The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “There was a broad once was supposed to jump through the window in an apartment in the John Hancock Building, but I don’t think you can. I mean, you’d have to really hit the glass the right way, with a lot of force, to even crack it. These high-rises are built like brick shithouses.”

  She staggered around the desk to put it between her and the man.

  The telephone rang.

  Kay pushed at the desk to shove it against him. Her robe opened.

  He stared right through her, the way Al Buck had stared right through her when he told her to clear the building. Her nostrils flared with the rush of adrenaline.

  He was talking out loud but he was talking to himself. He was really huge, outweighing her by about one hundred fifty pounds. His fingers were large and some of them had been broken once. He wore a blue suit and an open-collar white shirt. His black hair glistened with oil.

  “So how do you figure a broad throws a snit and walks out on a good job, good bucks, moving up the ladder of success? A good-looking broad, good tits, good can, and she walks out and goes to her fancy high-rise one-bedroom apartment on Chestnut Street and kills herself? I mean, what happened? She flip out or what? Yeah. She must of flipped out.”

  She ran across the room and he caught her by the wrist at the door of the bathroom and pushed her in. His hand was hot around her pale wrist.

  “Pills,” he said. “Broads do it with pills. Look at Marilyn Monroe. That was a waste. How do you figure people who got it made?”

  He opened the medicine cabinet.

  “Everyone’s got pills,” he said.

  He took the bottle of sleeping pills from the glass shelf and closed the cabinet. She hit him in the face.

  He looked at her. “You want me to slap you around some first?” He seemed surprised and hurt. “You make it easy, you make it hard.”

  “Please for the love of—”

  “Look, honey. I get no kicks out of this. Well, maybe in a way. But if it wasn’t me, it’s someone else. See? If it isn’t today, it’s tomorrow, and why put it off. It’s like going to the dentist to get a tooth yanked. You put it off and put it off, but you still got to do it in the long run.”

  “Please, please, please,” she said. He had her cornered in the small bathroom. He was twisting the cap.

  “I hate these fucking childproof caps,” he said.

  He opened the bottle and spilled the pills out into one huge hand. She hit his open hand and knocked the pills all over and she shoved him against the toilet. She had the strength because she was so afraid; she could have lifted a car. He struck his head on the edge of the shower door. He shook his head and he was bleeding.

  Kay was out of the room and running toward the front door. She opened the door and ran to the fire stairs at the end of the corridor. The place was full of electrical hums and the rush of wind against the building twenty-nine floors above the ground.

  He was slow, but when he got to the hall he started to run.

  She pushed open the green fire door and the door resisted a moment because of the change in pressure between the concrete stairwell and the corridor.

  Her robe was open and the cord trailed behind her. She ran down the stairs on slippered feet. The stairs above her rang with the sound of his large feet. She ran down and down and down and it was like falling. The numbers of the floors were painted on the doors at each floor. Down and down, her legs without any feeling, her breath coming in great, panicked sobs.

  She pushed the door that said Lobby and ran into the world. The doorman was schmoozing with the cop who came around every night because he had a girlfriend in the studio condo on the nineteenth floor. The cop was big and good-looking the way young cops are before they drink too much or get too cynical about the job. He was only twenty-six but he thought he had seen it all, the crazies and weirds and winos and killers in the alleys. Now this, a crazy broad running into the lobby with her bathrobe practically falling off her so that you could see her tits.

  “Someone is after me, someone coming to kill me.”

  The doorman turned more slowly. He hated to be interrupted when he was bullshitting the young cop.

  The big man was right behind her and grabbed her as if he were merely annoyed.

  “The fuck you running for?” It was as though they were the only two people in the world. “The fuck you making it hard on yourself?”

  The doorman said, “Hey, man, what you doin’?” It was something he was used to saying. He acted like he owned the building sometimes. He didn’t even look at the cop, who was taking a step toward the big man. The big man had a knife now and everyone saw it: Kay Davis, the doorman, the cop. The knife filled the lobby.

  “Don’t!” she screamed.

  But he was going to stick her and he pulled the knife back so that he had room to swing it into her body. He held her by the neck, like a chicken.

  The cop moved the way he moved when he was playing football. You don’t even think about it, about the pain, the guy slicing off tackle toward you, the way you’re going to be hit in a few seconds. You just see your body moving through spaces that open for you. That is the way he pulled the .357 Smith & Wesson Police Special, pulled it easy off his belt and aimed and fired without even thinking about it. If he had thought about it, Kay Davis would have had a knife between her breasts. That’s what they all said later. The kid didn’t know how easy it was going to be.

  The gunshot blasted the lobby to silence. It was shocking to hear a pistol shot in the context of the lobby. A cabbie leaned on his horn on State Street to make a bus move. It didn’t work.

  The big man didn’t really hear the sound. The bullet was between those two eyes set so wide apart. Kay saw the dirty hole in his head a moment before he keeled over.

  “I want to make this absolutely clear,” Hanley said in a sly voice.

  Mrs. Neumann said, “Of course.”

  “Stowe sent a blip an hour ago and we’ve just ironed it out,” he said.

  The “blip” was a microwave signal sent in the clear from Brussels, bounced off a satellite and picked up by the Section receiving station near Indian Head, Maryland, about twenty-two miles south of Washington. Indian Head actually housed the U.S. Naval Propellant Plant, which was a top-secret base used by the four armed services for training of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts—bomb squad people. But because the base was so vast and so secret, the government had appropriated other land near it along the Potomac River that was used for odd service needs—including the power-receiving and -transmission system used by R Section.

  The “blip” had been .02 seconds in transmission and contained 623 digital sequences, which were “ironed out” through a complex reverse microprocessor that elongated the signal to its normal length and then translated the code.

  “There is a private contractor involved and he has made contact with the Opposition concerning the sale of certain ‘damaged goods,’ ” Hanley said. He frowned, remembering the arch way that Stowe had put it in the “blip.” Stowe was of the old school and he thought spies were better spies if they could whisper without moving their lips and if they spoke in such a roundabout way that no one—not even the person they were talking to—could understand what they really meant. He was a maddening man, Hanley thought, not for the first time. “I don’t know what Stowe means by damaged goods and there’s no point right now in asking for a clear signal. Time is the problem. Prague was contacted from Brussels two days ago by the private contractor. And Prague is on the move, we’ve monitored their embassy in Brussels constantly and it’s a regular little anthill the past two days. We presume Prague—or, I should say, Stowe in Eurodesk presumes Prague—has agreed to the terms of the sale.”

  “What about our man?” Mrs. Neumann said. It was ten minutes to midnight in Washington. The eerie red “eyes” of the Washington Monument—aircraft-warning lights—blinked incessantly above the city. The streets were lined with painted trees and orange anti-crime lampposts. National Airport was shut d
own for the night and all was deep, silent, clear, save for the faraway wail of an ambulance.

  Hanley got up from the chair and went to the window and looked down at the deserted quiet of Fourteenth Street.

  “There is no mention of him. There is something else.”

  Mrs. Neumann waited.

  Hanley cleared his throat. He remembered very well the matter on St. Michel of a couple of years ago. It had been a personal thing at the end and he did not approve of that. Section was impersonal, it was a tool of the government. There was no place in Section for personal feuds. Except that time Devereaux had had the say of how the thing would be handled.

  “The private contractor has a face,” Hanley said. “Stowe really performed for us in the end.” He said it with wonder. “He had a right to have his nose out of joint, we went out of channels with Devereaux to bring Miki out. But Stowe worked it hard and he has a face. It’s one we know.”

  He described Colonel Ready to her. Of course, Mrs. Neumann had been in Computer Analysis then—CompAn—but she had been his confidante then and not his superior. She knew about Colonel Ready and the business on St. Michel that had nearly cost Devereaux and Rita Macklin their lives.

  “We should…” She hesitated.

  “We should watch and wait and do nothing and let him come out more into the light,” Hanley said. He knew the procedure.

  “But Rita Macklin. She’s in Brussels. We should—”

  “We should do nothing,” Hanley said. “Ready is the target now. He is the private contractor and somehow he managed to penetrate security and hit our train. So he has Devereaux and Miki and he is apparently dealing Miki back to Prague. We can accept our losses.”

  Mrs. Neumann’s hoarse whisper startled him. “Dammit, man, we’re talking about our own man in there.”

  “He’s dead,” Hanley said. “If we had any doubt, we can’t have any now. That’s Colonel Ready whom Stowe described. Ready is dealing Miki back to Prague. Ready has him, so Ready has Devereaux. So Devereaux is dead.”

  “But he might be—”

  “Devereaux is dead,” Hanley said. “It doesn’t really matter if he’s temporarily breathing. He’s out of the picture, Mrs. N. We take our losses but we look for our opportunity. Stowe identifies the man we’re looking for, the man who wrecked the train. We don’t know where he’s run to ground yet or where he is keeping Miki. We watch and wait. Stowe’s a good man. Let the thing go on the way it is. We can’t interfere with fate. Warn off Rita Macklin and what will happen? Can we trust her not to blow up that St. Michel business and make Section look bad? Can we trust her at all? It’s not as though we had an official secrets act to sign. She’s a goddamn reporter, Mrs. N. Her loyalty is to Devereaux. And we know there can’t be a Devereaux anymore, not once Ready got him. Tell her that and she won’t have any loyalty left, and that doesn’t get us Ready and it doesn’t get us closer to cutting our losses.”

  “Mason. Mason is with her. He’s one of ours.” She said it without any tone in the whisper. The urgency had gone out of her voice. Hanley was laying the cards down, one at a time, and turning them over. Tarot cards: This was the hanged man, this was the sailor torn from the sea. This one was dead, this one was waiting to die.

  “Mason has to be careful,” Hanley said. He said it in such a neutral voice. He was under control and he passed the calm across the desk to Mrs. Neumann. This is the way it is, he was saying: This is a world of losses, little advantages, small victories, and minor defeats, gray mixed in gray, reports filed today to be forgotten tomorrow. Agents moved in dangerous worlds because it had always been so. “Mason is a neophyte but he’s had his training, he has to be careful.”

  “If she gets on Ready’s trail, Ready will get her,” Mrs. Neumann said. She thought she was weak to say it; she was showing a loyalty to her sex that Hanley would see as weakness.

  “Perhaps Stowe will get Ready first,” Hanley said, turning another card over.

  Mrs. Neumann stared at the words like the face of a card. It was the card of the drowning sailor.

  14

  TRAIN MOVING EAST

  Devereaux’s mouth was thick with thirst. He felt his cracked lips with his dry tongue. The pain in his left leg throbbed gently, reminding him he was alive. He had slept and now his eyes were open and he stared into the darkness of the room. He could see light from the window.

  They had taken him out of the broken chair and left him on the bare floor. Because he could not eat with his hands behind his back, they cuffed his arms in front—but they chained his right leg to a small radiator pipe that ran along the wall. He tried to pull that cuff off or render the pipe from the wall but it was no good. He had eaten the crusty bread and drunk water from a bowl. But the water was all gone now and it was dark again and the house had been empty a long time.

  Devereaux slept from time to time.

  He dreamed of Rita Macklin. He saw her for a moment apart from him and then saw her beneath him, felt her body open, make its demand, insist upon him. He could hear her voice in his dream, smell her, make love to her. The last surprised him. When he made love to her in his dream, it was so good and real that when he awoke and he was still in darkness and pain, it seemed the darkness was the dream and that the lovemaking was the real side of consciousness.

  In his dream, she smelled like flowers. She was innocent, thoughtful, staring away from him in a May field in the mountains above the town. The town was Lausanne in one part of the dream and it was Front Royal, Virginia, in another part, the part where they were in the cabin on the Virginia hill and it was before the time the two killers had come for them. The time before innocence ended.

  He touched her and she turned to him and changed. Her open, green eyes became dark with lust. He touched her and she touched him back, she opened her mouth to taste his mouth and fell against him with her mouth working against his mouth, kissing and tasting each other with lips and tongues, and then she put her hands on his belly and he rolled with her in the field of flowers, hidden by the tall grass all around them. He opened her legs with his hands and felt her wanting to be opened, felt her hands now on his back, his buttocks, pulling him toward her.

  He awoke and it was darkness and pain. He groaned, felt the familiar sickness in his bowels. Everything was the way Ready said it would be. The only thing he could do for himself was to kill himself before they squeezed everything out of him. He couldn’t even save Rita Macklin when Ready came after her.

  “Are you still alive then?”

  Devereaux tried to speak but he had no voice left. The dryness had taken it.

  “You want some water?”

  He had dreamed of water. He kept his head still now. He wanted to say: Yes, please give me water. Please, please, please. He wanted to beg for water. But a strong rational part of him had thought of Lubyanka, the dread prison that was part of KGB headquarters in Moscow. A part of him thought he wanted Lubyanka less than he wanted water. Even Ready could make a miscalculation about the water. He could die in a day or two and it would be over.

  “Why don’t you speak? Can’t you speak?”

  He closed his eyes and the man came near to him in the darkness and peered at his face.

  “Hey. Are you dead?”

  Devereaux opened his eyes. It was the big one called Damon, the one who had hit him in the cellar with a pistol. Damon squatted down and stared at him.

  “You aren’t dead,” Damon said. He held his hand up to Devereaux’s nose to feel the breath.

  Devereaux grabbed the hand with both manacled hands and twisted and the fulcrum moved the world. The big man cried out, twisted, fell to the floor on his back and Devereaux reached over his head and pulled back. The big man elbowed him in the belly. Devereaux grunted, pulled the chain taut against the big man’s neck. For one moment, the big man fought with his body. In the next moment, the big man grabbed for the chain because the life breath was going out of him and his head was about to explode. His eyes bulged out of their sockets
and his tongue protruded. He made a gagging noise over and over and his lungs pumped up and down but there was no breath.

  Devereaux closed his eyes to feel better the life going out of the other man. He bunched his shoulder muscles and pulled back and the big man stopped struggling. The big man was dead.

  When Devereaux opened his eyes, sweat blinded them. He reached up and released the corpse and the big man’s head slammed on the floor. His eyes were open and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. Devereaux felt the pockets and found the keys. He opened the handcuffs. He found the small pistol in the right-hand pocket and opened it. It was some sort of cheap French make with five shots. He put the pistol in his pocket and tried to get up.

  The left leg hurt like hell. He braced himself against the wall and rose up. When he was on his feet, he tested the left leg. He could stand on it but the pain made him wince when he lurched along the wall.

  Devereaux went to the window and stared out at the night. There was a canal outside the window and all the houses were old and very beautiful. He had never been in this place and he tried to guess where it was. Below the window, the cobblestoned street was empty.

  Devereaux got to the door and down the stairs slowly. No one else was in the house. When he moved, he swung his left leg out stiffly, like an old man.

  Adrenaline gave him more strength than he thought he had. For the first time, he thought he had a chance. He took the pistol out of his pocket, checked the action, waited at the front door.

  He pushed the door open to the darkness. The night was clear, cool and the moonlight sparkled on the canal. The old houses had stacked roofs in the Flemish style. He took one step to the street and then another and he stayed in the shadows.

  The headlights flicked on at the corner and caught the shadow of the limping man. He turned, started to run, felt the pain rise up his legs into his crotch, all black and sickening. He stumbled, cursed, turned with the pistol toward the car and waited.

  But two men were already out of the car.

  To hell with it, he thought. This way was better than Lubyanka. He squeezed the pistol at the first shadow and the trigger stuck. The pistol was jammed. He slammed at the side of the barrel with his hand and the second man slapped him with a lead-weight sap.