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Manhattan 62

Page 19

by Nadelson, Reggie


  I took my gun out of the holster, and slid it across the floor. Without looking down, he picked it up. “There’s another empty box just there, that one that says Purdue Broiler Chickens? Won’t you sit down?” He gestured to a wooden crate a few feet from where he sat. “You’ll be more comfortable, though it’s damp like hell in here. The smell is quite bad.” He shifted his weight, and buttoned his jacket with one hand. “I’m sorry it’s so cold.”

  “Yeah? That suit looks warm enough.”

  He was wearing the heavy gray suit I had first seen him in. He had left his new clothes behind—I had seen them in the closet on 10th Street—as if shedding a skin, leaving behind his American self. Only the loafers remained. Maybe he had forgotten. Maybe he couldn’t give them up.

  With one hand he got a cigarette out of his pocket. Examining it, he said, “My last Lucky Strike. Please tell me the news.”

  “We’re probably going to war. Your people have been shipping nukes to Cuba,” I said. “I brought you a couple of packs.” I reached for my pocket.

  “Don’t do that. I’m sorry, Pat. Keep your hands, if you won’t mind, out of your pockets, would you?”

  Even in the dim warehouse I could see how tired he looked. Maybe if I could get him talking, it would change things. The more time passed, the less likely he was to shoot me. Talk, you bastard. Talk to me.

  “You knew I’d come, didn’t you?” I said. “Isn’t that why you chose this place? Didn’t you send me a message? Did you think I’d help you, or I’d go easier on you than the FBI?”

  He was silent.

  “Are you planning to kill me?”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  Could I jump him? He was tired. I got up off the box and stretched.

  “Sit down, please.”

  If he didn’t kill me now, I’d get a better sense of his intentions. I stayed standing. Stretched again. I heard him cock the gun. I sat down. A rat ran across the space between us.

  “You got in the way. You told the police I killed this man you found on the pier last Tuesday night. It seems so long ago, a week and a day already.” He rubbed his eyes. “Yes, it’s Tuesday now, isn’t it?” He seemed uncertain. “I’m just a bit tired. Yes. You should have let it be, Pat.”

  “How did you get the gun?”

  “In your country it is quite easy. No problem, as you say.”

  “But you didn’t buy it yourself?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I assume you know how to use that thing.”

  A rueful smile passed over his face. “Actually, I was on the Soviet shooting team.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “We were very good. Sadly I was not at the competition this year in Cairo. I would like to have seen Egypt, Pat. The Pyramids, the temples at Luxor, the tomb of Tutankhamen, these were things I dream of seeing from the time I was a boy. I came here instead.”

  “What kind of pistol did you shoot?”

  “Similar to a .22. Easy enough to make it look like I shot Valdes for somebody who knew about my sporting achievements in the USSR. You know what? I wish I could have seen more of America. New Orleans. San Francisco. Chicago. Well, it was never possible.”

  “Your bosses wouldn’t allow it.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Who are you going to assassinate?”

  “What? Nobody. Nobody.”

  “Is it Bounine, then? Does he run you, are you his creature?”

  “Although I would like to have seen the Wild West, as they call it. Perhaps I could have been a gunslinger of old western style?”

  I was under no delusion about Ostalsky, who was a cold-blooded killer, and I wasn’t laughing.

  “You think this is funny? Does it make you laugh? You think this is one of those quaint American ideas that you can turn into one of your little ironic jokes?” I said.

  “I am not ironic.”

  “No? What are you, then? A trained murderer? A killing machine? What else did they teach you?”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “I’m not in any goddamn hurry, am I, Max? I know you killed Rica Valdes on Pier 46. I told my boss, and he’ll have his men on your case, the FBI too, and as for your own goons, how come you’re hiding from them? How come you don’t go to your bosses and say, I need help. This makes me feel they’re not one bit goddamn happy with you, isn’t that so?” I was bluffing, but it was all I had. “So entertain me.”

  The large rat scampered across the floor between us, and began to run around in frantic circles.

  “We are in the rat race now, don’t you think, Pat?” said Max, laughing. He aimed his pistol and shot the rat, but it didn’t die. Max shot it again. Now it was dead.

  The action startled me.

  Max stared at the dead rat, stretched out his foot and kicked it away. “They taught us everything you would imagine,” he said. “Languages. How to behave in a foreign country, to find your way around, to elude a tail, to see quickly who might be following you, their tactics. How to adapt to the culture, even which type of telephone might be used. We had a great deal of physical training, of course, and we were taught the use of weapons. Technical stuff, too, such as how to use radios, code, all that you would think. Did you know we make the world’s very best pen for invisible writing? It’s true. I should have procured one for you as a gift.”

  “Adapting to the culture didn’t turn out the way you thought, did it? America wasn’t what you had been taught.” “You’re right.”

  “Propaganda. Brainwashing. Blackmail?”

  “Sure. The brainwashing, as you call it, is more specialized. It’s more to the Chinese tastes. Propaganda, naturally, how to detect what is real and what is not in foreign propaganda, although I suppose you could say propaganda depends on who is looking at it. But, yes, we are taught this, and also how to provoke, if necessary.”

  “But in your country nothing is real, is it?”

  “It is more complicated.”

  “Christ, Ostalsky. You still believe. Jesus.”

  “Yes, I believe in socialism, of course. I love my country very much. Even though I have learned many other things here.”

  “You still sound like a fucking robot. It’s horseshit, and I’m guessing you know it. You know better now. I guess they hired you because you had the brains for it. For the propaganda, and the lying, and, of course, your talent with guns. And for using people.”

  Max shifted his weight. “You misunderstand, Pat. We only want people to see that our system is directed towards social justice and against imperialism and the enslavement of the less able.”

  “You think we enslave people? The United States? You sound like a brainless Bolshie when you talk like that.”

  “Perhaps no more than when your own people talk of America as the greatest nation on earth, and say their Pledge of Allegiance, and tell the world that peace and goodness depends on your system of capitalism, even when there are hungry people, and Negro people hanging from trees.” He looked at me. “As if making money is essential to these things. Do you believe money can buy peace or that capitalism will purchase equality for your Negroes?”

  “Can it, Max. Just give me a break, OK? You don’t have to impress me with how you con people with your Marxist horseshit, OK? I know it by heart. Your country’s idea of peace is to ship a bunch of nukes across the world to Cuba, right next door to us, ninety miles away. There’s probably going to be a war because of your people.”

  “Cuba has a right to self-determination.”

  “It was all a fucking game, wasn’t it? You, and NYU, and Greenwich Village, and Nancy Rudnick, and me, Pat Wynne, the easy touch.” I saw that he looked nervous. I kept talking. I would talk until I dropped. I didn’t want to die in that warehouse.

  “You imagined because I love Greenwich Village, and baseball, and the Half Note, and John Coltrane, even your rock and roll, and fried clams at Howard Johnsons, and espresso coffee at Café Figaro, and Some Like It
Hot, and I do, I do like them a very lot, you didn’t see that this could be true, my sincere delight in all this, but that I could also love my country, and that learning about these things could be part of my job. I was good at it, too. They didn’t have to teach me much, it came to me, naturally.”

  “What about Nancy? Was she part of the plan?”

  “Nancy was not in any plan, or you. You were not in a plan.” He was bitter now, and in his voice was despair, and then he yawned, like a man desperate for oxygen to keep him going. He saw my face and laughed. “Oh, yes, we are also human beings. We yawn, we cry. We laugh. All of it.”

  “So what? I’ve collared killers who loved their children and ran home to them right after they strangled some poor bastard and watched him die. They’re all human, even the maniacs. That gun you’re holding isn’t a .22. Where’s the gun you used on your friend, Valdes, the friend you slaughtered at the end of Pier 46? What kind of man shoots an unarmed friend?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  He was lying. They ask me to eliminate a friend. Ostalsky had written it in the notebook.

  “You can believe me or not believe me, but Riccardo Valdes was my good friend and I would never hurt him.”

  “When forensics finishes with this case, your prints will be all over him. We already know there were prints on him. Not too smart, Ostalsky. They must have left something out of your training, or is it the soft life in Greenwich Village that got to you? Too many songs about brotherhood peace?”

  “I didn’t kill Rica, or his girlfriend, Susana Reyes. They were wrong because they betrayed their revolution, but why would I kill him?”

  “One of your bosses ordered it.”

  “You already know I could not have killed Susana, because I was with you that evening at Minetta Tavern, and later I was with Nancy. It’s not what you want to hear, but you can ask her.”

  “What the hell were you doing on the pier the night Valdes was murdered?”

  “How can you be so sure I was at the pier?”

  From my pocket I took the silver charm that had belonged to Nancy, and held it up to him.

  Ostalsky moved closer, peering into the dark at the silver object. “I see, yes,” he said.

  “Do you think Nancy also knows that you’re a killer? Right now, she just thinks you’re dead. Just as well, if you ask me.”

  Saul Rudnick had said Ostalsky didn’t have what it took to be an agent; didn’t have the right kind of treachery in his heart. How wrong Rudnick had been. How much Saul, with all his righteous decent misguided ideas about the workers, about equality and justice, lived in a fantasy of socialism. He had no damn idea. He had no idea there were Cuban spies everywhere, no idea that people like Ostalsky were part of a network of spies who killed, even their own friends if necessary.

  Deceit, lies, treachery, it was all part of the game. My game, too, of course. You lied to solve a case. If you went undercover, you lied. If you collared a suspect and wanted to push him over the edge, you bent a few rules, but in the end, you did it to catch a killer. Everyone knew this; we just didn’t talk about it.

  Max Ostalsky was in a different league. He had deceived everyone. He had made up stories. He had worn his charm, the curiosity, his smile, his love of the city and its music, like a costume. He had written it in his notebook:

  In my new clothes, do I look like a clown? Like a man in a costume on a stage?

  He was a clown all right; he was the murderer in the mask who came up behind you and slit your throat. Max the magician.

  Even after he had butchered a man in the most brutal way I had ever seen, Ostalsky had remained composed enough to make his way back to his apartment, to keep out of sight for almost a week, to summon a friend from Washington, to get here, to this warehouse. That same evening before he had committed murder, he had been cool enough to pass the time at the Village Gate listening to Stan Getz with Nancy.

  He stayed silent.

  “What are you going to do after you kill me? Your Mr Ustinov said you needed a friend. Things can’t be all that good.”

  “Did he say that to you?”

  “Give me the gun, Max.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Fuck you. You want to kill me because I know who you are and what you did. So you got your fat pal to say you needed me, tell me where you were hiding. You knew I’d find you. I’d find you and you could kill me and you figured you’d be OK, because some of my people want me off the job. There are others on it.” I was bluffing, it was all bravado; I was scared as hell. “Just out of curiosity, now you’ve killed one friend and you’ve got me in your sights, how does it feel? Or maybe you’ve done it so often you don’t feel anything.”

  Max got up from the box where he sat. The gun still aimed at my heart, he took a few steps towards me and sweat began to ooze down my back. I was more terrified than I had ever been at the prospect of this man getting ready to murder me.

  Slowly, I got up from the chicken crate where I had been sitting. For some insane reason, I didn’t want to die sitting down. Maybe I read about somebody in a battle who said he wouldn’t die sitting down. Or was it with his boots off? Who the hell knew? In one hand, I had a pack of Chesterfields and a box of matches.

  “Can I smoke?”

  Max nodded, watching carefully while I lit up, and the seconds ticked away.

  Through the cracked window I saw the moon slide behind the clouds. A tug on the river hooted mournfully, and I tried to judge the distance between us. Somewhere in that vast concrete space, water dripped down the walls. Max Ostalsky was three feet away from me, gun steady.

  And then he said, “Pat, please, just go now. Just walk away from this thing, which is not normal, not good at all. This is not a good place for you. Go away. Go to your life.”

  “So you can shoot me in the back?”

  “Tell my friends I am sorry, get my clothes from 10th Street, if there is anything you like, please take it, or ask Mrs Miller to give these to her nice charities, and say to everyone how much I enjoyed New York. Just go away.”

  “Is it because you’re too much of a coward to shoot somebody who was a friend in the face? Is that it? You want me to turn my back?”

  He took another step towards me.

  “There’s nowhere for you to go, Max,” I said. “You won’t make it.”

  “I know this,” he said. “But even more sad than this makes me, it makes me so sad because I know now that I am very bad at my job.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Finally, I was asked to serve my country, according to how I was trained, to do, how do you say, the real thing?”

  “How?”

  “By eliminating my friend, Rica Valdes. This was my task. And I failed. You ask how I feel? Do you still want to know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Filled with fear. Scared. Unhappy. I’m not going to shoot you, Pat.” He dropped the gun to his side, but kept a tight grip on it.

  “Then give me my weapon back.”

  “I can’t do that. But I didn’t kill anyone and you will understand that if I could not kill one good friend, I won’t kill another. I won’t kill you if you just leave. If you leave, I can say I never saw you.”

  “Somebody wants me dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Not now.”

  “Is it your friend in the camel-hair coat?”

  “No. I asked Ustinov to send you here because I need your help. You asked me about an assassination. I need your help to try to stop it.”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t believe he’d let me go. He’d shoot me, and I didn’t care for the idea.

  “There will be an assassination,” he said. “Ustinov agrees this is possible and he is close to things.”

  “Where? Who? Why? Is it an American?”

  “I think so. All I know now is Rica Valdes was trying to stop it, in his own way, and of course he had no power, and I was ordered to kill him.”

/>   “Your people are planning this assassination.”

  “Or yours,” Max said, and I was so enraged by his crazy talk now, that almost without thinking about it, I kicked an empty bottle I spotted. Kicked it hard. Ostalsky was distracted for an instant. I lunged.

  I grabbed at his arms, dragging him down onto the concrete floor and clawing at his eyes. If you could make somebody blind even for an instant, you could change the odds. My fingers were in his left eye; I felt the eyeball, the liquid, the soft tissue.

  Close to where I was, something else—not the bottle, but something light—shattered and there was glass on the ground. Then the gun went off.

  CHAPTER NINE

  October 24, ’62

  MAX OSTALSKY WAS ON the cold cement ground. I kept hold of his gun. He opened his eyes and struggled to get up, reaching for the wall to steady himself, but it was too far, and he fell back and lay on the floor. There was blood on his hands, where he had tried to break the fall and some on his face. Instinctively he reached for his face, but his glasses were gone. I had heard them shatter.

  I said. “Get off the floor and sit down.”

  The gun had gone off by mistake when I grabbed for him. Even before I had a chance to hit him, the force had knocked him back.

  “Get up off the floor and sit down on that box, goddamn it, and keep your hands where I can see them,” I said, and Max crawled to the crate where he had been earlier, a blind man feeling his way forward. I’d have cuffed him if I had a set. Maybe I could find some wire later. Ostalsky looked defeated. He reached down, trying to find his glasses.

  I picked them up, what was left of them, and tossed them over. He put them on. One lens was completely gone, the other was cracked, and Ostalsky peered through it, squinting. From my pocket I grabbed a handkerchief and tossed it to him. “Wipe the blood off.”

 

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