The Watchmen

by Brian Freemantle

  It became even more difficult when Olga said, almost formally, “This is Igor.”

  The man said, “Hello.”

  Then Danilov did laugh, unable to stop himself.

  Olga said, “Don’t laugh. Igor. My hairdresser.”

  Danilov became aware that despite what they’d obviously been doing, the man’s perfectly blond hair, although now disarrayed, would have been a close-fitting coif.

  Igor said, “I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me.”

  Danilov said, “Get up.”

  “We haven’t got any clothes on,” said Olga.

  “I know,” said Danilov.

  “Bastard!”

  “Get up and get out.”

  “You fucked Larissa!” she shouted. “Why shouldn’t I fuck who I want?”

  Danilov hadn’t known that Olga knew. Inexplicably—ridiculously—he felt embarrassed. He said, “You can fuck who you like, which you always have. With my blessing. But not in my home, in my bed. Get up and get out.”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go!” said Olga, quieter now.

  Into Danilov’s mind came the memory of Naina Karpov gazing around an apartment far more luxurious than this, protesting she had nowhere else. “Why not go home with Igor?”

  “I’m married,” said the man.

  Abruptly it no longer seemed absurd or laughable. It was sad and miserable—a fitting part in the mess of his life. Their lives. “Call Irena.”

  Danilov went out of the room and picked up his carefully placed drink on his way into the living room. He had to clear a space on the couch, sweeping papers and magazines and discarded clothes on to the floor. Almost at once there was movement and the slamming of the door as the man left.

  Olga appeared at the doorway and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Danilov said impatiently. “You made a hobby of being unfaithful from the moment we got married. I’ll sleep here, on the couch.”

  “Thank you.”

  Danilov didn’t say anything.

  “Good night. And thank you again,” said Olga.

  Danilov didn’t reply. If Olga’s lover was a hairdresser, why did he let her hair look like it did?

  Patrick Hollis had so much wanted to take the Jaguar—so much wanted to impress Carole in each and every way he could—but he changed his mind literally at the last moment. Not yet. Not until he knew her better. A lot of his penny-stolen fortune was deposited in ways to sustain a story of it being an inheritance, but it was still better to be careful. He told his mother it was a major conference of all the bank branches and went to the Italian restaurant Carole had suggested—the place in Albany, she’d said—in his lunch hour personally to reserve and choose the window table and talk through the menu so he wouldn’t be caught out if Carole asked for guidance. On his way back he bought an orchid corsage.

  The afternoon heat wilted it by the time he gave it to her, and the purple clashed against her yellow sweater so she didn’t put it on. She named the bar for a drink, and Robert Standing and three others—a man and two girls—from the mortgage department were already there. Hollis was immediately frightened that Carole would expect to join them, but she didn’t. Hollis was sure his casual wave had just the right degree of nonchalance. He wished his breathing was easier, conscious of wheezing. Carole had chardonnay. Hollis chose a martini, for its sophistication. He’d only tried it once before, and it burned his throat as it had the first time, but he resisted anything ridiculous like coughing. Carole asked for another, so he had to have a second and hoped the light-headedness wouldn’t last. He managed another nonchalant wave to Standing as they left.

  Carole made him taste her marinated calamari, and he was sure that was what made him feel sick, rather than the chianti. He left most of his veal, which he’d forgotten came in a cream sauce. He didn’t think she saw him swallow back the belch that brought something up to the back of his throat.

  Because she’d shown an interest he talked a lot about loans and securities, exaggerating some of the contracts he’d negotiated, and said his influence was sufficient if she wanted a transfer the moment a vacancy arose. Toward the end of the wine he had to grope for words that escaped him.

  Carole’s apartment was actually in Albany. As soon as they drew up outside, she got out of the car without saying anything, stopping some way away in apparent surprise that he wasn’t with her.

  “Aren’t you coming up?”

  He got hurriedly out of the car, fervently wishing he didn’t feel so sick. It was a walkup, on the third floor, and he was wheezing badly by the time he got to her door.

  “I have whiskey as well as vodka or gin. But I guess you’d like another martini. You want to mix?”

  “I’d better stick with coffee. I’ve got to drive back to Rensselaer.”

  Carole frowned. “You’re not staying over?”

  “I didn’t … I mean …”

  “No reason why you shouldn’t, is there?”

  She wanted to sleep with him! Go to bed with him where he could do all the things he’d seen on the porn channels: things that made them groan and cry out. He couldn’t! His mother. She’d stay up—awake, certainly—until he got back. It was already past eleven. She would have already started to worry. “Maybe not tonight. Left some work back at home that I’ll need tomorrow.”

  “You want to skip the drink then—end the evening properly?” She smiled.

  “Please,” he said, not thinking what he was saying and tried to cough, to cover it, but knew he hadn’t. Her smile was broader when she turned toward the bedroom.

  He followed her in and she turned, holding out her arms. “Want to help a girl?”

  He didn’t undo the neck buttons of her sweater and had to pull it back on to unfasten them before it would go over her head. When he saw her breasts he said, “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful.”

  She was helping him undress and their hands got in the way and the zipper of her skirt jammed and in the end she wriggled out with it only half undone. She kept her panties on and got into bed ahead of him, frowning back at his flaccid nakedness.

  “A girl’s feelings could be hurt.”

  Hollis got in beside her and reached with a single finger to touch her nipple. She said, “If you’re counting, there’s two.”

  Why wasn’t he hard! He’d thought about this so much—fantasized about what it would be like really to do it and not just watch—and now he couldn’t. He said, “I don’t know … I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ve changed my mind anyway.”

  “No, please. Wait.”

  “I’m tired of waiting, darling. Let’s skip it. Maybe you’d better get home.”

  On his way back to Rensselaer he had to stop once, because his crying blurred his glasses. His mother was up and said she had been about to call the police. Hollis said he’d had a flat.

  “I hope you called out a repair truck. You’re not supposed to do things like that.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said.

  Virtually everyone in the FBI’s Albany office was permanently seconded to the New Rochelle massacre and the UN attack. Only Anne Stovey was on duty when Clarence Snelling walked in.

  The balding, stooped man said, “Bank robbery’s a federal offense, right?”

  “Right,” agreed Anne.

  “Good,” said Snelling.

  9

  Six of the families whose husbands and fathers died in the massacre went to the same Baptist church just across the Potomac in Alexandria, and the funerals were combined. One was that of Jefferson Jones. There had been no children from Cowley’s marriage to Pauline, and he had difficulty gauging the ages of the six Jones children. He guessed they tiered down from a boy of ten to a bewildered girl of four. Each—three boys, three girls—were in their Sunday church clothes, stiff-faced with determination to be brave. Grief only very slightly chipped away the beauty of their mother. All the other families were white, maybe ten more children between them. They moved through the ceremony�
�the churchyard entry from a cavalcade of matching funeral limousines and then the service itself—as a group, some linking hands, all needing the contact of shared sorrow. The Jones family refused to cry.

  The priest talked of pointless and savage terror and of the mysteries of God’s ways, and the White House chief of staff included a message from the president in an address in which there was again the personal pledge to track down the perpetrators. It echoed as emptily as it sounded, and Cowley thought, irritated, that the speechwriters should have done a hell of a sight better than virtually repeat what they’d written for the president for his televised address to the nation.

  Cowley supposed the official representation justified what one commentator claimed to be the tightest security cordon, this time against an unknown enemy, since the interment of John F. Kennedy. But Cowley wasn’t impressed by the political cynicism of turning the funerals into an even bigger media event than their initial State Department crisis meeting, although the reasoning now was simpler to understand. Acknowledging his own cynicism, Cowley thought that probably for the first time ever the near-hysterical media criticism genuinely reflected the fear—and outrage—of the general public. The television and newspaper attacks had culminated that morning in suggestions that the failure of the president to attend—after it had been officially leaked that he would—was because his safety couldn’t be guaranteed.

  As Cowley watched, Frank Norton left the lectern and paused by each family—kissing the women who weren’t crying too bitterly—to rejoin Henry Hartz on the first pew. Next to the secretary of state was Leonard Ross and then the CIA’s John Butterworth. All around them were senators and congressmen. Two rows behind Cowley identified the men, headed by James Schnecker, with whom he’d entered the UN building.

  Cowley was glad he hadn’t gone, even though there had been at least three references—one when his bureau-issued picture had been flashed on the screen—to his being too ill to be there. He’d seriously considered attending. From the previous night’s telephone conversation with Pamela Darnley, who’d openly asked if he felt he could make it, he knew the bureau’s public affairs unit would have judged his being there a criticism-deflecting coup. Which was the major reason—and the one he’d given Pamela Darnley—for deciding against it. He would have been the focus of every camera, making it even more of a circus, detracting from—denigrating even—the mostly sincere, nonpolitical mourning.

  There was another reason, though: a personal, determined reason. The turban bandaging had gone but there was still a large dressing on the right side of his head. And the double vision had virtually gone: Certainly it wasn’t a problem getting around the hospital room or walking to the bathroom, and he didn’t have any difficulty identifying everyone on the screen before him. And that morning he’d managed to decipher enough from the Washington Post—certainly the attack on the bureau for its total lack of progress in the investigation and the doubt about the president’s safety—to understand what the stories were about.

  His problem was the broken rib, particularly if he tried to walk in anything like a proper manner at his usual pace. If he’d gone today, he would have needed a wheelchair to get from a car into the church and would have sat there in front of dozens of cameras like a physically destroyed man who might never recover. And the last impression Cowley wanted to create or allow was that he couldn’t walk or stand, would never be able to get back to work. The total and absolute opposite, in fact. He was sure the chest pain wouldn’t be so bad if he took the prescribed painkillers, but he was refusing them—actually agonizing himself walking too fast in front of the neurologist and hospital staff—and insisting there was scarcely any discomfort. He didn’t believe Joe Pepper was impressed or convinced, but others were.

  There were more public displays of condolence from the assembled dignitaries outside the church following the burials, before each hurried away encircled by his personal security, the sight of which immediately prompted a repetition of the presidential safety doubt from the commentators. As soon as the last of the mourners got into their cars—every member of the Jones family still refusing to cry—the program switched to a studio discussion among White House and State Department political correspondents and two men—one Arab looking—introduced as experts on international terrorism.

  The State Department correspondent disclosed that before leaving Foggy Bottom for the funeral that morning, Henry Hartz had summoned the Russian ambassador for the third time to demand faster and more substantial responses from Moscow. The White House journalist insisted that relations between Washington and Moscow were strained to the breaking point by an apparent lack of cooperation. Which brought Cowley’s mind back to the previous day’s telephone conversation with Pamela Darnley about Dimitri Danilov’s apparent reticence. Despite trying for most of the evening afterward to balance the woman’s complaints against their possible personal advantage to himself when he resumed control, Cowley was still undecided about manipulating his special relationship with the Russian. The unpredictable was the necessary working relationship between himself and a possibly hostile Pamela Darnley. Secondary, he immediately told himself. Maybe, even, less important than that by the official edict of bureau director Leonard Ross. So why, he asked himself, was there reason for any hesitation?

  Into Cowley’s reflection broke the voice of one of the terrorism experts on television suggesting that within the FBI there was a growing belief that so badly had the New Rochelle bombers misjudged public outrage that they would never claim responsibility or commit another atrocity.

  It wasn’t until he heard the phone ringing in his ear that Cowley realized he hadn’t had any problem picking out the numbers to dial the FBI director’s direct line at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Danilov didn’t think Olga had been asleep when he went into the bedroom that morning for a fresh shirt and underwear, but he’d gone along with the pretense as if believing she were, treading lightly and making as little noise as possible opening and closing closets and gently pulling the door shut when he left the apartment.

  He did it knowing full well he was only postponing an inevitable confrontation, but he simply didn’t know what to say to Olga. How to react at all. Long ago—long before he fell in love with Larissa—Olga’s affairs had reduced their marriage to beyond lack of affection to their scarcely being even friends, so there was no feeling of bitter betrayal or outrage. Nothing, in fact, to be sorry for or about. So it didn’t make sense—he didn’t want for them to go on sharing the same apartment. It hadn’t for years. It had just been convenient: too much trouble to find somewhere else. He didn’t have any attachment to Kirovskaya, so he supposed it would be easier for him to move out. But before he did that he had to find another apartment and agree to some financial support for Olga. Which wouldn’t be easy. His official income as a general was adequate, but it would be stretched maintaining two homes. Olga would be demanding when she realized he was serious about their finally divorcing, even though she was the guilty party. Of one thing Danilov was absolutely determined: He didn’t want—wouldn’t have—a court fight, dragging Larissa’s name and memory through the mud. He’d simply pay, within reason. Get it over with. It wouldn’t have been so difficult if he’d still had the additional income from the favors-for-friends understanding endemic in the Russian militia in general and in the Moscow force in particular. Danilov grew angry at himself—particularly with the reflection of how things had been years before. It was distracting from what should have been his sole concentration, more so because of the impressions that were hardening after Gorki and since his arrival back in Moscow.

  He had been treated contemptuously in Gorki, which didn’t make sense in view of the international enormity of what he was investigating. Even as accustomed as they obviously were to unchallenged corruption, Oleg Reztsov and Gennardi Averin had been far too confident. And there was something that didn’t fit—because, in fact, it fit too easily—about the roped
-together drowning of the mobster and the germ factory stores supervisor.

  Despite the unexpected delay on the inner beltway, there was still enough time before the scheduled Interior Ministry appointment for Danilov to detour to Petrovka. Yuri Pavin was already there. The autopsy report on the two dead men had been promised that afternoon, and he’d arranged for Naina Karpov to be taken formally to identify her husband’s body. Although the woman insisted she’d never met any of Karpov’s friends, Pavin had taken from their criminal record files photographs of the two men who’d provided the arms-trading alibi for Viktor Nikov to be shown to her. The two were Anatoli Sergeevich Lasin and Igor Ivanovich Baratov. Their files—with other photographs—were on Danilov’s desk. Their last known addresses were being checked for them to be brought in for questioning.

  “We know the brigade they are with?” asked Danilov.

  “Osipov,” responded Pavin. “Mikhail Vasilevich Osipov. The biggest and best-organized gang centered around Vnukovo Airport. Fought quite a lot of turf wars a few years ago.”

  With the pointless Gorki encounter with Aleksai Zotin fresh in his mind, Danilov decided it would be another waste of time interviewing Mikhail Osipov, at least until there was something positive with which to confront the gang leader. “Where are the warheads and the mine casings?”

  “Still in the trunk of my car. I thought they were safer there than in here.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “What do you want done with them?”

  “Leave them where they are,” decided Danilov. Would he be able to turn their possession to another, protective advantage? He was going to need something and couldn’t at that moment—that far too impending moment—think what it was.

  “This is becoming—might even have become—precisely the situation I made clear should not be allowed to arise!” declared Georgi Chelyag.