If Sasha was aware of these speculations, he ignored them; but if he had been pressed to answer them, he would have been forced to concede a germ of truth in all of them. He found the sight of an attractive female on her hands and knees, breasts swinging and perky rump pointed skyward, a source of quiet satisfaction, subdued excitement, and an overwhelming contentment. Further than that he did not attempt to analyze its effect on him. He knew only that watching a naked girl scrub his kitchen floor was the closest approach to domesticity that his chaotic life would allow, and if the sight at times aroused the curious mixture of his sexual imperatives, why, that was just so much profit on the transaction. Within the limits of the kitchen routine he never saw himself as a debaser of womanhood, but on the other hand the thought of getting a boy to scrub his floor had never crossed his mind.
Marcella had been scrubbing for almost two hours, and Sasha, lulled by her movements and by the aphrodisiacal aroma of pine-scented detergent, was slowly approaching a state of satori when the telephone rang. Jarred from his reverie, he frowned, snapped his fingers at Marcella as a sign to take a break, and went into his bedroom to answer the call.
"Sasha, I want you down here right away," said Anya Ignatiev. The noises in the background were those of the House of Joy. "Right now, you hear?"
"Hmmmmm?" Still bemused and not quite himself, Sasha smiled into the telephone. "Can it wait awhile, love? Half an hour or so?"
"No, it cannot. What are you doing that's so important?"
"Cleaning house, darling. You know how things pile up."
"Oh, that. No, I need you now." Her voice was rough and irritated. "And tell whoever it is this time to get her sweet little ass down here, too. She's being paid to dance on her feet, not scrub on her knees."
She hung up sharply. Sasha went back to the kitchen where Marcella was leaning against the sink, resting. Her lean dancer's body was covered with sweat. Sasha shuffled bills from his wallet and paid her.
"Game's over, sweetie," he said. "Time to go back to work. Just mop up and lock the door when you leave."
Twenty minutes later he sauntered into the back room of the House of Joy and found his mother behind her desk. When he saw the look on her face, he locked the door behind him before he settled into a chair and gave her a questioning glance.
Without preamble, Anya said, "We have a report from Backfire."
"Bloody well about time. Do we have a location for Emerson?"
"Mexico. A house outside a village called Atotonilco, which is out in the middle of nowhere in the state of Guanajuato. I have all the details."
Sasha grunted, and without thinking his hand went to his temple to touch the bandage that covered the tear in his skin. It was a small bandage, only a strip of gauze and tape, but the wound still throbbed on occasion. It bothered him painfully now as he thought of the night at Emerson's home and his failure to protect the man he thought of as his father. He was not a stranger to failure, but he had never learned to live with it; and although he enjoyed an easygoing relationship with Anya, he was not at all sure how much professional credit he still had left with her.
"What happens now?" he asked as lightly as he could. "Do I assume that I'm going after him?"
To his relief, his mother nodded without hesitation. "You'll go alone and pick up some people from our embassy in Mexico City. Make contact and bring him out. Those are your orders. Nothing less will be acceptable."
"I understand."
"I wonder if you do." Anya looked tired and, he realized, older. No, not older, simply her age. Her eyes were sunken, and violet shadows edged them. "There's no room for failure here, Sasha. What happened the other night was . . . barely allowable. But if something else goes wrong, I won't be able to protect you anymore." She thought for a moment. "And God only knows who will protect me."
"I understand that, too." For once his voice was level and serious.
"It won't be easy. He has an American with him, a dangerous man."
"The same one who . . . ?"
"The same." She hesitated, then said, "I want you to understand something else. Our priorities on this subject have changed somewhat."
"What does that mean?"
"We still want him alive, of course. Alive and back in Moscow. But if we can't have him that way ..." She shrugged.
He looked at her in disbelief. "You're talking about Yuri Volanov? James Emerson? My father?"
"I never said he was your father. I'm also talking about the man who was once my lover, but that's the way it has to be," she said wearily. "Those are the orders from Zhukovka."
"But why? It doesn't make sense."
"That isn't for you to judge. The question is, can you do it if you have to?"
He did not answer. He stared right through her.
"Tell me now, Sasha. It may never come down to it... I hope it doesn't, but it might. And so I have to know. If you can't do it, I'll send someone else."
He still did not answer. At the moment he was a long way from the House of Joy, parked on the side of a road and watching a house burst into flames, the inferno roaring and racing from room to room . . . destroying, blasting, burning. And he heard the sound of his father's voice calling for help.
"Sasha?" This time it was his mother's voice asking the question gently. "Sasha, I have to know. If you have to, can you kill him?"
And then it was his own voice he heard, removed from himself and echoing strangely, but unquestionably his own voice saying, "I can do it if I have to. Count on it. I can do it."
After leaving Elena Castelnuevo in the bar, Vasily joined Chuc and Van for a light meal, after which he napped in his room for two hours and met them again in the parking lot shortly before midnight. They made the same approach to the house as they had in the afternoon, driving up to the highway, leaving the car, and working down along the contours of the land to the hill and the tower. Vasily handed them the cable cutters.
"Remember, not too deep," he warned. "We don't want to cut it tonight. Use the edge of the tool to rub the cable, make it look worn. Nothing more, understand?"
They nodded, but for the first time they looked uneasy. They both glanced up. The night was cloudless, and the cables showed clearly against the starry sky. They seemed very far away.
"Not so easy at night," Van said nervously.
"Don't start that with me." Vasily's voice was angry. "You were the one who said it was a piece of cake. You were the one who was doing all the spitting."
"How much juice in those lines?"
"Enough to light up a small town. But those tools are fully insulated. It's an easy job."
"Easy for you. You stay on the ground."
"You're damn right I stay on the ground. I never said I could climb that bloody monster, but you did. You're the kings of the jungle, aren't you? Half monkey, half snake ... so get your asses up there and get to work."
They were still unhappy, but they secured the tools to their belts with lengths of line, clenched pencil flashes between their teeth, and began the ascent up the latticework of the tower, moving gingerly at first, and then with more confidence. Vasily watched them go up until he could no longer see the tiny dots of light from the flashes; then he sat on the ground with his back braced against the lowest strut of the tower and looked down at the house below. There were no lights, the house was darkened for the night, and it was all too easy for him to place himself in his imagination within the shell of the building and wander through the halls and gardens, up and down the tiled stairways, in and out of the bedrooms filled with the silence of slumber. All too easy for an active imagination, but in that direction lay disaster, and when the sexual images began to flicker he forced himself to stop. The people down there were as good as dead, and he pushed his mind in other directions. He thought for a moment of Elena Castelnuevo, transferred the sexual imagery to her, let it build and mentally explode. Then, finished with imagery and ignoring the dark bulk of the house below, he centered down coldly within himself, blanked ou
t his mind, and waited.
It was almost an hour later when he felt, rather than heard, the two men descending. Their descent was noiseless, he conceded in reluctant admiration. One moment he was alone on the ground, and in the next moment they were there beside him, breathing rapidly but otherwise at ease.
"How did it go?" he asked.
"No sweat."
"Piece of cake."
He collected the cutting tools from them. The insulated handles were clammy, and he could see now that their faces were covered with perspiration. "No sweat," he repeated. "Yes, I could tell. I could feel the tower shaking all the way down here. How much did you shave them?"
"Right down close," Chuc said smugly. "One more clip and away they go."
Vasily nodded. He had little confidence in either of them and would have preferred to check the work himself, but he was not about to attempt the tower. Twenty years ago. perhaps, and with both eyes ... he sighed. "All right, let's get back to the hotel and get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."
It was a long three days, not one. For those three days they lay up in the same spot below the tower, observing the routine of the house below. The days seemed endless and the sun was merciless. They ate dry sandwiches, drank bottled water, and endured the dust and the flies silently. Chuc and Van rebelled at the procedure, but Vasily insisted, and by the end of the third day they had a rough idea of how the pool was used. Eddie was the first one out in the morning for a quick swim before breakfast. Rusty and Emerson used the pool around noon, he to thrash a limited number of laps and she to paddle about placidly. Ginger did not appear until late afternoon, when all four of them swam together. That was the only time the pool was full.
"That's it, then," Vasily said at the end of the third day. "It isn't much, but it's a pattern. As of tomorrow we go operational. We'll hit them around five in the afternoon when they're all in the pool. If they're not all together, we wait for the next day."
They dragged themselves wearily back to the hotel. Once there, Vasily said, "I don't want you two hanging around me tonight. Do what you want, but stay out of my way."
It was cocktail time as they walked across the close- clipped lawn, making their way through the maze of tiny tables. The last of the sun lay heavy on the hills, and the tables were filled with brightly dressed guests chattering gaily in a handful of languages. Two mariachis wandered over the grass singing softly, and white-jacketed waiters with broad Indian faces rushed drinks on trays with un-Mexican haste. It was that time of day when anything seems possible and anticipation rules. Still half an hour away from his first Pernod of the evening, Vasily could already feel the heat of it in the back of his throat. His eyes roamed the tables, and he wondered about Elena Castelnuevo.
"We stay together," Van said, frowning. "Those are the orders."
"Not tonight."
"Every night. Swan said so."
"Screw Swan. He's in Washington, and we're here. I don't want any nursemaids tonight."
The two Vietnamese looked at each other uncertainly.
"Go and amuse yourselves," Vasily said cheerfully. "Get yourself a drink, get yourself a meal, get yourself a woman." He gave them a mocking grin. "This would be a good chance for you to call your cutout number. Isn't it time for you to get in touch with Swan?"
Van said impassively, "We have no cutout number."
"Merde."
"It is true. Our only communication is through you."
"Naughty, naughty. Didn't your mother ever tell you not to fib?" He reached into his pocket, found the car keys, and threw them over. "Here's your insurance that I'm not going anyplace. So don't let me see your faces tonight."
He went up to his room, bathed, and changed into a dark blue suit of shantung silk that he had bought off the peg before leaving Washington. He groomed himself carefully before the mirror, brushing the silver wings of his hair and adjusting the patch over his left eye to a rakish angle ... the Moshe Dayan touch. After a complacent inspection, he left the room and went down to the lounge.
He was still on his first Pernod when he heard Elena's voice behind him, saying, "So there you are. I thought you might have retired to a monastery."
His one eye met hers in the mirror behind the bar. "I tried. They wouldn't have me."
"You're at your devotions early today, padre." Her husky voice made a pool of pleasure inside of him.
"The wicked always pray early," he said, turning on his seat to face her. "There's always the chance that God is still drowsy."
She nodded approvingly. "Also, it leaves the rest of the day open to sinning."
"Still the Jesuit, aren't you? Will you join me in worship?"
"Si, como no? A vodka tonic, please."
She sat beside him, settling down comfortably as if she had been there often before. They smiled at each other, sipped at their drinks, and began the ritual of identification, each telling the other a life in capsule.
He was the Baron Viktor Barnowski, a Polish expatriate and now an American citizen with the American name of Victor Barnum, an oil broker based in Dallas who often traveled south of the border to deal with Pemex, the state- owned Mexican oil producer. He was a lifelong bachelor, a collector of pre-Columbian statuary, and an unabashed lover of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Whenever he could, he stopped at Taboada to partake of its curative waters.
She, in turn, was Elena Castelnuevo Leon, a widow from Mexico City whose husband had died four years before and had left her with the dual responsibilities of a comfortable estate and a twelve-year-old daughter. Content in her widowhood, she divided her time between her home in the capital's Zona Rosa and a flat in Puerto Vallarta, and she was an unabashed lover of nineteenth-century Italian opera. She and her daughter - now sixteen - stopped often at Taboada to partake of its curative waters.
They had another drink while he complimented her beauty and she complimented his command of the Spanish language. They compared notes and found that they had friends in common in New York (the exquisite Carollinis; the two Lamont brothers; and the ancient pianist, Gina Lescower), in Bangkok (darling Paul and his ever-changing flock of boys), and in Paris (poor Carlotta Obregon and her alcoholic husband, and that terrible Linda Paternoster, who was always in trouble with the police). They smiled comfortably at each other, destroyed two bowls of salted almonds, and fended off the approaches of the mariachis with a twenty-peso note. He told her wearily of the difficulties involved in brokering petroleum in today's chaotic market, and just as wearily she told him of the difficulties involved in the raising of a teenage daughter in today's permissive society.
The object of her concern appeared just then, the sixteen-year-old daughter, Isabella, bursting into the lounge and running the length of the bar calling to her mother. Fresh from the mineral pools, the girl wore a next-to- nonexistent string bikini and a terry-cloth cover-up, which she had not bothered to tie together. The temperature went up sharply in the lounge; heads turned and eyes were riveted on firm flesh bouncing, buttocks and breasts a jiggle as Isabella jumped up and down in excitement and begged Mamacita to please, please let her stay at the pool during dinnertime and have hamburgers and beer with the other young people.
"Cover yourself," said Elena.
"What? Oh." She had been casually indifferent to her near nudity, but now she tugged the terry cloth closed. "May I, Mama, please?"
"I was about to call you to dress for dinner."
"Just this once, please? It's so boring in the dining room."
"The sun is down, you'll be cold out there," Elena said.
"No, I won't, really. See?" She hugged the terry cloth to her body and shivered to show how warm she would be. Everything jiggled again.
"Basta, we don't need an exhibition," her mother said resignedly. "All right, but not too late, understand?"
"Thank you. Mama!" Isabella jumped with excitement again. She kissed her mother three times quickly on the cheek, then turned to run down the length of the bar and out the door. The terry-c
loth robe fell open again as she ran, and necks craned and eyes narrowed as her passage was followed.
Elena laughed with a touch of embarrassment. "You see what I mean about problems?"
"She is a lovely child," Vasily said gravely.
"Child? She's a teenage volcano." This time Elena's laughter was natural. "I saw what your eyes were doing, you and every other man in the room."
Vasily smiled easily. "One would be less than human not to admire, but she is still a child. With some luck she may grow into a woman as lovely as her mother."
Elena acknowledged the compliment with a nod. "And vou called me a Jesuit. Still, she's at a difficult age. There are times when she embarrasses me badly."
"Such as now." Vasily pointed out. "She has deserted you at the dinner hour."
Elena waved the thought away. "Not important at all."
"But it is, and I was thinking of remedying the situation by asking you to dine with me."
"I was hoping you would," she said simply.
Three hours later, Vasily lay flat on his back in Elena's bed, the perspiration cold on his skin as he stared at the ceiling and wondered at the fragility of the male ego. The bedroom was part of an elaborate suite, its walls ornately decorated with tapestries of hunting scenes. Vasily glared at a slavering wolfhound and dared it to glare back. Beside him, Elena, all soft pink undulations and comforting noises, cuddled close. Vasily gritted his teeth and made a despairing sound deep in his throat.
"Be easy, hombre," murmured Elena. "Rest, and we'll try again soon."
"The hell we will," snapped Vasily. "Enough is enough. I'm getting out of here."
He rolled over on his side, preparatory to jumping out of bed. Elena caught his arm to stop him. then gently pulled him to her. He groaned as he sank back into her arms.
The Sleeping Spy Page 16
