Azrael (14 page)

“And Borzov called him Azrael.”

“So says the legend,” Bulanin said quietly. “It might have been his own idea. That would explain why Borzov is so high on him. Like minds, you know.”

“Azrael was an angel, wasn’t he?”

“The Angel of Death,” Bulanin said. “I got curious once—a dangerous trait, but from time to time I succumb to it—and I looked it up.”

“The Angel of Death,” Trotter said, not realizing he was again parroting the Russian. He was remembering Hannah Stein, with her broken neck, lying in his hallway. With her hair wet. And he thought of the other deaths, the ones that had already happened and the ones to come.

Borzov, once again, had been on the money. Trotter was going to make it his business, though, to find out just how appropriate that name was.

T
HERE WAS A PARTY
at the home of the department chairman this evening. Dr. Smolinski was there; he was always there. One had to be polite. One had to be grateful. Smolinski was a refugee, after all, an exile of conscience, having left Poland in protest of the crackdown on the workers in the wake of the Solidarity movement. He was a noted scholar; in that instant of the evanescent American consciousness, he was a hero, though he was sure he had been completely forgotten by now.
The New York Times
had done an article on him, and before the week was out, Sparta University, an institution suffering the martyrdom of being more famous for television sports announcers and petroleum engineers than first-rate scholarship, had invited him to be a guest lecturer.

The invitation specified no time limit, and Smolinski was still here. His tasks were not onerous. Twice a week, he met with two sets of graduate students, and discussed the modern history of Eastern Europe. Occasionally, he repaid the
Times
by favoring its readers with a piece for something called the op-ed page. He worked on his book, but aside from admitting the project was in motion, he said little if anything about it and refused to project a time when an eager academic world might be allowed to see it.

He had, several times, subtly reassured the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, in response to questions subtly asked, that when the time came, the hospitality and encouragement of the administration and faculty of Sparta University would be fully acknowledged.

And he attended parties, though he had little interest in the main activities his colleagues engaged in for amusement. Since he did not seek advancement, he had no need to perform character assassinations on potential rivals or to lick the boots of those with power. Since he was not married, he had no need to arrange adulteries. Smolinski was well content to restrict his liaisons to a coterie of attractive, but undemanding, single women. He was a guest here, after all.

And being a Pole, he did not need to find some hypocritical excuse to drink liquor. If you wanted to drink, then
drink.
If you wished to be drunk, you should get
magnificently
drunk, in the company of like-minded companions. And stay off the road.

What one should not do is to get drunk when others are sober, or get drunk and pretend you haven’t.

Here was the Department chairman, now. His tie was askew, and his eyes were abnormally bright. He would have another Polish joke. The Department chairman would rather be flogged than tell an ethnic joke while sober, but when sufficiently drunk, he told Smolinski incessant, vulgar, stupid jokes that bore no relationship to the reality of the Polish people.

“Stan,” the Department chairman said earnestly, “I’ve got another one for you.” He was always “Dr. Smolinski” when the man was sober.

“I somehow suspected you did.”

“Who’s the most important Pole in the United States?” Even drunk, the Department chairman would not say “Polack.” As much as he loathed them, Smolinski knew that none of these things could be funny, even to the fools who laughed at them without the word “Polack” in them somewhere.

“I don’t know,” Smolinski said. He wondered if the Department chairman remembered these little incidents when the alcohol had been metabolized, and what he thought of himself if he did. “Who is it?”

“Stashu Liberty.”

Smolinski laughed politely. He always laughed politely. It was part of his conception of the obligations of a guest. At that, the Department chairman was improving—this joke was merely moronic.

“Thank you, sir,” Smolinski told him. “A smile to send me home.”

“Oh, don’t go. The evening is young.”

“Young enough to be pressed into some productive work, I hope. My book, you know.”

The Department chairman tried to change his mind, then turned the task over to his wife, who ignored her assignment, and instead offered, for the hundredth time, to “show him around town.” This was accompanied by a repertoire of lascivious gestures that stopped just short of baring her bosom, but Smolinski was heroically obtuse. He escaped from the house about forty-five minutes after announcing his desire to leave, which was better than the average.

Smolinski rented a three-room cottage a short walk from campus. It was comfortable. He could work there, and he was eager to arrive, because he had much work to do tonight.

It was a cool night, but Smolinski enjoyed it. The weather here was much like the weather in Poland. He liked to ski and had tried it last winter, but too many people crowded the slopes for him to enjoy himself.

Smolinski entered his house. He locked the door behind him and made sure the shades on all the windows were drawn. He always did. No one noticed. If anyone did, it still would not concern him. He was a refugee, after all. He is bound to want his privacy, they would say. It is natural that he is cautious.

It was more than natural that Smolinski should be cautious. It was imperative. Dr. Stanislaus Smolinski was the KGB’s regional director for Upstate New York. He’d been preparing to play this role for years, since first he showed intellectual promise at school. Smolinski had always been intelligent enough to know where the power was, and the power in Eastern Europe was in Moscow. There was no more to be said. As one dedicated to Lenin’s principles of revolution, he had always been drawn to Russia.

The irony was, he had never been there. Once he had been groomed to be a “dissident,” it would have been a grave mistake to bring him East, across the border.

One day he would go. He would see the body of Lenin with his own eyes, and he’d offer the long, uncomfortable ordeal he had endured in his native land and in the West as a tribute to the great man.

In the meantime, he served the KGB, in the tradition of Felix Dzerzhinski, the Pole who began the organization that would become the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, and Beria, the Pole who succeeded him.

Borzov was not a Pole, but Smolinski looked upon him as a patriarch. It had been Borzov who realized that secret was not always best; that a man set up in the easily dazzled eye of the American media as an underdog hero against an “oppressive Communist regime” (in the phrase Smolinski had trained himself to say almost by reflex) would be able to pick among a dozen fine opportunities for spying.

And this was the one he had been instructed to choose.

Smolinski had been surprised, at first. He had been offered a lecture tour; he had been offered a post at a Washington think tank. No. Visiting Professor at Sparta University in upstate New York was what Borzov had said.

Smolinski had had sufficient presence of mind to hide his surprise from the man at the other end of the scrambled radio signal. It was a good thing, too, because later, when he thought the situation over, Borzov’s wisdom had revealed itself to him.

Because Stanislaus Smolinski had not been chosen simply to be a “mole,” as the British writer had put it, he was to do in the West what he had done in Poland—act as a sort of litmus paper. By their reactions to him, as a public opponent of the world he had left behind, he could judge who might and might not prove to be useful.

In addition, he was to gather whatever intelligence he could, and to supervise special operations as they arose. He could hardly do that while on a lecture tour.

And Washington was too close to the center of things. A refugee from a so-called Iron Curtain country would be screened much more closely if he chose to join a Washington think tank than if he went to a second-rate college in New York State.

Yet there was much for Smolinski to do in northern New York State. There were missile bases and Air Force bases. It was major supplier of water power for the Northeast Power Grid. There was all sorts of government and defense-related research going on at the many colleges and universities in the region. There were several hundred miles of unguarded land-and-water border with Canada. An agent could travel much more easily to Canada than to the United States from the Soviet Union, sometimes by way of Cuba, sometimes not. It was then a simple matter to sneak them into the United States. Until recently, these agents would disperse throughout the country to their various assignments. In recent months, though, they had been placing themselves under Smolinski’s command. He now had close to a dozen men working for him. He had met few of them face-to-face, but through coded phone conversations and letters, he kept in constant touch.

It all had to do with the operation going on in Kirkester, some hundred miles east of Sparta. There was an agent working there, answering directly to Borzov. Smolinski had no idea what he was up to, but it involved the Hudson woman. Smolinski was responsible for support services for the mission—he had given the order for the faked telegram to be read to the Hudson woman over the phone. It was his men who passed frequently through Kirkester (Smolinski had been ordered to keep any of them from trying to set up operations in the town itself) and photographed newcomers to the town.

And it would be Smolinski himself who, in a very few days’ time, would relay Moscow’s demands to the Hudson woman. He had received the orders, along with assurances that he need not fear his cover being blown, earlier today. He was excited, and proud.

But he would not meet with the woman until a certain other matter had been attended to. One of the photographs had been recognized in Moscow. They knew him as Jeffrey Bellman, and it was he who had gone to England and induced the defection of the traitor Bulanin. He called himself Trotter now, apparently, and he looked different—spectacles, different eye color, loss of weight, etc.—but not so different that the experts in Moscow could not recognize him. He was too dangerous to be left around when the plan (whatever it was) went into high gear.

Mr. Trotter would be attended to. Tonight.

And if he turned out to be the wrong man, what did it matter? There had been so many mysterious deaths in the town of Kirkester already.

J
OE ALBRIGHT WENT UPSTAIRS
and began straightening out the apartment above the shop. He’d furnished it entirely with junk—with salvaged/reclaimed items—and it didn’t look bad at all. All he’d needed to buy new was a TV set and cushions for the sofas and chairs. He knew this was something big and a little off-center, and he found himself nervous about making a good impression.

He knew it was stupid. The FBI hadn’t hired him because of his domestic skills. Still, he was glad he wouldn’t have to receive a heavy hitter like Trotter (and who
did
he work for, anyway?) in a messed-up, uncomfortable place.

The only hard part of setting up the meeting was arranging things so that Trotter could come visit him without anybody knowing. It couldn’t be during business hours, because in the mornings Joe was out in his truck, collecting merchandise and information, and in the afternoon he was in the shop, selling stuff and writing coded reports for Rines in his spare moments, which he didn’t have a whole lot of. Lot of traffic through that door.

It was still the fallout from that article. Joe had never been in a situation like this before. It occurred to him that if there were only, say, five or six black families in America, there would be no prejudice whatsoever. There would also be no basketball worth a damn, but that was another problem. But he could see it in this town—there weren’t enough black people around to scare the whites. His store was booming because people were coming to see the Amazing Colored Man, not because of a sudden passion for secondhand furniture.

Trotter rapped out the code they’d agreed on, and Joe went down to let him in. He waved Trotter up the stairs first, figuring good security was good security.

“Where’d you park?”

“Around on Asket Street. I didn’t want the folks at the body shop to see me.”

“That’s the owner. Greek guy. Greek name, anyway. He never goes home. I got back from church Sunday, there he was.”

“Learn anything from Tina Bloyd?”

“I learned she’s a real brave lady who’s had a tough time.”

“I know.”

“I don’t like messing her around.”

“What, messing her around? Did I ask you to rape her? Seduce her? Kiss her hard? I just want you to make friends and find out if there’s anything about the baby’s death that didn’t turn up in the reports.”

“Like what?”

Trotter looked at him. Joe realized his good impression was slipping, but he cared less than he thought he would.

“Like if the killer dropped a monogrammed cigarette case in the crib,” Trotter said. “Look, Joe, if I knew like what, I would just go and ask her yes or no. What’s the matter with you? You fall in love or something?”

“That’s ridiculous. What’s today, Tuesday? I didn’t even talk to her until Sunday.”

“Since then?”

“Once a day or so on the phone.”

“You gonna answer my question?”

“I already said it’s ridiculous.”

“Love is ridiculous.”

“If I said yes, you’d pull me off the case.”

“Well, hell,” Trotter said. “We can’t have that. Never mind, don’t answer.”

“You get the stuff from Rines?”

Albright unlocked an old rolltop desk made, as far as he could tell, of solid oak. He twisted a flower, and part of the inside facing popped open. Albright reached inside, pulled out a manila folder and handed it to Trotter.