THE DEATH FREAK -- An Eddie Mancuso Thriller (Eddie Mancuso And Vasily Borgneff Book 1)

by Clifford Irving

  The colonel disengaged his hand. "I will call the Kremlin to make arrangements. I am sure that Leonid Ilyich will not deny me this small favor."

  As he left the room, the colonel nodded to the other two. They followed him into the corridor. Once there, he addressed himself to Marchenko. "The ceremony will be on Friday. Your job is to make sure that this killer turned milksop is in proper shape to attend. I want him looking like a model Soviet officer as well as a bereaved husband—do you understand?"

  "I do, Colonel."

  "As for you, Durin, I want you in charge of security at the ceremony. You know how Borgneff works. Take every precau­tion necessary ... up to a point. Do you follow me?"

  Durin obviously did not. Puzzled, he said, "If the colonel could be more explicit."

  "Very well, if I must. I worked with Vasily Borgneff for over twenty years, and I can assure you that if he is behind this new attack he will be at that ceremony Friday. No matter where he is now, he will be there. To try again. And frankly, I don't want him frightened off. I want him to make his attempt."

  "And Suvarov?"

  "You see what the man is like now. Worthless to us. Let Borg­neff take him if he can. Just so long as Borgneff is taken as well. Now do you understand?"

  "Perfectly, sir."

  Thus it was that although the manner in which Nedya Suvarova had met her death went unreported in the Moscow papers, on the following day both Pravda and Izvestia announced the plans for a memorial funeral service to be held in the grand hall of the Ministry of Justice, a ceremony in keeping with the deceased's honored position as a Heroine of the Soviet Union. The public was advised that the body would lie in state on Friday from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, during which time citizens would be able to pay their respects.

  The concierge at the Hotel Rossiya was pleased to translate the Pravda announcement for the sad-eyed Mr. Morrison, and in fact was impressed by the American's apparent concern to the extent of deciding that compassion was an international attribute and that all men truly were brothers. He would have been less im­pressed had he known that Eddie's melancholy sprang purely from a battered professional pride. Neither sadness nor remorse had anything to do with it. Nedya Suvarov had been as much a serving KGB officer as her husband, and as such her life had long been up for grabs. She bought some early retirement acciden­tally—those things happened; but on the scoreboard of results Nedya was dead, her husband was still alive, and Eddie Mancuso had blown an assignment.

  He thanked the concierge for the translation, and took the ele­vator to the fourth floor, claiming his key from the dezhurnaya, and walking down the long corridor aware of the smell of fresh paint in the air. The door to the room opposite his was open, the pungent odor flowing out from it. Cans and brushes were stacked on the floor, but the painters were absent.

  Long socialist lunch hour, Eddie thought as he unlocked his door. He slumped in the chair to ponder, stared out the window at the Church of the Conception of St. Anne, which occupied his section of the Moscow skyline, and proceeded to kick his ass around the room. When he got tired of that, he began making excuses for himself.

  "Who could figure it that way?" he asked the empty room. It's supposed to be Suvarov's own secret mushroom patch, so how the hell do I figure that Sunday morning, maybe, he rolls over in bed and says, Hey, sweetie, I'm really whacked out this morn­ing. You know how it is—long, hard week arranging to kill peo­ple, like that Colonel Fist is a tyrant in the office, seven copies of everything. So how's about you go out and pick the mush­rooms today, huh? Give the old man a break.

  Or something like that.

  All right, excuses don't help. What now? I've got one ace going for me, the funeral. Suvarov has to come out for that. So I can take him at the ceremony, but how? The camera? It's a sure thing they don't let anybody in with a camera. The hand? Yeah, I can take him with the hand, but for that I have to get up close, and once I take him they take me, which is not exactly the purpose of the operation. Besides, I can't afford an open kill. It has to look natural, at least for a while, so that I can go after the others. But how?

  How would Vasily do it? This is his turf, what would he use?

  He sat and thought about that for a while, trying to think as Vasily might, but the process was fruitless. He was a stranger on foreign ground without a working knowledge of the people and the customs of the place. He could think of a dozen workable gadgets that he might have made at home, but here in Moscow all doors were closed to him. There were no friendly machinists or cooperative druggists to supply his needs. He was wholly on his own, and helpless. He sat back and sighed, wrinkling his nose at the irritating odor of fresh paint. A quick movement on the floor caught the corner of his eye, and as he swung his head he saw a cockroach scurry across the strip of wooden flooring beyond the carpet. The roach slipped into a crack in the wall, and was gone. Seconds later another roach followed, then another.

  It's the painting across the hall, he told himself, tenement-wise in the ways of the roach. New York or Moscow, it's the same, I guess. When the painters move in, the roaches move out.

  Paint? Roaches?

  The edge of something scratched at his mind, then slipped away. Paint and roaches. Go together. Why?

  He sat up suddenly in the chair. His chin came up as well, and he started to smile. The smile changed to a frown as he checked the details of the idea now expanding in his mind like a super­nova. He checked each point, then checked them all again. He made his mind a blank, let the idea rest, and then opened up and went through it one more time.

  "Only if they have the strips," he muttered. "They should, it's a deluxe hotel—but who knows in this country?"

  Almost as if he were afraid to test his theory, he stood up very slowly and walked to the edge of the carpet. He ran his foot along the border. Nothing. He did the same thing a few feet farther down. Again nothing. On the third try, he felt something long and flat under the carpet. He knelt down and flipped back the edge. Under the carpet was an oblong orange strip of plastic.

  "Eddie, my boy, you've still got the touch," he said softly. He picked up the strip, examined it, and grinned at the English print­ing that read shell no-pest.

  Moving quickly, he worked his way around the edge of the carpet, feeling and reaching. He found four of the strips of pesti­cide. On a sudden thought he looked in the clothes closet and found four more hanging as fly killers. With the eight strips clutched in his hands, he stood in the center of the room and looked around until he found what he needed. Taking a vase from the bedside table, he discarded the flowers. He emptied the water down the bathroom sink, and dried the inside of the vase thor­oughly. Then he went back into the bedroom and slipped the strips of pesticide into the vase one by one. The eight of them filled the container.

  "Phase two," he murmured.

  He left the vase on the table, went to the door, opened it, and peered out. The corridor was empty. Leaving his door open, he skipped across the hall to the opposite room. The painters were still out to lunch. He was into and out of the empty room in less than a minute, and when he came out he was carrying a two-liter can of paint thinner. Back in his room, with the door locked, he poured the thinner into the vase until the plastic strips were cov­ered. A quick trip across the hall to replace the can, and phase two was complete.

  "Phase three," he said as he tried to figure the rate of evapo­ration. He decided on twelve hours as a minimum and eighteen as an optimum. He picked the vase up carefully, opened the closet door, and set it down behind his suitcase. He looked down happily at the soaking strips.

  "DVDP," he said, pronouncing the letters the way a lover would murmur the name of his beloved. He wondered if Vasily would have thought of the roach strips, and decided against it. He's got the wrong kind of background. To know about cock­roaches you either have to live in New York or a luxury Moscow hotel.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon working on his nasal spray. He took the mechanism apart,
cleaned the tube of residual chlor­ine, and then went to work with his pocketknife and cigarette lighter. The folding knife contained, among other things, a dia­mond-edged blade. The lighter's charge could be boosted to the temporary strength of an acetylene torch. He used the two tools to cut down the nasal-spray tube; when he was finished it mea­sured less than an inch and a half. He cut the spray mechanism in half as well, repacked it into the tube, and filled it with water. He tested it in the bathroom, filling it and emptying it three times before he was satisfied. Then he took it apart again, dried it, repacked it, and went to stand in front of the hall mirror.

  You're going to have to be quick as a snake, he told his reflec­tion. Quick and accurate.

  He spent the next hour practicing in front of the mirror: reach­ing into his left jacket pocket, palming the spray, and bringing it out with his hand flat at his side, the tube unseen. He worked steadily, pausing only when the telephone rang.

  "Yeah?"

  Wolfs voice said, "Do you know who this is?"

  "I know you. When and where?"

  The voice gave an address, and added, "It's off the corner of Arbat Street, very easy to find. Saturday at six."

  "What name?"

  "No name."

  "If there's no name, I'm not interested."

  "All right: Igor. Just ask for Igor."

  "Does Igor know the story?"

  "He knows everything." The voice became concerned. "You won't forget my commission, will you?"

  "You'll get it," Eddie said, and hung up.

  He went back to practicing before the mirror, thinking, It has to be Durin. Igor Durin. I take Suvarov tomorrow, Durin on Saturday, and then I go after the big brass. If that stew in the closet works. It damn well better. It's about time I did some­thing right on this run.

  He put the nasal spray aside and went to the closet to get the records from his suitcase. He stacked them on the bed. The slip jacket of the top record read, piano music of chopin by wil- helm kempff. The record inside was the Billie Holiday 1956 Carnegie Hall concert. The second jacket announced three Bee­thoven sonatas played by Vladimir Horowitz, but the record was vintage Louis Armstrong. The rest of the discs were similarly disguised. He flipped through the stack until he came to four recordings by the Modern Jazz Quartet. He picked one at random and examined it carefully, nodded, examined the other three, and then compared the four rigged records with several that were untouched. He could see no difference between them. Again con­tent, he packed the records into an attache case and slid it under the bed.

  That evening he enjoyed his meal at the Hotel Rossiya for the first time since his arrival, eating the zakuski with an extra vodka, and devouring a goulash which, in other days, he would have rejected. Also that night, for the first time since his arrival, he allowed himself to think of Chalice as he lay in bed on the edge of sleep. The desire was strong in him, and he tried to count the number of days since he last had seen her, last had had her. He fell asleep still counting.

  He slept soundly through the night and awoke as the first touch of gray reached the windows. He started to get out of bed, then forced himself to lie down again and be patient. He stayed in bed that way for another hour, dozing and waking, checking the bed­side clock. Then at seven o'clock he rose and forced himself to go through his bathroom routine slowly and carefully. Only after he was shaved, and bathed, and dressed for the day did he allow himself to open the closet, take out the vase, and set it on the table.

  The vase was apparently empty. The plastic strips were gone and the paint thinner had been totally evaporated. What was left in the container was a thin, oily sludge that covered the bottom. The sludge appeared both innocent and commonplace.

  "Dichlorovinyl dimethyl phosphate," Eddie said with a chuc­kle. He did not stumble over the complex syllables. He knew the words well.

  Standing in the grand hall of the Ministry of Justice, Captain Igor Durin reviewed the security arrangements for the lying-in­state ceremony, and was satisfied with his work. The hall was a long, narrow, and high-ceilinged room with only two doors, one at either end. The open casket had been placed on a bier in the cerrter of one long wall, surrounded by flowers, banked with greenery, and guarded by armed sentinels from the various ser­vices. Opposite the bier, against the other long wall, stood the official mourning party, the KGB contingent led by Colonel Fist, seconded by Major Marchenko, and between them the pale but composed Suvarov. The shape of the room allowed for an easy flow of traffic as the double line of viewers entered from the south door, filed forward slowly past the casket, and then exited at the other end. Uniformed KGB troops guarded each door and stood in positions of observation down the line. Outside the hall, where the line extended as far as the street and into it, more troops maintained a disciplined order, collected handbags and packages to be returned later, and kept the visitors moving at a steady rate. At no point during the process was a visitor left unobserved.

  From his concealed position well behind the casket, Durin watched the procession filing past, wondering not only at the large number of visitors but also at the diverse types of people who had come to pay their last respects. Some he recognized as apparatchiks, party members present for political purposes. Oth­ers were obviously visitors from sister socialist republics, and curious foreigners from Western trade delegations; but the bulk of the mourners were ordinary Soviet citizens with nothing better to do with their time than honor a dead woman of whom they had never heard before, and all because she bore on her breast the star of a Heroine of the Soviet Union.

  Durin checked his wristwatch. Just after two, less than an hour to go, and already by his calculations over two thousand people had passed through the hall. Two thousand pairs of eyes into which he had stared from behind his screen, two thousand faces he had studied, recorded, and rejected. There were only a certain number of ways in which a man could disguise his appearance, Durin knew them all, and certain basic characteristics always remained. After over four hours of continuous observation he was certain that Vasily Borgneff had not yet appeared in the hall. He was equally certain that should Borgneff appear he would know him at once.

  From behind the screen, Durin could see down into the open coffin and the body lying there in the dress uniform of the KGB. She had been an attractive and intelligent woman, Nedya Iva­nova, and there had been a time when he had seriously con­sidered . . . but the thought was indecorous for the occasion, and he dismissed it. Besides, the word on the woman was that she had been totally devoted to her clod of a husband, just as he had been to her. Durin allowed his eyes to flick across the room to the official party. Suvarov's face was set, and there were no tears, but every once in a while he would rock back and forth on his heels, as if about to crumple to the floor. Marchenko stood close to him, close enough to catch him if he fell.

  Durin thought: A hell of a job for the major. If Borgneff does try something, Marchenko is right in the line of fire.

  He peeked again at his watch. Two thirty, another half hour to go. A long and monotonous duty, and one that was obviously unnecessary. The computer had said so, but because an old fool like Marchenko preferred to trust his instincts, poor Igor Durin must stand on aching feet peering into thousands of strange faces. When there were so many other things he could have been doing, like relaxing in his nest off Arbat Street, feet up in the air, a bottle of brandy by his side, and some Charlie Parker on the stereo. Something like "Embraceable You," where he takes that six- note phrase and noodles it around five different ways, up and down, inside out, and then comes back to rest on the same six notes. Thinking of that, he wondered what the boy, Wolf, had come up with this time. It sounded good—early Louis, MJQ, Horace Silver, and all the rest—but five thousand dollars? Dol­lars! For some Yankee capitalist entrepreneur squeezing money out of honest Soviet citizens. There were laws to deal with such people, and for a moment he toyed with the idea of applying those laws, of buying the records from this so-called businessman and then arresting him for il
legal trading. And reclaiming the money. The idea lasted only for a moment; the scandal would be too great. No, better to pay the money and get the goods. If the merchandise was worth it.

  Thinking such thoughts did not distract Durin from his duty. As the line moved slowly forward he carefully scrutinized each face that passed at a distance before him, male and female alike, staring, recording, rejecting; and at the moment found himself looking into the eyes of Eddie Mancuso. He was not looking for Eddie Mancuso, he was looking for Vasily Borgneff.

  He stared, recorded, and rejected. His eyes went on to the next in line.

  Because of that, he failed to see the quick motion of Eddie's hand, although the four service sentinels at the bier, and a dozen other officers standing nearby, did not see the motion either. The hand moved only inches, traveled those inches in seconds, but during those seconds the concealed and converted nasal spray ejected an almost invisible mist of lethal DVDP that settled on the lips and nose of the corpse of Nedya Ivanova Suvarova. Then the line moved on.

  At exactly two forty, the people still on the line outside the Ministry were told that no more visitors would be admitted. By that time Eddie was outside the hall and walking briskly up the street. At three o'clock the last of the visitors had passed by the casket, and then had exited through the far door. By that time, Eddie was sitting in a taxi on his way back to the Hotel Rossiya. When the last of the visitors had left the hall, Durin gave the signal for the doors to be closed and locked. Colonel Fist left the group of official mourners and crossed to where Durin was stand­ing.

  "Well?"

  Had he not been in uniform, Durin would have shrugged. In­stead, he contented himself with saying, "The computer was cor­rect. No sign of Borgneff."

  "We were obliged to try," the colonel said, unruffled. "Let's put an end to this farce. Do you know the drill from here on in?"

  "The casket is to be closed and pallbearers then take posi­tions," Durin recited. "The official mourning party forms behind the pallbearers according to seniority. The casket is then borne to the hearse waiting in the courtyard, after which—"