She took the bottle from his hand a drew a long generous sip. Keeton then did the same and let the slight earthy taste of geosmin take him back to his childhood in the rural rough of Kentucky. In the intervening years of his life Western modernity had happened to him and it often took a supreme effort to resist total capitulation to the easy life. He wanted to explain to Luiza their shared existence of countryside upbringing and transition to urban adulthood. It would be something he could leverage as an asset to his mission, something to draw her closer to him and make her more amenable to helping him. That was why he did not do it.
Instead, he simply kissed her again and got out of the bed, leaving her the water and gathering up his clothes. “I’ll look for breakfast downstairs while you get dressed.”
“Toby, really,” she said with only a half-mocking tone. “You may be used to being a bachelor and doing things for yourself, but here in Poland it would be—untraditional—to let you fix my breakfast while I lounge around in the bedroom.”
“But you said—” he began.
“No,” she playfully interrupted him with a raised hand. “The manly thing for you to do is start a fire in the stove. There’s only one problem.”
“No food,” he said, then laughed when Luiza nodded sheepishly. “I saw a coffee grinder down there.”
“Yes, and there’s a jar of grounds in the cupboard. I’m sorry, Toby.”
He shrugged. “We’ll survive. I’ll see you down there.” With that he left the bedroom, walked down to the small living room, and finished dressing. In the kitchen he found a pan for heating water and a small bunch of matches in an old tin cup. Then he lit the cooking stove using bits of kindling and a chock of wood sitting in a box on the floor. By the time Luiza walked into the living room Keeton had just finished making the coffee in two of the drinking glasses from the hutch.
“Looks like you made the most of things,” Luiza said. Instead of the form-fitting yellow dress from the prior evening she now had on a plainer, looser denim version. Nonetheless, Keeton could tell she had spent some time arranging her hair and cleaning up the small bit of makeup from the night before. She had done this for him, to great effect—he found her just as attractive as before and perhaps more so.
“I always try,” Keeton answered lightly and carefully handed her the glass of coffee. They sat down together at the small table and took sips gingerly. He had made it strong as a way to ward off the effects of the Krupnik and the late night they had spent together. Luiza seemed not to mind. After a couple of minutes of idle pleasantries, her face turned a bit darker.
“I need to get back to university this morning,” she said. “But I suppose there’s something we need to talk about before we leave here.”
“The dinner tonight,” Keeton answered. In reality it had not left his mind for more than a few moments. “What are you thinking about it? You don’t want me to go?”
“It’s not that, Toby,” she said. “I do want you to go. If you can use your story like you said I think that would be a good thing. But I also don’t want you to get into trouble. Things you say, things you ask about…well, they will be listened to carefully.”
Keeton paid attention to her, to her tone and the slight tremble in her voice from the latent fear. Her concern was not only genuine; he knew it was warranted. The coincidence of Luiza being invited to dinner by the very man Keeton was to contact pricked his spy’s intuition but was still the easiest way to meet Kozlow. Yes, both he and Luiza would need to be careful, but he believed he could still negotiate the delicate situation in order to sell the story about needing a photographer. He looked into her face and saw affection and trust. He hoped that sentiment was warranted as well.
“It will be tricky, Luiza,” he said. “But I have a plan…”
***
Keeton became aware of the two figures which had fallen in behind him soon after he’d passed the entrance to Wawel Hill. At the penultimate corner before reaching the Hotel Royal Keeton stopped, pulled off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, then turned and looked up toward the cathedral. The two men sauntered past him apparently without taking note. They were conversing in French.
“Two-fourteen, now,” Keeton said to them.
“Merci,” one of them answered softly and continued down the block alongside his companion.
Keeton began a mental countdown of two minutes, after which he continued on to the hotel, through the lobby and up to his room, number 214. He had just drunk his second glass of water from the lavatory faucet when there was a coded knock on the hotel door. When he opened it, the sarcastic, confident grins of Romain Roy and Jimmy Morel immediately raised his admittedly anxious spirits. Without a word he nodded them in.
Roy raised a finger before anyone could speak, then pointed to his ear in a silent question common to the reconnoiter of Iron Curtain hotels. Keeton shrugged, whereupon Roy whispered something to Morel, and the two of them began a quick, thorough examination for listening devices. Keeton lay down on the bed and watched them with an amused smile.
“Don’t see anything,” Roy said softly despite his observation.
“I was going to tell you that I already checked,” Keeton answered with a cruel loudness. “But you didn’t give me the chance.”
“Well, I’d still feel better if we had a sweeper or at least a jammer,” Roy commented. “We could’ve gotten it through in a false bottom or in one of our cameras.”
Keeton shrugged. “Maybe—yeah, probably. But why chance it? Besides, what I really need is to develop this film.” He held up the Minox. “And by the way, it’s good to see you guys.”
“Same here,” Roy said as the grin returned. “Poland’s been quite the encounter so far. It’s still hard to believe the Poles have rebuilt almost all of Warsaw from where the Nazis left it—and mostly from old paintings and memories.”
“The train to Krakow could stand a little rebuilding, too,” Morel quipped. “Six hours in a rolling third-class train carriage is enough to make me want to buy a car here.”
“I don’t think you’d be any happier with the car,” Keeton said. “You just let Roy know if the conditions are too much for you.” The playful swat stung a bit, but both men knew it was only partial payment for Morel’s superiority in the boxing ring back at Camp Peary.
“I’ll be sure to yell uncle,” Morel said with a sideways glance over to Roy. Keeton held up his hands in surrender, bested yet again by the upstart.
“We brought the gear to take care of the film,” Roy said. In their covers as tourists on a European excursion they could explain carrying the basic supplies needed to develop photographs. Of course, some of the materials in their possession were more advanced than the average tourist’s. “What’s on it?”
Keeton relayed the encounter he’d had with Tusk during the Star mission: the brief fight in his hotel room, the pictures of both the man and his apparent cover passports, and the Star envelope paper with the enigmatic string of characters. In the meantime Roy pulled a small flask of whiskey from his jacket and poured shots into the two water glasses that came with the room. After passing them around, he took a couple of pulls from the flask directly.
“We should be able to get the pictures finished here in the next hour,” Morel said. “But it sounds like we might as well base over at the other place—the Serkowski?—since we need to try tracking down this Tusk fellow. Right?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Keeton answered. “There’s more.”
He then told them about the encounter with Edgar and meeting Luiza and the dinner party at which he would have a chance to meet Anatol Kozlow, the potential provocateur against Schoolboy. “So, we both agreed that we needed some kind of story to explain why I’d be with her this evening.”
Roy took another swig from the flask and spoke up. “That you arrived in Krakow and went looking for a history professor and a photographer to get your story for the Ploughshare. You found her at the university and she suggested Kozlow b
ecause she already knew him.”
“That’s right,” Keeton nodded.
“But she knows you only as Toby Lodge, the socialist reporter with a soft spot for Schoolboy—and her, apparently.”
“Also right,” Keeton said. “She’s uneasy about the invitation, and adding me probably makes it worse, except that I’ve told her I can use the story to actually help Schoolboy, not hurt him.”
“She just might have a soft spot for you, too,” Morel said before knocking back the final liquor from his glass.
“Maybe so,” Keeton said with an unforced smile that then faded as he pulled himself back to the cold reality of his mission. “Well, I got her to agree to the story, anyway. And she’ll need to be my interpreter—Kozlow doesn’t speak English. That’s what I need her for.”
“We’ve got our task to do, too. Anything else for us?” Roy asked.
“Not at the moment,” Keeton answered. “When you get to the Serkowski tell the kid at the desk—his name is Olek—that Mr. Lodge recommended it to you. Might help you get a decent room. You can try to get some additional information about Tusk, but be careful. I’ve already told Olek I don’t know him, so neither do you. He was in room 33.”
“This Star thing is now more about pride than objectives, don’t you think?” Roy asked pointedly.
“Professional pride, yes,” Keeton said. “Look, if it’s a dead end so be it. Let’s plan to meet downstairs at the restaurant here tomorrow morning at nine, and we’ll decide if this damned Star mission of Lionel’s is finished.”
The two agents nodded and said their goodbyes to Keeton. When they had gone he stripped and drew a hot bath. After a decent soak and scrubbing he emerged relaxed enough to call down and ask Szymon to ring the room at one and please have a lunch reservation ready for him at one thirty. Then he slid under the sheets of the bed and allowed the thoughts of the Star mission to fade away with the confidence he had in Roy and Morel. His final hope before drifting off was for a brief rest without a return to the brutal dream world of the previous night.
***
Keeton emerged from the Royal well fed and rested. He had changed into a light-brown—almost khaki—suit matched to a knitted russet tie over a white shirt. The tailored outfit, along with chukka-style boots, was by way of Olek Budny’s uncle and had arrived about noon to the hotel. The slight vibration of disquiet that he shared with Luiza about the invitation had been politely shouldered aside. His support team was in place, the Star mission would soon be a memory, and he was off to dinner with the local asset who just happened to be a beautiful woman. He confidently flipped open the clubmaster sunglasses and pushed them on. The Smith & Wesson automatic had been left behind in the room.
The afternoon was warm and sunny, although Szymon had warned of a possible summer storm later in the evening. Keeton had only walked a block before taking off his coat and slinging it over his shoulder. As he meandered along, the fortified Wawel Castle dominated his attention, until as he turned the corner to head north to the center of town none other than Bishop Kazimierz Paszek himself was only a few steps away, walking in Keeton’s direction.
It was the Schoolboy, the ECP, the mission—the man at the epicenter of a possible disruption in Soviet hegemony in Poland and all of Europe, and thus the object of keen Red Communist attention. Options flashed suddenly through Keeton’s consciousness. Engage him, ignore him, follow him? He quickly decided on the former.
“Dzień dobry, Biskup,” Keeton said amiably as Paszek approached close enough. The bishop nodded his head with a smile but appeared ready to move on. In English, with Toby Lodge’s accent, Keeton said, “They call you Baca, don’t they?”
Paszek stopped next to Keeton and looked up into the sunglasses, then gave him an instantaneous once-over glance. “You are British, eh?” the bishop asked back in English as well. “I see. Sir, welcome to Krakow. I hope you enjoy our city.”
“I have been, Bishop,” Keeton said. “Well, actually I’m a reporter, and I’m here to write a story about you.”
“A story,” Paszek mulled for a few seconds. “Stories can be adventures that elevate our conscience or tales of horror that grind our sensibilities to a coarse dust. They can be parables or fantastic fictions that bear no resemblance to reality. What kind of tale are you about, then?”
Keeton was taken aback momentarily by the implicit challenge. The Schoolboy must know that he was a target of state scrutiny, so perhaps it was not completely unexpected that in his world, like Keeton’s, there was rarely such a thing as a chance meeting. The irony of this afternoon’s coincidence put a wry smile on Keeton’s mouth. He stuck his hand out toward Paszek.
“My name is Toby Lodge,” he said. “From the Ploughshare newspaper, based in London.”
The bishop shook Keeton’s hand. “It’s quite sunny here in Poland today, isn’t it?”
Keeton was compelled to slip off the sunglasses and immediately felt the boring gaze that accompanied the boyish grin of Baca. Keeton returned the look and began to feel the details that had appeared in the Schoolboy dossier come to life before him. There was a gravity in Paszek’s stare, the look of a man who had endured personal loss and yet faced down a brutality that had crushed so many others, who taught caritas to all but practiced a savvy resistance to injustice. This man deserves to be protected, Keeton thought, and if necessary saved.
“Bishop, I would very much like to have a few minutes of your time,” Keeton said. “At your convenience, naturally.”
Paszek’s hands locked behind his back, and he made a show of peering around them. “Mr. Lodge, while I do not discern a state agent following you—yet—the surest way to collect one is to spend time at the Pałac Biskupi interviewing me. I’m very sorry; I must decline.”
“Another location perhaps,” Keeton persisted. “There must be ways for us to meet away from the eyes of the SB. I could be at the cathedral, hidden, so to speak, until after a Mass. We could talk then. You’ve operated secretly before.”
“True, in younger days,” Paszek answered. “But no. Inflating the scrutiny could only mean trouble for those around me—including yourself, by the way. You talk more like a spy than journalist.”
Keeton felt the slight tremor of adrenaline at Paszek’s words. “Only one question now, Bishop, if you’d permit. You just mentioned trouble. Do you feel like danger to you and the church in Poland is escalating?”
“The interview has begun, then,” Paszek said with a slight laugh. “I’m afraid my only comment today is—no comment.”
“Well, one must try,” Keeton said lightly. “Perhaps in Rome an opportunity will emerge. I presume you’ll be at the council for the final session?”
“I believe so,” Paszek said. “Until then, let’s both of us try to stay out of trouble.”
“Bishop, I’m meeting a man named Anatol Kozlow this evening,” Keeton said. “Do you know him by chance?”
“No comment,” Paszek responded. “You know, Mr. Lodge, I would think you’d respect my—what do you call it?—Fifth Amendment privilege?”
“That’s not British, sir,” Keeton said. “That’s for Americans.”
“So it is,” Paszek said, then raised his fist and tapped it on his chest. “Mea culpa.”
The bishop turned and resumed his walk toward Wawel Hill. When he looked back at Keeton momentarily there was a peculiar twinkle in his eye.
Chapter 8. Cat and Mouse
The man wearing the tan fedora was not the first person to arrive at the flat on Długa Street. An hour earlier a little rattle-trap truck had pulled up to the narrow sidewalk, and a trio who looked to be brothers had piled out and begun unloading small wooden crates into the building. They finished by bringing in two wooden tables and several chairs, marking off the delivery in a battered ledger book and tearing away right past the window of the little bar across the street, which served as reconnaissance post.
Keeton now studied the new arrival, who was a bit shorter than him, perhaps five-ten,
and lean. There was no hair peeking out from under the hat, so Keeton imagined he was bald or nearly so. When the man turned in his direction to light a cigarette, Keeton saw a flinty face of close-set eyes, hawkish nose, and thin mouth framed in a Van Dyke beard reminiscent of Lenin.
Could be his skinnier cousin anyway, Keeton thought. The man waved the match and tossed it aside, then looked up to the row of second-floor windows momentarily before approaching the door of the building and walking in. The number above the door—417—matched the address on Luiza’s invitation. Keeton also recalled that Anatol Kozlow’s apartment number was 22.
But this man isn’t Kozlow. He wouldn’t have looked up at his own windows. Was the man with the fedora and Leninesque beard a visitor of Kozlow’s? Another caterer of some kind? Keeton played back the brief encounter again. The man was dressed in higher-end clothes—a light-gray suit a dark tie—so not a common worker by any means. He could have walked some distance to the building or been dropped off by taxi—Keeton had not been able to discern which. Or perhaps he isn’t connected to Kozlow in any way.
Keeton dropped some money on the table to pay for the coffees he had drunk and walked out to the sidewalk. He put on the sunglasses again and made his way across the street, heading past the front of 417 Długa Street to see what he could see.
“I don’t suppose you’re expecting company?” Jakub asked from the window of Anatol Kozlow’s flat that overlooked Długa Street.
“What’s that, Jakub?” Kozlow asked as he arranged the plates and silverware that had arrived earlier from the vendors and that Jakub had agreed to pay for.
“Oh nothing, my friend,” Jakub answered. “I was just talking to myself.”
The dark-haired man with the sunglasses was dressed smartly. Either a westerner tourist or one of these pathetic Poles wishing to be Western, Jakub thought. As the man passed directly underneath the window he disappeared from Jakub’s view, then after several seconds reappeared and continued on down Długa. Jakub shrugged and turned around to see that Kozlow had nearly finished arranging the accoutrements for the fancy dinner.
The Schoolboy (Agent Orange Book 2) Page 15
