“Okay. We’ll check. Mr. Walther, thanks for your help, okay?”
NADYA SMILED AND nodded and Lucas bobbed his head and fluttered his hands and a minute later they were walking back down the sidewalk. “That didn’t work out,” Lucas said. In the car, he picked up the phone and said, “I’ll call off Andreno . . .”
Nadya held up a hand and said, “Leave Andreno for a while.”
“Why? The guy . . . ?”
“Because I am a spy, I notice that the old man now knows everything we know, and we know nothing that he does. He is probably senile. But for a man who is senile, he did an excellent debriefing.”
Lucas looked at the house, where the old man had taken up his post in the picture window, staring out at the lawn. “No.”
“I think no also. But . . .” She shrugged. “I see a chess magazine in his bookcase.”
“A chess magazine.”
“This is about the contest between the world champion of chess and the IBM computer. This contest was in the summer, so the magazine is new.”
“Huh. You think he bitch-slapped me?”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll leave Andreno,” Lucas said. “Couple hours can’t hurt.”
“So now . . .”
“Back to the genealogies. We’ve got the rest of the afternoon. Pick out a new target . . .”
“One more thing—this boat that his parents came on. I have heard of such things,” Nadya said. “Societies that gathered people together, and they rented a boat to come to a certain, em, colony in the United States that was purchased in advance. Many of these were swindles and the land would be poor or too cold and the boat would be destroyed and the people would go somewhere else.”
Lucas nodded. “The point being that this might not be a cover story for illegal entry. It could be real.”
“Doesn’t feel real; it’s too unlikely. But . . . there is a ten percent chance that this hospital problem is innocent.”
“You believe in coincidence.”
“As long as there are not too many.”
“There are getting to be too many,” Lucas said.
“I think so, but I am not certain,” Nadya said. “Let’s find a new target. What about this Roger person, the old man’s grandson?”
“My exact thought.”
22
GRANDPA WATCHED THEM GO, and without turning to his wife said, “They know all of us. I’ll have to do the rescue.”
She said nothing; stared sightlessly at the TV screen. He turned, stepped over to her, put his hand on her head: “We had a really good run, and we can still save the others. I’m going to start it.”
She seemed to nod under his hand, and he bent, kissed her forehead, glanced at his watch, went to the kitchen, opened a drawer, and took out the walkie-talkie. A van was parked up the street, one that he hadn’t seen before, but not unlike one that had been parked across the street the day before—they both had dark windows, and he could feel the surveillance.
Was the house bugged as well? He thought not, because for the last three days he’d been putting telltales on the doors before he went out, a hair stuck on with a little spit, and they’d been undisturbed.
Still, there was no point in taking chances. He carried the walkie-talkie to the front hall closet, climbed inside, sat down, pulled the closet door shut, and beeped Carl. Carl, he thought, should be finishing lunch.
Two minutes later, he got a patch of static, and then, “Yeah. I’m bringing the two-by-fours.”
“The inspectors came by,” Grandpa said. “We passed, but they’ll be back. I need to fix the door. You’ll have to pick me up.”
“What time?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Eight? Can it wait that long?”
“It’ll have to. I’m waiting for a guy to get off work.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then.”
“I’ve got a watch; call me ahead of time, though.”
“Okay.”
“I’m out.”
“Out.”
Simple voice code, a crude effort to sound like a construction site. The key was the time: Carl would add three hours to the specified time, and would come by at eleven o’clock.
A LONG WAIT. Melodie was fine in her wheelchair. Grandpa went to the kitchen, pulled out a silverware drawer, nearly dropped it, put it on the kitchen table, and felt back under the sink until he found the pistol.
The gun was old, in a way—it had been made in the 1930s—but guns hadn’t changed much. He pulled the magazine, looked at the shiny new shells stacked inside, put the magazine aside and dry-fired the pistol a hundred times, aiming at a can of soup on the kitchen counter.
There was no need for great accuracy: he’d be shooting from four feet. Carl had cleaned the gun after the last use, and the cleaning oil was pungent and not at all unpleasant. The gun felt just fine; nose heavy, because of the suppressor, but he was used to the weight.
After a hundred practice snaps, he reseated the clip and put the gun back. His hand touched the second pistol, the one they’d taken from the Russian in the parking lot outside the bus museum. That was a piece of luck—they wouldn’t have to find a second pistol.
At loose ends, he went back to the living room, looked at Grandma—she was asleep, he thought, her breathing imperceptible, but he touched her neck anyway, to find the artery, now so close to the skin . . . found it, and the thready beat, and felt the usual trickle of relief. Still alive.
He could work a chess problem, but the thought bored him. Big events were under way. Lives were coming to a close. He checked Grandma again and then back to the bedroom, lay on the bed and closed his eyes.
The cop, the state cop, had seemed bright and tough, and the Russian woman just as bright. He knew their types from the early days. He’d learned, though, that the young feared dementia—Alzheimer’s they all called it—and he knew how to play that card. He was old enough that not only did they believe the act, they expected it. He smiled and drifted . . .
The feel and smell of the gun took him back, all the way back. He’d been a young boy in Moscow when the revolution swept through. He could remember the crowds in the streets, the excited arguments between the adults, people rushing into the house with newspapers. His father was a Bolshevik from the start; when his father died, too young, in the winter of 1921, Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov had been taken in by his old comrades, shown how to use a rifle, and had gone off to fight the Whites.
He’d been little more than a boy, but he’d done well. He was trusted. And when he was grown, when he was eighteen, he’d been sent to the Ukraine to help with the elimination of the kulak class.
He remembered one place, one city, where they’d brought the kulaks in trucks, unloaded them in the city park, hands tied behind them by the soldiers. He and the other executioners shot each one in the back of the head and let them topple into the grave; nine shots and reload, nine shots and reload. A cigarette, a bottle of tea, another truck full of the enemies of the state.
Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov lay on his bed and remembered.
And smiled.
23
THEY FOUND JAN WALTHER in the back of Mesaba Frame and Artist’s Supply, doing inventory on her acrylic paints; the place smelled of paint and freshly cut wood and coffee. They’d been to her house, had been told by a neighbor that she and Roger Walther had divorced years before, and that while Roger was still around, the neighbor didn’t know where.
“Good riddance, if you ask me,” the neighbor said. She had the eyes of a chicken, small and suspicious. “He used to beat her, and the boy, too. More’n one time she’d be hiding a black eye. He drinks, is what does it.”
If they wanted him, the neighbor said, Jan would probably know where he was: “He must be paying child support; I don’t think she makes enough to support both her and the boy.” She directed them to the frame store, just off Hibbing’s main drag.
WALTHER WAS A BUSY, pretty woman, with the beginning
s of worry lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She was wearing a pink blouse with a round-tipped collar, inexpensive beige slacks, and a matching vest, with an arty silver dangle on a chain. With a round face and ten extra pounds, she was precisely a Minnesota Scandinavian; and when they came in, a bell jingling overhead, she was happy to see them.
That didn’t last.
Lucas identified himself, told her that they were investigating the murders of two Russians and a cop, and she put both hands at her throat and said, “What do you want from me?”
“We’d like to talk to your husband,” Lucas said. “We really don’t know who is doing what, but there seems to be a group of associated families up here, and he belongs to one of them. We think they may have been spies for the Soviet Union.”
“The Walthers? That’s ridiculous. They’ve been here forever. They’re from German stock, not Russian . . .” But her interlaced fingers were white as chalk.
“You wouldn’t know about these people, whoever they are?” Nadya asked.
“Well, sure, I know Grandpa Walther,” she said. “I never knew Roger’s parents. They were killed in a car accident. This spy thing . . . you’re not joking? This is absolutely ridiculous. If this rumor gets out, you’ll ruin my business . . .” Now she had tears in her eyes.
Nadya was not sympathetic. “Did Roger tell you that he was a spy?”
“No. No. Roger’s not a spy. If you knew Roger . . . Roger’s an alcoholic. A drunkard. He goes around in a haze. He couldn’t spy on anything. If he’d had a gun, he’d have sold it by now, so he could buy more beer. He’s about one inch from going on the street. I mean, the whole thing . . .” She looked from one of them to the other, her voice rising. “The whole thing is ridiculous.”
“I understood he was an athlete in college,” Lucas said. “At UMD.”
She nodded. “That’s his problem. That’s why he’s drinking. He was a big hero here in Hibbing, he was a second-stringer in Duluth, and after that . . . nobody wanted him.”
Roger Walther, she said, was basically a good guy, but had never studied anything but hockey and when his eligibility was gone, he was gone. “The coaches nursed him through four years of college with a C average, and the fifth year, when he couldn’t play anymore, it was nothing but big red F’s,” she said indignantly.
“Where does he live?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said. “Virginia. I heard that he had a job somewhere, that he was working, but he hides that from me because he’s afraid that I’ll have the child-support people get after him. He owes me almost fifteen thousand dollars in support.”
Lucas said, “We heard that he, ah, has gotten physical with you. In the past.”
“He hit me a few times—that’s why I eventually threw him out. I wasn’t going to put up with it. He was always drunk, but that was no excuse. He says it himself—it’s no excuse.”
“You ever call the cops?”
“No. I threatened to, but he begged me not to. He used to hunt, and the way the law is now, if he got a ticket, he could never have a gun again. He could never hunt again. So I didn’t call; I just threw him out.”
“Okay.” Lucas looked around. “Where’s your kid?”
“He’s in school,” she said. “I don’t want you bothering him, he’s just a child. God, you’ll ruin his life, too . . .”
Jan Walther knew nothing about anything, she said. Nothing about spies, nothing about the other families, although she knew the Svobodas and had been inside Spivak’s, but not for years. As a final question, Lucas asked, “Is he a runner? Roger? Go out and jog and stuff?”
An incredulous look passed over her face: “Roger? Roger has a cigarette with every drink. He couldn’t run around the block.”
WHEN THEY LEFT, and were back at the truck, Nadya said, “Everybody lies. She was too worried, but not enough . . . amazed . . . when we asked about spying. She should have been amazed.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “We’re a half hour from Hibbing . . . wanna get a late lunch? I’m starving. Then we find Roger.”
THE LUNCH SERVICE was slow, and took a while; and there was roadwork on the way to Virginia, and they got hung up while a paving machine tried to maneuver across the highway. By the time they arrived at the Virginia police station, it was almost four o’clock. John Terry, the chief, said he didn’t know Roger Walther, but he could check with his on-duty cops in a few minutes. He went to do that, took ten minutes, and came back: “Nobody on-duty knows him. I took a minute and went out on NCIC and they have no record of him. He’s kept his nose clean.”
“He’s a drunk,” Lucas said.
“Really a drunk, or just an alcoholic?” Terry asked. “Lots of alcoholics hold it together forever. Keep working, never drive drunk.”
“He beats his wife.”
“She ever charge him?”
Lucas was already shaking his head. “Okay, listen. If he’s a drunk, he’s drinking up here. If you could have your guys check the bars and get back to me. Somebody’s got to know him.”
Lucas’s cell phone rang, and he said, “Excuse me,” took it out, and turned away. “Yeah, Davenport.”
Larry Kelly, from Duluth. “Is Nadya Kalin with you?”
“Yes. Right here.”
“We’d like to get you both down here, this evening, if we could. We need to take statements. We’re not trying to cover up the relationship, but we want to make it clear that Reasons was guarding her, that he’d been assigned to do that, and that the, mmm, emotional relationship grew out of that, uh, closeness.”
“I think we can do that,” Lucas said. “Nadya and I will coordinate and get down there.”
“Come right into the Detective Bureau. The statements are for our shooting board, and the chief and the city attorney both say that written statements will be okay.”
“See you in an hour,” Lucas said.
TERRY PROMISED TO have every bar in Hibbing checked by morning. Lucas gave him a cell-phone number, and he and Nadya headed for Duluth.
“What they’re doing is, they’re taking testimony on the shooting to make sure nothing illegal happened, and that all proper procedures were being followed,” Lucas told her on the way, explaining the board. “If Reasons was assigned to guard you, then your, mmm, emotional involvement becomes irrelevant. He was killed in the line of duty.”
“He wasn’t exactly . . .”
“Shhh . . .” Lucas said.
24
GRANDPA FUSSED AROUND the rest of the day—shuffled out to put a bill in the mailbox, raised the red flag for the mailman, saw that the van was still there. Went out to the garage, threw a shovel in the back of the car, unscrewed the automatic light in the garage-door opener, shuffled back to the house, and didn’t look at the van, still there halfway up the block. Would it ever leave? And if it did, would it be replaced by another? He saw nothing at all on the backside of the block . . .
He couldn’t help watching, but he was afraid he’d be spotted if he did. Eventually, he spent a few minutes vacuuming, pushing back and forth in front of the picture window. When he was done, he propped open one of Melodie’s old compact cases in the corner of the window, among a group of plants, adjusted the mirror so he could see the van, then sat on a couch opposite the television and watched the mirror.
An hour or so after the cops left, Jan Walther called, panicked about being interviewed by the police. “They think Roger is a spy. They think he was spying with the Spivaks and the Svobodas and some people named Witold. They’re crazy,” she said.
“They are crazy,” Grandpa agreed. “There’s nothing we can do but cooperate. Maybe we should get a lawyer.”
“Not yet; I can’t afford a lawyer.”
She gave him everything the cops had asked her about, but in the context of a protest to a relative. Excellent. Janet had been told a little bit, back when she was still in love with Roger, had been told that the spying was a heritage thing that the families
were trying to work out of . . . but that was it. If the phones were bugged, her protests would sound normal and innocent. If the tapes ever got into court, they might help influence a jury.
He watched the van the rest of the afternoon; watched as a mostly cloudy day turned gloomy and dark, and little spits of rain began trickling down the window. At a little after five o’clock, the van pulled away. The movement was so quick, and unexpected, that Grandpa almost missed it—and he knew for certain, from watching all afternoon, that nobody had gotten into it. Whoever was driving had been inside all morning and afternoon.
This was not paranoia; he was being watched.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, with a steady drizzle darkening the streets, he drove slowly down to the supermarket, and then back to the house, going out one way, coming back on the other side of the block. He saw no one following, and he knew all the cars still on the street. So the watch was sporadic—the state cop and the Russian must have wanted to see if he’d panic after they talked to him. Grandpa smiled as he pulled back into the garage, just thinking about it. He’d sold them, all right.
There was, he thought as he went into the house, just the slightest possibility that they were watching from a neighbor’s house . . . but then, why would they watch from the van at all? Still . . .
INSIDE, THINKING of bugs and phone taps, he said to Grandma, “Let’s eat.” He banged around the kitchen, heating up some spaghetti, fed her and then himself. When she was done, he cleaned her up for the fourth time that day, and parked her in front of the TV again. The History Channel had a show about World War II, the landings at Normandy. They watched it together, and he talked to his wife, and then they watched a show about ice dancing, then the local news, and finally he said, “Let’s get you off to bed, sweetheart. Let’s get you off to bed, okay?”
AT TEN THIRTY, he flushed the toilet and said into the walkie-talkie as the water rushed around the bowl, “Exactly at eight.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 160
