The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

  “He’s beautiful.”

  The midget clown Wojo was drunk. Jan Tomczek, who had searched for bottles to smash them, could smell liquor in the small compartment in the middle of the train. Wojo’s home in America.

  Wojo had not shaved for two days. He had performed badly in Minneapolis, missed his stunt fall, endangered the lives of two other clowns when he playfully put too much powder in the mock explosive detonated at the climax of the midget auto race. As it was, Miki the Clown had been burned and hospitalized in Minneapolis. The circus had received bad publicity because of that. Which did not bother Wojo.

  He was small, in perfect proportion, a little man with tiny, raisin eyes and brown hair and a sharp face. His parents had been normal size. He was born in a suburb of Gdansk. His brother and sister were normal size. Only he, Wojo would think from time to time, bore the curse.

  Wojo pitied himself, had done so all his life. The circus rescued him from the taunts of children, turned jeer into laughter to his profit. His success even enabled him to escape the regimentation of the state and attain a certain status; despite the conservatism of the Polish government, he could indulge an increasingly bizarre sexual appetite.

  Nearly forty, a performer for twenty years, Wojo was sick of life and himself. He was consumed with the thought of sex. In his sexual encounters, there was always the matter of dominance, no matter what partner or sex, no matter what other fantasy was played out. Everyone in the circus was afraid of Wojo, and drawn to him.

  Jan Tomczek locked the boy in his room on the train. It was the only way to protect him. Even Jan Tomczek could not be everywhere. A week ago, when the boy joined the circus train, reluctant and bewildered, Tomczek left him alone in the communal dining car in the middle of an afternoon. Wojo had found the boy, talked to him briefly, and then kissed him, held him, touched him. Until the child began to scream hysterically.

  Tomczek had returned in time, had slapped the clown away, and the midget had refused to perform that night.

  That same night, Tomczek had been warned by his superior in a message from Washington: Never touch the clown, he is important. And protect the boy.

  Impossible.

  The impossible was accomplished by imprisoning the child. Jan Tomczek felt miserable, felt haunted. And he felt fear for the first time in his life: the clown, Wojo, incarnated evil for him.

  It was Wojo who arranged to have the child replace Miki after Minneapolis. Stefan, dressed as a bride, stood perched atop a twelve-foot wedding cake made of wooden braces and plywood sheeting painted crudely to resemble frosting.

  Wojo, dressed as a groom, clambered up the tiers of the cake—with much slipping and pratfalling—until he reached the top of the cake to embrace his “bride.” They were married then by a clown at the bottom of the cake dressed as a priest. At the climax Wojo picked up the “bride” and, hidden from the audience, tumbled down a wooden slide in the cake into a pile at the bottom, falling on top of the priest and “witnesses” as the cake suddenly exploded with fireworks and roman candles.

  “Where is my mother?” Stefan Kolaki had asked Jan Tomczek after he was attacked in the dining car by Wojo.

  “Soon, little one,” the agent said.

  It was the last question Stefan would ask him. The last thing Stefan would say to him.

  Afterward Stefan, mild eyes peering weakly out of his glasses, would sit in the locked compartment and stare out the window at nothing at all. He was a child and accustomed to the sudden madnesses of adults who controlled the world. Like his mother, running away to America without him. Like this grotesque clown. Like Jan, who promised him lies.

  Stefan would not speak of Wojo. Would not speak of the moments when, hidden in the darkness of the wedding cake as it was wheeled to the center ring, Wojo grabbed him and held him and forced kisses on him, his foul vodka stench suffocating the boy, his arms squeezing the boy, his fingers probing the boy. Wojo had killed one of the aerialists three years ago, the circus people said. It was true that the aerialist, a woman, had spurned his sexual advances; it was true she had ridiculed the midget once in the dining tent for his sexual pretensions. It was true, further, the aerialist missed an easy turn in practice one morning, fell thirty-five feet, and broke her neck and died. All true and all proving nothing. Except the superstition of people in the circus.

  Wojo contented himself with a Hungarian boy of seventeen, an apprentice in the tumbling act. The boy—who made fun of Wojo to the others but had no great moral pretense—slept with the clown for the money that Wojo gave him. It was substantial. Wojo was a rich man.

  The circus manager once told Jan Tomczek: “The human mind is incapable of seeing beauty unless it is to destroy it.” He was a middle-aged man and cynical.

  A strange thing to say to a member of the Polish Security Police. But he said it about Wojo, about his lusts, his foul tongue, his rages, his abandons; Jan Tomczek understood perfectly. The midget did not love the little boy; he merely wished to destroy him.

  “You are afraid of the midget,” the manager had said to Jan Tomczek. “Yes. Don’t lie. I know you are secret police, but it is true. The child fears Wojo; you fear him, you smell evil from him. I smell it as well. You are right. He is a devil.”

  “A very small devil.”

  “See? Everything is his size. You ridicule him. But quietly. He cannot bully you but you can still fear him. He knows he is a freak, always has known it. He is too insignificant in his own eyes so he must be larger than life. For good, for evil. He chose one.” The manager paused. “Perhaps it chose him.”

  And through the nightmare days and nightmare nights, the child named Stefan Kolaki, hostage on a circus train in a strange land, slept alone, locked in a train compartment so that demons would not destroy him.

  32

  ZURICH

  Devereaux slipped into the car and turned to Denisov behind the wheel.

  “Can you find the airport?”

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are dead. To KGB, even to your own people.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have money. Why are you going back?”

  “I didn’t say I was. It doesn’t concern you.”

  Denisov took the pistol out of his pocket and looked mildly at the American agent. “You see, it does. I was going to finish you.”

  Devereaux said nothing. He stared straight ahead through the windshield at the silent length of street. Below, Zurich was beginning a night on the town.

  “The message you sent to NSA in Morgan’s code. It will be picked up by KGB; they will write your name off the books. And mine. I don’t need American protection anymore.”

  “Fine. I didn’t ask you to go with me.”

  “You are going back.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “If you are dead, I am revenged. If you are dead, there is no possibility that my file will be reopened. By anyone. No more visits from Washington every six weeks.”

  Devereaux smiled in the thin light of the street lamps that illuminated the interior of the car. “Was that prison so hard?”

  “No. It was not Lubyanka. But it was a prison.”

  “Well, I won’t tell anyone. If you don’t.”

  “What about my revenge?”

  Devereaux turned and stared at the Russian for a long moment.

  “Don’t talk me to death,” Devereaux said.

  “The man. Krueger. You took care of him?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Killing isn’t very much.” Denisov spoke softly. “Two men killed today. Maybe three. It could have been me in the zoo. It could have been you.”

  “It wasn’t. Do you suppose we have a divine purpose?”

  “Why do you mock God?”

  “Why do you even ask?”

  Silence again.

  “The airport,” Devereaux said.

&nbs
p; “I thought and thought about you. About this child, this Stefan Kolaki. You don’t even know him, have never seen him. I think I understand you. I had your file in Moscow once. All of it. When you were a child, you were taken from your mother and put in a house with your aunt. Is this true?”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “Very touching,” Denisov said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Devereaux turned. “I’m going to the airport. Now. Or you’re going to shoot me.”

  “An ironic place,” Denisov continued.

  “What?”

  “I thought about Zurich. Did you know Lenin lived here before the revolution? He plotted in the cafés here. The social revolution came from Zurich. And it is such a city of capital. That is ironic, isn’t it?”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “You and me. Twenty years from Asia and we are both dead men now.”

  “No. We died a long time ago,” Devereaux said.

  “Yes. So it won’t matter too much. To you. What I do now.”

  Devereaux thought about it. In a voice of exquisite weariness he agreed it probably didn’t matter. It was all a lie.

  Denisov put the black muzzle of the Walther against Devereaux’s left temple. The metal felt cold.

  Devereaux closed his eyes. He never heard the explosion.

  33

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  At that moment, Hanley stood in front of Yackley’s desk. Yackley had just finished. Hanley took the pen, bent slightly at the waist, signed the resignation.

  Yackley, head of R Section, a man in his late thirties, almost boyish, had been quite willing to let Hanley run operations, until yesterday.

  The National Security Adviser and the Director of Central Intelligence had gotten a complete fill on R Section’s abortive attempt to short-circuit a sensitive counterespionage operation conducted by the National Security Agency. The operation involved the detection of a vast espionage network in the United States run by KGB. They had heard about the illegal and dangerous use of an agent of the old KGB who had been held in California. They had been informed about the assaulting of NSA officers by a dangerous R Section agent code-named November.

  Hanley accepted responsibility for botching the operation. He knew that NSA had told only a small part of the truth of the matter, but Hanley couldn’t prove them liars.

  So Hanley was being forced to resign, and R Section was in extreme danger of fulfilling O’Brien’s promise to make it “a paper agency with paper networks and paper armies.” NSA, in a bureaucratic sweep, was about to swallow R Section whole in the next federal budget.

  And Hanley had let it happen.

  “I never wanted to hurt the Section,” he said after putting his name on the line.

  Yackley almost felt sorry for him. “Yes. But you did. You and November.”

  “Well, he’s paid for it, hasn’t he?”

  “I suppose. He didn’t have to take the risk. And using that Russian defector—Hanley, what were you thinking of?”

  Yes, Hanley thought. What was he thinking of? He had let the agent control him instead of the other way around. He had believed Devereaux. Perhaps Devereaux had believed himself, right up to the moment he was dispatched, dropped like a parcel in the icy waters of the lake in Switzerland.

  He walked out of the office, still in a daze. Fired. The place looked different to him. He blinked and realized he was in something like a state of shock. This could not be happening. But it was.

  When Rita Macklin left Teresa Kolaki in Chicago, she had felt she was running away. But Teresa, bitter and harsh, had made it plain that Rita was not welcome. Not in her brother-in-law’s home, not with her anymore.

  Rita had argued with Teresa, fighting off her own grief, not quite believing she could still care about anything else. She had fought ever since the telephone call from Hanley. There had to be a way, there still had to be a way.

  But there was no way to resist anymore. They both knew it. Only Teresa had admitted it.

  “He told me he could do this thing. He lied to me. I’m not sorry he’s dead. I don’t care about him, about you. Both of you used me, used my son.”

  Words as bitter as poison, spit out one by one, made to cause pain. For Rita, for herself.

  And Rita had finally left a few hours after the call from Hanley, after the second call from Levy Solomon that even the tapes were gone.

  The plane dipped now, preparing for the descent to National Airport. It was just after midnight, the last plane of the day.

  Rita Macklin stared at the clouds. The moon was full, the clouds were ghostly meadows and mountain peaks under the light of the moon. They extended all the way from Chicago.

  She closed her eyes now as she felt the plane fall down through the clouds.

  Rita Macklin had not felt tears. She had felt rage, an unspeakable frustration, a sudden rush of emptiness inside her that scraped her like a knife. Everything had been lost. Most of all, he was lost.

  She tried, with her eyes closed, to remember him that last time, in Levy Solomon’s apartment in Los Angeles; to remember him watching her open her blouse, remember his touch on her, remember the smell of him, his weight on her, the way he felt inside her. She would remember little bits of it—she almost felt she could smell him next to her—but it was too incomplete. And in a while she would remember less and less. As she remembered so little of her dead brother, or of her father. At least she had photographs of them.

  When she opened her eyes, the plane was on its final approach. She wished it would crash. Pain, death.

  The wheels struck the ground, bounced, the brakes screeched, the flaps caught the wind and held it. The plane slowed, taxied to the terminal.

  In a moment, like a sleepwalker, she was outside, automatically going through motions she was not aware of. She hailed a cab, gave her address on Old Georgetown Road, and sank into the back seat.

  Teresa Kolaki had shown her a photograph of her child, Stefan. Teresa had talked about her husband and about life in Poland. In three days she told Rita everything. And now she was going back.

  Everything was starting over, as though Devereaux had never existed. It had only been a week; it seemed like years had passed from the moment those two men surprised her in her apartment.

  She entered the apartment still sleepwalking, threw her bag on the chair, shrugged out of her coat, and walked into the bedroom. She fell on the bed without undressing.

  Once, in the middle of a night of dreams in which Devereaux was alternately alive and dead, floating face down in a lake, she woke enough to roll into a blanket. She was cold. She had cried during the nightmares, called out, sweated her clothing damp. But she was too tired to get up, to change, even to crawl under the covers. Grief had finally, mercifully, drugged her.

  So much so that she did not hear the phone ringing at first. Then she thought it was part of a dream. Then she opened her eyes. It was morning and the phone did not stop ringing. She lay in bed, waiting for it to stop. It kept ringing. “Goddammit,” she said. She got up, staggered, lurched into the living room.

  She picked up the phone and didn’t speak.

  “I have to see you.” It was Hanley.

  34

  CHICAGO

  “Ladiesssssss and gentlemen! And childrennnnn of all ages!”

  The spotlights played on the man in black tie and tails who waved a top hat in his left hand and held the microphone next to his lips with his right hand.

  His accent was pure American, bred for television; he had been hired for the circus tour to give attendance a boost and reduce the “foreignness” of the show. In fact, he seemed the most exotic thing about it.

  “Now, for your pleasure, an aerial act of prestidigious proportions, the death-defyingggggg Grabonowskissssssssssss!”

  Floor spots were extinguished. Ceiling spots suddenly revealed two empty trapezes while another spot followed two sequined figures in tights scrambling up a twisting rope ladder. At the top platform, one reached for
the empty trapeze, pulled it, leaped forward, and grasped the bar, followed by the other. They sailed across the roof of Rosemont Horizon from trapeze to trapeze, dancing on air, while a small band below played a frantic melody of impending danger.

  Cymbals and drums and roars of the crowd.

  A too-small crowd for the matinee. Clusters of schoolchildren, sectioned off by ushers and teachers; families with children, children’s coats, children’s caps, gloves held and gloves about to be lost, popcorn kernels over everything; and, strangely, groups of adults sitting alone or in pairs, come to see the circus not for the sake of any children but for their own childlike selves.

  Alexander Vishinsky stood at the gate closest to the north entrance of the auditorium. He put the pocket field glasses to his eyes, scanned the crowd. He was—if anyone asked him, if anyone detained him—a correspondent for Tass. He had come to write a story about the triumphal tour of the Warsaw Circus, which served to further cement the friendship of the Polish government and the United States.

  At the far end of the east boxes, Mikhail Korsoff, without benefit of field glasses, saw her first.

  As instructed, Teresa Kolaki sat alone in a section of empty seats. If she had not appeared alone, the child would not have been permitted to perform. They had contacted her, quite openly, by telephone after Rita Macklin was seen to leave the Kolaki apartment.

  She looked frail, Mikhail Korsoff thought. And very young. He felt uncomfortable about the business, about the interference from Washington in the form of Vishinsky, about being chided for his “failures” in not finding November right away.

  An hour before, Vishinsky had actually smiled at Korsoff. “Good news for you, comrade. November is killed. In Zurich. You are off the hook.”

  Patronizing bastard. Yet Korsoff would not feel comfortable until the woman and the child were on the special plane back to Poland and Vishinsky was back in Washington where he belonged.

  Vishinsky had instructed her carefully. Come alone. The child will be shown to you. And when the performance is over, you will go to O’Hare International, Terminal C, and wait. You will then be given fresh instructions. No, the child will not be harmed. Yes, you will have him returned when you are safely on the plane.