The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “Saul, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” Stone said. “What’s going on?”

  Ansbach exhaled noisily. “Just … Just lay off, Charlie. Lay off it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Look, you know as well as I do that this isn’t something purely historical.”

  “Obviously. But it still doesn’t explain how this mole M-3 is connected. What are you trying to tell me, Saul?”

  “Nothing, Charlie. Just an instinct. A smell. This whole thing has the rotten smell of an intelligence operation gone bad, and I think you’re just lifting up a corner of the rug. I shudder to think what you’ll find if you keep lifting. “

  “You’re beginning to sound paranoid, Saul.”

  “As my friend Henry Kissinger once said. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.”

  “He wasn’t the first to say it, Saul.”

  “Look. You know damned well that the Agency has ways of expressing its displeasure. They—we—don’t go in much for legal niceties. They can do more than terminate your contract.”

  Stone shook his head slowly, contemplatively. “I’m not really concerned about that,” he said, his voice steely. “I think you know how important this is to me. It’s a question of my father’s reputation. His life.”

  “You’re not going to drop this, Charlie, are you?”

  “Not until I learn the truth about what happened to my father.”

  “Your father was framed, damn it! End of story. The why isn’t important anymore.”

  “I notice you haven’t given me any explicit orders. You’re scared about this, and I can’t blame you.”

  Ansbach gave him a long, stony glare. “Christ. What do you want, Charlie?”

  “There’s an old woman, living today, who actually was a private secretary to Lenin. Emigrated in the twenties, lives under an alias. I came across her name in one of the data banks.”

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  “I know. I heard about her from Bill Donovan, in my OSS days. So?”

  “I want to know her whereabouts. I think it’s a good place to start.”

  Ansbach gave another sigh. “I don’t like this at all,” he said, and pushed back his chair.

  Several hours later. Stone returned to his West Side apartment with photocopies of the dossier he’d taken from Lehman’s archives. He removed his coat and hung it in the hall closet, beside the mountain-climbing equipment he so rarely had a chance to use these days.

  He knelt down and ran a hand across the smooth marble floor, feeling for a slight ridge, which he located after a few seconds. Grasping the ridge, which even on close inspection looked like nothing more than a slight defect in the grout between two tiles, he pushed at it. One tile slid open, revealing a small safe. He dialed it open and placed the original dossier in it, alongside a small wad of cash, some papers, and the Smith & Wesson revolver he had used maybe once or twice, only for target practice at a range in Lexington, Massachusetts, years ago. He’d bought his father an identical one.

  He closed the safe and slid the tile over it. Then, as he circled the room, saw the flashing ruby light on his answering machine, a winking red eye.

  He hit the playback button. One was from a woman he had met at a party and hoped he’d never hear from again. One from his father, calling to thank him for coming by and to say he was feeling better.

  And the next two were from Saul Ansbach.

  Saul sounded increasingly desperate. His words were at times drowned out by the roar of traffic; clearly he’d made the calls from a street phone. Ordinarily, Saul would have used a secure line.

  ”Charlie, it’s Saul. I’m at the law firm. Call me as soon as you get in.”

  Beep.

  Ansbach was still “of counsel” at Sheffield & Simpson, and occasionally he and Charlie would meet there, when Saul was attending a firm meeting and wanted to see an analysis Stone had done.

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  “It’s Saul. You — Listen, you’re on to something. I want you to meet me at the law firm. Not at the office. I’ll be there from seven to around eight. And listen — don’t call me at the Foundation. I don’t trust the phones there. This is serious fucking business, Charlie.” There was a long, long pause, during which an ambulance siren could be heard. “How much time do I get on this fucking machine? Charlie, listen. I got some stuff for you. Had it flown in by courier — pulled some strings.” Another long pause; the roar of a truck. “Does this machine cut you off? Charlie, shit. Get over here.”

  Stone raced for the door.

  Sheffield & Simpson occupied the twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth floors—there was no thirteenth—of a stately old twenty-floor building near Wall Street, a building with a grace and simplicity that the newer structures lacked.

  Stone arrived a little after eight. The evening rush hour was just about over; a few stragglers in topcoats and carrying briefcases emerged from the ancient elevators. He’d always liked this old building—it whispered stability and solidity and longevity. The elevator was paneled in cherry wood, with lamps in sconces mounted on the walls.

  He pressed the button for the fourteenth floor and leaned back against the elevator walls, admiring the well-oiled smoothness of the old machine. The elevator’s doors opened at the fourteenth floor a few seconds later. There were a few lights still on; although most of the secretaries were gone, several of the associates were working. Stone silenfly thanked the deities that he hadn’t become a lawyer.

  And then he remembered that Saul would probably want to meet him upstairs, on the fifteenth floor, which at night was mostly empty; it was taken up by rooms of filing cabinets, old law books and reporters, discarded equipment. Half the floor was unrented. But there were a few conference rooms there, too. Whenever Ansbach wanted to meet in privacy, he chose one of the empty conference rooms upstairs.

  Stone took the elevator up one flight, to the dimly lit fifteenth floor. Fluorescent light flickered from alternating ceiling panels; there was no one in sight. No sign yet of Ansbach. He passed a plate-glass window and noticed the view of New York twinkling below. The two conference rooms were halfway down the hall, on the right. Both doors were closed. Stone turned the knob of the first door and pulled it open.

  “Saul Ansbach,” he called out heartily.

  And whispered: “Saul?”

  What he saw made him freeze in terror.

  Saul Ansbach, the big beefy man, sat reclining in a cushioned chair beside a conference table, staring straight ahead through his heavy black-framed glasses. His head lolled peculiarly. The eyeglass lenses were partially obscured by rivulets of blood that ran down from a neat, perfectly circular hole in his forehead, just above his brow. His hands were curled into loose fists, as if he’d been about to rise from his seat to challenge an intruder. Before he’d been shot dead.

  Stone was unable to emit a sound. He opened his mouth, his mind whirling with terror. He took a step forward, then a step back, before he heard the creaking of a floorboard, the ever-so-faint groan of the wooden floor beneath the wall-to-wall carpeting, beneath someone’s tread, a few feet away in the hall.

  13

  He took a few silent steps backward.

  It was there again, the scrunch of a footfall in the corridor. Someone was unquestionably there, standing, shifting his weight.

  The sound was coming from oflF to his left, outside the room.

  The blood that covered Saul Ansbach’s face was visibly wet, sticky. He had just been killed, within the last thirty minutes at most.

  The killer was out there.

  Stone turned his head slowly and saw the figure of a man, poorly illuminated in the flickering hall light. He stood perhaps ten or fifteen feet away, a squat, compact man wearing a black leather jacket with wide lapels. Small eyes, a bull neck. Jet-black hair combed straight back. Something bulky concealed in the jacket’s pocket, probably a gun. The man was looking directly at Stone,
with a calm expression of dull incuriosity.

  And he saw what Stone knew, what Stone had seen.

  Stone’s heart hammered, his body surging with adrenaline. With an enormous lurch, he bounded down the hallway.

  The man was running now, great loping strides.

  Careening down the hall, around the corner. Stone whipped past the elevator, unable to see anything but the stairway door twenty yards away.

  The man was gaining on him, accelerating his pace with amazing agility, a great burst of speed.

  Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus. Stone had never moved so fast. Please

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  God get me out of here oh God. He flew across the space, grabbing at the door handle. If the door is locked—

  The door was unlocked.

  Thank you.

  The man in the leather jacket was mere feet away. Stone lunged into the stairwell without looking, momentarily almost losing his balance as he clattered down the stairs. The man was behind him, his footsteps thundering on the metal-and-concrete steps. Stone could feel the man behind him, could feel the rush of cold air.

  There was an agonized yelp of pain as the man stumbled. Stone could hear, as his legs pumped down, down, the impact of the man’s leg against the steel.

  Must get out of this stairwell, out of the direct line of fire. Why wasn’t the man shooting? Now, for sure, he would, but Stone couldn’t look back, wouldn’t know when it came, when the bullet came singing toward the back of his head.

  Out of the stairwell. Another door: Stone grabbed at the knob and felt the surge of relief when it opened. It couldn’t be locked. Stone knew that; he would have to run. How many flights had he descended? Three? Four? The floor was dark, a deserted office, shut down for the night.

  And nowhere to go.

  The man had regained his balance; Stone had a few seconds. He could hear the footsteps sounding.

  Desperately, he looked around for a way out.

  He lunged at the elevator button, jamming his thumb against the down button, which lit up. Somewhere the elevator machinery hummed into life.

  Oh, God, there was no time!

  Stone ran toward the stairwell door, crazily searching for a lock of some kind, and when he found none, he wrapped his hands around the knob and pulled toward himself with all of his considerable mountain-climber’s strength, pulling the door shut, and then the squat man with the jet-black hair was there, throwing himself against the door, tugging at the knob with more force than Stone could counter, and then—

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  The elevator, with a high-pitched bing, had arrived, its doors yawning lazily open, its interior light blazing into the dark lobby, its cherry-wood paneling bright and welcoming. Stone had no choice. He tore himself from the doorknob, lunging in an awkward sideways motion toward the elevator at the instant that the stairwell door swung open, and he was inside the elevator, and the man was in the lobby, extending an automatic gun and—

  The explosion was enormous. The bullet crashed into the closing doors as the man jammed his free hand in between them, the elevator doors closing agonizingly slowly around the man’s extended powerful fingers, which grasped the inside of the door to trigger the automatic opening mechanism—

  But there was none. The ancient elevator had no modern safety precautions, and its doors were closed inexorably. The man yanked his hand back with a roar of pain, and the elevator sank slowly. For the first time in endless minutes. Stone took a giant gulp of breath.

  He had escaped.

  The elevator would outmove his pursuer, would descend much faster than the man would run, and it was the only one. In a haze he watched the numbers light up as it moved, with steadily increasing speed, down the building, down toward the main floor and freedom—

  And then the elevator jolted to a stop.

  Please God no, Stone shouted inwardly. The elevator was between floors, its power source no doubt, somehow, shut off.

  He was trapped.

  “God damn it,” he said aloud, looking around at the gleaming wood of the interior. ‘Tucking stupid move.” His voice shook with fear. He was a prisoner in this elevator cage. He lashed out wildly and struck the buttons for each floor. Nothing. The elevator did not move. He formed his hands into two claws and inserted them into the microscopic space between the double doors. There was give, he was forcing them apart. Behind the doors he could make out the discolored grayish concrete: he was definitely between floors. But the doors would open no farther than an inch or two.

  He was trapped.

  Suddenly he knew what the man would do. Of course. You could

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  call the elevator up, or down, express, by throwing one switch, located somewhere in the building. Even the old elevators like this one could be moved from the first floor to the top, or the top floor to the first, without stopping in between.

  He was a prisoner.

  What was taking the man so long? Do it, just do it, get it over with, Stone chanted to himself. Get it over with. Jesus God, this is it. Whoever had murdered Saul Ansbach would certainly not hesitate to do the same to a witness.

  He looked around the car. He could hear the blood rush past his ears, the sound of the ocean captured in a seashell, the sound of terror. He was sealed in this gleaming wooden box, paneled and elegant, an electric coffin.

  —With an escape hatch on the ceiling. There it was. Of course; all elevators had them, were required to have them. A panel on the white-painted metal ceiling, a large rectangle fastened with protruding thumb screws. He reached his arms upward, as far as they would go, but the ceiling was too high; he could not quite reach it.

  Think! Glimbing the crack on a mountain’s face, you had to make do with the elements, with whatever was there. What was here? Wooden paneling: a toehold. And—oh, thank God^—a brass fixture, the sconce that held the lamp. He grabbed it; it held firm. He pulled at it with all his strength, lifting himself up, grabbing a hold on the panel’s indentation, and with his left hand—yes—he twirled the thumb screws, one, and then another, and then, in one sudden motion, he slammed against the hatch. With a metallic groan, years of corrosion and disuse at last gave way, and the panel was open.

  And he was looking up at absolute darkness.

  The elevator shaft.

  He pulled himself up until he could reach into the hole, grasping the sides. His palms sliced against something sharp, and he could feel the skin torn open. The stars of pain shot through his left arm.

  With his other hand, more carefully now, he grabbed, and thrust his head and shoulders into the dark opening. He had leverage; he pulled himself up, his hands slapping against greasy metal.

  He knelt atop the elevator cabin and inhaled the dank, oil-

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  smelling air. His eyes were straining to become accustomed to the pitch-darkness of the elevator shaft, but it wasn’t absolute pitch-darkness. Somewhere way up there was a meager source of bluish light, maybe a skylight, and his surroundings came into sudden, horrible focus.

  The vertical tunnel was perhaps eight feet by eight feet by—well, it was impossible to say how tall it was. His legs struck something: the coiled steel hoist cable on top of the car, which stretched vertically the length of the shaft, as far as Stone could see.

  Terrified, Stone inspected further. On three sides the shaft was encased in pale glazed bricks; the other face was concrete. Two of the walls were crisscrossed with horizontal steel girders.

  He could make out the rails on which the elevator rode, the vertical steel beams that seemed suspended in the shaft, two feet away from the walls. Were they electrified? If he grasped them, would he … ?

  “Now what the fuck?” Stone said. Get back into the elevator, his instincts told him. You can get killed here.

  And I will get killed in there, another inner voice responded.

  Gingerly he reached out to the steel rail, his fingers coming closer and closer a
nd then wispily brushing against it and—nothing. No. Thank God, it was not electrified. With one hand, and then the other, he gripped the rail.

  There was only one way to go: up.

  He slid his shoes, leather dress shoes not meant for climbing, against the elevator car’s ceiling, until they hit the brick wall, angling the toe of his shoe into the cracks between the bricks. And slipped. The bricks were coated with some sort of grease, the deposit of decades of use. He could not get a toehold.

  Layback, damn it. Just like you’d do climbing up a crack. Lay-back. Grab the rail and pull as hard as possible, and the simple pressure of your feet pushing against the brick will give you some traction.

  Yes.

  He pulled and pushed, pulled and pushed, and now he was moving up, slowly and awkwardly at first, then with increasing assurance, and then he allowed himself a glimpse above. A few more feet.

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  He could tell he was close to the next floor: there was a vein of horizontal steel, the thing the elevator normally rested against when it came to a stop. He looked down. A mistake; the drop, even after only a minute of climbing, was dizzying. Sickening. You don’t look down. Never look down; look up. He laybacked up, up, and then, from somewhere, he heard a click and then a hum. The elevator was starting up. His stomach lurched.

  If it moved up, if he didn’t release his hold, he would be crushed.

  No.

  Maniacally, he pulled himself up, then kicked at the double doors that opened into the shaft. Nothing. He flailed one arm outward, grabbing at the place where the doors met. It would not open. The elevator car hummed smoothly upward, ten feet away maybe, and then Stone saw the roller guides, these protruding round things connected to the double doors, the things the inner door hits, triggering the outer door. He kicked at it, hard —and the outer door opened. With one foot on the ledge. Stone leaped forward, and just as he did so, the top of the elevator car cracked against his shin, but he was safe, out of the shaft, sprawled on the floor.