Checkpoint Charlie (13 page)

“A man is rewarded for his worth, I suppose.”

“You should have been born to an aristocracy.”

“I was. My father was a duke.”

“Oh yes. I'd forgotten.” I hadn't forgotten, of course; I was simply endeavoring to prime the pump.”

On the far side of the lake a rowboat appeared from an inlet and proceeded slowly right to left, a young couple laughing. I heard the faint slap of the oars. I said, “I hope you'll be able to enjoy the villa.”

“Why shouldn't I, Charlie?”

“You might die in harness.”

He chuckled avuncularly.

I said, “It would be a waste of all those quadriphonic speakers.”

“I've often thought it would,” he agreed with grave humor.

“I don't have a villa,” I said.

“No. I suppose you don't.”

“I've got nothing squirreled away. I spend everything I earn. I have four-star tastes. If they retired me right now I'd be out in the street with a tin cup.”

“What, no pension?”

“Sure. Enough to live on if you can survive in a mobile home in Florida.”

“Of course that wouldn't do.” He squinted at me suspiciously. “Are you asking me for money? Are you proposing to sell out?”

“I guess not.”

“I'm relieved. I would accept your defection, of course, but I wouldn't enjoy it. I prefer to see my judgments vindicated — I've always respected you. It would be an awful blow if you were to disappoint me. In any case,” and he smiled beautifully, “I wouldn't have believed it for a moment.”

“The trouble with Charlie Dark,” I said, “I have champagne tastes and a beer income. I'm way past retirement age. I can't fend them off forever. I'm older than you are, you know —”

“Only by a year or two.”

“— and they're eager to put me out to pasture. I'm an eyesore. My presence embarrasses them. They think we all should look like Robert Redford.”

“How boring that would be.”

I said, “This time they're offering me an inducement. A whopping bonus if I pull this last job off.”

“Am I to be your last job?”

“Charlie's last case. A fitting climax to a brilliant career.” He laughed. “How much am I worth, then?”

“If I told you it would only inflate your conceit even more. Let's just say I'll be able to put up at Brown's and the Ritz for the rest of my life if I take a notion to.”

“I don't believe very much of this, Charlie.”

“That's too bad. I was hoping you would. It would have made this easier for both of us.” I took the pistol out of my pocket.

Yaskov regarded it without fear. One side of his lip bent upward and his eyebrow lifted. Across the lake the young couple in the rowboat had disappeared past a forested tongue of land; we were alone in the world.

I said, “It's only a twenty-five caliber and I don't know much about these things but at this range it hardly matters. With your heart condition your system won't withstand the shock.”

“It's a tiresome bluff, Charlie.”

“That's the problem, don't you see? I don't want to shoot you. But you're not going to leave me any choice. I can't think of any way short of shooting you to convince you that I'm not bluffing.”

He poked at the pine needles with his cane. I gave him a look. “Can you think of any?”

“Not offhand.” He gestured toward my pistol with the head of the Malacca. “You'd better go ahead.”

“We've got plenty of time. Maybe if we put our heads together we can think of an alternative.”

“I doubt it. You're quite right, Charlie — I don't believe you'll do it. I believe it's an empty threat.”

I studied the pistol, an unfamiliar object in my hand. “At least I know where the safety catch is. I think of this thing as a nuclear arsenal — a deterrent force. If you ever actually have to use it, it's too late.”

“Yes, quite.”

“But that doesn't make it impotent. The nukes are real, you know. This thing's loaded.”

“I'm sure it is. But a loaded gun is no danger to anyone until there's a finger willing to pull the trigger.”

I said, “It's a fascinating dilemma. I guess it comes down to a comparison of relative values. Which is more important to you — your life or your self-respect? Which is more important to me — the conceit of never resorting to violence or the promise of luxury for the rest of my life?”

“It's no good, Charlie. You'll have to kill me. There's no alternative at all. Look here, suppose I agreed to leave Finland and never return. Would that satisfy you?”

“Yes.”

He said, “It would be easy for me to agree to that. Here: I promise you I'll leave Finland tomorrow and never return. How's that?”

“Fine. We can go now.” I smiled but didn't stir.

“You see it's no good. I have only to break my word. My people would begin the hunt for you immediately. And it would be you, not I, who would end with a bullet in him.”

“Ah, but if you kill me then they'll send the whole Langley Agency after you and they won't sleep until they've nailed you. They've got their pride too. No, Mikhail, you can't do it that way.”

“Not to be terribly rude, old boy, but I really doubt they'd care that much. They're trying to get rid of you anyway. I might be doing them a favor.” He spread his hands to the sides, the cane against one palm. “Charlie, it's no good, that's all. You've never killed a man in cold blood. In fact you've never killed a man at all, have you?”

“No. But obviously I'm not a pacifist or I'd be in some other line of work. I believe in protecting oneself and one's interests.”

The rowboat reappeared, heading home. I put the gun away in my pocket to hide its telltale gleam from the young lovers but I kept my hand on it and kept the muzzle pointed in Mikahil's direction. I said, “Your running dogs aren't good enough to sniff me out. You know that. While they were looking for me I'd be looking for you. Sooner or later I'd reach you. You know as well as I do that there's no way on earth to prevent a determined adversary from killing a man.”

“There's one. Kill the adversary first. Unlike you I have no compunctions about that.”

“Thing is, Mikhail, right now I'm the one with the gun. There's also the fact that I'm only a replaceable component. If I'm taken out they'll just send someone else to finish the job.”

“Joe Cutter, no doubt?”

“Probably. And Joe isn't as peaceable as I am.”

“On the other hand he's not quite as good as you are, Charlie. I could best him. I'm not sure I could best you — not if you were actually determined to kill me.”

“And the next one after him, and the next after that?”

“Oh, they'd grow weary of it; they'd cut their losses.”

“If nothing else, I think your heart wouldn't stand the strain.”

The smile drifted from his gaunt handsome face; he regarded me gloomily. “Do you know what I'm thinking about?”

“I guess so. You're thinking about the comforts of those quadriphonic rooms and the untidiness of trying to operate in a country where the enemy superpower wants you out. You're thinking I'm never going to give you any peace. You're thinking how you like me as much as I like you, and you don't want to kill me any more than I want to kill you. You're thinking there's got to be a way out of this impasse.”

“Quite.”

The rowboat was gone again. I heard the lazy buzz of a light plane in the distance. Yaskov drew doodles in the earth with his cane.

I said, “You can leave any time you want. You write your own ticket. You volunteered for this post, I imagine, and you can volunteer our. No loss of face. The climate doesn't agree with your heart condition.”

He smiled again, shaking his head, and I took the pistol out of my pocket. “I want that bonus. I want it a lot, Mikhail. It's my last chance at it.”

He only brooded at me, shaking his head a bit, and I lifted the pistol. I aimed it just past his face. I said, “If I pulled the trigger it won't hit you. You'll get a powder burn maybe. The first time I shoot you'll flinch but you'll sit there and smile bravely. The second time my hand will start to tremble because I'm not used to this kind of thing. I'll get nervous and that'll make you get nervous. I'll shoot again and you'll have a harder time hanging onto that cute defiant smile. And so on until your heart can't stand it any more. When they find your body of course they'll do an autopsy and they'll find out you died from a heart attack. My conscience will be a bit stained but I'll live with it.
I want that bonus
.”

He sighed, studying my face with an impassive scrutiny; after a long time he made up his mind. “Then I suppose you shall get it,” he said, and I knew I'd won.

*   *   *

Y
ASKOV LEFT
Finland at the end of the week and I returned to Virginia to other assignments. As I said, these events took place several years ago. Recently I had a call from an acquaintance in the Soviet trade delegation in Washington and I met her for drinks at a bar in Georgetown.

She said, “Comrade Yaskov sends his regards.”

“Tell Mikhail Aleksandrovitch I hope he's enjoying his villa.”

“He's dying, Mr. Dark.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“I'm instructed to ask you a question in his behalf.”

“I know the question. Tell him the answer is no — I was not bluffing.”

I thought of it as a last gift from me to Mikhail. In truth the whole play had been a bluff; I would not have killed him under any circumstances. I lied to him at the end because it would have been churlish and petty to puncture his self-esteem on his deathbed. Far better to let him die believing he had sized me up correctly. It meant he would think less of me, for compromising my principles. But I guessed I could live with that. It was a small enough price to pay. You see, I really did like him.

Still, I suspect he may have had the last laugh. It has been several months since the lady and I had drinks in Georgetown. To the best of my knowledge Yaskov is still very much alive; now and then an evidence of his fine hand shows up in one operation or another. I suspect he's still pulling strings from his Black Sea villa — directing operations from his concert-hall surroundings. It leads me to believe he was simply growing tired of field work, tired of pulling inept Soviet colonels' chestnuts out of fires, tired of living in dilapidated embassies with enemies breathing down his collar. He was looking for an excuse to return home and I gave him an excellent one. As the years go by I become increasingly uncertain as to which of us was the real winner.

*   *   *

Charlie
in Moscow

T
HE PLANE DELIVERED ME
to Sheremetevo at eleven Tuesday morning but it was past three by the time the Attaché's car brought me to the Embassy: the Soviets get their jollies from subjecting known American agents to bureaucratic harrassment.

After my interminable session with insulting civil servants and the infuriating immigration apparatus I was dour and irritable and, overriding everything else, hungry.

As we drove in I had a look at the Embassy and saw the smudges above the top-story windows where the fire had licked out and charred the stonework. I made a face.

I introduced myself at the desk and there was a flurrying of phoning and bootlicking. I was directed to the third floor and managed to persuade one of the secretaries to send down for a portable lunch. Predictably I was kept waiting in Dennis Sneden's outer office and I ate the sandwiches there, after which — 20 minutes having passed — I stood up on the pretext of dropping the lunch debris in the blonde receptionist's wastebasket. When she looked up, startled, I said, “Tell him he's kept me cooling my heels long enough.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know you all resent my coming. But making me sore won't help any of us. Punch up the intercom and tell him I'm coming in.” I strode past her desk to the door.

“Sir, you can't —”

“Don't worry, I know the way.”

*   *   *

S
NEDEN WAS
on the phone. He looked up at me, no visible break of expression on his pale features, and said into the mouthpiece, “Hang on a minute.” He covered it with his palm. “Sit down, Charlie, I'll only be a minute.”

The blonde was behind me, possible trying to decide how to eject me by force. It would have been a neat feat in view of the fact that I outweighed her by two-and-a-half to one. After Sneden had addressed me with civility she changed her mind, made an apologetic gesture of exasperation to Sneden and withdrew.

He said into the phone, “Nothing we can do until we know more about it. Listen, Charlie Dark's here, he just walked into the office. I'll have to call you back — we should have an update later…. Right. Catch you.” He cradled it and tried to smile at me.

The chair was narrow; I had to perch. Through the high window I had a distant glimpse of the Kremlin's crenelated onion towers.

Sneden looked pasty, his flat puffy face resembling the crust of a pie; I attributed the sickly look to chagrin over what had happened and fear for his job. I said, “I'm not necessarily here to embarrass you.”

“No?”

“The Security Executive — Myerson — wants a firsthand report. And I'm to lend a hand if it seems desirable.”

“Desirable to whom?”

“Me.”

“That's what I thought.” He lit a cigarette. His fingers didn't tremble visibly. “It was a freak.”

“Was it set? Arson?”

“We don't know yet. It's being investigated.”

“But there were Russian firemen inside the building.”

“Moscoe fire department. We had to. But not on the top floor. We handled that ourselves with portable extinguishers — it never got too bad up there, we caught it before it spread that far.”