The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “Christ, where the fuck are you?”

  “Peter, you know I can’t—”

  “The phone. Right. Listen, man, are you in some kind of mess.”

  “I didn’t do it. You know that.”

  “Come on! Of course I know it. Jesus, what a fucking disaster! As soon as I heard about it, I asked around. It’s got to be a setup.”

  “Peter, I need your help.”

  “What’s all that noise in the background? Where’re you calling from, the middle of the Mass. Turnpike?”

  “I’ve been framed, Peter. I need help.”

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  “You’re telling me. They’re all over the place, looking for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Who do you think? The cops, probably Uncle, the Fee-bees, too.”

  “Uncle?”

  “Uncle Sam. The FBI. It’s a big thing. Whoever did this wants your ass. Don’t even think about turning yourself in, Charlie. Listen. In about a minute, I want you to terminate this call.”

  “Trace?”

  “Right. Keep calling back; no call should last longer than two minutes. All right? And don’t bother calling the cops.”

  “But you’ve got friends, don’t you? You were a cop once.”

  “Forget it. They’ve been asking me questions—they’re talking to anyone who knows you.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know the whole thing’s a frame, and a brilliant one. Believe me, I asked my share of questions when I heard it was you, buddy.”

  “I was drugged.”

  “So I hear.”

  “The Globe said they found heroin in my bedroom and in my apartment.”

  “I’m sure they did. Whoever murdered your father planted the shit, too. Had to be. Hang up, Charlie.”

  Stone found another pay phone across the street. He noticed as he walked that people were going out of their way to avoid him. The disguise was working.

  He dialed Sawyer’s number again, and this time Sawyer answered on the first ring.

  “You believe me, Peter, don’t you?” Stone said quiedy. “I mean, you don’t even have any doubt, right?”

  “Your prints are on the knife, you won’t be surprised to know.”

  “Jesus! Of course they are. I sharpened the whole set, Peter. I used them a number of times.” A middle-aged woman walked toward him as if she wanted to use the phone, then turned away in disgust.

  “My point exactly. But the thing is, some of the prints were smudged, and not by human skin oil. By something like rubber gloves.

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  Not something like, but precisely that. Disposable rubber gloves, the kind that have talcum powder on the inside and the outside. So there’s also traces of talc on the knife.”

  “How the hell do you know all this?”

  “I got a friend of mine on the job to get me a copy of the police report. Before they locked it up.”

  “Let me call you back.”

  Five minutes later, Stone found a phone inside a newsstand, and as he picked it up the vendor began to yell at him: “Get out of here unless you’re going to buy something.”

  Silently, Stone left. After a long walk, he found another phone, several blocks away.

  “So what do I do?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Hide out for a bit, until the search blows over. After a while, you know, they’ll give up. Business goes on as usual, police resources are limited. Get yourself a lawyer, maybe. I don’t know what the fuck you should do.”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “I wish I could hide you here. But this is one of the first places they’d look. They’ll be looking at your friends’ houses, anyplace you might be likely to go in Boston—and especially New York. Plain-clothesmen, unannounced visits, the works. I’ve already had a couple of visits. Don’t come near me, Gharlie. I hate to say it. Promise me you’ll stay out of town.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “]esusr Sawyer exploded. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Your name is being read off at police roll calls at all stations. They’ve got flyers in all the patrol cars. And your father’s house—forget about it.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the numero uno place they’ll be watching. You go back to Boston, it’s suicide.”

  “I can’t talk anymore. Listen, Peter, I appreciate it. Everything. I mean it.”

  “Forget about it, Charlie.”

  “I’ll call you later on. Peter, I need your help. Badly.”

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  “I’m sorry—”

  “What do you mean, sorry?”

  “There’s rumors.”

  “About me.”

  “I don’t want to lose my Hcense. That’s what I’m hearing. I wish I could help you, Charlie, but I can’t. Stay away from me. For you and for me.”

  Stone hung up the phone and hailed a taxi. None would stop; none would even slow down for the vagrant with the long beard and the greasy hair. Finally, he set off for Boston on foot.

  27

  Cambridge

  A little over four hours later, Stone was standing in front of the granite steps of the Cambridge Post Office, Central Square branch. Along the way he had acquired a shopping cart, which he had stolen from in front of a supermarket, and in it some trash bags filled with garbage.

  He had the advantage of surprise. His adversaries, whether they were police or intelligence or a private group of fanatics, could not reasonably expect him to return to Boston. No one but a crazy person would do it. But how closely could they really be watching, how far-reaching was their surveillance? They could be anywhere, or nowhere.

  In front of the post office three cars were idling: a police car, an old Dodge, a fairly new Chrysler. Stone stood behind his shopping cart, watching them. All three of the drivers were waiting. After a few minutes, the Dodge left. The driver of the Chrysler seemed to be consulting a map.

  It was a risk, but everything was a risk now. Yet it was unlikely that the police car was staking out the post office—no one knew he had rented a box. There was only a key, and Stone had it in his pocket.

  Two other vagrants were sitting on the post-office steps, and both of them watched him silently as he rolled his cart by. Now what? You didn’t just abandon the cart if it contained all your earthly possessions.

  Stone began pulling the cart up the stairs, a step at a time, then rolled it through the doors. Nothing happened; no one followed. Completely safe.

  His post-office box was off to the left, against the far wall. Would

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  it seem strange for a shopping-bag man to have a post-office box? But no one was watching.

  In the box was a supermarket circular and a yellow slip of paper that informed him that Mr. Robert Gill had a registered and cerhfied envelope. To get it he would have to go to the registry window.

  He walked across the post-office lobby to the line, in the slow gait he had perfected on the long walk from Saugus. The woman in front of him, who looked as if she might be some city bureaucrat on her lunch hour, stared at him.

  The Boston Globe. His picture had been printed for several days running, in the Globe and certainly in the Herald, the tabloid for the common man. Did she recognize him? Stone studied the floor. She turned around and glared at the slow-moving clerk. People never actually expected to see a killer themselves. Charles Manson could be standing in the express line at the supermarket and no one would give him a second thought unless he had more than twelve items in his cart.

  Finally, it was his turn. Silendy, he shoved the yellow slip at the clerk.

  The clerk gazed at him with unveiled amusement. “You have any identification?”

  Identification!

  Ah, the driver’s license! He remembered that he had Robert Gill’s driver’s license in his wallet; he removed it and pushed it across the metal counter through the window.

>   The clerk stared at it and then at Stone. “This isn’t you.” Indeed, the picture bore almost no resemblance to him.

  Stone looked up at the clerk plaintively. “I grew a beard,” he said in a low growl.

  The clerk looked again, then shrugged. Two minutes later. Stone had Robert Gill’s brand-new passport.

  He got the cart down the stairs more easily than he had gotten it up, and wheeled it down Mass. Ave. Next stop: the bank. But the police station was two blocks away, and there were too many police cruisers in the area. Any one of them might contain an especially

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  sharp-e>ed cop. Stone took a left and wheeled the cart down a steep hill.

  Within fifteen minutes, he was in Harvard Square, in front of the Adams Trust Bank. His father had a safe-deposit box here, on which Charlie was the “cotenant,” as the bank called it: he had filled out a signature card and had a key to it. Cotenants have “right of survivorship”—everything in his father’s box now belonged to him.

  He always kept the key in his wallet. The box held cash, and Stone needed it.

  But the bank was dangerous. A vagrant was sure to arouse suspicion, especially in a bank that catered to Cambridge’s richest citizens.

  As he approached the bank’s entrance with his shopping cart, he noticed a policeman watching him. “Hey,” the policeman called out. “What are you doing?”

  Stone looked down and kept going.

  “I’m talking to you. Get the hell out of here. You can’t be here.”

  There was nothing to do, short of revealing himself, so Stone wheeled the cart around without saying a word.

  Half an hour later, he left the cart in an alley and approached the bank from another direction. The cop was gone. He pushed the revolving door and went in.

  On the streets he was invisible; in commercial establishments he was the center of attention. Several tellers looked up as he entered. He walked over to the counter where he had rented the box. A dark-haired, well-scrubbed young man approached.

  “Please leave at once,” the man said.

  “I want to get into a safe-deposit box,” Stone said quickly.

  The man looked at him uncomfortably for a moment. “Your name?”

  “Look,” Stone said. “I really do have a box here. I realize what I look like. I’ve been through some hard times.” He spoke quickly, running his sentences together so that they would make more sense in the aggregate than they did separately. “I’ve been deinstitutionalized, but I’m okay now.”

  “I’m sorrv, ” the man said, without sorrow.

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  Stone pulled out his key ring and removed the two safe-deposit-box keys, placing them on the counter. “Can we sit down?”

  “Certainly,” the man said, relenting a bit. He led them over to a desk and sat down behind it. “I must say, I was a little taken aback. Most of our customers—”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Stone said gently. “I’ll get cleaned up just as soon as I get my money.”

  “You know how this procedure works,” the man said. He was obviously still suspicious.

  “Of course. I sign an access slip. You compare my signature with the copy of it you’ve got on a card in your file.”

  “Right. What’s your name?”

  “Charles Stone.”

  The man hesitated. Did he recognize the name? “Just a minute, Mr. Stone.”

  Was there a button on the floor behind the desk, just as there was at the tellers’ counter?

  The bank officer got up from the desk. “Let me get your records, Mr. Stone,” he said, and walked toward the rear of the tellers’ counter.

  A minute later, the bank officer returned with the two signature cards. Clearly not recognizing the names on the card, he let Stone into the vault.

  His father’s safe-deposit box was a shock. Jumbled in with the bills of sale and stock certificates and municipal bearer bonds and deeds was a small white envelope. And underneath that was cash. An enormous quantity of cash: well over a hundred thousand dollars in twenties and one hundreds, a pile of banknotes several inches high. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

  He asked for a white canvas money bag, which the astonished bank officer got for him quickly. A minute later, he was out on the street, the bag of money concealed under his frayed coat.

  He had made his way slowly out of Harvard Square, taking the smaller side streets. Around five o’clock, he found a small diner in Inman Square, parked the cart in an alley, and went in for a cheap

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  dinner. As he ate the gray meat loaf and mashed potatoes and sipped hot coffee, he opened the envelope.

  Inside was a letter, typed on his father’s old Underwood at least ten years ago. The paper had begun to yellow.

  Dear Charlie,

  I’m writing this just in case anything happens to me. If nothing does, you won’t get this anyway.

  The money here is, as you may have surmised, money that Winthrop Lehman has paid me steadily over the years since 1953, in amounts from ten thousand a year to twice that. Some of it I’ve spent, but a lot of it’s here. He gave this, he said, to help me with whatever expenses I should ever have. I guess he understood the meaning of my favorite line from Pasternak—you know it: “You are eternity’s hostage, a captive of time.” Aren’t we all?

  Someday I’ll tell you the whole story about Lehman. About Moscow, about the Staroobriadtsy. There is much to explain, and someday I hope to be able to explain everything to you.

  Stone sat, reading and rereading the note, until the waitress asked if he wanted a refill. That line from Pasternak—obviously it referred to Alfred Stone’s terrible public immolation.

  Staroobriadtsy. The Russian term for the “Old Believers.” Stone knew the Old Believers were a seventeenth-century Russian faction of Orthodox faithful who had rejected the sudden, wholesale changes in the Church. There were bloody battles, and then they went underground. But who were the Staroobriadtsy today?

  What was his father trying to tell him?

  Night had fallen by the time Stone arrived at Milliard Street. A blue-and-white police cruiser was parked in front of his father’s house, two policemen inside, drinking coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts cups. Stone passed by with his cart, careful not to look at them.

  He could not enter the house from the front; that was obvious.

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  They had put routine surveillance here, which meant that anyone entering would be scrutinized. But the police clearly could not keep this up forever; they were not that well equipped. And cops, being human, have to take a piss sometime, get a cup of coffee. He could outwait them. Still, he couldn’t risk loitering in the neighborhood, either.

  He drew a deep breath of the cold October air.

  An image of his father, bloodied and mutilated, suddenly appeared in his mind. He was instantly filled with anger once again, and something new: a desire for vengeance.

  He wheeled the cart around to the end of the block and, shivering from the cold, abandoned it. He remembered a pay phone nearby and dialed the Cambridge police.

  “There’s a robbery in progress,” Stone shouted in a North Cambridge accent. “Guy was shot.”

  The officer on duty answered quickly, “Where?”

  “Here. Store 24 in Harvard Square. I’m the night manager. Jesus!” He hung up.

  By the time Stone walked around to the rear of the house, the patrol car that had been parked in front was gone. His calculation had been right on the mark: a serious crime reported in the immediate area would be handled by several of the nearest cruisers. But how long would the ruse keep them away?

  A telephone trunk cable entered the house at the side. Stone, balancing the sack of money, ran quickly to it. He did not have a knife, but he pulled up a stake from the small garden and used its sharp end, laboriously, to sever the telephone cable.

  Then he ran, in a low crouch, over to the por
ch and pulled himself up to peer into the kitchen window. Through the kitchen he could see the front door just beyond it.

  It was alarmed. A suitcase-sized piece of apparatus had been placed near the door, attached to a length of wire that plugged directly into the wall telephone jack. That had now been disabled, with the telephone wires cut. A similar device, he saw, had been placed just below the window at which he knelt.

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  He yanked the window up; it was locked. Raising his elbow, he jabbed it sharply against the pane, which shattered on contact. Suddenly he was inside his father’s house again.

  It was eerily dark, and he knew he could not turn on any lights. Shapes were unfamiliar, menacing. He could smell the odor of antiseptic; someone had cleaned the place. He listened a minute. Not a sound, no one breathing, nothing. He had to move quickly. He walked silendy through the kitchen, then through the dining room into the living room, which was partially lit by the streedight below. He could not risk being seen from the street. Any shadows, any shapes would be noticed. He hoped the alarm would sound only by means of the phone lines. If not … But he didn’t want to think about that.

  Any moment now, they would realize that the call from Store 24 was a hoax, and the police would return.

  The house had been thoroughly torn apart. Everything had been stripped from the walls, every drawer opened. They had searched the entire place.

  He loped up the stairs to his bedroom, where he had left the envelope containing the photographs and the copy of the dossier from Lehman’s archives.

  Nothing.

  It was gone. Somehow they had found it and removed it. One of his last hopes, and it was gone.

  The gun.

  He ran to his father’s bedroom. The Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic he’d bought for his father was still there on the closet shelf, hidden in an empty paper box. Next to it was a full fourteen-round magazine. He slipped it into his coat pocket, along with the clip. He could not afford to stay here any longer.