The Sleeping Spy

by Clifford Irving

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The plate that Spiro Dodonis threw might have transformed the gaily decorated Albanian barn into a slaughterhouse if Andriakis had not been dancing alone. Andriakis had no chance at all. The plate exploded directly in front of him and opened him up from groin to sternum. He was dead within seconds, and so was Lex Enhora, the man nearest to him, his scalp laid open to the brain. Spiro Dodonis himself was pitched out of the hayloft by the force of the explosion; when he struck the floor below, his neck snapped. Three other men were wounded. The explosion also blew out every light in the barn, and in the resulting chaos the groans and yells of the injured were mixed with the cries of others searching for flashlights and lanterns. When light was finally restored the scene resembled the aftermath of a wartime air raid. No one except James Emerson yet realized what had happened.

  He was dazed, but not for long. Spiro's long thin knife, that recent instrument of unbearable pain, lay close to hand, but the hand that it lay close to was maimed almost to the point of uselessness. But he gripped the haft of the knife, shut his mind to pain, swore he would neither scream nor faint, and sawed his right hand free. It was easier after that, using his good hand to unbind his feet, and then he stumbled down the stairs. He stared in disbelief, the pain in his hand almost forgotten for that moment.

  He saw the body of Andriakis, and he nodded to himself with satisfaction. He saw Spiro's body, and he nodded again. He saw the body of Lex Enhora.

  My God, he thought - what did Eddie give me? "An antipersonnel weapon," he had said. "Limited range. Good for taking out a single target..."

  None of the survivors commented on Emerson's presence.

  They were all contained within envelopes of shock and grief. Besides, with his bloody hand and tattered clothes, he looked like one of the wounded. A single target? If they had been a few steps closer, any one of those wounded men might be as dead as Andriakis.

  And as dead as Lex Enhora, the man who had tried to stop Andriakis from torturing him . . .

  It was the priest - his cassock torn and stovepipe hat crushed in - who saved him, tugging at his sleeve, firing incomprehensible Greek at him. Only one word came through - Kerkyra, the Greek name for Corfu.

  "Corfu?" he asked. "What are you saying? You want to go to Corfu?"

  "Corfu, yes," said the priest in surprise, switching languages. "I must get away from here at once."

  The barn was filled with a whirlwind of imploring voices, the wounded men begging now for help. Emerson looked at them quickly, but long enough to assure himself that none of them had suffered more than a deep cut.

  "I can't help anyone from a jail cell," the priest said. "Perhaps you don't understand. I am a priest from Corfu, and I am Greek, and this is Albania. I came over here to perform the ceremony. After such an explosion the police must come shortly. When they do, I am finished." The priest looked at him shrewdly. "You are certainly not Albanian, either."

  Emerson nodded. "Let's go outside . . ."

  Outside, under the stars, he said, "I know where there is a boat. However ..." He held up his left hand, and the priest sucked in his breath. He had not seen the extent of the damage before. "I'll need help handling it," Emerson continued. "Do you know anything about boats?"

  "I am from Corfu," the priest said. "We learn to sail before we can drive a car."

  Emerson let out his breath and sucked air. "In that case. Father, let's get the hell out of here."

  The priest led the way down the steep and rocky path that led to the sea, pushing the dinghy off the sand and into the water, and rowing them out into the cove where the sloop was anchored. Once on board he got the mainsail up while Emerson steadied the helm, then slipped the anchor for speed and silence, and ran up the jib. He came aft then to take the helm. He kept the boat under sail until they were well past the point of the Albanian patrols and the lights of Corfu were dead ahead.

  "We can use the engine now," he said and went below. The engine chugged into life, and after a while the priest came topside carrying an old shirt and a slab of something soft and yellow.

  "Butter from the galley," he explained. He tore the shirt into strips, greased each strip well with butter, and wound them around Emerson's hand in a makeshift bandage. When Emerson winced, he apologized for his clumsiness.

  "It will have to do until we can get you to a doctor."

  "Where are we headed for?" Emerson asked as the shore lights came closer.

  "Anywhere you wish. I know this coast the way I know my beard."

  Emerson hesitated before saying, "I have a car in the hills above Kalami. The keys are in it. We'll need it to get me to a doctor."

  "Kalami. Where Mr. Andriakis lives. Lived."

  "Yes."

  "And this is his boat, is it not?"

  "Yes."

  The priest looked out to sea and said nothing.

  It all seemed to go very quickly after that: getting the car and the drive to Ipsos to pick up his clothes and papers; and then into Corfu town, where the priest roused a doctor who complained bitterly about the hour but who tended to Emerson's hand. He took one look at the maimed fingers and asked the priest a question in rapid dialect. Whatever answer the priest gave seemed sufficient. The doctor shrugged and went to work, and when he was finished he accepted payment reluctantly.

  "What did you tell the doctor?" Emerson asked later. It was nine in the morning and they sat in the airport restaurant, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking sugary Greek coffee. They made an incongrous- looking pair: the priest in his torn cassock and dente that, and the American with the bandaged hand dressed in smooth gray worsted. "Whatever you told him, it certainly worked."

  The priest blew on his coffee before sipping. "I told him that we no longer live in an age where every question has an answer."

  Emerson looked at him silently. He did not trust himself to speak. His bloodstream was so full of painkillers that his brain was humming.

  "I don't even know your name," said the priest, "and I don't want to know it. But you probably saved my life last night and I probably saved yours, and we'll never see each other again. In a few minutes you'll be on the plane to Athens and wherever else you're going and I'll be on my way home to my wife and children ..."

  "Your wife . . .?" Emerson caught himself. He had forgotten that these priests marry.

  "But before I do, there is still a question that I have to ask. Even if there is no answer to it."

  "Go ahead."

  "I'm not asking you as a priest. You're not of my faith, and my office means nothing to you. But I'm asking you as a man. Were you responsible for the horror that happened last night?"

  "I was."

  The priest winced, as if he had been struck. Emerson looked away for a moment, and then looked back, directly into the priest's eyes.

  "Father," he said, "there are many questions about me that will have to remain without answers. But I can tell you this much, as God is my judge. Two of those men deserved to die. The third, Lex Enhora, did not."

  "Then you carry the burden," the priest said slowly.

  "Yes."

  "And what now?"

  "I don't know, Father."

  "More killing?"

  They called his plane then, and he left the priest sitting there with his half-eaten sandwich and the sugary dregs of his coffee. He walked away without having answered the question, but he knew what that answer had to be. Once the killing starts, it never stops.

  Gerard Krause felt warm and comfortable. He always felt that way at Katerina's house: protected against the world. His room on the top floor was like a vault into which he could lock himself safely, bounce around from wall to wall and emerge only when it was time to show himself again. In that room he was fed, nurtured, and catered to like a royal infant. It was the most trouble-free place he had known since his childhood, and although fear had sent him to the Fun House this time, it was a delicious sort of fear, tinged with the pleasure of naughtiness.

&nb
sp; He watched as Katerina collected his dinner dishes onto a trolley and wheeled it to the door. That same flood of warmth and comfort flowed over him as he watched the neat manner with which she handled the plates and cups. She reminded him so much of his mother, so tall and erect and full-breasted that he wondered for a moment if . . . and then discarded the thought, for she lacked the one ingredient he needed. Sitting slouched in a chair with his hands jammed into the pockets of his lounging robe, he smiled up at her. She smiled back, as if she knew what he had been thinking.

  "Do you want me to send Anna up?" she asked.

  "I'm ready for her now."

  "You look it," she said, chuckling. "What about the other one, the redhead you brought? What shall I do with her?"

  "Is she working?"

  "Not that one. She just sits in the corner. Not very enterprising."

  Krause thought for a moment. "Keep an eye on her. Don't let her go wandering off."

  Katerina nodded in understanding. "She won't be going anyplace. I'll send Anna right up."

  Once she was gone he undressed quickly, lowered the lights, and got into bed. He lay flat on his back, pulled the covers up under his chin, and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply several times, letting his mind go blank, spiraling back and down through the years to simpler times and simple pleasures, long-remembered tastes, touches, and smells: the particular flavor of the strawberry ices he loved as a boy, the odor of baking bread, the stroke of his mother's hand on his cheek. Thinking of that, he turned on his side, his knees came up and his arms went down to grasp them. He lay that way, suspended in time, as the door opened and Anna came in. The door closed and was locked behind her.

  She had changed from her somber dress into an equally somber dressing gown that rippled and flowed over her full hips and breasts. Her hair was pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her face was scrubbed clean of cosmetics. She smelled of plain soap and of lilac water. She came to the edge of the bed and sat there, and when she spoke it was in a soft, almost whispering Italian.

  "Ah, little Gerry, are you sleeping? Yes, you are, I can see that you are. You look so cute curled up that way, so precious that I hate to wake you, but it's that time, you know, time to feed, time to drink Mamma's milk and grow up big and strong. Come, my little one. Wake up and drink."

  She opened her robe to reveal the full, white, blue- veined, slightly pendulous breasts of the nursing mother, the aureoles dark and the nipples protruding. She slid her left arm under Krause's head and moved him gently toward her, holding her left breast in her right hand, offering him the nipple. His lips brushed against her hesitantly, once and then again, and then with his eyes still closed he took the nipple into his mouth and began to suck the thin, rich milk from her. He swallowed greedily and sucked again.

  "Good, that's a good boy," she murmured. "Drink it all up, there's plenty of milk for little Gerry."

  He gurgled contentedly, and as he sucked she slipped her hand under the blankets, down over his belly and in between his legs. In rhythm with the in-and-out motion of his lips and the tug at her breast, she began to stroke him to hardness. As always when she did this with him, she felt a rush of warmth inside her, a feeling not so much of excitement as contentment. Aside from the money that he paid her there was nothing about the little man that excited her.

  not even the rapidly hardening shaft between her fingers, but she was contented to know that she could offer to him the one service that no other girl in the house could supply. After a while she said gently, "Wait, wait now, baby. Time to change over."

  She moved to the other side of the bed and gave him the other breast as she resumed her stroking. She was a big woman with an ample supply of milk, but whenever she did this with Krause she was always amazed at how much of it he could drink. And the more he drank, the harder he got.

  His eyes were open now and his hands were at her breast, clutching it, pressing it into his face as he sucked. His breathing grew rapid, the air whistling in and out of his nose; his face grew flushed and she knew that he was close to climax. She quickened her stroke, murmuring to him, urging him on, and then his body stiffened; he arched his back and ejaculated over her hand. Then he went limp.

  "Good Gerry," she said. "That's a very good boy."

  When she was sure that he was finished, she waited a moment and then tried to move away. She could not. His lips still gripped her nipple, his hands still clutched her breast. Patient, she waited for him to release her, but he did not move.

  "Gerry?" she said tentatively and then, remembering that her role playing was over, said, "Signor Krause?"

  When he did not answer, she took his hands in hers and slid them from her breast. His hands fell limply. She took the nipple from his mouth with a faint plop, and his jaw fell open. Alarmed, she jerked her supporting arm away and his head fell back on the pillow. His eyes stared up, unseeing.

  It was then that she began to scream.

  Ginger heard the screaming in the downstairs bar as she toyed with her fifth glass of wine for the evening. Everyone else heard it, too. First it was only Anna screaming, two other female voices joined in, and then the bar emptied out as customers and girls alike dashed for the stairs and the tiny elevator to see what was happening upstairs. Ginger sat perfectly still, listening to the pounding feet and the screaming voices above her, listening for one word. She didn't know much Italian, but she knew the word that she wanted to hear. And then she heard it.

  "E morto, morto."

  "What happened? Who was it?"

  "A customer. Dead!"

  "God save us! How?"

  "Have they called a doctor?"

  "Too late! He's gone. Gone!"

  Ginger smiled faintly as the words swirled down the stairs. She was alone in the bar. She gathered up her purse and, without apparent haste, strolled to the door and walked out of the House of Felluci. Out on the Via Manzoni she hailed a late-cruising taxi and told the driver to take her to Malpensa Airport. There was the rental car up in Brissago and her clothing in the pension, but she was willing to write all that off.

  She sat back and closed her eyes as the taxi sped through the deserted streets, wondering what the coroner would say when he found that Gerard Krause had died of an overdose of mother's milk laced with penicillin.

  In the bunker deep inside the Fun House, Edwin Swan leveled his pistol and stepped cautiously from the bedroom closet. He had been alerted to danger at the moment of the second request for voice identification at the microphone complex on the floor above. That second request automatically triggered a beeper and a blinking yellow light on the display of the living room computer terminal. The third request, and its abrupt, unprogrammed termination, had switched the yellow light to red and sent Swan rushing from his desk to the bedroom with a speed that belied his seventy-three years.

  Swan was alone in the apartment. He had designed the system himself, years ago, when the Fun House had been set up as the Agency's prime hideaway. A little foresight, he thought, that may now save my life. . . . How rare it is that we plan ahead and are so richly rewarded.

  He had immediately ducked into the clothes closet and slid shut the six-inch steel door. About a minute later.

  Through the transparent bombproof panel, he had seen his apartment destroyed.

  The scene that he now observed as he edged quietly from the closet. assembled that of a wartime village devastated by artillery. The wooden furniture was reduced to splinters and rags, the government-issue desk had been pulped, and the Swedish metal chairs looked like twisted paper clips. The smoke still billowed in the close confines and the air stank of cordite.

  Yes, Swan thought again, an artillery barrage - that was an apt analogy. And such a barrage is usually followed by an infantry attack. He wondered who it would be. Mancuso again? Borgneff? Perhaps even James Emerson himself, now that their friendship was in ashes equal to those in this room. No, not likely. It was daylight up above at the carnival site, and Emerson's face and gait we
re too recognizable. Ditto for Vasily Borgneff, he realized. The penetration had probably been by one man alone. So it's the little one, the nervy one who had tried the first time in the hotel room with poison ... the streetwise Italian ... the one whom they had never been able to catch and who was now attempting to repay them for their lack of doggedness.

  "Well, yes ... we shall see," Swan murmured to himself gripping his pistol. He drew back a step, crouching behind what remained of the desk. He waited. Whoever the visitor might be, he had proved himself both resourceful and ruthless. He must therefore be respected.

  And what next? If I were he - not knowing what damage the Beano explosives might have wrought, not knowing with any degree of certainty if my target was alive, wounded, or dead - what would I do? Swan analyzed that for a moment or two. He tried to glide into Eddie's mind. Mancuso: define him as impetuous, talented, determined- but with a limited imagination. Place him in a hostile, alien territory. He would surely be tempted to follow the Beanos down the chute . . . but then he would wonder if there was a reception committee. Yes, he would mull it over, but not for too long. And then . . .

  The two technicians at the voice ID center would be either dead or neutralized. Swan smiled. Yes, of course, he decided. The technicians . . . that's exactly what I would do if I were Eddie Mancuso - smart and stubborn, but not smart enough to do the job right the first time.

  Almost on cue, as if he willed it, Swan heard the swift whooshing sound of someone tumbling down the chute. He raised the pistol and waited. Mancuso would be thinking, If Swan's alive down there, and that's what I've got to know, he'll shoot first and worry later.