“It’s getting late,” said a voice. The fat man I had seen with Bounine outside the hospital was standing next to me.
He wore the same expensive camel-hair coat, his stomach straining against the belt. He could have been a banker or a lawyer, and like many large guys, he moved lightly. He raised his Wall Street Journal to his face, as if to inspect the closing prices on his stocks.
When he put the paper down, I saw he was relatively young, about forty, not more, but with jowls that, in a few years, would grow fat as his stomach, and drop like a basset hound’s. He wore horn-rimmed glasses.
He caught my eye. “May I help you with something?” he said, tipping his hat. “Are you perhaps lost? It’s quite easy to get lost here, would you not agree?” he said. “It’s happened to me quite a few times.”
“I’m good.”
“Are you coming or going?” he said.
I played the game. “Waiting for a friend. You?”
“It’s sad that they will soon tear down this wonderful train station, don’t you think so? I have heard the waiting room upstairs was compared to the Roman Baths of Caracalla.”
“Very sad.”
“Are you interested in architecture, then, in the preservation of old cities? I understand your lovely first lady, Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy, is quite a force in this area.” He examined his gold watch. He removed his fine brown leather gloves, extracted a pack of foreign cigarettes, opened it and offered it to me. “These are quite tasty,” he said. Two of his fingers were missing.
“The Great Patriotic War,” he said. “We all lost something.”
Had he somehow followed me from Columbia? I accepted a cigarette, and let him light it.
“The weather has changed suddenly, don’t you think? Such lovely Indian summer, and now it’s quite chill. Chilly.” He corrected himself. “What do you say? Is that usual?”
“What do I say about what?”
“This weather.”
“Do you visit New York often?” Only clichés fell out of my mouth. I wanted him to make a move first.
“Yes. Sure. It is normal. I come here as often as possible for you have very fine theatre and concerts. On some occasions my wife accompanies me as well. In fact, I have been here to see the ballet. My wife is a musician,” he added, maybe to let me know it wasn’t a pick-up, that he wasn’t queer. “She plays the cello.”
“Where are you from?”
“Washington DC,” he said, and, glancing at the clock, added, “I have only five minutes before my train departs.”
“But have you got something to tell me? This isn’t an accident, is it? Our meeting?” I was impatient. “I saw you with Bounine outside Columbia.”
“Yes.” He put out his hand. “If you come to Washington, please look for me. Here is my telephone number,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a little blue leather case. From it, he removed a card and handed it to me. I examined it. In elegant script, it read Mr Gennadi Ustinov. It was engraved.
“As you see, my name is Gennadi Mikhailovich Ustinov. I work at the Soviet Embassy,” he said.
“Pat Wynne.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You knew my name, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It’s written on the return address of the envelope in your pocket.” He was right. There was an envelope sticking out of my jacket pocket that I’d meant to mail to my cousin in Liverpool for her birthday and had forgotten. “Please, shall we sit down?” He gestured for me to follow him to a bench in the waiting area. He sat. I sat next to him. A group of suburban women took the rest of the space. Ustinov then looked around the cavernous hall, got up again, and led me to an empty corner, where his back was against the wall.
This was a man who always preferred his back against the wall. You could see that. From his black leather attaché case he removed a copy of the Journal-American. He folded it so I could see the story about the dead man on the pier, with a photograph.
“You knew I was coming?”
Ustinov lowered his voice. “Our mutual friend mentioned he had telephoned you, and thought you might make your way here.”
“Enough games,” I said.
“But this is a sort of game, is it not? Or call it magic. Things appear. They disappear. People as well.”
“Look, I’m just a dumb New York policeman, just tell me what’s going on, and where Max Ostalsky is.”
“Who?”
“Stop.” I got up. I was furious now. I felt in my pocket for the gun. “Stop fucking around, man. You know who I mean and you know where he is.”
He looked across the hall and removed his hat and put it back.
“Do you want to say why you were standing on the sidewalk with Mike Bounine up at Columbia?” I asked him. “It didn’t look all that friendly to me.”
He grinned now. “Is that what he calls himself here? Mike? Very, what would you say, charming? Mike, this is quite a piece of news.”
“Is it? Why? It’s what he told me. Don’t you people have nicknames over there? Is it against the law?”
“It is not. Certainly, we have many. This Mike, he, too, comes from the Soviet Union, like me, you know that, of course. We are compatriots. I stopped to say hello.” “Outside a hospital on 168th Street? Really?”
“As I have said, I work in Washington where I have a job at the embassy. Cultural attaché,” he said. “If you will ask why I was in New York, for the truth, I tell you I was here to attend to something for our famous Bolshoi Ballet Company. Several of our dancers left their slippers behind, and I must send them off to Chicago. Now I am waiting for my return train.”
“Come on, you’re telling me it’s about ballet shoes? You think I was born yesterday?”
“I do not imagine this. But it is true. Our ballet company has gone on tour, and the ladies cannot dance without their pink satin shoes. This was important. I have been on 39th Street at the Metropolitan Opera House to arrange for these shoes to be sent.”
“Ballet shoes.” I was looking for answers to a homicide, and this joker gives me ballet. “Listen, I’m going.”
“Please sit down again.”
Shifting closer to Ustinov, I let him know I had a gun. I was carrying my personal weapon, the one I kept at home, though it would not have pleased my boss.
Ustinov seemed not to notice, or to care. He was a secure man. “The ballet shoes were a cover.” Then he turned to look at me. “Wait, please.” He looked out into the crowd again, and as he did, I saw that he was looking at a man with a thick neck in a tan raincoat and a checkered flat cap standing under the clock.
“What did Ostalsky tell you?”
“He says he needs help.”
“So you just stepped up.”
“Our families are close. This is a difficult time. We go for a ride on the Circle Line boat, a nice quiet place to talk in the middle of a cold day. Poor Max, he looks out at Manhattan passing across the water and I see how much he likes this city, and he tells me he is in trouble, that the Americans think he killed a man on the piers. Somebody told the police. He even leans out over the railing of the boat and, to tell the truth, for a moment I think he’s going to jump into the river. I grab him as tight as I can, but he just points to a pier and I see in his face how melancholy he has become. ‘They are hunting me,’ he says. I have known Maxim Stepanovich since he was a child. He didn’t do it, Detective Wynne.”
“Oh, please. You’re going to tell me you baby-sat for him, that you taught him his first little magic tricks, to pull money out of people’s ears.”
He looked surprised. “How did you know? Yes, all this is true.”
“Why would I believe you? Why are your own people on his tail? Is this about Cuba?”
“Yes. And other things.”
“What other things.”
Ustinov lowered his voice. “There are people in my country who want a nuclear war, and the same is true of people in your country, I know this.”
“Yeah, so? How do you know? Yo
ur job is ballet slippers, isn’t it?”
“There are other, more informal jobs, too. I frequently meet with many officials of the United States, but not formally. Just, so to say, friends who might have a cigarette together on a park bench, or a bite to eat in a restaurant they both like, perhaps an accidental meeting on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.”
“But not accidental?”
“Not quite. You probably understand that by telling you these things it is a risk for me.”
“I don’t know anything about Washington politics. Who is it you have these meetings with?”
“That I cannot tell you. Just understand there are good people on both sides, who do not want war, but also the others.”
“Military guys.”
“You know?”
“I read Fail-Safe last week, for Christ’s sake.”
“This book tells the truth. I can’t say any more. But I think that Max has found himself involved with all of this by accident.”
“Somebody is using him. Framing him.”
“It’s possible,” said Ustinov. “May I give you some advice?”
“Sure.” I was angry, and I was on edge. Where was Max? If he had killed before and somebody got in his way, he would do it again. I had no idea what to make of this fat man with the soft voice and mild manner.
“Stay away from Bounine,” said Ustinov. “I think he has, how would you say, gone off the rails, Detective. I’m afraid he has, how do they say, problems that he cannot solve. Personal problems, do you understand what this means? I have a feeling he will not be welcome here in the United States very much longer.”
“Or in your country?”
“Perhaps.”
“Is that why you went to see him?”
“You could say this.”
“What kind of problems. Women? Money?”
Ustinov smiled sadly. “No ideology can protect from certain desires, I’m afraid. But no, not women or money.”
“Spell it out for me.” I guessed Ustinov was a lot more senior than he had said. In some way he was Bounine’s superior. I smoked, and followed his gaze as he looked at the departure board overhead.
“My train leaves for Washington in several minutes, so I must board now.” Ustinov rose, and put out his hand. “Be careful, Detective, please. I know you have been kind to my friend.” He turned just slightly, and I saw the man with the checkered cap. His shoes looked like a cop’s; rubber-soled, they were heavy and had been repaired more than once.
“Yours?”
“I’m sorry? What was that, Detective?”
“How did you know I was a detective?”
“The envelope in your pocket.”
“It only has my name. No title.”
He didn’t answer. Again, Ustinov looked around. Again, he lowered his voice; he spoke so softly this time, I could barely hear. “Your friend needs your help. He needs it very much. He is not a bad man. Help him if you can. Please. You have my telephone number.”
“Who the hell are you really?” I thought about grabbing Ustinov’s lapels, but I held back. “Tell me what the hell is going on, and where Ostalsky is. You know, don’t you? Where is he? Did you know I’d be here? You knew, you were with him when he called me. Weren’t you?”
“I will miss my train.”
I put my face into Ustninov’s. “Tell me.”
“I must go.”
I caught his sleeve, but he extracted it from my grasp. “You’re a foreign agent, I could get you arrested.”
“I am an official cultural attaché. I have the protection of my country. I didn’t tail you, as you put it.”
“Where is Ostalsky?”
The goon in the cap and tan coat edged closer. His face was hard and expressionless, like Russians in a bad movie. Maybe they hired these Ivans because they would scare you with their looks alone. He looked like the kind of man—I had met a few of ours—who would kill you if there was a reason, and sometimes if there was none. Sometimes, these men did it from boredom.
Ivan moved closer to us, within reach of Ustinov. From where he stood now, he could hear us talking.
Ustinov straightened up, bowed slightly, a courtly old-fashioned bow, and replaced his hat.
“My friend needs you, please help him, he is a good man,” he said. “He wouldn’t tell me where he has gone, for my own protection, but he said you would know. You would know because the two of you had been there before. He phones you, says goodbye only in case somebody is listening,” says Ustinov. “Detective?”
“Yeah?”
He lowered his voice, glancing around as if to see who might be listening. “If you can avoid a certain Captain Logan, it would be quite a good idea.”
“How do you know Logan?”
But Ustinov only offered me his hand, and I shook it and then, as he buttoned his coat, he felt in his pocket for his ticket. He walked steadily towards his train, with the man in the raincoat following him. He never looked back, just went calmly towards the tracks and the train that he believed would take him home, his camel-hair overcoat billowing behind him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
October 23, ’62
“HELLO, PAT.”
“What goddamn assassination?” I said.
I found Max Ostalsky in the warehouse near the High Line, sitting on an empty chicken crate in the dark, a gun in his hand. It was eleven, Tuesday night, about an hour after I’d left Penn Station. The place was bare and cold. The concrete walls dripped. It was the place the Cuban girl, Susana Reyes, had camped out before she was slaughtered, and it still stank of rotting fowl—chicken or turkey—and piss.
“Some kind of warehouse,” Ustinov had said, when I asked where Ostalsky was, and I had driven from Penn Station like a crazy man, soon as it hit me: the High Line.
The street-side door to the warehouse was missing. The cops must have yanked the door off when we were searching for clues to Susana’s murder. All that was left were some yellow strips of police tape and cigarette butts the detectives would have tossed onto the floor.
Max knew the place; I had shown it to him. All the questions he had asked me about the High Line case, all the pestering.
I went up the stairs. Most of the doors were bolted and nailed shut except on the fourth floor where I had found Susana’s little encampment, the faulty heater, a nest of newspaper. The door had been removed. For a moment, I listened, but all I heard was the wind, and the rats. I took a breath and went in.
A couple of empties rolled under my feet, glass clinking on the concrete floor. Used needles. Dope addicts came here to shoot up, drunks to sleep it off.
I didn’t see the rat until it ran over my foot, looking for food. I never got used to rats. Cockroaches you could smash, you could even enjoy the cracking of the shells. They say cockroaches can survive nuclear war. Rats, I hated; hated the teeth, the paws.
During the war, I had seen a Navy poster that showed a rat who looked like Emperor Hirohito, and he was nibbling cheese out of a trap labeled Army, Navy, Civilian with the words: ALASKA: DEATH TRAP FOR THE JAP. I was eight. I asked my pop what it meant. “It means them Japs are dirty rats, kiddo. You understand?”
Feeling the animal getting at the flesh of my leg, I shook it off. A match struck.
It was then, in the light from the match, that I saw him. Ostalsky was sitting on that crate, near the rusted heater. A snub-nose nickel-plated .38 special, same as most cops used, same as me, was in his hand. He held it like a man who understood guns. The fact that he had used a .22 on the dead man didn’t mean much. This was the kind of killer who knew his way around every weapon. He had been trained.
Yeah, sure, maybe Ostalsky spoke good English. He laughed a lot. He liked the movies, and good American shoes. He had willingly played a fool, a clown, grinning and laughing at himself trying to learn the local customs: how to buy a hot dog; how to do the Twist; how to drink whisky. He had not been sent to America just to learn about Moby-Dick, or listen to Gerry Mulligan, or make
friends in the park with a gullible cop who loved James Brown. The encounter in Washington Square had not been accidental. I had read this in Ostalsky’s diary. Max Ostalsky had been sent to use us.
The dark was playing tricks on me. I had trouble judging distance and, fumbling forward, I tripped over a paint can. When he struck a second match, I realized Ostalsky was only a few feet away, sitting on the wooden crate, back against the wall, elbows on his knees, the gun aimed at my heart.
Through the broken window behind him, I could now just see the tracks along the High Line, thirty feet above the street. He must have ditched his FBI tail, climbed up the ladder to the viaduct, stumbled along the tracks, onto the loading dock, into the warehouse through the window.
The only light came from the moon; distant, cold, half obscured by a reef of clouds over the river. Fall. Winter soon.
“I’m so sorry, Pat,” Ostalsky said. “But would you mind giving me your weapon? I’d like not to have to ask, but I must do this. Please.” A rueful smile crossed his face. “I didn’t mean for a thing like this to happen, not at all. Forgive me. Can you tell me anything of what’s happening? Cuba?” His right hand was bandaged with an old rag, and bloodstained.
“Your killing hand?”
Max looked at it. “I cut it. When I broke the window to get in. I was left-handed as a child, they tried to cure me of this, so I can use both.”
“Very handy.” I was scared, but I was mad as hell. I wanted to punch out his lights and throw him in a holding cell for a long long time, and then watch him fry in the electric chair. But he had the weapon, and I understood he would have no scruples about using it.
“Right now, please, Pat. Your pistol.”
He had changed. All that soft charm, the humor, the exuberance, was gone. He was quiet and polite, but behind the glasses, his eyes were focused and hard. He had shot the man on the pier—a man who had been his friend— had stuck a pistol in his ear and pulled the trigger. He had ripped his tongue out, wrapped his head in duct tape, maybe while he was still alive. He had stuffed the body in a black bag and dumped him on the pier. I had put my hand on the corpse, I had felt inside the wound, felt the flesh, the shattered bone.
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