for me. Have we had one happy night? You want me to miss you?”

  He lunged at her with the knife, but stopped short of stabbing her. “Zip zip zip!”

  She escaped out the door.

  His lunatic laughter continued until Jacek could no longer hear her steps in the hall. So that’s the thanks you get for being decent to a bitch, he mused. Wasn’t he being decent when she walked out on him? That was a mistake. Lilka was always making mistakes. They’d started their marriage with a mistake, one he could’ve fixed if she hadn’t concealed her pregnancy from him. Soon enough their parents had to be told about the baby. In a drunken temper never before so violent, his father had pulled a knife and, in a single, damning flick, cleaved Jacek’s cheek. Their hurried wedding was festooned with recrimination. Jacek’s bandages came off later, the stapled wound the first scar on their marriage, and the one most picked at.

  He went into the bedroom to check the suitcase. That bitch better not have messed with my stuff. She hadn’t. He went back into the living room and spread the contents of a satchel on the table. He got his spoon and needle ready, but decided to wait before trying the new Afghan shipment. He needed a steadier hand and clearer head than heroin for his next task and opted for a shot of vodka on his way to the bathroom.

  Once there, he unpacked a sack from the pharmacy, placing shaving cream and a straight razor on the back of the sink. He found a pair of scissors in a drawer and attacked his beard, sending clumps of wiry black hair into the basin until he reduced it to stubble. Then, slowly, he shaved with the razor. Jacek was in no hurry. He knew what he was uncovering. Unearthing. The archeology of his failed life. After passing over his scar, he could see, in the thin residue of the shaving cream, the pockmarks of his stitches. He rinsed his face. There was still stubble in the deeper depressions. Jacek sensed that he was perched on the cliff of his final downfall. He had wanted to see what had landed him there. And there it was, a railroad track of stitches with a red line running through it, polluting half his face.

  He slammed his fist into the mirror and broke it.

  Sucking on a cut knuckle, he returned to the living room, poured a glass of water, and sat at the table. He pinched some white powder from the Afghan shipment, put it in the spoon, and mixed it with a little water. He heated it with a lighter until the instant it started to bubble. He loaded the syringe and set it aside. Using his teeth and one hand, he tied a tourniquet around his other arm to make his vein bulge. He emptied the syringe into it.

  Clarity rode the heroin’s first fast-breaking wave. The prickly points of Jacek’s life came into focus. His accusers, and those he would accuse, popped into view like picture flashcards. His own face was among them, a fiery red scar burning through his beard. He decided that he should’ve cut Lilka. She was responsible for that devil on the flashcard. She was the seductress who hid the baby until things had gone too far. Then the opium’s second surge toppled him with its numbing claw. He relaxed into its sure serenity, void of judges, responsibility, motivation. That was part of his clarity, too. Jacek had opened a hatch into a world where there was no remorse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  KURT CRUISED PAST BASIA’S PINK building a couple of times. Her sporty red car sat at the curb. He could find no vantage point from which to watch inconspicuously. Hell, to be inconspicuous he’d have to leave the country. He had never experienced such frank curiosity about his color. If an exotic animal wandered down the streets, he doubted the Poles would react any differently. Sometimes he liked the attention. Right then he wished he were white.

  In a neighborhood coffee shop, he eavesdropped on conversations, surprised by how many words he understood for having the same Slavic roots as Russian. All those hours standing guard in Moscow had paid off. He settled his check, drove back by Basia’s place, saw her car was still there, and circled the block. When he came back to her building, it was gone. He glanced each way down empty streets.

  Kurt checked his watch: four o’clock. Early for cocktail hour, but he doubted if Billy stood on propriety, if that’s where she was going. There or Mladic’s lodge were his only guesses. He swung around in the direction of the train station and navigated the neighborhood streets with a map spread on his lap. When he reached the main road, he gunned the motor and accelerated over the bridge. Yanking his car into a hard left to beat oncoming traffic, he bounced into the Marriott’s circular driveway to a chorus of angry horns. He left it running for the valet and dodged back across the busy avenue and up the ramp to the station.

  He reconnoitered the vast hall’s layout, determining it had too many entrances for him to cover all at once. He decided to hang near the escalator that descended into the underground mall, going through a charade of checking his watch and the departure board, ever-alert to anyone who could be Basia Husarska.

  From across the cavernous hall, Detective Kulski had seen Kurt come into the hall. A black man in Poland was a magnet for the eye. He tried not to stare as Kurt walked by.

  From inside his booth, a vendor said, “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

  Kulski showed him the artist’s sketch of the fourth courier. “You ever seen him?”

  “Sometime last week, starin’ at me from right over there.” The vendor pointed to his newspaper rack. “Front page.”

  A wise guy. Kulski smiled his amusement. “Before that, in the land of the living, did you see him?”

  “I figure I did.”

  “Did you think to call the police?”

  “No offense to you, you showed me your badge first thing. Most of the time, the police just come sniffing around. If I tell ’em I saw the dead man, they’ll start asking why I run with crooks. That’s all the excuse they need to ask for more payoffs. I can’t afford to have the cops going to the bank for me.”

  Kulski had a pad and pen ready. “This won’t cost you anything. Tell me what you saw.”

  The black man walked by again, consulting a schedule and watching destinations change on the departure board. He carried no luggage, Kulski noticed, and wondered if he was having trouble deciphering the foreign words. But he had no time for anything else; he had a witness.

  “I sold him stamps,” the vendor told him. “He came up to me and handed me an envelope, and says he wants a stamp.”

  “Where was it going?”

  “Moscow.”

  “Do you remember the name or address?”

  “It’s lucky enough I remember Moscow. Most days I don’t remember morning to night. Sitting in this box all day, it’s a life best forgotten.”

  “Yeah, yeah, be a philosopher another time. Was he alone?”

  “You see how much I can see? He coulda been holding Madonna’s hand and all I’d see was his ugly face.”

  “So you got a good look at his face?”

  “Enough
to see he was ugly. And no missing his breath. His tongue must’ve fermented. I saw him coming up, he’d been standing over there.” The vendor stuck his hand out his window and pointed. “Where the bums sleep. You see that cardboard?”

  “Did anyone else see him?”

  “Look, the guys here, we don’t grab beers at the end of the day and talk about who buys what newspaper. If the other vendors were my friends, I’d shoot myself. I know what they got to talk about. Nothing, same as me. I show my wife the day’s take; if it’s enough, she puts out. It’s good for another day.”

  “All right,” Kulski said. “I understand, you and the other vendors did not discuss the matter. What exactly did happen?”

  “Like I was saying, he handed me a letter and said he wanted a stamp. I told him I don’t sell stamps for letters, only for postcards, so he asked how many postcard stamps it would take. Am I a post office? He told me to give him five stamps.”

  “Postcard stamps?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it? Five of ’em, stuck all over the envelope. I told him he could mail it over there.”

  Again a hand emerged from the kiosk and directed the detective’s gaze. From the same direction, a woman approached. Director Husarska. Her long coat swayed seductively as she approached, her heels going clickity-clack. She wore dark glasses. Her fur and whole demeanor screamed “high-class whore.” Kulski assumed she was working an undercover assignment. She had spoken of them, and he turned away so as not to blow her cover. She passed him close enough he could smell her smoke.

  The black man, too, saw Basia coming, watching her over the fold of a newspaper that he likely couldn’t read. When she disappeared down the escalator, he replaced the paper and casually followed her. Friend or foe, Kulski had no way of knowing.

  “I’m telling ya, I need a bigger window,” the vendor complained. “Not for my health, for the view. Even a blind man’s got eyes for her.”

  “You’ve seen her before?”

  “Not often enough.”

  “How about on the night you saw the dead man?”

  “Do I look like a guy who keeps a diary?”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  AMAZING, KURT THOUGHT, HOW SO many men could smell a sexy woman coming, and none ever tired of watching one pass. As a ship makes a wake, Basia rippled through the crowded underground passageways, and he only had to track the turning heads to know he was close behind. Kurt didn’t understand the hungry, sly words cast after her, but he could guess their meaning. For something men always talked about, they had mastered only a limited vocabulary for women.