“Why not?”
“I don’t possess the expertise for that sort of job. It begs for a professional.”
“If I find Fedorovich, then what?”
“Then I’ll interview him—the success of my book may hinge on that, but I’ll have to get to him ahead of the KGB!”
Lockington said, “Yes, Lord, I’d think so!” He stood up, feeling a dryness in his mouth. A rush of adrenalin always gave Lockington a dry mouth. “Care for a drink?”
Kilbuck grabbed his cane, heaving himself to his feet. His smile was the smile of a kodiak bear for a twenty pound salmon. He said, “I’ll drive—I know just the place.”
5
Gordon Kilbuck owned a sparkling dark blue ’87 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with Indiana plates. It was upholstered in leather and it was computerized to the nuts. Lockington said, “Your Rylon Jennings book must be doing well.”
Kilbuck’s snort was derisive. “Less than three thousand copies in eighteen months. If I didn’t have an inheritance, I’d be getting around on a bicycle.”
“No market for military stuff?”
“Nothing to brag about. America’s few male readers are into science fiction—people with three heads, that sort of thing. Women are slopping up historical romances faster than they’re printed. My work comes under the heading of reference material—it’s bought by libraries. That’s gratifying, of course, but it doesn’t buy good whisky.”
Lockington said, “You can probably blame television for people not reading these days.”
Kilbuck nodded. “Pap for imbeciles.” There’d been no bitterness in the remark, it’d come more as a flat statement of fact. They’d rolled east to Steel Street, turning north for three-quarters of a mile before Kilbuck wheeled the Caddy into the parking lot of a low gray frame building. The big red neon sign on the roof said POLLY’S PLACE. Kilbuck said, “I’ve gravitated to this joint—it’s down-to-earth.”
They went in. Polly’s was a clean establishment, a combination restaurant and bar with neatly lettered specials signs on the walls. Monday’s offer was pork shanks and sauerkraut $3.95.
“In New York pork shanks and sauerkraut would cost you twenty-five dollars.” Lockington said.
“Yeah, and that’d be without the pork shanks.”
They sat in a booth lighted by an Old Washensachs Beer lamp. A waitress drifted to their table. Kilbuck ordered a bottle of Budweiser, Lockington a double Martell’s cognac. She was back in a flash, a perky, peroxide blonde bit of fluff with saucerlike dark brown eyes, a pug nose, and a bee-stung lower lip, wearing a too-tight sheer white blouse, too-tight black satin shorts, and spike heeled red pumps. The plastic badge on her blouse said NANETTE. Lockington raised his glass to Kilbuck. He said, “Been in Youngstown long?”
Nanette said, “Long enough to know better. What did you have in mind?” She had a voice like Minnie Mouse.
“I was speaking to Mr. Kilbuck.”
Nanette said, “’Scuse me.” She went away, her bulging little buttocks rolling as she walked.
Kilbuck said, “I’ll be here a week come tomorrow—drove in from New York City. I’m from Indiana—Muncie.”
“Good town?”
“Good as any, better than most. Do you like Youngstown?”
“After Chicago, I’d like Beirut. So, in a week you haven’t turned up much on Fedorovich?”
“Naw—I’ve prowled around—been through his childhood haunts, Upper South Side, rotten area. It all went to hell after the war, they told me.”
“‘They’?”
“People in the neighborhood taverns—I’ve sat at every bar in that neck of the woods. Nobody remembers the Fedorovich family. Alexi was just a kid when his old man decided to go back to Russia.”
“Maybe you should sound out people in his age bracket—sixty-five or so.”
“Most of the old-timers have moved to the West Side or to the suburbs—Boardman, Poland, Canfield, Hubbard—the South Side is rough.”
Lockington watched Kilbuck load his pipe and light it. He said, “You mentioned having a lead.”
“Yes, well, to get into that, I should tell you that Alexi Fedorovich has written a book, and it’s just hit the stands—The Wheels of Treachery—Millard and Cummings, New York. It’s going for $23.95.”
“It’s selling?”
“Too early to say—far as I know, it hasn’t even been reviewed.”
Lockington was frowning. “Fedorovich hits the bricks in late May, he’s questioned for three months—that takes us to the front end of September. He knocks out a book and gets it published in that amount of time? Unlikely, wouldn’t you say?”
“Next to impossible—the book had to be written before he defected.”
“What’s it about?”
“What you’d expect—East-West relations, crystal ball stuff—predictions, mostly. Fedorovich claims that glasnost-perestroika will wear thin in the Soviet Union, that the hardliners will oust Gorbachev or shoot him, and that they’ll attack Western Europe without provocation or warning, possibly as early as 1991.”
“Pearl Harbor style?”
“Not exactly. The war with Japan was predictable enough—we’d embargoed its oil and steel—Japan had to fight. The Soviet Union doesn’t.”
“Then why fight?”
“According to Fedorovich, it’ll be a reunification war—Communism is crumbling, Warsaw Pact countries are restless, there’s clamoring for democracy, even in Moscow. A good old-fashioned war would shoo all the chickens back into the coop.”
“Anything concrete in that?”
Kilbuck gnawed on his lower lip, considering the question. “I don’t know—it’s possible, of course. Fedorovich gives it as the reason for his defection—he says that he wanted no part of it.”
“He goes into detail?”
“Hell, yes—timetable, early targets, overall Soviet strategy, the whole ball of wax. I have a couple of copies in the car—one is yours.” He motioned to Nanette for another round.
Nanette delivered it, bending over their table, rounding up the old glasses, putting down the new. Three buttons at the top of her white sheer blouse were undone and she wore a low-cut brassiere. There was a black and blue splotch above the nipple of her right breast. She hadn’t been nibbled on, she’d been bitten, Lockington figured. She said, “Something else I can do for you boys?”
Kilbuck winked at her. “Probably, but you couldn’t do it here.”
Nanette squealed, “Oh, naughty, naughty!” She popped Kilbuck playfully on the top of his head with her fist, smiling at Lockington. Lockington shrugged and Nanette faded into the gloom of the bar area, her buttocks swaying, her black satin shorts shimmering in the half-light. Kilbuck continued.
“Fedorovich predicts a dual-pronged Soviet attack—to the south it’ll swing out of Czechoslovakia’s Bohemian Forest into Bavaria, driving toward Munich, throwing nine divisions with eight thousand armored vehicles against five or six NATO divisions, half of these only partially mobilized. To the north, he sees the Russians blasting through the Fulda Gap, making a run to reach the Danube within thirty-six hours, and that’d be the only possible hitch in the operation—Fedorovich regards NATO’s Danube defenses as being tough to breach, but once Soviet forces are across the river, he says that Western Europe will be Russia’s oyster.”
Lockington said, “Well, there really isn’t much that I can do about that, is there?”
“Not a great deal.”
Lockington said, “All right, tell me about your Fedorovich lead.”
Kilbuck glanced around, leaning toward Lockington, lowering his voice to a confidential level. “I was in New York last week, and I dropped in at Millard and Cummings on 43rd Street. I talked to Fedorovich’s editor, a Patti Walton. Patti clammed up instantly, but I managed to get acquainted with the Millard and Cummings receptionist, a heavyweight from Queens. I met her at a 42nd Street lounge when she got off work and I bought her a drink—several drinks, in fact.” Kilbuck smiled. “
Women seem to see something romantic in a guy with a cane.”
Lockington said, “Yeah, especially when he smokes a pipe.”
“Well, we ended up in bed and she promised to do everything she could.”
“And did she?”
“My God, you’d better believe it—she damned near killed me! She weighed about two-fifty and was one of those women who likes to be on top—some sort of female-dominant complex, you know?”
“No, I didn’t know. I meant, did she come up with information on Fedorovich?”
“Sure did. I met her for lunch the next day, and she’d spent the morning digging into files. There was minor stuff—for instance, Fedorovich insisted on designing his own dust jacket. More interesting, I thought, was the fact that he’s never been to the Millard and Cummings offices. They have no address for him—contact is maintained through a Youngstown woman, an Olga Karelinko—she has a postal box, number 11, West Side Post Office at the corner of Millet and Mahoning Avenues.”
Lockington said, “That could be a start.”
“I’ve been to the West Side Post Office. It’s a cramped one-horse affair. The boxes are in the vestibule. I’d intended to hang around, keeping an eye on Box 11, but the place is so small, I’d have stuck out like a sore thumb. If Olga Karelinko is playing it cool, she’d have spotted me.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah—The Wheels of Treachery is dedicated to Olga Karelinko!”
“She’s in the telephone book?”
Kilbuck shook his head. “No Karelinkos at all. Apparently she’s an older lady.”
“Why so?”
“Because the dedication reads, ‘To Olga Karelinko for the old days on West Dewey Avenue.’ You see, as a boy, Fedorovich lived at 326 West Dewey—the house isn’t there now.”
“Torn down recently?”
“No, I talked to a couple of black youngsters—they were maybe ten or twelve years old, and they couldn’t recall a house ever having been there, so it’s been gone a while.”
“Anybody around there remember an Olga Karelinko?”
“No one that I questioned. Do you think you can help me?”
“I think I can try.”
Kilbuck leaned back in the booth, sighing, “Oh, excellent!” He dug into a pocket of his green leisure suit, producing a white business envelope, leaning it against Lockington’s cognac glass. “You have five thousand there. Do you think it’ll take more than ten days?”
Lockington said, “If I can’t find him in ten days, I can’t find him.”
“When will you start?”
“Tomorrow—I’ll need today to kick it around.”
“All right, you’re the doctor. I’ll be in touch, and if anything pops, I’m staying at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn on Belmont Avenue.”
Lockington shoved the envelope into his jacket pocket, glancing at his wristwatch. He said, “I’d better get back to the office—luncheon appointment.”
Kilbuck nodded, lurching to his feet. Nanette was approaching their booth with the tab. She said, “Seven dollars.” Kilbuck handed her a ten dollar bill, waving away the change. Nanette curtsied. Kilbuck turned to Lockington. “You’re married?”
Nanette said, “Three times—does it matter?”
“I was talking to Mr. Lockington.”
Nanette squeaked, “Oops!” and busied herself with clearing the table.
Lockington said, “No, not married.” He wished he was. He’d have married Natasha Gorky in a minute. One of these days he’d ask her, he thought.
6
At the door of Lockington’s office Gordon Kilbuck had opened the Cadillac’s trunk, reaching into a small cardboard box and coming out with a copy of The Wheels of Treachery. “My compliments,” he’d said. Now Lockington slouched in his swivel chair, paging idly through the book while waiting for Natasha. The Wheels of Treachery was a hefty volume, nearly eight hundred pages in length. It had an intriguing dust jacket, the front of which sported an excellent charcoal sketch of a group of loose-robed men wheeling a gigantic wooden horse through the gates of a high-walled fortified area. The horse was mounted on a six-wheeled platform and its inference was perfectly clear—the men in the picture would represent the NATO nations, and the horse would be fabled Trojan Horse. According to Lockington’s vague recollection of the old story, the Greeks had come to Troy in hope of conquering it, but the Trojans had been nobody’s pushovers so the Greeks had built a horse, leaving it at the gates of Troy before sailing away—apparently in search of greener pastures—and the Trojans had hauled the horse into Troy. That night the Greeks had returned, the Greek soldiers hidden inside the horse had slipped out to open the gates, and Troy had been overrun. Moral: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. And Russians waving olive branches.
The Wheels of Treachery would be laborious reading. It was packed with statistics, numerous references to the theories of Karl von Clausewitz, hundreds of footnotes, and there were dire predictions by the carload—it’d probably be a smashing success because nothing sells like bad news. Lockington’s smile was wry—write something with a sunny outlook and you couldn’t give it away, but adopt a pessimistic view and you had a worldbeater. There was a touch of the masochist in American readers, Lockington thought, but he didn’t concern himself with it, reasoning that most Americans didn’t read anymore, possibly because they wouldn’t, probably because they couldn’t. He’d heard that there’d be a gigantic 14.5 mill property tax on Youngstown’s November ballot. The money was required by the schools, it’d been said—more student counselors were needed, more courses should be offered, Peruvian Pottery for one, Indian Basketweaving for another. Lockington dropped The Wheels of Treachery into a desk drawer, lighting a cigarette, marveling at the progress of American education. Nowadays, when a kid got his high school diploma he could weave an Indian basket, but the poor bastard didn’t know how to read or write, and if you took away his pocket calculator, he couldn’t add three and three to save his educated soul.
Natasha came in at 12:05, prim in a tailored gray suit, blue blouse, and blue pumps, a bulky package under her arm. She smiled her wonderfully lopsided smile. “Sorry I’m late, but I was buying something for you.” She unwrapped the package, opened an oblong box, and placed a plastic radio on the desk. She said, “This is to keep you from going off the deep end, sitting here all by yourself.” She plugged the radio in, turned it on, and a flood of discordant guitar noises crashed into the office, rattling the windows. A couple of hoarse-voiced guys were screaming, “Yeah, yeah, yeah—Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Lockington said, “The London Philharmonic, no doubt.”
Natasha was doubled up with silent laughter. “Don’t you just love the lyrics?”
Lockington nodded. “Pure genius.”
Natasha killed the radio, rumpling his hair. “Come on, bright eyes, let’s go to lunch.”
The noonday weather was ideal and they walked the two blocks to Dickey’s through the sweet sad scents of autumn, the sun warm on their backs. Natasha squeezed Lockington’s hand.
“Lacey, I’m so glad I’ve found you!” It wasn’t a considered pronouncement—she just blurted it out.
Lockington said, “And vice versa, lady.”
They turned right on Meridian Road, walking north. A reddish leaf tumbled, catching in Natasha’s pixie hairdo. Lockington reached for it, noting that it was the exact color of her hair. It was an excellent day for being alive, he thought.
7
He hadn’t mentioned Gordon Kilbuck’s visit to Natasha—he’d save that and the five thousand dollar jackpot for their predinner martini hour, he figured, wondering just how she’d respond to his attempting to track down a former top-flight Soviet military man. He’d turned his attention to the radio she’d brought, sitting at his desk, experimenting with its rod antenna, prowling the FM band, crossing three classical music frequencies, encountering no fewer than fifteen rock stations. For the most part, classical music went over Lockington’s head like a bullet, and rock music
—if it was music—brought on severe diarrheic spasms. He’d heard a couple of holy-rolling preachers spewing fire and brimstone and pleading for “love offerings.” There’d been quite a few country stations, but country wasn’t country anymore—it’d sold out to the influence of rock.
He’d switched to the AM dial, hitting a phone-in talk show, then another, then a half-dozen more rock stations and a black gospel program. He’d been close to exhausting the AM band when he’d come to 1390—WHOT, Youngstown—where his scalded eardrums had been soothed by the sounds of music from the thirties and forties, and he’d stopped there, settling back in the swivel chair, listening to “Smoke Rings” and “Maria Elena” and “Deep Purple.” There’d been a short commercial break, then “Stardust,” and Lockington had basked in the soft glow of melody from a better day when the plague of heroin hadn’t swept the country and abortion clinics hadn’t been founded and funded by the United States Government. “Back in Your Own Backyard” was playing when his office door flew open, nearly departing its hinges. A man came careening into the office like an off-the-rails steam locomotive, a huge, belligerent-looking creature, probably six-five, not an ounce under two-forty. Lockington figured his age was in the ball park of fifty years. A wilted Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap topped an unruly shock of silver-streaked brown hair. He wore a faded blue cotton work shirt, his baggy jeans were oil-splotched and threadbare at the knees, his black brogans were scarred and run over at the heels, his prominent nose was bent into an S-shape, he was missing at least three front teeth, he had icy bluish green eyes, and he looked like he could have started at middle linebacker for the Roman Empire. The behemoth lumbered toward Lockington’s desk, growling, “So, okay, I wanta speak to the chief motherfucker.” His voice possessed the gentle tonal qualities of a Nantucket foghorn.
Lockington managed to force a yawn. He said, “You just did.”
The visitor said, “So, okay, what’s your handle?”
The Fedorovich File: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book Three Page 3
