Atropos

by William L. DeAndrea

  Trotter noticed that the crowd had formed a circle around Borzov, one that got wider with every cough. They wanted to give him room to collapse.

  Just when it seemed the old man’s breath was gone for good, the coughing stopped. Borzov pulled in a great breath, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few seconds. He took the handkerchief away from his mouth, looked inside, and made a face.

  The aide stepped forward again. Borzov handed him the handkerchief, which he took without a moment’s hesitation, as though being handed a flower from the Queen, instead of maybe a quarter of a cup of mucus. He’ll go far, Trotter thought.

  It seemed safe to talk now. A chorus of “Are you all right?” rose from the crowd. Trotter thought he could make out Senator Van Horn’s voice. Borzov held up a hand and said, “Just a moment, please, it is nothing.”

  The aide had gotten rid of the handkerchief. Stuck it in his pocket? Trotter thought. Yuck. In any case, he replaced it with a gelatin capsule and a glass of water. Borzov popped the capsule in his mouth, washed it down with the water, then smiled and turned to Regina as if he’d never missed a beat.

  “And as it was with your mother, my dear,” he said, “so it is with you. The Soviet Union’s loss is America’s gain.”

  “I’m quite happy with the way things turned out, General,” Regina said. Trotter almost kissed her on the spot. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Borzov spread his hands. “For a man as old as I, merely to be alive is to be ‘all right.’”

  He turned to Trotter. “And you, young man. Have I understood correctly? Your are to have the good fortune of marrying this young woman?”

  “I’m the one,” Trotter said. He looked in the General’s eyes. It was strange, almost frightening. There was little resemblance between the Russian and the Congressman, aside from the wrinkles of age and the gray hair, but their eyes were the eyes of twins. Worse than that; the light that glinted in the eyes of both men, the intelligence that lived behind them, was identical.

  “Take good care of her, Mr. Trotter.”

  “Oh, I will,” Trotter said.

  “That’s very good,” the General said. “Very good. Now, perhaps, Mr. Trotter, you can be of assistance to me. There is a man whom I especially wanted to meet during my time in America. I was told he would be here this evening. A comrade of mine in the war against Hitler. I knew then that he would achieve great things. Indeed, now he serves in your Congress.”

  “Oh?” Trotter said. “What’s his name?”

  Borzov told him.

  Trotter covered confusion with a smile. What was this man up to?

  “I haven’t seen him,” Trotter said truthfully. “But why do you ask me where he is?”

  “Oh, in some ways you remind me of him. And you seem to be a man of intelligence.” Borzov was smiling; behind his eyes, he was shouting with laughter.

  “Here I am, you old pirate,” the Congressman’s voice said. “If the damned crowd will just let an old man through—thanks. Excuse me. No, he’s with me. Come on, Joe.”

  The Congressman appeared, walking with just a cane. Joe Albright stood behind him with his hands open, ready to catch the Congressman if he fell. Trotter could have told him not to worry. The Congressman wasn’t about to fall. Not now. Not here.

  Borzov’s face lit up with what looked like genuine delight. “Comrade!” he said, and threw his arms open.

  The Congressman said “Dmitri” and did the same.

  Trotter stood there watching his father embracing his oldest and toughest enemy, and decided that at last, he’d seen everything.

  Chapter Ten

  MARK LOOKED AROUND AT Helen Fraser’s apartment. You’d think a person who’d had so many past lives as Helen claimed to would have accumulated more personality. While the exterior of the building was gingerbready Victorian brownstone, not too different from the Van Horn place, Helen’s second-floor apartment might have been carved from the inside of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. White walls and ceilings. White carpet. Glass and chrome and white leather. In the bedroom, there were a white pine bureau and a white pine vanity with a lighted mirror. Big, round, white lights. Mark currently reclined on a white pine platform bed on top of a white tufted spread. The only color in the whole apartment, Mark knew, was in the bathroom. Helen used pink soap. And pink toilet paper.

  She was in there now, putting in her diaphragm—a pink one, Mark supposed. Sometimes he wondered why she bothered. True, they always wound up having intercourse, but that didn’t seem to be the main point of things for Helen. When he thought of straitlaced little Regina Hudson refusing to take delivery in the rear, and compared her with Helen, he wanted to laugh.

  What he didn’t want to do was to play any of Helen’s games right now. He had too much on his mind. He had to think through what he’d seen tonight. Maybe Helen would understand.

  Who am I kidding? he thought. Helen could never understand the necessity of anybody’s thinking, because she never did any herself.

  She was going to insist on her goddam “challenge”; if he refused, she’d cry or fight, and he’d never get any thinking done unless he left, and he didn’t want to leave. If he left, he’d have nowhere to go but to the Senator or Ainley Masters, and he didn’t want to be around either of them tonight.

  The idea was to think of a challenge that would keep her busy without involving him too much. He didn’t want to be buckling leather or clinking handcuffs tonight. Come on, he told himself. The woman’s a bubblehead. You ought to be able to think of something.

  Helen came out of the bathroom wearing a satin robe, white, naturally. “Mark,” she said irritably, “you’re still dressed.”

  “So I am,” he said. He had exchanged his tux for ratty old sneakers, jeans and a blue work shirt before he left his father’s place, but he’d been so preoccupied, he had forgotten to shed them for Helen.

  Inspiration struck. “Of course I am,” he said. “It’s part of your challenge.”

  Helen said, “Oh,” and looked very serious, like a second grader whose teacher has said she’s about to say something very important. “I thought you forgot.”

  “I didn’t forget,” Mark lied. “Take off your robe.”

  Helen slipped it from her shoulders. She really was beautiful. Given her proclivities and her looks, Mark reflected, it was a shame Helen had been born the daughter of a prominent civil servant in this, the era of AIDS, because her true calling was to be a porno star. Maybe she’d been one in a previous life.

  One thing she knew was how to give her looks the best advantage. She stood with her hands on her hips, thrusting her red-tipped breasts forward. She angled her body so the lamp struck gold sparks in her pubic hair. She let him look, apparently expecting him to melt. He never did. That’s what she liked about him.

  “I’m ready, Mark,” she said.

  “Now undress me,” he told her.

  The lovely, patrician face scowled. Parts of her bounced in anger. “What the hell kind of challenge is that?” she demanded.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  Helen shut up.

  “Undress me,” Mark said. “But don’t use your hands. If one of your hands touches me, I’m out of here.”

  “How—”

  “I don’t care. You wanted a challenge. This is it.”

  Helen’s breath was heavy. She was going to love this. Because Helen couldn’t get off without being humiliated first. She had to be spanked or tied up or insulted. She found more release in tears than in orgasm. Maybe it had something to do with being born with money and beauty, the daughter of a powerful man. She’d been insulated from fear and humiliation her whole life, and she didn’t really have the brains to imagine them. They were exotic to her, and therefore exciting. Maybe the sex games, the “challenges” she needed were the poor dim child’s only way of feeling anything.

  Or maybe not. Mark was no psychiatrist, and he really didn’t give a damn.

  Helen said, “I don’t
know how ... I don’t know ...”

  “Start with the shoes and work your way up,” Mark said. “It’ll be easier.”

  Helen brightened. “Oh, right. Like getting your pants off.” She climbed up on the bed, knelt, bent, and began working on his shoelaces with her teeth.

  Mark left her to it and got back to his thinking.

  When he’d first found that tape, and realized someone had had his father by the balls for years, he suspected that someone to be Ainley Masters. It made sense. Hank came as close to being a loose cannon as any Van Horn, trained from the cradle in smart politics, could ever be. It would be natural for Ainley to want to know what the Senator was up to in greater detail than the Senator would be willing to tell him. Ainley would find out almost without trying whom Hank was screwing; it struck Mark that Ainley was the type to want to know what the pillow talk had been.

  “There!” Helen said. She had grabbed the rubber heal of Mark’s right sneaker in her teeth and pulled it free. She brought a long leg around and kicked it to the floor. She knelt again and bit the toe of his sock.

  It wasn’t as if the Van Horns or the people who worked for them were too noble to stoop to bugging, either. Mark had gotten his list of electronics experts from an old file in Ainley’s office during a flying visit to town. One of the reasons he’d wanted to stay with Ainley when he’d come to Washington this time was to see if Ainley betrayed any concern, or even any knowledge, of the deaths of these men. He hadn’t, at least as far as Mark could tell.

  Besides, Ainley did not seem to be a man with a secret stranglehold over the Senator. He seemed to be a man losing control of the Senator, and he seemed to have no idea why it was happening. Granted, Ainley hadn’t won and held his position without being an expert at deception; Mark thought he could trust appearances in this case. Mark believed that because he was convinced Ainley had the hots for him in an ancient-Greek, elder-mentor-loving-idealized-youth sort of way.

  Shoes and socks were gone now. Helen’s chin was digging into his belly as she worked on the heavy leather of his belt. Then the belt was open, and she went to work on the brass button of his fly, pushing at it with her tongue. It wasn’t working and it wasn’t working, and tears of frustration were close now.

  “Tastes awful, doesn’t it?” Mark asked.

  Helen screamed into the denim, and the button came apart. She grabbed one side of his fly in her teeth and pulled down the zipper. She started to struggle to get the pants down, nudging him first onto one side, then the other to get them past his butt.

  His father’s party tonight. As soon as he learned about it, learned who it was for, Mark knew that it was the Russians who had been holding his father’s leash all these years. And worse, they hadn’t been pulling it. He couldn’t think of a single vote of his father’s since Pina had gone up in smoke that was inconsistent with what the Senator would have done if nobody knew anything about him. So they were saving him. And you don’t save a big gun (even if he is a loose cannon) like Senator Henry Van Horn unless you intend to fire him at a very large target indeed when you get around to it.

  And this was a Presidential election year.

  The jeans had joined the shoes and socks on the floor. Helen surprised him. She went to his chest and, instead of unbuttoning his shirt, bit the buttons clean off, giving a muffled cry of rage each time she got one free. Mark laughed, and she spit a button in his face. Tears were pouring down her cheeks now. “You bastard!” she said.

  She turned him over with her head and pulled his shirt off by grabbing the collar at the back of the neck and pulling straight down. Then she nudged him back over. She was a strong girl.

  But what was it with Dudakov and Trotter? Dudakov’s presence, and Hank’s sucking up to him, meant the payoff was soon. Hank might have to rush the last phase of his plan.

  But what the hell did Trotter have to do with it? If Trotter were a Russian spy, sent to take the Hudson Group back over for the KGB, he and Dudakov (who had to be a KGB man) wouldn’t get within miles of each other. It was bizarre. What they acted like was a pair of old enemies, and that was impossible. Mark just couldn’t understand it, and he didn’t like what he didn’t understand. He’d have to find out more about this Trotter. If he could figure out a way to do it.

  Helen had Mark’s briefs down to his hips now, her wet mouth rubbing against him, her heavy blond hair tickling his belly. He was reacting in spite of himself. Helen gave a final tug, and his dick sprang free. Helen pulled the shorts down past his feet, then crawled back up him and took him in her mouth. Just as Mark closed his eyes, she bit him, hard.

  “Fuck me now, you bastard,” she said. “I earned it. Fuck me this fucking minute!”

  Mark grabbed her and flipped her hard on her back. She was still cursing when he entered her; she came before he was all the way in.

  Chapter Eleven

  TROTTER THREW HIMSELF DOWN on the Congressman’s black leather sofa. He let out a breath that matched the whooshing of air from the cushion. The Congressman and Rines were sitting on chairs, facing him. Nobody seemed to want to speak first.

  They were in the Congressman’s apartment in the Watergate. Two rooms, kitchen, bath. It had cost the old man a fortune. He lived here, the old man said, because it was only inside the goddam ugly place that you were safe from looking at it.

  Trotter had never been here before; all his meetings with the Congressman had been in open air, or in carefully selected safe houses, of which Fenton Rines Investigations was just the latest.

  The idea had been to avoid anyone’s seeing them together, thereby protecting both their covers. Now, with Borzov running around Washington, shaking Trotter’s hand and making in-jokes in front of Washington society, including two Presidential contenders, that particular sort of caution seemed a little superfluous.

  This was to be a council of war. The idea was to plan strategy and tactics so brilliant that they would confound Borzov and gain a decided advantage for the United States in the never-ending Cold War. These were to be discussions too hot even for Joe Albright to hear. Albright was (discreetly) bodyguarding Regina back at the hotel.

  It occurred to Trotter that these discussions could never achieve the brilliance that was their destiny unless somebody said something.

  So he said something. “For starters,” he yawned, “I resign.”

  “Don’t shit around, Trotter,” said Rines, who never swore.

  “I have never,” Trotter said, “been more serious in my life.” He turned to his father. “Congressman, if you are well enough to walk across a crowded room to embrace your greatest enemy, you are well enough to run your Agency again. I quit.”

  The Congressman stared at him. “You quit,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then get the hell out of here!”

  Trotter sat back. “What?”

  “Get the hell out of here! I’m good and sick of you. All your worthless life I’ve had to chase you around and drag you back to do what you can do better than anybody in the world, what you were born to do. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. You’d run out on me now? On your goddam country? Hell, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Get out. Be a rich girl’s pet.”

  “Hey, wait a minute—”

  “I’m not waiting any more minutes for you, boy. Something big is on, something BT-G. Borzov wouldn’t be here, otherwise. And it don’t take a whole lot of brains to see it has something to do with the election. There’s gonna be blood and fire over this, boy, I can smell it. You could, too, if you’d just be true to yourself. But maybe your nostrils have gotten delicate. It don’t matter. Rines and me will handle it. At least we care what happens to our country. We don’t need anybody who doesn’t. You just get.”

  Trotter looked at him in silence for a full thirty seconds. At last he said, “Are you done?”

  “You still here, boy?”

  “I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “After people resig
n,” Banes said mildly, “they usually leave.”

  “Agency fever,” Trotter said. “You finally caught it, Rines.”

  “And what did you catch, that makes you run out in the middle of a crisis?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Trotter said, “for a couple of intelligence agents, you two are being pretty stupid. I’m not walking out on you. I’m resigning as head or acting head, or tri-head or whatever the hell you want to call it, of the Agency. I’m not leaving the Agency itself.”

  “You’re not?” The Congressman sounded like a kid who had just found out he wasn’t going to be spanked after all.

  “No. I’m not. At least not now.”

  “Ha!” the old man said.

  “Not until this business with Borzov is squared away. As you said, our country might be at stake.”

  “Don’t say that like you’re joking, boy. I mean it.”

  “I know you do. You’ve got me scarred to death.”

  “That’s the proper attitude,” his father told him. “Why are you stepping down? Even assuming I’m up to taking on the whole thing again, which is more than I can be sure of right now, I’ll tell you that—even assuming that, how long do you think I can keep this up? You ought to be running the show, son.”

  “No, I shouldn’t. I’m terrible at it. You trained me for fieldwork, not for administration.”

  “You’ve been doing fine.”

  “And no serious emergencies have come up yet, either.”

  “As opposed to comical emergencies?” the Congressman said.

  “Droll,” Trotter said. “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do, son. What is it exactly you want?”

  “I want Borzov. I want to handle the situation.”

  “Handle it? You mean, handle it?”

  “I want to run it in the field.”

  “You mean the kind of thing you used to run away from? The kind of thing I used to have to kidnap you, or threaten to kill some innocent person, to get you to do?”