That would be altogether the best solution. Except it didn’t seem likely that they would solve the case, and if they didn’t, there would be no promotion out of Arkady’s department. So, so, so.
Well, no matter what happened, Gennady would have this American road trip. And for the honeytrap – well, he would just wait and see.
Chapter 4
On their last day in Honeygold, Daniel and Matskevich hiked out to the shooter’s blind. They started at the station where Khrushchev’s train had stopped, which was really just a platform at the edge of town, and followed the tracks eastward. “The shooter can’t have walked out this way on the day,” Daniel commented, when they’d gone about a mile. He turned back, gesturing at the platform, still in sight. “There were people waiting at the platform all day. He would’ve been visible.”
“The investigators thought he came in along the creek,” Matskevich reminded him.
“Yes, of course. I’m just… double-checking their work, I suppose.”
The original investigators had marked the blind with a little red flag on a pole. Without the flag, it would have been difficult to find: just a slight hollow hidden in the tall grass about halfway up a rise that wouldn’t have been called a hill anywhere but Iowa.
They canvassed the area, just in case the earlier investigators had missed anything, but they found nothing. The earlier investigators had boxed up the cigarette butts and the bullet casing; time and rain had done for the boot prints.
At length they both sat down in the blind, and watched and listened for a while. Daniel retrieved a pair of soda bottles from his jacket pockets. “Orange or grape?”
“I have never had grape soda.” Matskevich popped the lid and took a drink. He winced.
“Here, take the orange,” Daniel said, and switched out the sodas.
Matskevich looked at him. “Do you like the grape?”
Daniel shrugged. “It’s all right.” He took a drink, rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, and gestured at the train tracks with the neck of the bottle. “You feel that rumble in the ground? Train’s coming.”
Soon they could hear the vibration as well as feel it. “He would have plenty of time to prepare,” Matskevich observed.
“Yeah. And of course he must have been able to hear the noise from the whistle-stop from here. They had the marching band going and everything. He would have heard it get louder when the train pulled in, and quiet down again when it pulled out.”
A freight train rattled past, obscured by the long dry grass.
“A poor sightline,” Matskevich observed.
“It would’ve been worse in September,” Daniel added. “The grass would be thicker.” He looked around. “It’d be hard to find this place if you didn’t know it was here.”
“So a local, then. Except it seems they all have alibis.”
Daniel made a face. “Everyone went to the whistle-stop,” he agreed. “Or to Mr. Purcell’s anti-Communist meeting.”
“Perhaps Mr. Purcell sent an assassin.” Matskevich raised his eyebrows. “Did he seem like this sort of person? A man who can convince others to kill?”
Daniel considered the possibility. “He met me at the door with a gun,” he began.
“A gun!” Matskevich sounded startled. Daniel supposed Soviet citizens were too cowed to try that sort of thing on KGB agents.
“Oh, sure. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t going to talk to a government shill of a pollster, and he thought Khrushchev’s whole trip was a disaster from start to finish and Eisenhower ought to be ashamed of himself for ever letting the man set foot on American soil. I told him that was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear, that I was looking for people who weren’t afraid to speak truth to power, and he invited me in for coffee. We talked for two hours. He gave me a pamphlet about how fluoridation is a Communist plot and showed me his gun collection.”
“Mmm. You enjoyed yourself immensely.”
Daniel grinned ruefully. “The crackpots are always entertaining.”
“And the gun collection?”
“No Mauser. He fought in the Pacific, anyway. But he does have his great-uncle’s Enfield rifle from the Civil War. And a whole lot of knowledge about guns, in general. He would’ve known better than to send an assassin with a pistol.”
“Ah, but a Mauser… perhaps he wanted to make it look like Nazis were involved.” But after a moment of considering this wild theory, Matskevich shook his head. “Only if he ever had a Mauser, the whole town would know, and someone would have told me. He does not sound like a man to keep things to himself.”
“No. He’s a big talker,” Daniel agreed. “Did Jon Land let you look at his pistol that might be a Mauser?”
“Well,” Matskevich said. “It was in an upstairs drawer, and that would be difficult for him to get to.” He tapped his legs at the knee. “His legs are missing below here.”
“Why the hell does he keep his war trophy upstairs if he lost his legs in Europe?”
Matskevich shook his head. “He lost them here. Combine accident.”
They considered this grisly fact in silence. Matskevich lay back on the trampled grass and looked at the sky. “So he told me all about the battle where he won his prize,” he said, “and all about his comrades in arms, who were jealous, because he was the only man in his unit to lay hands on such a fine gun. He’s quite certain of this. The best war prize in the county. Of course Sheriff Woodley has his Mauser, but it was already broken when the Sheriff got it, it can’t fire… I checked this too, later, and it’s true. The gun is so safe that the Sheriff’s children took it to school for…” His brow knit.
“Show-and-tell?”
“Yes. This. The Sheriff’s Mauser was crushed somehow, a tank perhaps. Whereas Mr. Land’s pistol is perfect, it could still fire if he had the ammunition. And then Mr. Land sent his son upstairs to fetch it.”
“And?”
“It’s one of ours. A Tokarev. Lost, far from home. I think it was glad to be back in Soviet hands, if only for a moment.”
His face took on a wistful look. Daniel looked at him, then away, and took a notebook and ballpoint pen from his pocket. “As I see it,” he said, “There are three possible explanations for this shooter. Option one: it was an accident.”
Matskevich sat up again. He lit a cigarette. “This is the outcome your boss wants.”
Daniel hesitated just for a moment. “Yes,” he admitted.
Matskevich swept his cigarette from his lips and blew out a stream of smoke. “All right,” he said. “An accident. A man or perhaps a teenage boy brings his Mauser pistol, a prize war trophy, up on this hillside to… oh, shoot some rabbits, perhaps. He sits here and smokes a pack of cigarettes and shoots just one shot – only one bullet casing left, after all…”
“Or he cleans up his other bullet casings,” Daniel interjected.
“And leaves the cigarette butts?”
A fair point. And also: “The Iowa State Police would have found the spent bullets if he had discharged his gun more than once. They checked the site pretty carefully before they got called off.”
“Yes. So. He sits waiting for rabbits long enough to smoke a whole pack, but the only time he shoots, his shot goes so wide that he hits the side of a train instead.”
“Yes,” Daniel sighed. “The accident theory does sound a little far-fetched when you put it that way. All right. Option two: This was an assassin sent by an organized group. Which I suspect is what your bosses believe.”
In fact, Daniel suspected Mr. Gilman was right in thinking that the Soviets believed the US government was behind the assassination attempt, but it seemed impolitic to say so straight out.
Matskevich shrugged.
“But if it was an organized group,” Daniel said, “why did they pick a rank amateur? Look at the amount of evidence he left behind. The cigarette butts, the bullet casing. Footprints so clear that we know his shoe size. And why a pistol? That’s a terrible weapon for a long-range sho
t. He’s lucky he hit the side of the train.”
Matskevich lit a cigarette. “Maybe he isn’t supposed to shoot from the hill,” he suggested. “Maybe the assassin is supposed to go to this whistle-stop and get close enough to shake hands and shoot the Chairman at close range. A pistol is the right weapon for this. But on his way, he chickened.”
“Chickened out,” Daniel corrected.
“Chickened out. Yes. He stops to have a smoke to steady his nerves. He smokes the whole pack, and he misses his time at the stop, and then the train is passing and he must try to make the shot from here…”
Daniel considered the possibility. He jotted a note in his notebook. “You’d think that an organization with any reach could find an assassin with steadier nerves.”
“Perhaps they are a small organization. Small but fanatical. They see their chance to strike a blow against Communism and they take it.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “But no, I think this does not work. This place would not be on anybody’s route to the platform. He did not chicken out and stop. He came here on purpose.”
Daniel nodded.
“In any case, looking for an anti-Communist organization does not narrow our list of suspects very much,” Matskevich added.
“I’m afraid not,” Daniel said. “But the list of anti-Communist wing-nuts who either don’t realize or don’t care that assassinating Chairman Khrushchev would lead to thermonuclear war, or even consider that desirable, has to be at least a little shorter.”
“Are there such people? Who would consider nuclear war desirable?”
“A very conservative Christian sect that wants to jumpstart the apocalypse, maybe. But most of those groups are very apolitical: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s.” Daniel stopped, and then added. “Of course, most religious people aren’t gunning for the apocalypse.”
“Of course. Even a godless Communist does not believe that most religious people want the world to end in a mushroom cloud.”
“I expect your people would be pleased if the shooter turns out to be a religious fanatic.”
Matskevich nodded. “Yes, of course. It’s always nice to have a prejudice confirmed.”
“But even if he is a religious fanatic – and his choice of reading material suggests it – that doesn’t mean he’s part of any kind of organization,” Daniel said. “And that leads us to the third option: this was the action of a lone fanatic.”
“Which is what you believe,” Matskevich said.
Daniel hesitated, then nodded. “Yes,” he admitted. “The sloppiness in leaving evidence behind, the poor choice of weapon: it suggests that he’s an amateur with no military training. Maybe the pistol was the only gun he had access to. Maybe he didn’t even know that it’s the wrong kind of gun to fire a long-range shot. He tried to shoot Khrushchev because… oh, who knows. He hates Communists. Or he wants fame, notoriety. Maybe we’re looking for a Raskolnikov.”
Matskevich looked surprised. “You know our Dostoevsky?”
“I’ve read Crime and Punishment,” Daniel said. “In translation,” he added hastily. “I think it probably loses something in the process.”
“Oh, maybe not. Sentence by sentence, you know, Dostoevsky is not such a good writer. But still the force of the book builds up, it doesn’t matter about the sentences, and after all he had a great knowledge of the human soul.” He pointed at Daniel. “You should read Brothers Karamazovy. Very useful for a man in your position. It will give you a new understanding of the darkness of the human heart.”
Daniel brightened. “I’ll read The Brothers Karamazov if you’ll read, oh – let me think of an American novel.”
“Some capitalist propaganda,” Matskevich scoffed.
“The Grapes of Wrath,” Daniel suggested triumphantly. “I defy you to read that and call it capitalist propaganda.”
“What is it about?”
“A family loses its farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression, and they drive out to California to look for a better life.”
“Ah! No, I’ve read this,” Matskevich said. “By your John Steinbeck?”
“You’ve read Steinbeck?” Daniel was astonished. But of course if the Politburo was going to allow any American literature into the Soviet Union, it would be Steinbeck.
“Yes, of course!” Matskevich said. “Very popular in the Soviet Union. I liked it almost as much as Ilf and Petrov.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know Ilf and Petrov?” Matskevich mimed astonishment. “They are two Soviet writers, very funny. They visited America in 1935, and wrote a book about their trip.”
“All about how America is a land of capitalist misery, I bet.”
“No, no. Those are the kinds of books you in America write about the Soviet Union – ”
“Now wait. Steinbeck also wrote a book about his visit to the Soviet Union, and his Russian Journal isn’t like that at all!”
“ – but we are more fair-minded. A wonderful book.” A slight nostalgic smile touched Matskevich’s lips. Then he gave his head a shake, and said, “But we have wandered very far afield from our shooter. And I think we must hope he is not a Raskolnikov,” he added, “because Raskolnikov was only caught because he turned himself in. And this I think does not happen often in real life.”
Daniel nodded grimly. He stood up. “Let’s go check out the creek bed,” he said. “Maybe the shooter dropped something.”
“Like what? Drivers license?” But Matskevich was on his feet as well, dusting bits of grass off his pants.
They climbed to the top of the ridge and followed a line of poplars – “A windbreak,” Daniel told Matskevich. “The settlers planted them to slow down the winds across the prairie.”
“Good cover for the shooter,” Matskevich observed. “Probably he could not have been seen from the houses.”
They clambered down a ravine into the creek bed. It was dry at this time of year, only a little water here and there, floating thick with leaves. Daniel walked on the sandy bank, while Matskevich picked his way from rock to rock. He held his arms out for balance, a look of pleased concentration on his face, like a schoolboy out for a lark. He was, Daniel remembered from the dossier, only twenty-four.
“Don’t twist your ankle,” Daniel told him. “Unless we find something big at Camp Dubois, we’re hitting the road tomorrow to talk to Good Shepherd subscribers.”
“Yes, good,” Matskevich said. He balanced precariously on a jutting rock, and took a long awkward step onto a lower flat stone. “We should interview Mr. Don Westmark in San Francisco.”
“No!” But Daniel laughed as he said it. “Why the hell is some guy in California subscribing to a regional Midwestern rag anyway?” Daniel asked, and then answered himself: “Probably he moved there and took the subscription with him. No, we’d better start with the subscribers in Iowa. It had to be someone who had some familiarity with this area. They’d never have been able to find that spot on the hillside otherwise. I don’t suppose it could be Mary Lou after all?”
Matskevich shook his head. “When Khrushchev came, she was looking after her sick grandmother. This old lady,” he said, and he sounded aggrieved, “accused me of being a Communist spy.”
Daniel attempted not to laugh, then giggled uncontrollably.
“Yes, yes, very funny. She is like this with everyone, Mary Lou said, traveling salesman too, including that nice boy who came by last summer selling subscriptions to that magazine, what was it?”
Daniel stopped walking. “Matskevich!”
“The Saturday Evening Post,” Matskevich said, with a studied carelessness that showed that he knew that Daniel had hoped he would say The Good Shepherd.
Daniel shook his head. “So it’s not Mary Lou. If it’s not someone in town, then maybe it’s someone who used to live here. Or a Boy Scout who liked to sneak away from camp to watch the trains. It’d make sense for the shooter to be someone young and dumb enough not to think about the possibility of kicking off a nu
clear war.”
One of the rocks tipped. Matskevich’s arms pinwheeled. He caught his balance just in time to hop down on the sandy creek bed, then stepped aside and peered down at his tracks in the sand.
Daniel turned to look back at his own tracks along the sandy bank. He had left a clear trail. “If the shooter came this way, he must have stayed on the rocks,” Daniel said. “Or he would have left tracks for the first investigators to find.”
“Could he climb out of the creek bed without leaving tracks?” Matskevich asked.
But when they reached Camp Dubois, it was instantly clear that he could have. The Boy Scouts had built a rock dam on the creek, which an agile person could easily clamber up without leaving a trace.
They looked through the camp. Matskevich paused to swing the wooden arm of the gate on the access road, just to see that it could easily be done. But they found nothing. If there had been tire tracks or footprints, the October wind and rain had long since washed them away.
“If they had investigated this right afterward,” Matskevich said, “perhaps they would have found something. But now – ” He cut his hand through the air in a wrathful gesture.
“Maybe that’s what they want,” Daniel suggested. “If we never find anything, then everyone can believe what they want to believe. That’s convenient for everyone on both sides.”
“Everyone except us,” Matskevich pointed out. “Even if nothing is what they want us to find, they will not promote us for finding it.”
Daniel sighed. “Everyone except us,” he agreed.
Chapter 5
They did not get an early start the next morning. Their departure was delayed by Mrs. Wright, who was scandalized that they intended to leave before church.
Honeytrap Page 4
