“That Times story about you was the biggest thing to happen to our crowd in years,” he said. She resented the “our crowd,” but fought herself. It was despicable of her to resent anything about Cyril Greene at this juncture. And “our crowd” had always included a large number of people like Cyril, although they tended to take better care of themselves.
“Did you know there was a memorial service for you one night in Elaine’s?” he asked. He had brought a can of beer out with him, and popped it open.
She laughed, nervously. The sound came out more a stifled shriek. “Doubtless everyone raised a glass of Stolichnaya.”
He shrugged. “I drink Campari when I go there. When someone’s buying. Sydney, by the way, was absolutely devastated by what happened.”
“Happened to me?”
“To you, and to his play. He was drunk for days. He kept staggering around at parties, saying that if he had cast you in that part you’d still be alive, and if he’d cast you in that part, so would the play.”
Tatty managed a tremulous smile. “Cyril, please. I’m glad to see you. I want to talk to you, all night. But will you please go get something to eat? Chinese food. Pizza. Anything hot. And get some Scotch.”
“Yes, yes.” He rose and went to a corner near a stack of old magazines, sticking his bare feet into a pair of L. L. Bean rubber-bottomed Maine outdoor shoes. He added an old army field jacket and an Irish walking hat. This time her smile was not so tremulous.
“Mexican,” he said, pausing at the door as he slipped the hundred-dollar-bill into his jacket pocket. “Tamales. Refried beans. Chile peppers. Some Chivas Regal, and some Mexican beer.”
“Hurry back,” she said. “I want to talk.”
When he closed the door behind him, she had an urge to leap up and walk madly about the little apartment. She was still frantic, still fighting back tears. She sat and drank. She remembered the very nice times with Cyril. There had been some. There had been quite a few, actually, when she had first moved into New York after college and Europe. He had not been living in such a hovel then. She had thought him quite brilliant and witty, though her romantic interest then had been a hard driving advertising man with a passion for flying sailplanes.
She looked at her watch just seconds before he came back through the door, so she was able to know that her sanctuary with Cyril Greene had lasted exactly forty-seven minutes. Cyril came through the door headfirst, with his face bloodied and two men behind him, one white with extremely short hair and a mustache, a flowered shirt, and a white leather jacket; the other a muscular black, in dark clothes, with an earring. Tatty’s pistol was in her coat and it was folded atop her suitcase. She threw her glass into the face of the white man, then picked up the old floor lamp, yanking the cord out of the socket and heaving it against both of them. Cyril, his parcel now a glob of steaming food on the floor, leapt up and hit the white man in the eye with his elbow. He began clawing at the white man’s face. “Run, Tatty! Go!”
They blocked the outside door. She hesitated. The black man was coming toward her. If they had meant to kill her, she’d now be dead. They wanted her breathing.
Tatty lunged for the bathroom door, slamming it on his fingers. She fell back, then slammed it again, fixing the hook. She turned on the light. There was a small window of frosted glass, open a crack. She jumped up on the toilet seat and, with painful, grunting effort, wrenched the window sash free of its sticky old paint and up ten or twelve inches. She pulled herself up and through it, hanging head down, the sill sharp and suffocating against her belly. There was nothing below her but the cold, wet bottom of a gangway four stories below. She looked to her left and saw an empty, darkened window. To her right, perhaps three feet away, was a fire escape.
There were screams behind her. She squirmed, turning, sitting up, sitting backward, her hands holding her back from a fall, her legs still inside. She kicked off her shoes, and, with great difficulty, swung her legs out, holding tight to the window frame. There was a sort of ledge, barely an inch wide, above the window of the floor below. She set toes upon it, and looked across at the fire escape. If she swung hard from the window, she could grab the iron rail. There was a heavy crash against the door, amazingly insufficient against the hook. The next would not be. She stepped hard against the tiny ledge and, with right hand gripping and sliding free, swung toward the fire escape.
Her left hand caught the railing and slipped down. Her right, the palm bloody, caught the brick wall and then the bottom of the railing. Her body swung onto the fire escape the floor below. She crumpled, then rose. There were more screams and another, more successful crash from the open window. She started down the cold, wet, slippery stairs, faster and faster as she made the turns. If he had a gun, if he was ready to shoot her, she did not care. She could only run.
She landed on the pavement of the gangway, slipping. Pausing just a millisecond to glimpse the building rooflines around her, she dashed for the nearby street. It was colder and wetter. A taxicab was moving slowly down it toward her.
No. Inside Cyril’s apartment was the suitcase with all that mail with her name on it. And her gun. The gun from Russia.
Slipping again, her feet in agony where they were not numb, she raced up the front steps of the adjoining building, rolling into the vestibule and slamming the door shut behind her. The white man ran by. The black man may have gotten stuck in the bathroom window. He might be on the roof, or on the street running the other way, or still waiting in the apartment. He might be anywhere.
She had to go back to the apartment. They would not figure on that. They needed her, alive, needed her fast. They would look first where they expected her most.
The inner door from the vestibule was ajar, held open by many years’ layers of thick, ugly paint. Crouching, she pulled it open quickly, then crawled inside. She waited a long time. No one came in after her.
They had closed the door to Cyril’s apartment, locking it. She had to go back to the roof and down the fire escape. The open bathroom window seemed a hundred yards away. She began to cry. Crying gave her nothing. It would not get her to the window.
She climbed the fire escape to the level above, clambered over the railing, then lowered herself. She had gotten from the window to here. It was physically possible to get back there—not probable, not safe. She would likely kill herself. But there was no other way.
With a hard swing, she pushed herself away, aiming her foot at the window opening. Her leg shot through. Her pelvic bone thudded against the sill and her shoulder struck the window sash violently. But her hand, nails scraping, caught hold of the window frame, and then the sash. She sat motionless for a long moment, breathing with heavy sighs that came close to becoming sobs, then ducked her head and pulled and fell inside.
Cyril was on his back, pale blue eyes staring, mouth agape, his T-shirt soaked red with his blood, blood that had spread in great pools to either side. Her cold, battered stocking feet were now warm. She was standing in his blood. She bit her lip, fighting nausea, fixing her eyes on the Seurat print until the sickness passed.
Her bag was in the corner where she had left it, the coat she had borrowed from Gwen still folded atop it. She moved quickly, putting on the coat, snapping open the suitcase. She put on the Ferragamo shoes. Retrieving Gwen’s shoes that she had kicked off in the bathroom, and the bottle of Chivas Regal that had rolled free of Cyril’s grocery bag, she dumped them in the overnight bag and closed it. There was nothing left to do.
But there was. She set down the suitcase, then knelt by Cyril’s head, careful to avoid the blood. Gently, she closed his vacant eyes. He had proved himself her friend after all, more than any other friend, and she had killed him, just as she had killed Gwen. He had once said to her, with some embarrassment, that his life would be complete, indeed, a triumphant success, if she would kiss him just once. She lowered her head and touched his cool lips with her own. Standing again, she hesitated. She knew no Jewish prayer to say for him. She quietly spo
ke a Christian one. It must be all the same.
No one was in the street, but that was small comfort. There was no safety in this city. She had no idea when she would know safety again. She walked quickly, heading east. She crossed the garish brightness of upper Broadway almost at a run, continuing east. Reaching Central Park West, she waited for some cars to pass and then hurried across, plunging into the darkness of the park. There were a thousand kinds of fiends and thugs in that dark, urban wilderness, but she had this advantage. Those people would not be looking for her.
And she had her pistol. She kept it in her hand, once having to stick it in the face of some drunken lout who lurched out of the shadows of an underpass. When she finally reached Fifth Avenue on the other side, she was amazed she had not actually fired it.
There were doormen, canopied entrances, well-dressed people alighting from cabs. She passed an apartment building where, just a few months before, she had gone to a party with Sid Greene and found herself talking to Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and later, Tom Wolfe. She was back in her own country, but with no place to go. She tottered on, her legs still hurting from her bout with the window. The pain became a driving force. She kept going, east, toward the river, relentless but without purpose, moving because it was the most acceptable form of waiting. She had to wait, for her mind to come together, for an idea to come.
She reached the river, almost bumping into it unexpectedly. The street ended in a cul de sac. There was a railing, the late-night traffic on the FDR Drive humming beneath her feet. There was no one around. She took the whisky from her suitcase and drank. She found herself strangely calm, strangely untired. Her system was devoid of emotion, drained. But her mind was working.
Sunrise caught her leaning on the iron fence before the United Nations. She watched as the bright orange crimson on the horizon faded, and all the other colors of the river and city came brightly to life. Her eyes glanced along the familiar outlines of the General Assembly building and the Secretariat. She had been to the UN many times, not merely in the public areas but in the sanctums of the elite, meeting in the restaurants for lunch or in the delegates’ lounge for drinks with diplomatically connected friends.
Ramsey Saylor had been a diplomatically connected friend. He could come and go through this fence whenever he wished. Marshal Kuznetzov could as well. Tatty was a fugitive in her own city, hunted down like some vermin before an exterminator. Marshal Kuznetzov would be here as a guest, free to do as he wished, go where he would, as though welcome.
A guard in a glassed-in sentry box was watching her. She raised her bottle in toast, and drank. He looked away. She looked at the Secretariat building, all the way to the top. She felt a drunken desire to fly to the top, to stand there in command, to reorder the world about her as she wished, as though she were the czar. The czar to whom she was no longer related.
In a grubby little all-night cafe smelling of a morning’s strongly antiseptic mopping, she had coffee and something warm to eat. She was in the West Thirties again, heading toward Herald Square, coming full circle.
But not quite. She was not in desperate flight this time. Herald Square was now part of an incipient plan, a launching point.
She descended the grimy, littered stairs to the subway. At their bottom was a wide expanse of underground passageways leading off in every direction, some to the department stores, some to office buildings. There were a few little shops and vendors’ stalls down here, newsstands, posters, and endless graffiti; a shoeshine stand. Meager streams of people moved along this Dantean landscape, the poorest and scruffiest sort, all looking tired in the early hour. She must look more than tired, something horrible. There was a mirror in a chewing-gum dispenser bolted on a steel girder pillar. She quickly passed it by.
Two pillars down was an unfortunate, unattractive, dirty-looking girl, though probably no more unfortunate and unattractive than Tatty felt. She wore thick glasses, and her dark hair had not been washed in days, perhaps months. She held in her folded arms a thick sheaf of leaflets. Tatty accepted one, as she always did. It was a superstition with her. She had always passed such people by when she was young, but once, on the opening night of the play in which she had her first leading role, she had taken one from SANE demonstrators. The New York Times review that night had been wonderful.
This flyer was headlined SAVE SOVIET JEWS. A star of David followed, and after that was a raging text: “The Holocaust goes on! The Soviets are the new Nazis!”
Tatty supposed that was true.
The concluding line was “Death to the Kremlin!” At the end was emblazoned the “Jewish Revenge Committee.”
Her plans now advanced by bounds. She went back to the dark-haired girl.
“Give me more of these,” she said. “I’ll hand them out where I’m going.”
The girl was suspicious. “Are you Jewish?”
Tatty looked at her with great seriousness. “That doesn’t matter,” she said.
The girl pursed her lips and shrugged. She handed her perhaps fifty more leaflets. Tatty rolled them up and stuck them in her coat pocket, then walked quickly away. Ahead were steps beneath a sign saying PATH TUBES TO NEW JERSEY.
The train was a long time in coming, but it got her to Newark. A succession of grungy cabs, taking her from suburb to suburb and town to town, finally landed her at the railroad station in Trenton. A metroliner bound for Washington arrived in twenty minutes. She stopped in the ladies’ room to wash thoroughly and change into better clothes, then went to her seat and slept all the way to the capital. At Union Station, she took a subway train to National Airport. Using cash and the name of Shaw, she bought a ticket on Piedmont Airlines.
The DC-9 gained altitude following the Potomac River, then banked, and turned south.
15
The overweight waitress in the skimpy costume that seemed endemic to Holiday Inn saloons brought Tatty’s Manhattan on the rocks quickly. There were few other customers in the lounge, and Tatty felt very obvious. When one of the traveling salesmen at the bar looked at her, she turned pointedly away.
Paget entered in uniform—camouflage fatigues, combat boots, green beret worn low on his forehead. He looked very grim. She had told him about Gwen over the phone, but she was not sure that was the reason for his expression. In uniform, he might always look grim.
He pulled off the beret and touched her shoulder. His hand was gentle, but she could feel its strength.
“Good to see you again,” he said. “Under the circumstances, it’s very good to see you.”
The waitress came almost immediately after he had seated himself. He ordered beer. They didn’t speak until the waitress had brought it and left.
“Let me see if I have it straight,” he said. “You were in Russia. You got here. The hard way.”
“Yes. The very hard way.”
His eyes were studying her face, a very careful assessment.
“I’ve never done anything like that,” he said, finally. “You must be quite a lady.”
“I’d rather not be quite a lady. I’ve had two friends killed and my brother-in-law is in a Russian prison.”
“And the people who killed Gwen are after you.”
“Yes. You’ve met one of them. He was at my place in East Hampton the weekend you were. Ramsey Saylor.”
He sipped his beer. “I don’t think we should talk any more in here.”
“We can go up to my room. I have a bottle.”
“Your room.”
“Yes.”
“A bottle.”
“Yes. Scotch.”
He drained his beer in a few gulps. She left half her Manhattan.
She had opened the drapes, exposing the room’s view of the motel parking lot and the screen of pine trees beyond. She poured two strong whiskies and water, without ice. As she stirred them with her finger, he took her shoulders and kissed the back of her neck. She froze.
“Perhaps I misunderstood.”
“I think you did.”
“You don’t want to go to bed with me.”
“No.”
“Yet here we are.”
“If you want to, I’ll do it. At this point, I’ll do anything. I need your help. I need it badly. I’ll do whatever you want. But I don’t want to. No.”
“Entendu.” He released her shoulders.
She turned around. “Please. Don’t consider this a rejection. You’re an attractive man. I thought Gwen very lucky. But I have no taste for sex right now—I’m all cold inside.”
He took his drink to the table by the window and sat. “Tell me what I can do to help you.”
“I want you to come with me to New York. I want you to help me make the Russians very, very mad at Ramsey Saylor, so mad they’ll want to kill him.”
He leaned back until his chair was tilted against the wall, then sipped his drink. Paget stared at her a long while before speaking.
“Why don’t we kill him ourselves?”
“That won’t accomplish what I want.”
“And what is that?”
“I want Jack Spencer out of Lubyanka prison.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Maybe. But most important, I am obligated to him. It’s the greatest debt I’ve ever owed.”
“Tell me what you have in mind. Tell me as much as you can.”
“Captain Paget. I’ll tell you everything.”
“You trust me.”
“Yes.”
“Why? I could turn you in to those people. I could sell you to them. How do you know I wouldn’t? How can you trust me?”
“Captain Paget, at this point I have no one else to trust.”
“You don’t know very much about me.”
“I know everything Gwen told me. I first met you twelve years ago, you know.”
He looked unhappy. He let his chair come forward and set his drink down on the table loudly. He stared into it.
“Tell me what happened to Gwen,” he said, quietly. His face was handsome in a way, but the scar and his visible torment overwhelmed that.
Blood of the Czars Page 27
