The Sleeping Spy

by Clifford Irving

  Actually, she admitted to herself, she would have preferred to have found him to be a monster. She was aware, of course, that in many ways he was. She knew too much about the man to be deceived by his surface. He was an irrational fanatic, whose hands had been bloodied many times over, and he was one of the four men who had decided that her father must die.

  I'll manage, she told herself. I'll manage it very nicely.

  She realized that he was smiling at her, and she smiled back automatically. He reached out his free hand to touch her ankle and stroke it.

  "You're very quiet," he said.

  "Just enjoying myself." She breathed deeply, arching her back, and saw the appreciation in his eyes. "The lake, the Alps, the forests ... I didn't believe it at first. Fir trees and palm trees growing side by side."

  "Lago Maggiore is a jewel that has been polished by craftsmen for centuries."

  "It must be wonderful to live here all the time."

  "One gets tired of it after a while. I spend about half my time here, and half in Milan."

  "Why Milan? It's such a dirty, ugly city."

  He shrugged, his eyes on the luff of the mainsail. "A man can't always choose the places he does business."

  "I didn't know you were in business. Mary Jo didn't tell me that."

  "Mary Jo again." He seemed amused. "Are you going to insist on maintaining that fiction?"

  "Fiction?"

  "We both know that Mary Jo Betterman doesn't exist."

  His fingers tightened on her ankle. She felt a touch of ice in the pit of her stomach, but she kept her face calm.

  "You made a small mistake." He was smiling broadly now. He released the grip on her ankle as he hauled on the sheet to point the sloop closer into the wind. "You said she called me Gerry. Nobody calls me Gerry, I don't allow it. The name is Gerard."

  "I ... I probably misunderstood her," she said faintly.

  "Come, admit it. Why pretend?"

  She stared at him, not knowing what was coming next. They were closing up quickly on the stone jetty at Brissago, close enough to shore that if she had to swim for it, she could. She braced herself to move quickly.

  "Not that I mind, you understand." He was not looking at her. His eyes were on the jetty, calculating when to tack and lay the boat alongside. "This isn't the first time that a girl has tried that routine on me."

  "Routine?" she managed to say.

  "I assure you, I'm not offended. In fact, I'm flattered." He gave her a happy wink. "You wanted to meet me and you managed it very cleverly. But now that you have, let's forget about Mary Jo Betterman, shall we?"

  She made a confused gesture.

  His hand was back on her ankle. "I'm aware that I have a certain reputation with models. I enjoy beauty, and I pay well for what I enjoy. Where did you hear about me? In Milan?"

  Models, she thought. Good Lord, he thinks I'm trying to hustle him. She said vaguely, "Oh, here and there."

  "Cherubino's, no doubt, or Calvin's. That's where those bitches hang out." He suddenly giggled; it was shockingly out of character. "Well, you mustn't believe everything you hear. What agency are you with? Eileen? Wilhelmina7 Johnny C.?"

  "I'm not connected right now."

  "And so you decided to meet the notorious Gerard Krause. Not that I'm sorry you did. You're remarkably lovely." He looked at her reprovingly. "You American girls, you come over to Milan to do one spread for Italian Vogue and you get sophisticated much too quickly."

  She buried a smile as she remembered her words to Eddie: Don't worry, I'm going over there to kill him, not seduce him.

  Krause turned his attention to the boat, coming up into the wind deftly and letting the way drop off her until they drifted neatly alongside the jetty. Two of the boys from the marina were there to fend off and take lines. Krause hopped ashore, giving instructions to the boys, then held out a hand to help her. Standing next to her on the jetty, some of his charm dropped away. His head came only to her shoulder.

  "Do we go on from here?" he asked.

  She hesitated, just long enough.

  "Come," he said, with a touch of impatience. "Don't make me repeat myself. I enjoy beauty, and I pay well to keep it around me."

  I'll bet you do, she thought. I'd love to see your expense sheets.

  "How about dinner at II Giardino tonight? It's three stars, the best in Switzerland." When she did not reply, he took her silence for agreement. "I'll meet you there at seven thirty."

  "Let's make it eight. I have some things to do first."

  She went back to the Pension Valentina and did those things that she had to do. She crushed and then pulverized eight penicillin tablets into a smooth powder. Then, following Eddie's instructions, she packed the powder into two tiny plastic bags and secured them in her purse. Then she was ready for dinner.

  While Ginger was sailing on Lago Maggiore, Vasily was playing chess at the Club de Ajedrez in Barcelona. The chess club was located in an old building off the Plaza de Cataluna, a long and narrow room with three dozen tables. Everything about the club was old but serviceable. The carpet on the floor was heavy but worn; the chairs were well padded but faded; and behind the coffee bar the espresso machine babbled a constant complaint. The prevailing odors in the room were those of stale coffee and tobacco, for the windows to the street were sealed against both sound and light, and tiers of smoke collected around the green-shaded lamps that hung over each table.

  At four in the afternoon the club was almost empty, with no more than half a dozen tables in use. Vasily paid the visitor's fee to a bored ancient at the door, bought himself a carajillo at the bar, and stood sipping the anise-flavored coffee appreciatively as he watched a game in progress. When he had finished his coffee, he went to one of the empty tables and sat down. He dug his hand into the box of wooden chessmen and fingered the pieces absently. After a while a young man with long hair came over and asked if he wanted a game.

  "If you're prepared to be patient," said Vasily. "It's been a while."

  The young man shrugged and sat down. They chose for color; Vasily drew white and opened with a conventional

  Ruy Lopez that brought him to defeat in twenty-two moves. In the next game, playing black, he used a Queen's Indian Defense but did no better. In the third game he reached back into his memory and opened with the rarely used Nimzovich Attack. His opponent looked at him curiously but said nothing. After the forty-third move, the young man resigned.

  "You may not have played for a while, but you know what you're doing," he told Vasily. "Are you new here? I don't remember seeing you before."

  "I used to come here years ago, but the place looks the same. Ready to fall apart. Does the Chessmaster still play?"

  "Wolfe? Of course, every night. The club wouldn't be the same without him."

  "Does he still play simultaneous games?"

  "Twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. He limits himself to twenty opponents these days." He brightened as he added, "I've drawn with him twice."

  "Something to be proud of," Vasily assured him. "I might try him myself. That would be tomorrow?"

  "At noon." The young man got up to leave. "Try that Nimzovich on him. You might get away with it."

  After the young man had left, Vasily sat for a while at the table, apparently lost in thought. His eyes stared absently at the ceiling, and his fingers toyed with the chessmen in the box. Once in a while his hand went to his pocket. When he got up from the table to leave he had collected and secreted six chessmen, all white, one of each rank: one pawn, one rook, one knight, one bishop, one queen, one king.

  Back in his room at the Hotel Colon, he laid out the pieces on a table and set up his traveling lab kit, which was virtually the same as Eddie's. He made exact measurements of the pieces with a caliper and rule, and traced their outlines on a sheet of paper. Then, using a minute jeweler's drill, he bored a hole in the head of the pawn. The hole, on the surface, was barely visible. He used a second tiny drill with a burr tip to enlarge the interio
r of the hole, forming a hollow space in the top of the pawn. He worked slowly and cautiously, and when he was finished only the thinnest shell of wood was left. The procedure had taken over half an hour. He then did the same with the other five pieces. It was eleven o'clock before he was finished with that stage of the operation.

  After a ten-minute rest he went back to work. As a precaution, he coated the outside of the pieces with Vaseline. Working with extreme concentration, using a triple-zero pipette with a diameter no greater than that of a needle, he filled each hollowed piece with a special solution of almost pure nitrobenzine. Finally, he sealed off each entry hole with white wax, smoothed and sanded to the color of the chess piece. By then it was two in the morning.

  He regarded his handiwork soberly. Once the Vaseline coating was removed, each chess piece would be transformed into a lethal weapon. Anyone touching the head of the piece would receive, through osmosis in the wood, a substantial amount of nitrobenzene on his fingers. As a contact agent, this form of nitrobenzine was unbeatable. It bonded on contact with the blood, inhibited oxygenation, and resulted in death by suffocation within minutes.

  Staring down at the row of white pieces, Vasily smiled grimly and murmured four words. "Josefina. Martin. Wolfe. Checkmate."

  On that same Tuesday, Eddie Mancuso slept late. When he finally left his motel room for breakfast it was past eleven, and the fogginess in his head told him that he could have slept even later. A while back he had decided that he used sleep as a shield against the reality of certain things he had to do. Stay in bed, don't think, just dream, and maybe tomorrow will go away. As a theory it was comfortable; it made him feel more human, more vulnerable, and less like a life-taking machine. But if it was a comfortable theory, it was also a dangerous one, and he tried not to take it too seriously.

  "I'm just a precious little wildflower bending in the breeze," he sang to himself as he tooled the rental down the Interstate looking for a place to have breakfast. "Too fragile and delicate to survive in this cold, cruel world. No shit, really I am."

  He found an open Pancake Heaven and settled in for a meal. This would be breakfast and lunch combined (he had never been comfortable with the word brunch), and he had eaten lightly the night before. He ordered grapefruit juice, a four-egg omelet, and a pile of sausages, and then remembered what he would be doing for the rest of the day. He called the waitress back.

  "Hold everything. Make it a double order of corned- beef hash, toast, and coffee," he told her and just in time remembered to add, "No poached egg on the hash."

  When his breakfast came he ate it with a copy of the Washington Post propped up in front of him and leaning against a bottle of ketchup, feeling the pleasurable guilt of a man who has been somewhat tamed by a woman and knows he is reverting to bachelor habits. Finished with breakfast, he drove back toward the motel looking for a supermarket and found one just beyond the traffic circle. In the dairy section he loaded his cart with three dozen of what now passed for extra-large white eggs. Each was somewhat larger than a Ping-Pong ball. He looked at them distastefully.

  They'll have them down to the size of marbles soon, he thought. Schmuck, buy something else. Who the hell buys three dozen eggs and nothing else?

  He knew that it was unnecessary, but as a sop to his professional conscience he added flour, sugar, and a box of plastic cake frosting to his cart. At the checkout counter he debated going back for a cake of yeast but decided that he was verging on paranoia.

  Uncle Eddie is baking today, kiddies. First one home from school gets to lick the pot.

  Back in the motel room he laid the eggs out on the table, set up his lab kit, and stood for a moment staring at the setup. There are unpleasant aspects of every occupation, and this was one that he disliked intensely. He knew exactly what was going to happen. First he would try to do it the easy way, and then, after he had failed with the first dozen eggs, he would do it the hard way, but the right way.

  First the easy way. He took from his kit a hypodermic syringe and the finest needle available. Sitting crouched over the table, he punctured the shell of the egg with the needle and very slowly and carefully began to draw out the contents. The albumen came out easily. It always did. The problem came with the yolk. The viscous yellow substance clogged the tip of the needle at once. He withdrew the needle, washed it, and tried again. The same thing happened. He tried a third time, and this time the needle enlarged the hole so badly that the egg was useless. He sighed, discarded the egg, and reached for another one. The result was the same. It continued to be the same through the first dozen eggs, just as he had known it would be.

  So much for modern technology. He moved a carton of eggs into the bathroom. With an ordinary straight pin he punctured a tiny hole in the round end of an egg. He made a face at himself in the mirror over the sink, put the egg to his lips, and began to suck with an even pressure. The contents of the egg came out smoothly, filling his mouth. With considerable effort he kept himself from gagging and spat out into the sink. He sucked again until the shell was completely empty. He examined the result of his labor and found it perfect: a clean, empty shell with a tiny pinhole. He rinsed out his mouth and started on another egg. In no time at all he had six perfect specimens, but his mouth tasted like the inside of a chicken coop.

  "There's got to be a way," he said to himself in the mirror. "A smart guy like me should be able to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs."

  He moved the six empty eggs back inside. From his lab kit he took a dark, tightly sealed bottle, a lightweight gas mask, a tablet of amyl nitrate, and an amyl nitrate capsule. He swallowed the tablet dry and popped the capsule under his nose, trying to ignore the rush of pleasure that coursed through him. He had nothing against the rush, but this was business, not fun. Adjusting the gas mask around his face, he then proceeded to transfer the prussic-hydrocyanic acid from the dark bottle to the hollow eggs, injecting it drop by drop through the pinhole. Finally, he sealed off the pinhole with a calcium-gum compound and finished the exterior so that no sign of entry showed. He repeated the procedure with a second egg.

  Enough, he told himself. No sense mass-producing the damn things.

  He packed the loaded eggs into a padded box and cleaned up the mess. By the time he had finished, it was early evening. He knew that he should be hungry again, but he could not face the thought of food. He rinsed his mouth out with bourbon, built himself a proper drink, and settled down to watch television. At midnight he turned off the set and slept for two hours. Shortly before three in the morning, his bill already paid, he packed up and left the motel, driving the deserted highway into the city.

  James Emerson's mission had been, from the beginning, different from that of the others. Eddie had explained that to him during those hurried briefing sessions in Mexico.

  "You're going into a blind situation," he had said. "We don't know as much about Andriakis as we do about the other three. Generally, in a situation like this, we look for a weakness in the target. Either that, or a habit pattern that we can use against him. That's the whole point when you're using UKDs; it's not like potting a guy with a rifle and running for it. The takeout has to look either like a natural death or like an accidental death. If you can't make it look that way, then it has to look like part of something bigger, something that draws attention away from the actual target. That's why we hunt for the weaknesses. Is the target a junkie? Maybe he OD's. Is the target a drunk? Maybe he drives off a road. Things like that.

  "But with Andriakis we have a problem. It was easier to figure the angle with the others. With Swan it's his regular eating habits, his rigid schedule. With Wolfe it's this obsession he has about chess. With Krause it's even simpler. The schmuck is a fool for anything in skirts, which is why we gave him to Ginger. But Andriakis? We just don't know that much about his personal life. There's a weakness in him somewhere, either that or a habit pattern. There has to be; everybody has something like that. But you'll have to find it by yourself, and you won't have much
time. You'll have to find it quick and then make your move."

  By Tuesday evening, after a day of surveillance on Peter

  Andriakis, Emerson had come to two conclusions. The first was that he had been set a task that was preordained to failure. There was no possible way to discover the weaknesses of a man's character, much less the habit patterns of his life-style, in one day of observation. By Tuesday evening he knew no more about Andriakis than he had known on Tuesday morning. The second conclusion was that he was going to use the pistol and kill the son of a bitch anyway.

  I'm not cute like Eddie or Vasily, he thought. They have the minds of fiends, and they've been around this business for twenty years. My mind doesn't work that way. I'll shoot him, run for it, and take my chances.

  It had been a frustrating day. He had kept a discreet tail on Andriakis from early morning onward. From a distance he had seen the man confer with a farmer about the purchase of olives, seen him shop for fish at a local market, and had watched him drink three cups of sugary Greek coffee while chatting with friends in a cafe. He had gone without his own lunch, camping outside a taverne in Pyrgi, while inside Andriakis consumed skewers of lamb and a mound of rice, and then had followed him across the island to the beach at Aghios Gordis where his target had done nothing more startling than lie in the sun for most of the afternoon. Then had come the return trip to the house in Kalami, where Andriakis had disappeared inside and had not emerged since. Staked out on a deserted section of road that overlooked the house, the hood of his car up in a pathetic attempt to simulate a stranded motorist and sustained only by a sandwich grabbed on the fly, Emerson kept watch while his spirit weakened and his resolution waned. By ten o'clock he had been on the job over twelve hours, the night was dark, and he knew that he had accomplished nothing.