by Bill Granger
“What about Prague?”
Denisov blinked. He almost smiled. He reached for his glass of iced vodka and drank a little. “I am a man of business.”
“Filthy capitalist pig,” Devereaux said.
Denisov studied him for a moment.
“Should I sell my shares in this company?”
“You have shares?”
“I have a portfolio that is divested.”
“Diversified.”
Denisov frowned. “I talked to my brokers.”
“You have more than one?”
“One in Los Angeles, one in New York. Of course. And one in Switzerland.”
“Of course,” Devereaux said. He smiled. He put down the money.
“This is only part,” Denisov said.
“The rest in ten days, after I get back to Lausanne.”
“If you get back, eh?”
“I have great expectations.”
“Every man alive has them. But some die anyway.”
“The stage Russian is heard from again. You’re affected too much by the Slavic soul; you begin by making aphorisms and end up by believing them. Tell me about Prague.”
“The network owns sixty percent of Trans-Global Films. This is a cinema company. It makes international arrangements. I think it is a laundry, only two films in five years it makes itself. They are middlemen for many others.”
“How?”
“They arrange movies. They work with governments from the top to the bottom, to the local commissar. If you film in Poland, they arrange for you.”
“A Communist front?”
“You are too suspicious, my friend. No. They are American firm, owned by the network and forty percent by BH Productions. That is Ben Herguth, who does not produce anything.”
“Your broker knew all this.”
“And other sources. I have lived in California six years now. As you know, as you arranged.” Denisov looked at him.
Devereaux tasted the icy vodka. “Is exile so terrible?”
“Existence is to remember. You separate me from my past.”
Devereaux said nothing. He was in the city of his childhood. He was surrounded by brick and steel reminders of his past. He closed his eyes to them; he refused to see them for fear of creating pain.
“Information,” Denisov said. “I am still the old spy. The trade is the same, inside or outside. Information is always available. You call me because I know some things. Because I am in California. This is about film and television.”
“So Ben Herguth is a shell company?”
“Yes. But this is what you ask: What is Prague to any of this? Well, they make a film there. They make six films there in four years. They do not make themselves, you understand: They arrange. They get permits, they smooth the way, they bribe officials, they arrange transport and storage and accommodations. Now they make a new film about Napoleon. They will film in Prague.”
“Was Napoleon in Prague?”
“No,” Denisov said. “I ask why they film in Prague. They say that Prague looks like Paris from the inside and like Vienna the way it was from outside. And it is a hundred percent cheaper than using Paris. They use Prague also for Moscow when Napoleon attacks my country.”
Devereaux had stopped listening. He put his large hand around his drink and stared at it. He had been in the States for just twenty-four hours and the tiredness was gone. He had taken the plaster cast off his hand. He felt very close to the end. One way or the other.
“Is the company on the square?”
“Do you mean honest? Of course not,” Denisov said. “This is the cinema business. They steal, same as everyone steals.”
“You’ve lost your sense of morality.”
“Yes. It is the decadence of the West. I am diseased by it.”
“But rich enough to indulge the symptoms.”
“Alas,” Denisov said. He shrugged in his black cashmere overcoat. He had a large head and his eyes were crystal blue, like mountain lakes. They had known each other in the trade. They had come against each other one too many times and Devereaux had conducted Denisov to his side. They had been old enemies and were still; but in a world without friends, they had become accustomed to each other.
“Then they deal in Prague, they have contacts. Who would the contacts be?”
“You only asked last night,” Denisov said. “But there is Emil Mikita. I spring a name out of my glove. This is surprise to you?”
“Out of your hat,” Devereaux said. “Emil Mikita. How did you get the name?”
“He is called Miki,” Denisov said.
“I know.”
“I asked and everyone said he was the man to know in Prague. In the cinema. It is surprise to me that you know his name as well. But then, that is what they tell me.”
“What?”
“Everyone knows Miki.”
“I need a little more than information,” Devereaux said. He looked at his drink and then at the Russian. The Russian had put on weight and he had not started out small to begin with. Denisov was not the best he could do, but he couldn’t call on Section. He had the feeling Section would not like the game.
“So,” Denisov said. “I shipped through a bag.” He had understood from the beginning, Devereaux saw. The checked-in bag contained a gun and check-ins were never X-rayed.
“There might be problems.”
“Ah, well. My life is dull. Perhaps we need a problem.” He paused. “How many?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps a half dozen, perhaps less.”
“Will you say this is five thousand dollars?”
Devereaux nodded. “Ten days after Lausanne.”
“Is this your account or your agency?”
“At the moment, I pick up the bill.”
Denisov grinned and displayed the fierce square teeth set evenly in his wide mouth. “Good. It is pleasure more for me that you pay.”
“You knew that when I called.”
“Yes. You are running outside the fence again.” The image was more striking because Denisov had a wide but faulty command of the language. At language school in Kiev he had learned English with pain and without pleasure until one afternoon a colleague introduced him to a recording from The Mikado of Gilbert and Sullivan. He became a Savoyard overnight; he could not get enough of the music of the two eccentric Englishmen. He learned all the words to all the songs before he fully understood them.
“I’m just trying to find the gate,” Devereaux said. “To lock myself back in.”
“You are the exile, comrade,” Denisov said. “I am exile, too. We are all without country in the trade, is not so? We are both out of our countries and we have no place in them.”
“Russian self-pity.”
“Perhaps,” Denisov said and smiled to mock the other man. “What matters to you?”
“A little girl. She was kidnapped a week ago. We get her back and we return her to her own country.”
“What is?”
“Czechoslovakia.”
“Ah. That girl who saw the statue weep.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me: Is truth?”
“What?”
“The statue. Does it weep?”
“There are no miracles,” Devereaux said.
“Yes. So I believe also. But if there is one miracle, then I do not have to believe this anymore. So: Is truth?”
“I don’t know. She thought so. And now I think I understand. About Miki, about her. About why she was taken. They couldn’t stop the miracle show at St. Margaret’s Church and they couldn’t stop the news and they couldn’t let Miki come across for some reason. So they want to leverage the Czechs: Get Miki and we give you the girl. Except the Czechs don’t know they have Miki already. There’s a man who wants her and he’s putting his neck out for her.”
“And you? You know this and where she is?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. He put down a ten-dollar bill to cover the two drinks. The planes catapulted with nothing t
o spare into the crowded sky. The huge bar was filled with strangers staring out the windows at the planes.
“What do we do?”
“Kill people,” Devereaux said. He stood up at the bar and waited for Denisov.
32
NIGHT CALL
Hanley rode in the back of the Diamond cab as it crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge and followed the signs around to National Airport. What would Mrs. Neumann say to this? Hanley pulled his overcoat tight. She would be told in time and it would be made clear. If Devereaux wasn’t lying. He didn’t want to think about Devereaux lying.
He had not heard from Mason for forty-eight hours. The Eurodesk people in Brussels used the current Central American slang to describe the situation: Mason “was disappeared.” Devereaux, Macklin, Mason. The other side had everything going for it, whoever the other side really was.
The plane was a Boeing 707, really more plane than anyone needed for a short trip to Chicago. The side of the plane was painted with the familiar colors of one of the three biggest airlines in the country. The plane, however, was on permanent lease to the United States government. Specifically, to an agency called International Land Management and Evaluation, a subsection of the Department of Agriculture in the budget but, in fact, a part of Section.
Hanley was the only passenger. The interior of the plane was vast and spartan. The rear section was partitioned by wood and held the freight area. The front section had ten seats. The pilot and navigator invited Hanley to sit in the cockpit. Hanley accepted.
“What’s the cargo?” the pilot said, casually flicking switches and reading dials.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Are you fueled for a long flight?”
“Chicago? Hardly nudge the gauge.”
“Then Lakenheath. In England.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” the pilot said. He wore a turtleneck sweater and a nondescript leather jacket, just like pilots in movies. Hanley thought he seemed very young and he wondered if he really wanted to watch this.
The plane took its turn in line and rumbled across the tarmac of National and lifted off at the last moment before it would have crashed into the Potomac River. Washington spun off to the right at a dizzy angle, the Washington Monument blinking its ugly red eyes at the plane, with the White House glowing and tiny below. The plane veered across Virginia and the Maryland panhandle, climbing over the Appalachians before leveling out at thirty-five thousand feet. Hanley noticed he was gripping the chair arms tightly and he did not remove his seat belt. The navigator belched. The pilot flipped three switches, turned and stuck out his feet. The plane flew on above the clouds. The night was very clear from here, beneath the moon and stars. It was a Nebraska night for a boy, Hanley thought, remembering himself as he wanted to have been. Dream on the stars, the old man said to the boy of himself.
He thought of Devereaux.
I need a plane and a Europe landing site, not far from Belgium. The west of Belgium. I need medical supplies, just in case.
Hanley had held the receiver of the red phone calmly and listened. The cold voice at the other end was simple and direct, pronouncing each word carefully.
I can’t do this, Hanley said at last.
If you won’t, then I won’t play for your team.
You are trying to blackmail me.
You set me up, Hanley, you and Mrs. Neumann, and you didn’t tell me what this was about. This was no simple defection train, was it? If I have to take her out myself, I’ll do it, but it will cost you more than you’ll want to pay.
Each word in memory is cold, precise, each syllable is pronounced. The words are cut and dried, without texture or emotion. The words have no feelings left in them.
Are you threatening?
Of course he was. He had no time left. He had already sent the signal to Cernan. ANNA. One word. It cost him four hundred dollars. The woman was absolutely reliable. She sat at the phone and dialed the number in Belgium once every fifteen minutes. The phone rang precisely nine times. Then the woman in Chicago hung up. Fifteen minutes later she dialed again. She dialed and dialed for two hours and thirty minutes. On the first ring of the eleventh dial someone completed the connection in Europe. There was no sound, just the ether. The woman in Chicago said: “Anna.” The connection was broken. The message was complete.
But Devereaux did not have Anna. Not yet.
Devereaux said the plane should be ready to go at eleven, precisely, from gate F12. Section could arrange this with O’Hare. If no one showed at eleven, then they weren’t coming. It was that simple.
Hanley sat in the cockpit as the night became clear and Indianapolis glowed orange and white in the middle of the Indiana prairie blackness. The pilot was reading a paperback novel by Ed McBain. The navigator was still busy before a green scope, looking at the world through electronic eyes.
Hanley stared out at the reality of the earth from the cockpit windows. The earth glowed at the horizon and the land was black below, beneath stars and moon. Now and then there would be a city and all would be light and then it would fade again and the night took over the earth. The earth was unchanged at night in all the centuries of man, except for the glow of cities. Hanley thought suddenly of the Cathedral at Chartres.
“You’ve flown to Europe,” he said to the pilot.
“Sure.” The pilot turned the page and marked it by bending the page at the corner. He put the book away and stretched and yawned. He looked at his watch. “Long flight across. Need some grub. I’ll fetch us some good old ORD cooking when we get into O’Hare. When we going to Europe?”
“At eleven. Gateway F12,” Hanley said.
“Gotta go with my trusty navigator to plot a route. Hey, Randy, you want to send out for pizza?”
“Sure, I’ll go for some pizza,” said the navigator.
“You like pizza?” said the pilot to Hanley.
Hanley saw the immense brightness of Chicago loom at the horizon. The brightness was exactly cut off at the lake and defined the shoreline around the south end of Lake Michigan. He noticed then that the plane had been descending.
The pilot was back to business now, flipping switches, talking to O’Hare.
The earth came up slowly and the stars were lost in the redness of the sky above the city. Hanley felt the strap of the seat belt locked around his waist. He watched the sprawling city fill the windows of the plane. He closed his eyes and was surprised to think he might have uttered a prayer.
33
OPERATION
“Do you trust this man?” Denisov said in French to Devereaux. They sat in the back of the rental Ford that had been stolen from the shuttered Avis dealership on Western Avenue.
“He knows how to drive.”
“He provided the information.”
“That was another man.”
“How can they be certain?”
“There are only five or six operators who can pull something like this off. You use logic. If it was in Chicago, they have to be out of Chicago. There are two operators in Chicago. They do snatches, assassinations, the major antipersonnel stuff. It is one or the other. The source checks and pinpoints it. Then he fixes the focus by putting money out. Everyone is for sale.”
“Yes,” Denisov said. He had checked his bag through because it contained a nine-millimeter automatic with three cartridge packs that would not have made it through the X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport. The weapon was in the right-hand pocket of his dark blue raincoat. He sat behind the driver.
“You guys talking French?” said Anthony Riolli.
“He is certainly a genius,” Denisov said in good French.
“Twenty-two hundred,” Devereaux said in English. “You know.”
“I know.”
They got out of the car. They were in a deserted stretch of West Adams Street in the heart of the black ghetto on the West Side.
“Why can’t the FBI find her?”
“Because they don’t know how to look for people,” Devereaux s
aid. He took the weapon out of his pocket. A black face appeared at a window across the street and stared at the two white men with guns.
“They talk to police,” Denisov grunted.
“They’re always the last to know. You want to know about bad people, you talk to bad people. You explain it as business. There are always enough snitches and a few of them actually know something.”
“Why do you think she was kept here?”
“Why not? They going to take her all over the country?”
“What do we do?”
Devereaux stared at the Russian. The night was breathless and dead cold. The streets were lined with sticks of trees. The old houses seemed to lean against each other for support. The black face disappeared at the window and a light went out. It was a wooden house and there was no point in going through the alley because there was a huge Doberman pinscher in the backyard. All the backyards in the poor neighborhoods had dogs. They were an alarm signal and they were hard to get through. Devereaux had thought about the backyard but they would have had to shoot the dogs and waste ammunition.
Denisov checked the safety and tried the action. He and Devereaux stood in front of the wooden door.
“Steel plate?” Denisov said.
“I hope not,” Devereaux said. He tried the handle. The door was locked. He looked at the lock. He ran his hand along the seam of the door.
“These guys have confidence,” he said. “One deadbolt. A Lawson. Not more than an inch and a half. One kick,” he said.
And kicked.
The rotted wood splintered with the blow and the door blew in and Devereaux threw the stun grenade into the hall. The grenade shook the ancient house and windows blew out. He and Denisov went in crouching, guns extended.
The first man was on the stairs.
Denisov shot him twice. They didn’t use silencers. There was no point to it really.
Devereaux shot the tall man with white hair who came out of the back door beneath the staircase. The bullet hit his shoulder. Devereaux kept firing.
