by David Stone
“Now, I don’t have to remind you—”
“I know, I know. I’m just your biographer.”
“Joko’s a strange lad, Nikki. Looks like a fat old Kodiak bear, but he spent thirty years on the other side of the blanket . . . A real hard boy. I’m not sure which way this talk will go. If it goes badly, I want you to walk quickly away. And don’t get—”
“I won’t, Ray. Just relax. You look a little tense yourself.”
“Do I?” he said, checking his reflection in the door glass.
“Yes. You look like you’re going to your own wake. Try to smile more. When you smile, you’re not as horrible to contemplate.”
Fyke gave her a sardonic bow, took her arm, and shoulder-butted his way into the bar, the blare of easy-listening music assaulting their ears as soon as he got the glass doors open. Unlike Dirty Dick’s in Panama City, Joko’s place was crowded with reasonably well-dressed young people, very few backpacker types, and some sleek-looking older folks in Tommy Bahama and Banana Republic who had to be in on a cruise tour. The décor was a mix of African Queen, cargo cult, and Pirates of the Caribbean—twinkling pin lights in the fake thatch, bamboo walls, fiberglass spearfish and Styrofoam sharks caught in the ceiling nets—but the cooking smells coming from the kitchen were wonderful, and the entire glass front of the bar opened up onto the Mediterranean Sea, which was a shimmering field of deep blue under an opal sky.
A dazzling young waitress in a gauzy sarong that was struggling unsuccessfully to hold the line in the face of overwhelming pressures gave them a saucy smile and led them to a large booth overlooking the Med.
She took the stuffed parrot with the RESERVED sign in its beak off the table and seemed utterly thrilled to bring them a bottle of Perrier Jouët champagne and two iced glasses.
“And would you let Jacko know,” said Fyke, touching the waitress’s arm before she turned away, “that Ibis says hello?”
“ ‘Ibis’?” she said, her expression faltering, and then she recovered. “Of course, Mr. . . . Ibis?”
“Yes,” said Fyke with a piratical leer. “Ibis. Like the bird.”
When she was gone, Nikki leaned into him, trying to make herself heard above Astrud Gilberto, who, Nikki felt, ought to be over the girl from Ipanema by now.
“Wasn’t IBIS your operational ID in Kosovo?”
“That it was,” said Fyke, watching a cluster of giggling young blondes bobble past their booth. “And Mikey was Shrike. That’s how Joko knew us back in Pristina. It’ll bring him running, if only to see who’s pulling his . . . Who’s playing a game with him.”
In a few minutes, their champagne arrived, in a dripping silver bucket, along with two matching Art Nouveau flutes. The Sarong Girl wrung the bottle’s neck like a Sunday chicken and poured out two fizzy servings, saying as she did so, “I spoke to Mr. Joko, sir. He’s in his office now, but he’ll be out in a moment.”
“Thank you,” said Fyke, trying manfully to keep his eyes up on her face. And then, breaking away with an almost audible snap, he lifted his flute in a toast to Nikki, who looked no less hypnotic in a light cotton sundress with a gold chain around her neck, her auburn hair pulled back and caught in a golden ribbon, the pin lights reflecting in her hazel eyes, and her already olive skin now tanned a rich milky chocolate with a satin sheen.
Fyke, taking a pull at his champagne, was thinking that if ever carnal temptation was made flesh, she was sitting across from him right now. It was going to take ten Hail Marys and possibly Divine Intervention to get him back to Marcy Cannon in a sinless state. Nikki, aware of his deep appreciation and grimly determined to keep him at bay—she’d had it with all men, forever, and was giving some idle thought to becoming either a lesbian or a nun—pinged him back with a cheerful smile, touched her flute to her lips and then set it gently down, her attention shifting as a bulky and humanoid monster with a full black beard and tiny black eyes buried deep in a puffy roast-beef complexion emerged from the crowd to loom over their table.
Joko in the flesh, she presumed, wearing a hula shirt over a huge expanse of belly like a spinnaker, the shirttails draped over ragged cutoff jeans, and, to her practiced eye, carrying some sort of pistol in the waistband. The creature showed a set of large brown canine teeth to Nikki and then turned to look at Fyke, his smile fading into a puzzled frown.
“It is you. By God, it really is.”
“So it is, Joko,” said Fyke, smiling up at him, risking a paw and getting it back from Joko’s punch-press grip without any permanent damage. “May I introduce you to my associate, Miss Beatrice Gandolfo?”
After a brief hesitation—most of the “associates” he met in his line of business were beefy, beetle-browed thugs from the local union halls—Joko sat down beside Nikki, giving her a detailed once-over with obvious approval.
“Miss Gandolfo, I’m Joko Levon,” he said in a deep voice with a thick Israeli accent. “The ee-PON-ee-muss owner of this humble place.”
“Lovely to meet you,” she said, smiling and offering a hand she felt she could spare, getting it back safely, and giving the hulk some breathing room. Joko showed her his canines again and then turned to Fyke, laying his heavy forearms on the table.
“Ray. You Irish Mick prick. Sonia tells me Ibis. I say, What the fu . . . I say I do not believe her. You scare the latkes out of me. So. You look well fed, for a change. Not so much like a starving wolf-hound. How goes it? You still with the Amis?”
“No,” said Fyke with a thin, even a bitter, smile. “Got my watch and garters last year. Retired now.”
Joko nodded as if confirming this.
“Yes. I make a call when I hear is maybe Ibis. Last we hear of you, you are in Port Moresby. Then you are not.”
“Yes. Then I am not,” said Fyke. “My business was done, no point hanging about waiting for the peelers to clap me in bilboes. And you? Still stranded on the Med like a beached beluga?”
Joko glanced at Nikki and then back at Fyke.
“The lady associate?”
“The lady associate knows you were once a member of the Mossad, which, last time I checked, is still a perfectly legal organization to belong to. Miss Gandolfo is also a very good friend of Israel, as I am, or I would not have brought her. She is traveling with me on a research project.”
“I see,” he said, his expression indicating that he saw nothing of the kind. “What sort of research project, miss?”
Nikki rooted around in her purse, came up with one of Cather’s legend cards. “This man is a professor at the University of Virginia. I’m interviewing people who used to be active in the intelligence world. Sort of an archive work, an academic history, meant largely as an in-house training tool. Nothing that could affect the real world. If you like, you can call that number and verify—”
Joko waved the card away but not rudely.
“I always trust a pretty girl with hazel eyes. You think to learn something academic from me, Miss Gandolfo?”
“No,” said Fyke. “She does not. I’m the specimen in her bottle, Joko. But since she’s along for the ride, I thought it would be interesting for her to meet another old operator.”
“Old? I am fifty-four only. You are, what, ninety-three?”
“Much older. It’s the whisky preserves me. Look, Joko, time being fleet for both of us, and lovely as it is to banter with an old comrade, I got to be straight—”
“Hah! Straight like drain snake.”
“I’m here to ask you to put in a word for an old friend—” Joko’s face hardened up.
“This have anything to do with what your old friend did a few days ago in Vienna?”
Fyke leaned back, laid his hands palm up on the table.
“Joko. My lad. I thought you were out of the game?”
“I am retired. Not deaf. You are Ibis, he was Shrike. You two are the famous Birdmen who did so much to make the Serbs and Croats unhappy in Pristina. Is it to be a coincidence when Ibis appears just as the name Shrike is on everybody’s lips
?”
“I guess not. Yes, it’s about him—”
Joko held up a massive callused palm.
“I knew the man, you know. The dead man in the trunk of the Saab. He was my training officer. An old and valued friend. Also a patriot. A hero. His wife and kids, after he does not come back from the Negev and goes to Venice instead, we took care of his family. Whatever they needed—money, college, medical, dental, friendship—whatever was needed. For all those years. Took care also that they not ever know too much of what those Jordanian pigs did to him. You remember Ya’el Bar Zev?”
“Wiry. Looked like a starving ferret? Dark, brooding kid?”
Joko inclined his head, not taking his small eyes off Fyke, his voice a thick rumbling rasp deep in his throat.
“Yes. He and some others, they hunt down and punish every Jordanian officer what did this thing. Only Ya’el does not come back out of Jurf al-Darwish . . .” Joko shrugged, his shoulders lifting and falling with huge seismic shudders. “This is business, you know? Like with your people. You lose somebody you love, then somebody on the other side pays. Is the rule.”
Fyke’s smile was in place but now carried more threat than warmth. “Just as long as the right people pay.”
Fyke leaned forward, speaking in a low, flat tone.
“Hear me, Joko. The boys should know—you should know—it wasn’t him. The boys should back off. He and your friend, they were comrades. Fought a nasty little street war in Venice and then across the Adriatic in Kotor. In Trieste too. The man we’re talking about, he did not do this.”
Joko leaned in close to Fyke, inches apart.
“I know of this nasty little war. I also know when it is over. And Shrike goes on killing Serbs in Venice anyway. Kills four men with his bare hands. Hunts an old man named Mirko Belajic through the streets, puts a bullet in his eye. Inside a Christian chapel! My friend says to him, ‘You are crazy. Suicidal crazy. Get out of Venice.’ Galan says to him, ‘Get out of Venice and do not come back.’ ”
“Shrike did not kill Issadore Galan, Joko. He has been—”
“Set up? Hah. Proof, we have been given, Ray. Hard proof.”
“No. Not possible. Faked.”
“ ‘Faked’?” said Joko in a growl. “Faked is Shrike’s own voice? Your friends, the Amis, they have him on tape, from his cell phone, when he is in Vienna hunting Galan—”
“His cell-phone tape? How did you get it?”
“From his own people. The CIA. There is internal investigation of Shrike. For stealing Agency funds, for going crazy. Once he cut off a man’s head with a hatchet and send it to some American cop, did you know that? There is picture of this. Did you know he owns a town house in London? On agent salary? Also apartment in Venice, also has a big boat? How does he do all that? I am a bar owner only, for which I still pay fat slug mortgage, and I am thirty years with the Mossad!”
“The house in London, far as I know, he inherited from—”
“Oh yes. From old maiden aunt. Ray, our friend is on tape threatening Galan. I myself have heard it. I know Shrike’s voice—
“Joko, that’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“Yeah. What he says, and I have heard it. He is talking to some woman at Langley, she is not identified. He makes the call from the bar at the Regina Hotel in the Ring. On the tape he says, ‘Galan’s a problem, a nasty one. I need to take care of it.’ ”
That stopped Fyke for a moment.
Joko pressed his point.
“See. He says so himself. Galan is a problem. He needs to take care of it. And he does. He kills Galan, puts him in Saab—”
“Why, Joko? Ask yourself. Why would he do that?”
“Why? Because Galan chases him out of Venice. Maybe Galan also knows too much about his money, where he gets it. Time to shut up an inconvenient old Jew.”
“So he tortures him to death, Joko?”
Joko shrugged that off with a flat look of cold dislike.
“Got to know what the old man knows.”
Something seemed to leave Fyke then. He leaned back in the booth, looking at Joko as if seeing him for the first time.
“So you’re not going to call the boys off?”
Joko shrugged, looked around the room as if he were expecting somebody, came back to Fyke.
“Ray, listen good. When I hear you are in the bar, I make a call.”
“You shit. You called the Office.”
“Yes. I did. They think you know where Micah Dalton is.”
Fyke got up, put his hands on the table, leaned in close to Joko, who pulled back, lifting his hands up to ward off a blow.
“Here’s a promise, then, Joko my old friend. You tell the lads when they get here that if they want to go to war with Mikey and me, we’ll give them all the war they want. You follow?”
“I follow,” said Joko, looking over Fyke’s shoulder as three lean military-looking men in faded jeans and light summer jackets came in through the glass doors, already scanning the bar.
“But maybe you tell them yourself ?”
Staryi Krim
CENTRAL CRIMEAN HIGHLANDS, HIGHWAY P 35, 100 KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF SIMFEROPOL, TWO P.M. LOCAL TIME
Under a sky of Prussian blue, the central highlands of the Crimean Peninsula spread out in front of the Lancer like a patchwork cape. As they gained altitude, the lush farmlands slowly gave way to stony outcroppings and bare-bones ridgetops, the spring green and gold of the tilled lands fading into prairie foothills, relieved here and there by a darker green cloak of scrub forest. There wasn’t much in the way of civilization up here, just a few cleared acres with squat little farmhouses tucked into lee corners out of the winter winds. Cruising at a steady eighty klicks on what was fairly good two-lane blacktop, they soon reached altitudes where the Crimean winter still lingered, a harsh, semidesert landscape dotted with weathered and deeply scored outcrops of rock rising above a sea of prairie grass, here and there a stand of stunted trees and a patch of plowed field, a few head of skinny cattle, mixed in with shaggy little goats, picking a scarce living out of the gorse. It was a sullen and wintry desolation that soon grew tiresome, which Mandy dealt with by fluffing a pillow behind her neck, reclining the passenger seat, and drifting off into quiet contemplation of the previous evening.
Dalton found a tape—an actual audiotape—stuffed into the glove compartment, turned it over in the light. Theme music from Memoirs of a Geisha, with Yo-Yo Ma. It seemed to fit the landscape. He looked over at Mandy, at the taut skin along the side of her neck and her face at rest in the pale light. She was not a young girl anymore, but every year she seemed to grow more lovely, as if, like Merlin, her beauty was traveling backward through time.
He reached over and pulled her cloak up around her shoulders. She sighed, said something he could not make out, and slipped back into her dreams.
Around noon, they broke out of the grasslands and crested a summit of the inland range, where they found a fair-sized town called Bilohirsk. It was a rickety collection of concrete storage sheds and transit yards, with some Soviet-era concrete housing blocks scattered around the terrain laid out in a distorted grid on the southern slopes of a razorback mountain.
Since he hadn’t seen a gas station since Simferopol, Dalton turned off the road and pulled into a bleak little square lined with shabby shops and crowded vodka bars. He was hoping to find a trucking depot or a car lot where, if he was prepared to pay an outrageous markup, perhaps they’d sell him some gasoline that wouldn’t immediately destroy the engine. The Lancer, by the local standards a vehicle roughly equivalent to a UFO materializing in a luminous green cloud, attracted a lot of sullen attention.
Dalton’s fingernails’ grip on the Slavic languages wasn’t much help, but after getting a lot of blank stares and muttered rejections he was able to find a black-market stall on the eastern edge of the town and a grizzled old Kalmuck there willing to sell him some gas at about twice the going rate.
Dalton paid him in euros. The old man ha
ndled the crisp new bills as if they were pieces of the True Cross, smiling so broadly that his bright blue eyes disappeared in the folds of leathery skin around his eyes, the sunlight glinting off his silver tooth, which was also his only tooth. Mandy, who because of her father’s mining interests in the region spoke Ukrainian and Russian fairly well, stayed asleep—or pretended to—throughout the entire exchange, a half smile playing on her slightly puffy lips.
A few miles on, and they were crossing a winding river valley filled with pine forests. Theirs was the only vehicle moving along a deteriorating road that snaked between low stepped hills, with roughly two hundred klicks between them and Kerch. Mandy sat up, looking off to the south, where she could see a faint brown object floating in midair along a forested slope. She used a pair of binoculars supplied by the hotel to take a closer look at the small beige dot.
“It’s a helicopter. One of those ugly Russian things with the two stubby engines and all those propellers.”
“You mean a Kamov. And I think they’re called rotors.”
Mandy took the binoculars away and pulled out the folded map that she had stuffed into the side pocket, unfolding it with some difficulty.
“Odd,” she said, drawing a circle around the closest village, a place called Staryi Krim, “Nothing here but the ruins of a monastery and a museum for some writer named Alexander Grin. Even the Amosov heart clinic only runs in the summer. It’s just a wide spot in the road, less than five thousand people, and there’s nothing else in the region that would justify a helicopter. Unless they use them to herd the goats, which seems a tad excessive.”
“Yes. Down in the farmlands, they use Kamovs as crop dusters. What’s it doing up here?” he asked, straining to see the dot against the backdrop of green trees.
“Well,” said Mandy, studying the chopper through the binoculars. “If I were in the espionage game, I’d say it was tracking us. It seems to be moving in a parallel line along the highway . . . he’s keeping his distance . . . But it’s definitely possible we’ve attracted somebody’s attention. Any suggestions?”
