“I hope so,” said Charlie.
“So do I. Next time you can have the giraffe and Igor can have the lion.”
“We have to go,” abruptly declared Natalia, the flush returning as she collected up her valise.
“We haven’t properly talked,” protested Charlie. This could be the last opportunity it would be safe for them to meet, for him to persuade her!
“You knew we couldn’t, not today. That wasn’t what today was about.”
“I’ll call again, when things get clearer. But don’t forget what I said. And that I meant all of it.”
“You’ve told me you meant what you said a lot of times before, Charlie. And haven’t meant them.”
“This time I do. I really do.”
“I’ve got a call to make” insisted Natalia, ushering Sasha before her.
So had he, thought Charlie. And a hell of a lot depended on it.
26
“Hello!” a man’s voice, slightly slurred.
Charlie said, “I have this number to call?”
“This is a public phone.”
“Who are you?” Surely not a hoax! It couldn’t be!
“Get off the line. I want to use the phone.” The voice was slurred, the belligerence rising.
“Did you answer because it was ringing?”
“Get off the fucking line!”
“I will when you answer the question. Otherwise I’ll keep it open: blocked.”
“It was ringing as I got into the kiosk. Now get off the fucking line!”
Charlie did, stepping away from the telephone for a woman who was waiting with a tugging child on reins but stayed close enough to hear her voice when she spoke in case the contact was planned differently from how he expected. It was high pitched, a complaint about a gas installation, not at all the tone he wanted to hear. There could be a simple, easy explanation. The belligerent man could have got to the telephone seconds before the woman, no thought of politely deferring to her using it first. Probably wouldn’t have wanted him to, hanging around to hear everything she said. Made every sense for her to be the one to hold back. She would have heard the ringing: know he’d understood and was trying to reach her. All he had to do was wait. But not too long. The woman for whom he’d stepped aside appeared to be having an argument with whomever she was talking; the tugging child was pulling away, distracting her. Charlie walked to and fro in her eye line, to remind her he was waiting. Pointedly she turned her back on him. It was six minutes past five. His feet throbbed. The child became entangled in its reins and fell, pulling the woman off balance. He began screaming and she finally slammed the phone down, dragging him away.
Charlie wedged himself into the kiosk, determined against abandoning it again, and dialed out the number from the paper slipped into his pocket. The line was engaged. He had to redial continuously four times before he got a ringing tone, counting each separate sound. He got to six before the receiver at the other end was lifted. No one spoke.
Charlie said: “Hello?”
There was no response.
“I have this number to call.”
“You’re late.”
The relief surged through Charlie at the recognizable hoarseness. “A man answered when I called before, right on time.”
“I saw him.”
“Then you know I kept my word.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Do you now trust me?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a decision you’ve got to make.”
“Yes.”
“I promised to be alone at the Arbat. And I was. And I’m alone now: no one with me.”
“I know.”
“How can you know?” demanded Charlie.
“I can see you.”
Again Charlie avoided any startled reaction. Confident that he’d lost any pursuit, he hadn’t bothered to check out the streets directly around Hlebnyj pereulok, the street from which he was speaking. “Then you must know you’re safe.”
“It’s not true what they’re saying: about gangs and drug running and whores. They haven’t even got the name right!”
He had to put pressure on her, Charlie decided: imperceptibly, to prevent her panicking but sufficient to get out of this conversational cul-de-sac. “We have to meet; start talking differently from this. You know you’re not in any danger.”
“I don’t know that at all!”
At last Charlie looked around him, casually. There was what could be another public facility in the shadow of a building about thirty meters to his right. It was too dark for him to be sure, certainly to distinguish anyone inside. Good tradecraft again. “What do you want? If you want the proper retribution against the people who killed Ivan, I’m the man who can get it for you: the only one.”
“I don’t know that at all,” the woman repeated.
“You’re running away!” Charlie openly accused, conscious of the risk he was taking. “You keep running away from me you’re going to let those who killed Ivan escape. Is that what you want, for them to get away, never be punished?”
“No!”
“Then you’ve got to meet me. Talk to me. Tell me as much as you do know and let me take it on from there.”
“They’re too powerful; too influential.” She broke into a coughing fit.
“You don’t have anyone else. Can’t trust anyone else.” There was loud knocking from outside the telephone kiosk that made Charlie jump. He ignored it.
There was silence from the other end but another rap against the glass.
“Tell me how to meet you. Where to meet you.”
There was a sound that didn’t form into a word, something like a sigh that grew into a groan.
“What was that? What did you say?”
“Where the road joins Rizskij pereulok, on the left. The café there. Tonight. Seven. Wait for me to come up to you.”
“I need . . .” started Charlie, but the line went dead. His clandestine meeting with Sergei Pavel had been in a workers café, arranged over public telephone lines. And now Pavel was dead, Charlie thought.
The café was not quite a step but at least a ledge above that in which he’d met Pavel, but thicker with cigarette smoke. The concentration of virtually everyone was on an ice hockey match showing on the screen behind the counter, one group of men enthusiastic enough to shout at goal attempts and the more violent clashes. There were three women already there when Charlie arrived, two gossiping at one table and immediately behind at another, a babushka heavily muffled in a coat and scarf and woolen hat, despite the warmth. All three ignored him. As he had for his meeting with Pavel, Charlie chose a pole-supported stand-up table closest to the wall farthest from the door, where he was able to see everything and everyone inside. He decided the coffee was better than in McDonald’s but the baklava was stale. He still nibbled at it, hungry after ignoring his McMuffin. He wasn’t convinced she would come. He’d decided the unintelligible sound at the end of their conversation had been a sob of fear at edging closer to a decision she was terrified of making, cutting off the words she couldn’t at first utter, a refusal maybe. Charlie didn’t know what to do if she didn’t come now. She’d cut him off before he’d been able to suggest a fail-safe, which he’d anyway been reluctant to do because it would have given her an escape. Now he wished she’d given him the chance. He supposed he could again try the public telephone kiosk for which he had a number, promptly at five: she seemed to need the regularity of time. Or hope she would call the embassy again.
Would Mikhail Guzov have tried to reply to his early morning call? They’d surely make some attempt to restage the press conference; not to do so would give Stepan Lvov another victory. Charlie reasoned there was the danger of a further hijack by the world media ignoring the declared purpose of the conference and instead demanding from Guzov and Interior Ministry officials answers about the arrest and detention of Svetlana Modin. Would she have expected calls from him, even though it was a Saturday? Charlie thought she probably wou
ld. Automatically he looked at his watch, realizing the ORT main news was in thirty minutes, and just as automatically glanced toward the television, guessing it unlikely the channel would be changed from the ice hockey coverage.
So engrossed in the match was virtually everyone in the café—and so unobtrusive her entry—that Charlie thought he was probably the only person there to register the arrival of the woman he instantly and intuitively was sure to be his caller: it took several moments for the man behind the counter to become aware of her standing, waiting, and Charlie thought there was a professionalism about her nonentity cultivation. She was slight and very thin, anonymously dressed in a buttoned-to-the-neck gray linen coat and gray woolen hat pulled too low to give any indication of her hair shade. Her only distinctive feature when she turned away from the counter was her facial coloring. Charlie didn’t think there was any makeup and was surprised, if anonymity were what she wanted, because it could have reduced the strange mottled brownness to the left of her face. If she were who he believed her to be, he accepted that some of the coloring could have been apprehension but her appearance was that of someone who had spent the majority of her life in perpetual sunshine from which she’d made little effort to protect or shield herself.
She hadn’t appeared to look for him as she’d entered and continued to concentrate, head bent forward, over her cup as she came farther into the café, not bringing her head up until she sat at the table directly beside him, nodding then as if in permission for him to join her. As close as she now was, Charlie could see nervousness was trembling through her, the cup she’d carried from the counter puddled in a moat of spilled coffee.
Charlie said: “Relax. Nothing can happen to you.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute.” It didn’t seem possible for her to look directly at him. She coughed, clearing her throat.
“You know who I am. Can I know your name?” It was going to take a long time, Charlie guessed. He would have to be very gentle, not rush anything.
The woman hesitated. “Irena.”
“Irena . . . ?” encouraged Charlie.
There was another hesitation. “Irena Yakulova Novikov.”
“And Ivan . . . ?”
Her hands were clenched, to control the shaking. “Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, Charlie saw. “Tell me about Ivan Nikolaevich.”
She jumped at the sudden roar from people watching television. A man’s voice from the crowd said, “Giving the fucking game away!”
Irena coughed again and said, “We were together. Had been, for a long time. Before Afghanistan even.”
“He fought in the Afghanistan war?” The missing arm, Charlie thought at once.
“He was there.” She fumbled for cigarettes from her bag, the cheapest that minimized the tobacco with a hollow tube half its length, and had to steady the match with both hands.
“Is that where he was hurt?”
She nodded, not speaking. There was another roar from the ice hockey watchers. This time she didn’t jump.
“What was he doing there?” asked Charlie, registering her qualified reply.
The hesitation was the longest yet. “KGB.”
“He was a KGB field officer?”
“He was Georgian, as I am. He had the complexion . . .” Her hand came up to her own face as she spoke, quicker now, her confidence growing. “He was very good at language. He had Pamini as well as Pashto; a lot of Middle East languages. He was highly regarded, because of his ability.”
“He had to infiltrate the mujahideen?” guessed Charlie. The most difficult and dangerous of all field assignments was trying to adopt the disguise and culture of an enemy in a war or hostile situation.
She nodded again, looking directly at him at last. “He was attached to the military headquarters in Kabul, even though he was KGB, not the military Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie. He wasn’t popular, because he wasn’t one of them, either: considered an outsider. And he was too honest, insisting that Russia couldn’t win the war. Something happened. He never knew how. He was betrayed. There was an ambush, near the compound in Kabul. Three generals, air force as well as army, were killed. Ivan lost his arm.”
“Were you in Afghanistan with him?” asked Charlie, aware now that the skin on the left side of her face was puckered, as well as mottled brown.
“Does my face distress you?” she asked abruptly, her hand up to her cheek again.
“Not at all,” insisted Charlie, unhappy at the sideways drift of the conversation. Her pace, he reminded himself.
“It does some people,” she said, accepting his denial. “Ivan and I met on station in Cairo. That was where this happened . . .” She laughed, without humor. “The lobster was being flambéed, at the table. The chef poured on too much brandy and somehow the flame blew into my face . . .” There was another humorless laugh as she gazed around. “It’s safer here. They don’t go for flambé cooking.”
They were straying even further sideways. He had to get things back on track without appearing impatient. Groping, he said, “Did Ivan go to Afghanistan direct from Cairo?”
“He’d fixed it—Ivan was a good fixer—that we’d get married in Cairo and go to Kabul together: the KGB liked husband-and-wife teams. But I got medevaced back here to Moscow: the concern was not my face but that I’d lose the sight of my eye. They managed to prevent that and did the best they could for the burn scars but it took a long time. The marriage was rearranged here, during Ivan’s leave from Afghanistan, once I got better. Then Ivan was caught in the ambush and he was brought back and was in the hospital for even longer. . . .” Irena came to a gulping halt, her throat working, and Charlie realized she was close to breaking down. He held back from filling in the silence between them. She fumbled another cigarette alight, wincing at the sound of a goal being scored on television.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that . . .” She had to stop again. “Sorry. The wedding was finally planned for the Saturday after he was found dead, in the embassy. . . .” Irena began to shake again.
“Can I get you something?” offered Charlie, not knowing what.
“Sometimes they have brandy here.”
They did and Charlie bought two glasses. It was gritty and probably home distilled and caught Charlie’s throat, almost making him cough. It didn’t seem to cause the hoarse-voiced woman any difficulty.
“Things haven’t been good for you,” Charlie sympathized.
“No,” she agreed. The shaking was subsiding.
Everything still had to be at her pace, Charlie warned himself again, nervous of another near collapse. “What about the KGB? Were you and Ivan kept on after the change to FSB?”
Irena shook her head. “I wasn’t, because of the circumstances in which I was hurt. It was bourgeois; criminal, even—enjoying myself at KGB expense. I was dismissed, on reduced pension.”
“What about Ivan Nikolaevich?”
“He was kept on, of course. He’d been injured on assignment: he was even awarded a distinguished service medal.”
He was getting closer, thought Charlie, more apprehensive than encouraged but deciding to take the risk. “When he was fully recovered, was Ivan Nikolaevich kept in the First Chief Directorate?”
Irena looked at him wide-eyed, open-mouthed. “You know . . . the structure . . . Directorates and Departments!”
Shit! thought Charlie. “It’s all right! You’re not betraying anything . . . anyone. All I want to know, to find out, is who killed Ivan Nikolaevich . . .”
“No!” she refused. “If they find out—”
“They won’t find out,” insisted Charlie, desperately. “No one will find out.”
She’d had both hands cupped around her brandy tumbler, but the renewed shaking made it rattle against the tabletop, so she released it. “Ivan Nikolaevich wouldn’t want me to talk to someone like you . . . he was loyal . . .”
“He was killed, murdered,” argued Charlie, his desperation grow
ing. “And nothing’s being done to find out who did it. Why they did it. Officially they’re lying: you know they’re lying, with stories of Ivan belonging to a gang. Pimping whores. And you know Mikhail Alekandrovivh Guzov is FSB.”
“I know why they did it,” declared the woman, suddenly calm and under control.
“Why, Irena?” pressed Charlie, quietly and controlled. “Why was he murdered?”
“He found out something that he shouldn’t have; shouldn’t have known about. Tried to do a deal.”
“What was it he found out?”
Irena remained silent for a long time, both hands back around her glass, sipping from it once, seemingly unaware of the continued noise from the ice hockey fans. She straightened, suddenly and said, “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“You’ve got this far. Been this brave,” pleaded Charlie. “I won’t betray you, like Ivan was betrayed.” He reached across the table, taking one of her hands away from the glass to hold it to reinforce what he was saying. “I will find out who killed Ivan. And make sure they’re punished. But I can’t do it without your help. Things went bad for you, both of you, all the time. Don’t let this go bad like all the rest, now that you don’t have Ivan anymore.”
“I need to think. Will think,” she said, defiantly.
If he pressed her any harder he’d lose her, Charlie knew. “Promise me we’ll talk again.” When she didn’t reply he repeated, “Promise me!”
“I promise. I’ll call the embassy.”
“No,” refused Charlie. “No more telephoning. Give me a place: somewhere we can meet like this.”
There was another long pause. “Here.”
“Tomorrow,” insisted Charlie. “Give me a time to be here tomorrow.”
“I have to work on Sundays.”
From the coarseness of the hand he’d briefly held, it could even be close to manual labor, a machinist in a factory perhaps. “You have a lunch break: you always telephoned at ten past twelve. Let’s meet here during your lunch break.”
“Twenty past. But maybe not tomorrow. Monday.”
“Tomorrow, Irena,” insisted Charlie. “Don’t run away. If you run away you’ll be betraying Ivan Nikolaevich.”
Red Star Rising Page 28
