Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  She shook her head. “She was Grandmother Hale. Ellen. Grandpa was Frederick. No one in the family was Trembley.”

  I sighed in frustration. “Okay. Trem. Canada. Trembling. Canada…”

  … tromblon …

  “There’s something more,” I said. “You’re thinking—or maybe you’re subvocalizing—something, some thought, some name, something your conscious mind isn’t entirely aware of.”

  “What do you—?”

  Impatient, I interrupted: “What’s ‘Tromblon’?”

  “What?—oh, my God—Tremblant. Lac Tremblant!”

  “Where—?”

  “The house was on a lake in Quebec. I remember now. Lac Tremblant. Beneath a big, beautiful mountain called Mont-Tremblant. Her house was on Lac Tremblant. How did I know that?”

  “You remembered it. Not enough to speak it, but it was there anyway, in your brain. Probably you heard the name mentioned dozens of times when you were little, and you stored it.”

  “And you think that’s important?”

  “I think that’s crucial. I think that’s why your father left that photograph of a place no one would be able to recognize but you. A place that’s probably to be found in no records anywhere. So that if anyone got into this box somehow, they’d come to a dead end. The most anyone else except you could do would be to identify you and your parents, but then they’d be stymied.”

  “I was almost stymied myself.”

  “I suppose he counted on you to summon it up, track it down, something. This was for you. I’m quite sure of it. Your father left that for you to find.”

  “And—”

  “And to go there.”

  “You think that’s where the … the documents are?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me greatly.” I stood up, straightened my pants and jacket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to waste another minute.”

  “Where? Where are we going?”

  “You’re staying here,” I said. I looked around the conference room.

  “You think I’m safe here?”

  “I’ll tell the bank manager we’ll require the use of this room for the rest of the day. No one is to be admitted. If we have to pay a rental charge for the use of it, we’ll pay. A locked conference room inside a bank vault—we’re not going to get more secure than that, at least not on more than a moment’s notice.” I turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Molly called out.

  By way of reply, I held up the scrap of envelope.

  “Wait. I need a phone in here. A phone—and a fax machine.”

  “For what?”

  “Just get it, Ben.”

  I glanced at her with surprise, nodded, and left the room.

  * * *

  Rue du Cygne—the street of the swan—was a small, quiet street just a few blocks from what was once the Marché des Innocents, the great central market of Paris, the place Emile Zola called le ventre de Paris, “the belly of Paris.” After the old neighborhood was cleared in the late 1960s, a number of gargantuan and impressively ugly modernistic structures were put up, including Le Forum des Halles, galleries and restaurants, and the biggest subway station in the world.

  Number 7 was a shabby late-nineteenth-century apartment building, squat and dark and musty inside. The door to apartment 23 was of thick, splintery paneled wood that had, long ago, been painted white and was now quite gray.

  Long before I had reached the second floor, I could hear the low, menacing bark of a large dog from within the apartment. I approached and knocked.

  After a long time, during which the dog’s bark grew more shrill and insistent, I heard slow footsteps, the tread of an old man or woman, and then the rattle of a metal chain, which I assumed was the door being unbolted from the other side.

  The door swung open.

  For an instant, the barest fraction of a second, it was like being in a horror film—the footsteps, the rattle of a chain—and the face of the creature that now stood in the shadows of the opened door.

  It was a woman; the clothes were those of an old woman of bent posture, and the hair atop the head was long, silver-gray, and pulled back in a loose chignon. But the old woman’s face was almost unspeakably ugly, a mass of welts and growths and lumps surrounding a kindly pair of eyes and a small, deformed, twisted mouth.

  I stood in shocked silence. Even if I had the wherewithal to speak, I had no name, nothing more than an address. I stepped forward and wordlessly showed her the yellowed scrap of envelope. In the background, from the depths of the dark apartment, the dog whined and strained.

  Wordlessly, too, she squinted at it, then turned and was gone.

  A few seconds later, a man came to the door who appeared to be around seventy. Once, you could tell, he had been strong, even stocky; his coarse gray hair had once been jet black. He was now frail, but he still walked with a pronounced limp, and the long, thin scar on one side of his face, at the jawline, once an ugly, inflamed red, had faded to a pale, etiolated white. Fifteen years had aged him dramatically.

  The man whose face and figure I knew I would never forget, because I had seen it night after night after night.

  The man I had last seen limping away from the rue Jacob fifteen years ago.

  “So,” I said with more calmness than I would ever have believed I could summon. “You’re the man who killed my wife.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  I did not remember seeing his eyes, which were a watery gray-blue: vulnerable eyes that did not belong to a KGB “wet-work” specialist, to the man who had dispatched my beautiful young wife, fired off a shot to her heart without a moment’s thought.

  I remember only the thin red scar at his jawline, the shock of black hair, the plaid hunter’s shirt, the limp.

  A would-be defector, a KGB filing clerk in the Paris station who identified himself as “Victor,” has information to sell. Information he says he’s discovered in the archives in Moscow. Something to do with a cryptonym, MAGPIE.

  He wants to defect. In exchange, he wants protection, security, comfort, all the things we Americans are known to dispense to defecting spies like some sort of intelligence Santa Claus.

  We speak. We meet on the Faubourg-St. Honoré. We meet again at a safe-house flat. He promises us earthshaking, really explosive stuff, from a file on MAGPIE. Toby’s interest is piqued. He is quite interested in MAGPIE.

  We arrange to meet at my apartment on the rue Jacob. It is safe, because Laura is gone, I think. I arrive late. A man in a plaid shirt, a thatch of black hair, is limping away. I can smell blood, sharp and metallic, warm and sour, a stomach-turning odor that screams at me, louder and louder as I mount the stairs.

  Can that really be Laura? It’s not possible, certainly it can’t be, that contorted body, that white silk nightgown, the large bright red stain. It’s not real, it cannot be. Laura’s out of town; she’s in Giverny; this isn’t her; there is a resemblance, that’s all, but it can’t be …

  I am losing my mind.

  And Toby. That tangle of a human form on the floor of the hallway: Toby, barely alive, paralyzed for life.

  I have done this.

  I have done this to both of them. To my mentor and friend. To my adored wife.

  * * *

  “Victor” examined the scrap of envelope, and then looked up. His gray-blue eyes regarded me with an expression I couldn’t quite place: fright? Or nonchalance? It could have been anything.

  Then he said to me: “Please come in.”

  * * *

  The two of them, “Victor” and the deformed woman, sat side by side on a narrow couch. I stood, gun trained on them, flushed with anger. A large color television set was on, its volume muted, playing some old American situation comedy I didn’t recognize.

  The man spoke first, in Russian.

  “I didn’t kill your wife,” he said.

  The woman—his wife?—sat with her trembling hands folded in her lap. I could not br
ing myself to look at her face.

  “Your name,” I said, also in Russian.

  “Vadim Berzin,” the man replied. “This is Vera. Vera Ivanovna Berzina.” He inclined his head slightly toward her, sitting at his right.

  “You are ‘Victor,’” I said.

  “I was. For a few days that is what I called myself.”

  “Who are you, really, then?”

  “You know who I am.”

  Did I, in fact? What did I actually know of the man?

  “Did you expect me?” I asked.

  Vera shut her eyes, or, rather, they seemed to disappear into the swells of flesh. I had seen a face like hers before, I now recalled, but only in photos and films. The Elephant Man, a powerful film based on the true story of the famous Elephant Man, the Englishman John Merrick. He had been terribly disfigured with neurofibromatosis, von Recklinghausen’s disease, which can result in skin tumors and deformities. Was that what this woman had?

  “I expected you,” the man said, nodding.

  “But you’re not afraid to let me into your apartment?”

  “I didn’t kill your wife.”

  “You won’t be surprised,” I said, “that I don’t believe you.”

  “No,” he said, smiling wanly. “I am not surprised.” He paused, then said: “You can kill me, or both of us, very easily. You can kill us right now if you want to. But why would you want to? Why, before you listen to what I have to tell you?”

  * * *

  “We have been living here,” he said, “since the death of the Soviet Union. We bought our way out, as did so many of our comrades in the KGB.”

  “You paid off the Russian government?”

  “No, we paid off your Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “With what? Dollars stashed away somewhere?”

  “Oh, come. Whatever few dollars we could scrape together over the years are nothing to the great and wealthy Central Intelligence Agency. They don’t need our grimy dollar bills. No, we bought our way out with the same currency all KGB officers—”

  “Of course,” I said. “Information. Intelligence, stolen from KGB files. Like all the rest of them. I’m surprised you had any interested buyers, after what you did.”

  “Ah, yes,” Berzin said sardonically. “I tried to entrap a bright young CIA officer whom Moscow Center had a grudge against. So I arrange a false defection, right out of the textbook, yes?”

  I said nothing, and he went on. “I show up, but the young CIA officer is not there. And so—because vengeance is not selective—I kill the young CIA officer’s wife and wound an older CIA man. Do I have this right?”

  “Approximately.”

  “Ah. Ah, yes. A good tale.”

  I had lowered my gun while he spoke, but now I raised it again, slowly. I believe that few things evoke truth the way a loaded gun does in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.

  For the first time, his wife spoke. She cried out, actually, in a clear, strong contralto: “Let him speak!”

  I glanced quickly at the disfigured woman, then turned back to her husband. He did not look frightened; on the contrary, he seemed almost amused, entertained by the situation. But then his expression turned suddenly grave. “The truth,” he said, “is this: When I arrived at your apartment, I was met by the older man, Thompson. But I didn’t know who he was.”

  “Impossible—”

  “No! I had never met him, and you hadn’t told me who would be joining you. For reasons of compartmentalization, I’m sure. He said he was assigned to vet me, that he wanted to begin the interrogation right then. I agreed. I told him about the MAGPIE document.”

  “Which is?”

  “A source in American intelligence.”

  “A Soviet mole?”

  “Not quite. A source. One of ours.”

  “Code-named MAGPIE?” I used the Russian word soroka, for the bird.

  “Yes.”

  “So it was a KGB code name.” There was a long line of KGB code names taken from the names of birds, far more colorful than anything we ever came up with.

  “Yes, but, again, it wasn’t a mole, strictly speaking. Not a penetration agent, exactly. More like an agent we had managed to turn, bend our way, just enough to be of use.”

  “And MAGPIE was…?”

  “MAGPIE, as it turned out, was James Tobias Thompson. Certainly I had no idea I was addressing the source himself, since I didn’t know the real name—KGB files are far too compartmentalized for that. And there I was, chirping away about a file I wanted to sell on a sensitive Soviet operation, and there was the agent right there in front of me, listening with great interest as I tried to sell him information that would blow his cover.”

  “My God,” I said. “Toby.”

  “Suddenly he became violent, this Thompson. He lunged at me, pulled a gun on me, a gun with a silencer, and demanded that I give him the document. Well, I was not so foolish as to bring it with me, not before we had made a deal. He threatened me; I told him I did not have the document with me. And he was about to kill me, I believe, when all of a sudden we both turned and saw a woman come into the room. A beautiful woman in white, in a white nightgown.”

  “Yes. Laura.”

  “She had heard everything. Everything I said, everything Thompson said. She told us she had been asleep in the other room, ill, and that the noise had awakened her. And now, suddenly, all became confusing. I took advantage of the interruption to get to my feet, try to escape. As I ran, I pulled out my own service revolver to protect myself, but before I could cock the pistol, I felt my leg explode. I looked, and I saw that Thompson had shot me. He had shot me, but he had not killed me, his aim had slipped in his haste, but by then I had my revolver out, and he froze, and I fired at him, out of self-defense. And then I leapt into the hallway, down a landing, and managed to get away before he could kill me.”

  All I wanted to do was to sink down onto the floor, cover my eyes, seek refuge in sleep, but I needed my entire reservoir of willpower now. Instead, I lowered myself to a large boxy armchair, clicked the safety back on, and continued to listen in silence.

  “And as I ran down the stairs,” Berzin continued, “I heard another silenced shot, and I knew he had either killed himself or had killed the woman.”

  The disfigured old woman’s eyes were closed, I noticed; they had been closed for much of his narration. A long, long silence ensued. I could hear the far-off buzz of mopeds, a roar of a truck, the laughter of children.

  At last I was able to speak. “A plausible story,” I said.

  “Plausible,” Berzin said, “and true.”

  “But you have no proof.”

  “No? How closely did you examine your wife’s body?”

  I didn’t answer. I had not been able to bring myself to look at Laura’s corpse.

  “Exactly,” Berzin said gently. “But if someone with expertise in ballistics had inspected the wounds, he would have discovered that the shot had been fired by a gun belonging to James Tobias Thompson.”

  “Easy to say,” I said, “when the body’s been in the ground fifteen years.”

  “There must have been records.”

  “I’m sure there were.” I didn’t add: But none that I had access to.

  “Then I have something you will find useful, and if you will let me get it, I will have settled my debt to Harrison Sinclair. Your father-in-law, yes?”

  “He’s the one who got you out of Moscow?”

  “Who else would have enough influence?”

  “But why?”

  “Probably so that someday I could tell you this story. It’s on top of the television set.”

  “What is?”

  “The thing I want to show you. To give you. On the television set.”

  I turned my head slightly to look at the television set, which was now playing a rerun of M*A*S*H. Atop its wooden console was an array of things: a bust of Lenin of the sort you used to be able to buy anywhere in Moscow; a lacquered dish that app
eared to be in use as an ashtray; a small stack of Russian-language, Soviet-published collections of verse by Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova.

  “It’s in the Lenin,” he said with a smirk. “Uncle Lenin.”

  “Stay there,” I said, walked over to the television and lifted the small, hollow iron head. I turned it over. A tag on its base said BERIOZKA 4.31, meaning that it had been purchased from one of the old Soviet hard-currency stores for four rubles and thirty-one kopeks, once a fair amount of money.

  “Inside,” he said.

  I rattled the bust, and something inside it shifted. I removed a scrunched-up loose ball of what appeared to be scrap paper, and then a small oblong came out. I took it in one hand and examined it.

  A microcassette tape.

  I looked at Berzin questioningly. From one of the other rooms the dog (which I assumed had been tied up or somehow restrained) began to whimper.

  “Your proof,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  When I didn’t respond, he went on: “I wore a wire.”

  “To the rue Jacob?”

  He nodded, pleased. “A tape made in Paris fifteen years ago bought me my freedom.”

  “Why the hell did you wear a wire?” An answer occurred to me, but it made no sense: “You weren’t actually defecting, were you? You were working for the KGB even then, right? Planting information?”

  “No! It was for protection!”

  “Protection? Against whom? Against the people you wanted to defect to? That’s ludicrous!”

  “No—listen! This was a microcassette recorder the Lubyanka had given me for ‘provocations,’ entrapments, all of that. But that time I wore it to protect myself. To record any promises, assurances, even threats. Otherwise, if ever there was a dispute about what was promised me, it would be my word against yours. And I knew that if I had a tape recording, it would be useful somehow. What else did I have?” He took his wife’s hand, which I noticed was somewhat disfigured with small tumors, but nowhere near as badly as her face. “This is for you. A tape recording of my meeting with James Tobias Thompson. It is the proof you want.”

  Stunned, I approached the two old people, pulled a chair very close to them, and sat. It was far from easy, given how my mind was whirling, but I bent my head and concentrated, focused, until I seemed to be hearing something, a syllable here, a phrase there, and then I was quite sure I could hear something, I was certain I had tuned in on his desperate, anxious thoughts, which fairly shouted at me.