“That’s bad?”
Lucas said, “I run three miles most days. I try to keep it at twenty-one minutes. Some days, I run five or six.”
“You’re my hero,” Andreno said.
“You see that picture of Walther? The guy looked like a walking heart attack. And he outran me up and down the hills of Duluth, carrying a pizza box?”
Then they all rode for a while, and finally Andreno said, “You know the old line: too many facts can fuck up a perfectly good case.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“What is this?” Nadya asked.
THEY WENT TO Janet Walther’s house, which was on the way into downtown Hibbing, found it—nobody home—and continued to the frame shop. An older woman in a cloth coat was talking to Walther about a frame for a photograph of her grandchildren, something under twenty-five dollars, and Walther, almost flinching away from Lucas, Andreno, and Nadya, took her to a ready-made stand and helped her choose one. The woman said twice, “You can help these other people,” and she smiled and nodded at Lucas, but Walther said, “No, no, let’s get this right.”
When the woman was finally gone, she moved behind her counter and said, “What do you want?”
“Your ex-husband was living with a woman named Kelly Harbinson, up near Virginia,” Lucas began.
“So what? I don’t know what he does, and I don’t care.”
“We found her shot to death in her bed this morning. Roger Walther is missing. We’re looking for him.”
Her mouth opened and closed, and opened and closed again, as though she were having trouble breathing, and then she said, “Oh, my God.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Not for weeks. He came here and asked for a loan and I told him I didn’t have any extra.”
“You don’t know where he might be running to? Or how he might be getting there?”
She shook her head: “I have no idea. This whole spy thing is crazy, though. He’s probably in a tavern in Duluth. Or here.” She looked out the front window, as though she expected him to show up. Then, “Are you sure he’s the one who . . . did it?”
“He was living with her, he’s missing, apparently some clothing and his shaving equipment are gone . . .”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
He tried a threat: “You know that if you’re hiding him, or helping him, you’re an accomplice.”
Now she raised her voice: “I’m not doing that! I don’t like the man anymore! He’s not the man I married anymore! I don’t have anything to do with him!”
Lucas swerved to a new topic: “How . . . senile . . . is Burt Walther? Is he qualified to take care of his wife?”
“Burt? Burt’s not senile. Burt’s sharp as a tack.” Her voice was sharp, at first, as though she was afraid of a trick. Then her voice softened: “Melodie has gone away, though. She was a nice woman, and she’s gone now. If Grandpa couldn’t take care of her, I don’t know what would happen. They’d lose the house if they had to put her in a nursing home.”
“Burt’s not senile.”
“No, he’s not senile. Have you talked to him?”
OUT THE DOOR, PISSED.
Lucas said to Nadya, “You were right. The guy bullshitted me. That doesn’t happen too often.”
“It’s because you’re afraid to look at old people who are, mmm, mentally dying? I don’t know your word, but you know what I mean,” Nadya said. “This happened to my grandfather, when he lived with us, and I saw it all. Old friends would not look at him or talk to him. It is very unpleasant. Burt did not seem that way to me.”
THERE WAS NO ONE at Burt Walther’s house. Lucas banged on the door, and looked in the windows, and finally a neighbor came out and said, “They’re not home. Can I help you with something?”
“We’re police officers and we need to talk with Burt Walther,” Lucas said. “Have you seen him?”
“This is their day at the doctor,” the man said. “You missed them by ten minutes. They’re usually gone for two hours.”
“Do you know which doctor?”
“Not exactly which, but I know the clinic . . .”
AT THE CLINIC, Andreno spotted Walther’s Taurus. “They’re here. Want to go in after them?”
Lucas, still a little angry, thought about it, but finally shook his head. “We can wait. Let’s get lunch. No point in messing with them in public.”
THEY TOOK NADYA to a Subway; she liked the sandwiches and Lucas suggested that a franchise might work in Moscow. “Probably is one,” she said. “We have one of everything now.”
THEY SWUNG PAST the clinic on the way back to the Walther house, and the Taurus was still there. Down on the main drag, they stocked up on newspapers—New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Star Tribune—went back to the clinic parking lot, rolled down the windows, and read newspapers for half an hour. Then Andreno said, “Here they come.”
A nurse was pushing Melodie Walther in a wheelchair, and helped her into the car. She and Burt Walther talked for a moment, then Burt got in the car and drove away. Lucas fell in behind and closed up. When he was close enough, he could see Burt’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He hung at that distance, and Burt took them home.
At the house, Lucas pulled to the side of the alley, next to the garage. Burt came out to meet him. “Get your wife inside, then we’ll talk.”
“I don’t . . .” His eyes unfocused.
“Can the senile shit,” Lucas said. “We talked to Janet Walther. She said you’re sharp as a tack.”
Walther’s head bobbed up and down a couple of times, and he shuffled back to the car and helped his wife out, and into a wheelchair that he’d left in the garage. He pushed her up the back walk, helped her inside, with Lucas a step behind, Andreno and Nadya trailing.
“Where’s your grandson?” Lucas asked, as Walther moved inside the house.
“Are you going to arrest me?” Walther asked, through the open door.
“Maybe.”
“I want a lawyer. Right now,” Walther said. “Before I answer a single question.”
“Your grandson may have killed the woman he lived with.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not yet.”
“Then get out of my yard,” Walther said. He closed the door in Lucas’s face.
“THAT WAS PRETTY rude of him,” Andreno said, looking at the door.
Lucas was smiling now: “He knows where Roger is, I think. I think we’re getting to them.”
Lucas led the way back to the car, called Roy Hopper, the Hibbing chief, and said, “I need a favor.”
“What?”
“I need you to park a car outside Burt Walther’s place. The guy doesn’t need to do anything—just park it there, and watch the house.”
“Ah, jeez, I don’t have all that many guys . . .”
“Just . . . please.”
THE SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES were still at the murder scene outside Virginia. On the way back to check on progress, Lucas told Nadya, “When somebody does the lawyer thing—he wants a lawyer and he tells you that—you have to break off any questioning. That’s the way it works here. You can sometimes bullshit your way around them, but if they insist, that’s it. But the thing is, most of the time, it amounts to a kind of confession. You know you’ve got the right guy.”
“That’s a big deal,” Andreno said. “Once you know you’ve got the right guy, you can come at him from all kinds of directions. Talk to his friends, relatives, everybody he knows. You can build a picture.”
Nadya nodded. “I know this from my own work. Identification is perhaps more important there than here. Identification is everything.”
“Ah, there’s still a lot of work.”
“Oh, not really,” she said. “I tell you, you take the man down in the basement, where you have an old coal furnace, and you take off his shoes. Then you have one of these, mmm, metal cooking tools, they turn pancakes . . .”
“Spatula,” Andreno said, and he
glanced at Lucas.
“Spatula,” she agreed. “You put this in the coals, and when it gets so hot that it is white, you start with the toes . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Andreno blurted out.
Nadya had turned away, but Lucas caught the corner of a smile.
“I think the Russian is joking us,” he said to Andreno.
AT HARBINSON’S HOUSE, the lead deputy said that the body had been moved, but the crime-scene crew was still picking up bits and pieces of DNA, as well as going through all the paper in the place. “We checked with the phone company, and there were no calls out of here last night. None. We’re thinking that if he’s running, and he’s got something sophisticated going, he should have called somebody.”
“Did you check to see if he has a cell phone?”
“We checked, but couldn’t find one. There are only three companies up here.”
“How about bills, personal stuff?”
“That’s what we’re looking at now. In the kitchen. We’d be happy to have your help.”
“We can look for a while,” Lucas said. “Nothing in Russian?”
“No.”
THEY WERE STILL THERE, an hour later, when the deputy took a call, looked at Lucas, said, “Yeah, he’s still here.” He handed the phone to Lucas, said, “Roy Hopper, down in Hibbing.”
Lucas took the phone and said, “Hi.”
Hopper was breathing hard, and Lucas could hear sirens: “Bill, uh, the guy we’ve got sitting outside of Walther’s. He just heard two shots. He’s going in.”
27
GRANDPA PUSHED THE door shut on the cop, and waited. Would the cop come in after him? No. Instead, the cop seemed to laugh at him, turned, and walked back toward the other two, motioned, and they all went back out toward their car.
Let him laugh. But now there was no exit, now the endgame was critical. In a way, he felt a certain satisfaction because he’d seen it coming.
He pushed Grandma into the front room, facing the TV. She lifted her head when she saw it, and her face seemed to loosen, as though she were relaxing with the familiarity of home.
Grandpa rubbed the top of her head, something he used to do when she was still with them; he would do it before he went out, a kind of good-bye and good luck and I love you. And he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He went into the kitchen, got the walkie-talkie from the drawer, buzzed it. A minute passed, and he buzzed it again. If Carl wasn’t home, that could be a setback. Another minute, then “Yeah?”
A growing knot in his stomach suddenly unwrapped. “Instructions. Write this.”
“Let me get a pencil.” A few seconds. “Okay.”
“Number one. Recover this walkie-talkie before police do.”
“What?” No code. Carl was confused.
“I’m going to take this walkie-talkie and put it under Mrs. Kriegler’s garbage can, between the bricks they stand on, back in the alley. Get it there.”
“Why—?”
“No questions. Just write. Number two. You are a child. Act like one.
You must remember! Act like a child.”
“I don’t—”
“No questions! Remember. Will you remember?”
“Yes.”
“The instructions will be clear, soon enough. They were here this afternoon, and my endgame proceeds.”
“Should I come over?”
“No! Not until you must. Be a child. Act like a child. And when you must come over, you will know it’s time.”
“Okay . . .”
“Now we need silence. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
GRANDPA SIGHED, got his jacket and a piece of newspaper, crumbled it into a ball, put it in his pocket with the walkie-talkie. They might be watching; maybe he couldn’t get rid of the walkie-talkie. He would see.
He went out the back door, shuffled down the block, around the corner, back up the alley. Hadn’t seen anyone. Came up to the Krieglers’ garbage can, took the walkie-talkie and the ball of paper out of his pocket, stooped, slipped the walkie-talkie between the bricks that held the can off the ground, then stood, lifted the top off the can, and tossed the ball of paper inside. Hoped any watcher would think he’d picked up the paper and was dumping it into the can. Or, if they didn’t believe that, that they would look at the trash.
Continued up the alley. Thought about Carl as he shuffled along. He hadn’t had enough time with the boy. He needed two more years. He wasn’t ready for what Grandpa was putting on him—but then, Grandpa hadn’t been ready when he was pushed out into the world, either.
Maybe that’s all it would take—to be pushed into the real world.
BACK HOME . Preparing the endgame, such as it was, would take only a few minutes. Before he did it, Grandpa went to his favorite chair, turned it to look out over the front lawn, closed his eyes, and remembered.
His first memory, the earliest he’d had, came from the countryside near Moscow. In the fall, he thought, because the memory was of a gray-and-tan landscape. He was standing with his father, maybe looking out a window, and a man was walking through a field not far from them. The man had a cigarette dangling from his lip, and a gun over his shoulder. His father must have known the man, because the man smiled and held up a dead rabbit, dangling the furry body by its tail . . . There were other scattered childhood memories: watching four men trying to push a car out of a muddy ditch, groaning and swearing; sitting in a cold outhouse with an older man—an uncle?—as they talked and shared space in a three-holer. He remembered looking down the holes, into the mysterious pit below. And he remembered the smell of a country kitchen, and the big round cold purple beets sitting on the counter, ready for the soup . . .
He remembered the first time he’d seen Melodie, who was a typist at the Cheka training school, and the way she’d cocked her head when she laughed . . .
He turned away from his memories of the kulaks; those were not for this day, though he couldn’t repress the memory of a peasant who tried to joke with him, tried to make him laugh as a way out of execution. The man’s oval, careworn face but with the jolly mobile lips as he told his joke and did a little awkward dance to accompany it . . . Didn’t work.
He remembered the English lessons, the violent old man who beat the grammar into them, the long lists of words. He remembered the first time he saw Canada, the trip across the bleak prairie, on the train, the walk through the frozen farm fields from Manitoba to North Dakota, Melodie freezing in an inadequate wool coat that turned out to be mostly cotton, and leather shoes that seemed to dissolve in the snow.
The memories after that all ran together: World War II, the arrival of the children, Korea, moving operators across the border and up the lake, the victory in Vietnam followed by the growing anxiety of the post-Vietnam years, the car accident that took his children away and left him Roger.
Regrets about Roger: he’d been too harsh with him, too demanding of a boy who just didn’t have the fiber for a spy’s life.
He remembered scouring the newsstands for word of Afghanistan . . .
Then the collapse, and the years of silence from the motherland.
GRANDPA OPENED HIS eyes when he heard a car crunching off the road in front of the house. A police car, and his heart sank. He stood up, waiting for the cop to get out of the car. He could see the cop looking at him, but he never got out.
What was going on? Was he waiting for more to arrive?
Maybe there was still time, he only needed five minutes . . .
He hurried into the small bedroom they used as a library, found the video camera, the new tape and the cheap tripod that had come with the package. The battery he’d recharged over the last two days, and had already tested: it was fine.
The camera had been a Christmas gift ten or twelve years earlier, and he’d only used it a few times. That wasn’t a problem, though, because it was a simple, inexpensive machine. He took it into the living room and se
t it up in front of the picture window, aimed toward Grandma. At the same time, he looked out at the cop: the cop was reading a newspaper.
Nothing but pressure? An attempt to embarrass him? Maybe he had time . . .
Grandma stirred, and he said, “Just a minute, Melodie. It’ll be just a minute.”
He started the camera, made sure it was running, and focused on Grandma, then walked around it, stood beside her, and said, “This is Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov, also known as Burt Walther, checking the camera.”
He went back to the camera, ran the tape back, and watched himself speaking. Fine. Plenty of light from the picture window, focus was good, sound was tinny, but clear.
Ready. He went back to the bedroom, changed into dress pants, a white shirt, and a suit coat, then went back to the kitchen and got the gun he’d taken from the Russian agent in the bus museum parking lot.
He peered out the window: the cop was still reading the newspaper.
He cleared his throat and went back and stood in front of the camera, next to Grandma, the gun at his side, one hand on her shoulder, and began.
“MY NAME IS Colonel Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov, known here in the United States and Hibbing as Burt Walther. This is my last will and testament. I came here in nineteen thirty-four as part of a spy group working with the Soviet Union. I was first a lieutenant in the Cheka, a major in the NKVD, and when the Soviet Union dissolved, I was a colonel in the KGB. Since then we have been stranded, out of contact with the motherland. Melodie and I came here with three other couples. I have reason to believe that the U.S. government knows their names, but I will not mention them here, so as not to bring embarrassment upon their children.
“I was the commander of the group. Of the group, only my generation, now all dead except for Melodie and me, were intelligence agents—with two exceptions. My son worked as an agent, and my grandson; I was able to train both of them personally, as I raised my son as a good Communist, and, after he and his wife were killed in an automobile accident, my grandson, Roger. I felt the only way I could create a reliable agent was to teach them myself. The other families, and the later generations, lacked commitment and reliability.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 163
