by Bill Granger
“All right. I’ll work my computer magic and maybe I’ll get through and maybe I won’t. But what if they know about this… Soviet operation in Chicago? What if they know about it? I’ll use the names you give me, times, places. What if I get a matchup?”
“If you get a glimmer, let it go. Just tell me,” Hanley said.
“But what do we do then?”
“You mean if it turns out one of our sister services already knows about this operation?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a possibility I don’t want to think about,” Hanley said.
11
CHICAGO
“You got a piece?”
“I don’t carry no guns,” said Peter.
Devereaux paused. “You better start.”
“Why’s zat?”
“Shit is going down.”
“Zat right?”
“Melvina’s in trouble. If you can’t do the job, I’ve got to get someone who can.”
“What kinda trouble? Trouble you bring?”
“Yes.”
“What kinda trouble?”
“Who the fuck do you think those two guys were who came to the house nine weeks ago?”
“I don’t know. I don’t mess with white boys long’s they don’t mess with me. That’s how I get along.”
“If I want philosophy, I’ll read Schopenhauer. They were agents.”
“Immigration?”
“Come on, Peter. If I thought you were that dumb, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Foreigners.”
“Soviets. You know, the Big Red One.”
“And you a spy.”
“You don’t want to know that. You want to know that those two men are going to come again. Or maybe different men. But all of it’s going to be the same.”
“I got a piece.”
“I know.”
“You know, why you ask me?”
“It’s a game. I find out when you want to tell me things.”
“I tell you ’bout that ole lady. That ole lady is a bitch on wheels but she’s all right. I was inside.”
“I figured that.”
“You did, huh?”
“Stray dogs. Homeless children. Ex-cons. Melvina does good in the world.”
“She do. Do you good. I don’t want no more trouble out of life.”
“Neither do I. But it keeps looking for us. How long inside?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Nobody does time like that anymore.”
“You want to see my sheet?”
“Who’d you kill?”
“The wrong person.”
“I guess so. I’ve got no clout with the cops, you know. But it’s either move Melvina out of this house or watch her. By the time I’m gone, you won’t have as much trouble. It’s just a couple of weeks; it’s going to be tricky.”
“They looking for you.”
“You win the cigar.”
“Why?”
“To kill me.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Die.”
“Die? You gonna do what they want?”
“I probably won’t have much say in it. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to arrange a few things first. Clean up some matters.”
“What about Melvina? When she say where you are?”
“Tell her I’m dead.”
“Man, you’re coming down hard.”
“Hard as I have to. You tell her, Peter. What d’you want out of it? Money? I can get it.”
“Man can always use money. But it ain’t money to be carryin’ again with my parole and ever’thing.”
“You didn’t live this long being a pussy.”
“No, you right. Okay. Whatta we do?”
“Find out what some friends of mine are going to do tonight first.”
“You mean about that Polish woman was working here?”
“Yes.”
“What’s gonna happen to her?”
“I don’t know.”
Mary would not take the pills and so the priest and John Stolmac administered the drug by hypodermic. It wasn’t pleasant. Mary cried; she was shouting at them. John struck her, and the priest was shocked and said so. Mary, before she went under, said John beat her all the time. The priest asked was this true. John Stolmac said nothing. His nerves were on edge. Mary had upset the other women; Teresa Kolaki had left the house, returned, saying she had taken a long walk because she couldn’t stand the atmosphere in the apartment.
It was a mild sedation. Father Wojniak saw it was best. Best for Mary, best for everyone. Before they left, Father Wojniak blessed the house and blessed the women. Tanya Korvasiak knelt to receive the blessing; she knew she was pregnant and she hoped the blessing would be both for her and for the child. Only Teresa Kolaki did not kneel or make the sign of the cross.
Mary was conscious but drowsy. Her mind was full of Karol. She could smell him, hear him, touch him. But he was dead. The drug interacted badly with the alcohol already in her system. She felt depressed and elated by turns. She seemed drained of fight, though, when they finally bundled her down the steps and ushered her into the back seat of the black car—a car summoned from somewhere by someone; she had never seen it before. A black-suited driver in black hat and mustache pulled away from the apartment building on Kenwood Avenue. Mary Krakowski did not turn to look back.
John Stolmac was next to her. The priest shared the front seat with the driver. The car prowled across 51st Street and wound down through a little park to 47th Street and then to the drive along the lake.
“Karol,” she said in a small, weak voice.
“Be quiet, woman,” John Stolmac said. He was upset. Teresa had been acting strangely. He grabbed Mary’s arm above the elbow and squeezed it brutally, so that despite the drugs and alcohol Mary winced with pain. A whimper escaped her lips. She would be quiet.
John had terrified her from the first day because men had represented terror in her life. She was a woman who had learned to work around the brutal, unpredictable nature of these beasts. If John beat her, let him not beat her too badly. Let her endure.
That was exterior. Inside, Mary was all rage and anger. Even against the man in the kitchen of Melvina’s house. He told Teresa he would help her but not Mary. Not Mary because Karol was dead. So cold a man, so brutal. He terrified Mary, too; Mary had been too afraid to speak of him for fear of what he would have done to her. But what could he do to her now? She was dead, as dead as Karol, going back to a dead place, to live the life of death until sleep.
She was a slave. And no one would help her be free.
“Are you all right?” The man who said he was a priest stared at her.
“All right,” she mumbled. John let go of her arm. It felt numb beneath the black coat. She had never understood what she was supposed to do to please John. Except for that…
John had showed her how to use the camera but she ruined rolls of film. So clumsy and slow. He had hit her. That was the first time. It had become easier after that. He had pinned her arms at the wrist with one giant hand and slapped her face until she cried. They were alone in the apartment. It was night, the others were working. John had grinned at her when she had said, “Please don’t.” The first time, it had seemed so easy not to be hurt. She did what he asked. She slipped to her knees, opened his pants, took it in her mouth. It was all he wanted. She was ashamed. John Stolmac said she wanted to be beaten but it was not true.
Once John struck Teresa, but Teresa had screamed at him, attacked and scratched him, and John had retreated, uttering threats. Mary knew Teresa felt contempt for her. They all did. They were right. It was because of her sins that God took Karol from her.
No more contract. She felt so tired, so tired.
She gazed sleepily out the side window at the glowing night city. The towers were full of bright yellow-lit windows. Snow lay crisp on the parkland along the lake, unmarked and glistening. The water steamed in the cold lake as though it were on fire.
“Mary.”
She was outside the car. She turned. How had she gotten here?
The car had stopped at a light in Grant Park. She had opened the door somehow and just walked out, and now John Stolmac was calling her. He was so far away.
“Mary!”
What a strange feeling overcame her. She felt light. She was running across the snow. No, she was flying, leaving no trace of herself. She smiled at the beauty filling her. She could not hear John anymore. Karol was not far away; she could not see him but she felt him near her. She smelled him.
The park reached to Michigan Avenue, where the towers of the Loop began. The bare trees were stark in the lights of the street lamps, claws extending from the monstrous trunks.
Like a night in Warsaw, years ago, the cold all around stinging young cheeks red, the laughter coming from the café, and Mary dancing across the snowy street.
Karol.
John Stolmac was running across the snow but he would never catch her. She turned and looked at him and wanted him dead. Die. Die right now. But he ran toward her.
Where is Karol?
Dead.
She saw his broken body in the newspaper photograph. That was Karol. All else is false. That is what is real. You killed Karol because of your sins.
And so Mary realized in that moment she desired to die because it would let her be with Karol always. God revealed to her there was no hell, only an abyss beyond life where souls warmed each other.
She crossed to the bridge over the Illinois Central Gulf commuter tracks that lay in a wide trench between the lakefront park and the Michigan Avenue traffic. Her side ached; perhaps she had been running, not flying. John was running behind her, shouting at her. She saw his footprints on the snow but not her own.
She must fly.
The 6:09 commuter train pulled slowly out of the Van Buren Street station heading south toward the suburbs. Because the engineer was accelerating the electric-powered train, there was no way he could have stopped in time, even if he had seen the woman vault the stonework of the bridge and fall in front of the engine. She struck the window, her body fell, she was impaled for a moment by the bumper guard; then, almost gently, her body slipped beneath the carriage of the train, crushed by the wheels. It was no one’s fault. Everyone agreed on that later.
It was not so difficult to escape at night. At midnight, Teresa Kolaki and the other women in the laboratory took a break to eat their sandwiches and drink Thermos bottles of coffee laced with milk and sugar.
Teresa simply walked out of the building. She picked up a shopping bag full of clothes and walked down the steps of the university building to Midway Plaisance, a wide street with a sunken park in the middle that stretched along the southern border of the university grounds.
A taxi stopped at her signal and she climbed inside.
“Forty-six zero one Ellis Avenue,” she said gravely. She had never ridden in a taxi before.
The driver turned and looked at her. He was a small-faced, dark-skinned man with glittering eyes. “Are you certain? That is the neighborhood of the blacks.”
She said nothing. She was terrified of herself, her boldness, of all that had happened to convince her that she had to save herself if she could not save Mary. She had to save Stefan. John Stolmac had returned home less than an hour after departing for the airport with Mary. He had seemed shaken. The priest was not with him. She had asked if Mary was all right.
“Dead,” John had said, his eyes wide with horror. He had refused to say anything further.
So. It was true. They wanted to kill Mary.
Maybe they would kill all of them. The contracts were worthless now.
12
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
“Go ahead,” said O’Brien. He was deputy operations chief.
Craypool cleared his throat. A device on one wall created a thin coating of white noise that rendered the room routinely bugproof. Room 7398-A in the main building of the Puzzle Factory complex on the Army post was always used for the most sensitive debriefings. O’Brien had commandeered it because what was to be said was not to be repeated.
“Gleason and Frankfurter finally got lucky.”
“About time. Did you come down on them yet about the translation we taped out of the subbasement room at the embassy?”
“No, sir. I thought it was better to keep Gleason and Frankfurter in the dark. They don’t have to know why we know they were goofing off. It doesn’t matter. They tumbled to being watched by Malenkov and his crew. Made a verbal report two hours ago.”
“Jesus Christ. This will mess things up.”
“Yes, sir. But I still have to do something about it. They want to start tapping Malenkov.”
“Idiots. I thought we picked them because they were strictly peons.”
“Peons get lucky, too. Gleason even said that it now seemed likely the Russians were still after the R Section agent, using his girlfriend.”
“Brilliant. These guys take smart pills, right?”
“Well, I sent them to Chicago. They ought to be arriving in an hour.”
“Why? Because of what Malenkov said in the transcript translation?”
“Partially. Get them out of the way. If November is in Chicago visiting relatives, it’s easier to let them hit him there. It makes our part less complicated.”
“Because of the fuckup in Vienna? A fucking priest can’t even watch one kid. Asshole. You deal with these people long enough, you begin to believe Polish jokes.”
“Well, I couldn’t figure out a way to direct them to Chicago. The Russians, I mean. Short of just telling them.”
“Fuck. They’re as bad as the Polacks. They fucked this up from the beginning when they sent those two hitters from Sofia to waste our man. Dumb. So you send Gleason and Frankfurter and what do they do?”
“See if he’s there.”
“Is he?”
“Probably. Remember, we weren’t much interested until this fuckup of the Zurich operation. If he’s sticking his nose in it, and I suppose he is, he hasn’t talked to the Section yet. We’ve got Hanley tapped like a maple tree in spring and he isn’t leaking a damned thing.”
“All his phones, everything?”
“Sir, his apartment is like a stage set. I mean, we have opened him up. If November is contacting him, I don’t know how he’s doing it.”
“I don’t mind fucking up R Section. Strictly amateur night over there. But this other thing. I don’t like November getting so close.”
“November would have contacted—”
“Maybe, maybe not. He plays a lone hand more than I like. That’s what gets him into trouble in the first place. How’s this scenario? Malenkov takes out Devereaux; we help by spotting him, setting it up. Then if he kills the broad, we do a trap on him—get some smart guys for a change, will you?—and do this booga-booga about the Russians killing innocent journalists on our own shores.”
“It might play. The other thing, it keeps attention away from Chicago.”
“Okay. Morgan is on his way to Zurich tonight. We’ve got to keep the fat man calm, keep the Big Red Machine humming quietly to itself. And get rid of this fucking Section hand. Keep him here one more night. Morgan, I mean.”
“And if they don’t kill the broad, we let Malenkov keep rolling along as he is. He’s been useful to us since we penetrated their secret room, you know that? He does better work than our guys do—Gleason and Frankfurter going out to take a crap when they should have stayed on the broad. Assholes. The quality of people you got to deal with.”
“Yeah.”
13
CHICAGO
Teresa Kolaki was drained. She finally fell asleep just before three in a second-floor bedroom in Melvina’s house. She had been awake nearly two days. She had told them everything before she fell asleep.
The house was dark.
Peter sat on the couch with a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver on his lap. Devereaux stood at the window and watched. Two
white men in a blue rental car were parked in the alley across the street. Two or three white men in a white rental car had been circling the house every ten or fifteen minutes since midnight. He wasn’t sure either of them had seen Teresa Kolaki when she came to the house in a cab; he wasn’t sure they hadn’t.
“What are you going to do?” Melvina asked him in a brittle voice after she put Teresa in the bedroom and rejoined the two men in the front room of the silent house.
“I have to get out at four and make a call. I’ll be gone in a few hours, Melvina.”
“But why did you give Peter that gun?”
“Ask Peter.”
“Peter? You won’t tell me, will you? You’re breaking parole.”
Peter grinned. His teeth were bright in the darkness. “No big thing, Miz Devereaux.”
He felt alive. He had been dead so long. Inside. Even here for the past four years. She meant well but she was hard to get along with, too. Peter kept his head down, kept out of her way. White women like her were strange sometimes. And she was real old.
“You made him do it?”
“Be quiet, Melvina. If you want to go to bed, don’t let me stop you.”
“What is going to happen?”
Devereaux did not turn from the window to look at her. His voice was flat, without guile. “They’ve found me. The Opposition. I don’t see I have much chance. Peter is going to protect you. He needs a piece in case they want to hurt you. Teresa is the complication. I didn’t expect her so soon. They’ve killed Mary Krakowski.”
God, she thought. As though she had lived her life in sanity and all had become madness at the end of it.
“Will you go to California, Melvina?”
“I’m an old woman.”
“Yes. I thought you’d say that.”
“Why California?”
“I know someone. For Teresa. It could be safer for her. For a while. While I make arrangements.”
“Arrangements?”
“For my funeral. I’ve got a will to write out, a few things.”
He was smiling at her.
“Don’t say such things, even in jest,” she protested.
