Requiem For a Glass Heart (33 page)

“Up to five days, I think he said.”

Irina nodded, thinking.

“How long will you be here?” Cate asked.

“Two or three days, no more.” She rotated her wineglass by its stem. “What did he think about your going with me today?”

“He didn’t seem to mind. He thought it was odd.”

“Odd? He is such a fool.” She had grown sober, thoughtful.

Silence.

“Well, I’m not with him all the time,” Cate said. “Maybe … maybe we could have lunch again, or dinner.”

“I will be keeping very strange hours while I am here,” Irina said offhandedly. “That might be hard to do.”

“Well, won’t he be keeping strange hours too?”

“I don’t know. This trade commission business is … Well, it is not a routine situation. We don’t work together, I mean, directly together.” She sipped from her glass. “I have to go to the ladies’ room. Excuse me.”

She took her purse and left, making her way through the dining room, again causing heads to turn. Tall, blond, expensively dressed, and having a body every woman would envy,
she possessed an aura that people were most likely to associate with a famous model or actress. You could almost see people trying to decide where they might have seen her.

Knowing that she would be alone for probably ten minutes or more, Cate was tempted to talk to Hain and the others. Then she realized there was nothing she could say that would clarify what they had been hearing. They knew what she was doing. If they didn’t like it, they could get a message to her. It seemed to her to be going all right. Her only concern was the time frame. If Irina’s reference to her schedule was not a fabrication, they didn’t have a lot of time. And still no sign of Krupatin. Still no indication that these people—Irina, Izvarin, Volkov—were making contact with anyone else. Everyone seemed to be waiting. Krupatin was still the center of attention, even in his absence.

“W
ELL,”
O
METOV SAID, SHIFTING THE HEADPHONES AWAY FROM
his ears but not taking them off his head, “if we can read between the lines and separate the fact and fiction of her story, I think we can be sure that our first guess was right about her. Krupatin has taken her daughter away from her. That is why she is doing whatever it is she is doing for him.”

Curtis Hain nodded and pulled away his headphones as well, putting down his pencil on the pad next to him. The folding metal tables were now so crowded with electronic equipment they were almost sagging. The cables snaked all over the floor of the living room.

“Cate was beautiful with that,” Ann said, nodding at the radio receiver. “She saw the opening and took it.”

“And Irina seemed to accept this,” Erika added, chewing a bite of apple. She and Ann were sitting on the opposite side of the tables, their backs to the courtyard. They had to peer around computer screens to see Hain and Ometov. “I was surprised at the sound of her voice, the way it changed when they were talking about their daughters.”

Ometov stared at the table, tapping a computer screen with the back of his fingernails. “I am going to guess that Sergei is planning on remaining out of the picture. Whatever
he is up to here, I think he is going to do it through these people he has sent. He wants to stay hidden.”

“If he’s even here.”

“True.”

“We still haven’t any proof he’s left London.”

“True. But I think he is here. With all of these people … He is here.”

“Irina mentioned three days or so,” Ometov said, almost to himself. “I think that has significance. If this operation has a limit, everything is going to move fast.”

One of the telephones at Hain’s elbow rang, and he picked it up.

“Curtis, this is Jernigan. Listen, we’ve got an interesting development. About an hour ago Izvarin decided he’d go out to the pool and hang around and look at the babes. Volkov took off in another direction. He went down to the lobby and wandered around a bit. He got his shoes shined. He wandered into the tobacco shop, looked around, got a few cigars, killing time. Two guys walked into the shop. One of them started looking around too, but the other one walked up to Volkov and said something. Volkov was caught off guard, but the guy had a lot to say and Volkov listened. After about ten minutes Volkov pays for his cigars and leaves the shop with the two guys. They walk to the elevators and the three of them get into one of them. You could see them punching all the buttons as the doors closed. There was no way we could tell where they went.”

“Son of a bitch,” Hain said.

“We got photographs of the guys, though. They’re Italian, Curt. Way Italian.”

“No shit.” Hain raised his eyebrows at Ometov and motioned to everyone to pick up the other phones. “Everyone’s getting on the line.”

“If they’re not from Sicily, I’ll lose a ten-dollar bet,” Jernigan continued. “We’ve got Strey’s people running the photographs through the ID section.”

“Did you have people outside?”

“Yeah. They didn’t leave the hotel. And that’s not all. Early this morning, before dawn, someone, I guess it was Irina, found all the bugs in her place. They’re out. We got the camera in place about midmorning and forty minutes later someone spray-painted the lens.”

“Jesus.”

“So I guess we’ve got Italians in the hotel here somewhere, but we’ve been in the business office for the past hour trying to find out where they might be and can’t. Someone’s fronting for them. We’d have to physically walk into every room.”

“Italians contacting Russians?” Ann asked rhetorically. “Curt, you think this is Bontate?”

“The Camorra has a very healthy presence here,” Jernigan said. “We have good records on these guys. It could be they’re just checking, heard the Russians were coming in and thought they’d pay them a visit, let them know who’s got a grip on things around here.”

“Who painted the lens of the camera?” Erika asked.

Ometov wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know. Why would the Italians care who got their picture taken going into Irina’s suite? Unless
they
were going in.”

Hain thought a moment. “When Irina checked in, she deliberately avoided the room Izvarin had reserved and took another one at random.”

“Seemingly at random.”

“She couldn’t have known before arriving that it was going to be empty.”

Ometov shrugged. “Then Sergei has other people there?”

“Or maybe it was the Italians,” Hain offered. “Maybe they’re making passes through Irina’s suite too, planting bugs, just like us.”

“And they want you to know they know you are there.”

“Yeah,” Hain said, disgusted.

“So there are questions. Are they guests in the hotel, registered guests? Or are they just coming and going, some of the anonymous transients who occupy busy hotel lobbies and dining rooms?”

“I don’t think someone passing through would have found that camera or seen it installed. Someone’s watching.”

“Then you think it was someone on that floor, observing her room, or observing everything that takes place in the hallway.”

“Someone’s sure as hell watching her door,” Hain said. “The question is, from what vantage point?”

For a moment none of them spoke, all of them thinking
through the maze of possible scenarios, the possible rationales of possible adversaries.

“Krupatin is like Satan,” Ometov mused. “Everybody is Jesus to him. He takes them up on the mountain and shows them the world. He promises them everything they want in exchange for a little favor, a little service.”

“Someone in the hotel,” Hain said. “Staff.”

“I think that is a good possibility.”

“Neil, can you check that out?”

“Sure.”

“Wait,” Hain shot back. “Second thoughts—I’m not thinking right. We don’t know how high up on the staff he might have made payoffs. If we go after them like that, there’s a good chance they’ll hear of it immediately. We could run them off, scatter them all the hell over the place. Let us put our heads together, Neil. We’ll get back to you.”

Hain broke the connection, and they all looked at one another.

“Maybe Sergei has other people there besides Izvarin and Volkov,” Ometov said. “In other rooms. Maybe that is how he will communicate with Irina. Maybe they are others your people have not identified yet.”

“Jesus, Leo. You make it sound like they’re swarming,” Ann said.

“Oh,” Ometov said, nodding emphatically, “I think they are indeed swarming. I think you will be surprised when this little episode is over. You are working against people who used to be with Soviet intelligence. Some of them used to
be
Soviet intelligence. Do you want to think about that? How did your country fare in that little contest? These are the people who turned Aldrich Ames and assassinated ten of your agents. We bankrupted an entire society to train these people. The social system did not survive, but these people got the best education imaginable in deception, and they
did
survive. These are not just gangsters you are dealing with here, my friend. These are the people who used to manipulate a nation. And now, as criminals, they still do.”

“Okay, Leo,” Hain said, sitting back and making his chair creak as he massaged his right thigh with both beefy hands. “What do you suggest?”

Ometov crossed his legs, dropped his head, and began nodding, his rounded shoulders looking for all the world as
though they were carrying a burden that would cripple him. As he pondered Hain’s question, he absently tore a piece of paper off the notepad on which he had been doodling and began rolling it between his fingers, mashing it, kneading it, working it info a tiny, hard little pellet.

“It is my feeling,” he said, his head still down, “that Sergei Krupatin has outmaneuvered us already.”

“What?”

Ometov looked up and put the little pellet into the breast pocket of his rumpled suit coat.

“These little games of bugs and cameras,” he said, “—they are, you might say, a diversion. I think your instinct not to try to root out who might have been bought off at the chateau was a good one. I think Izvarin and Volkov are decoys to keep us busy in the old cold war ways, to preoccupy us with bugs and cameras and teams of agents conducting surveillance, even the gambit about the disguises. This is hum-buggery to convince us that these men mean serious business. And then Irina arrives. The girlfriend. Not terribly important with all these other men around, these big boys.”

“The trip Izvarin and Volkov took to pick up the guns.”

“Just busywork for us. Old games.”

“So what’s the new game?”

“I don’t know.” Ometov shook his shaggy head and sat up straight for a moment, looking at the screen savers, which were taking him through starfields into deep space. He slumped again. “What I do know, what I feel in the marrow of my bones, is that Irina Ismaylova is at the very center of this. And by simple, stupid luck, Cate has found herself in exactly the right place. We thought of her as an enticement for Krupatin—we instructed her as a concubine, a Mata Hari, a bait of flesh for Sergei. But as it turns out, her real value to us is simply to be a sympathetic woman, a friend to another woman.”

“So how the hell are we going to keep them together?”

“We cannot keep them together. Irina will have to get away from her to communicate with Krupatin. But we can make them closer.”

“And how do you propose to do that, Leo?”

Ometov looked at Hain with a sober, almost forlorn expression. “Sympathy,” he said.

F
ROM THE FOYER OF THE WOMEN’S ROOM IN
C
AFÉ
A
NNIE
, I
RINA
called the hotel and asked for messages. There was only one. Irina looked at her watch. She had a little over an hour.

When she got back to the table, Catherine smiled at her as she sat down. It had been a long time since she had seen a smile that she thought was genuine, a smile meant for her only with kindness and without an undercurrent of lechery or brutality. It was difficult to accept it just as it was offered, difficult not to dissect it, not to pick it apart for its real meanings.

During the nightmares of the last few years, one of Irina’s great secret concerns had been what she would be like if she survived this hell into which Krupatin had shoved her. If she ever was able to escape him, to escape this unimaginable intercourse with death in which he had buried her, what was she going to be like? He had initiated her into a world of deception and menace and taken away her innocence, just as if she had been a child on whom he had forced himself, bringing into her life all the ugliness and sickness of his own putrid world. Would she ever be able to accept innocence again? Would she even be able to recognize it except in a child—in another adult, a good person who might come her way and help her restore all that Krupatin had taken from her?

She poured what was left of their wine, a little bit into
each glass. She made a small toasting gesture, and each of them drank.

“I have to go back now,” she said. “I have things to do.” It was difficult. She wanted to smile too but couldn’t.

Cate nodded. “Well, I enjoyed it. I’ve never seen anyone shop like that,” she said, laughing easily.

Irina looked at her mouth as she laughed, her clean, bright smile. It disguised the unpleasantness of Stepanov, perhaps even made it disappear—the triumph of good over evil. For that moment the woman was free of Stepanov’s corrupting taint, and Irina could almost sense, almost remember, what that was like, as if the waft of an old fragrance had for an instant transported her back to a dear and former time.

“Maybe … it would be good to do something together,” Irina said. Her heartbeat actually accelerated. Could she really allow herself to believe that this woman was what she appeared to be? Was she, Irina, going to act on pure faith? Suppressing her suspicion of this person was like anticipating losing her virginity: it made her nervous and created a giddy quiver deep in her abdomen, as though she could not imagine the experience, its sensations, its possibilities.

“Sure,” Cate said. “I’d like that.”

Irina stared into her and through her, her suspicion as irrepressible as Catherine’s apparent honesty.

During the brief ride back to the hotel, they agreed that Irina would call Catherine as soon as she had the time. They didn’t have to have anything specific to do. It would just be good to visit. But it wasn’t lost on Irina either that this unallied woman might be more than a friend; she might prove to be a useful friend as well.

When they arrived at Chateau Touraine, Irina reached out and impulsively squeezed Catherine’s hand just before the doors were opened by overzealous attendants. For an instant their eyes met, and Irina believed in that sudden moment that she and this woman were more than acquaintances, more than friends, that their lives had become intimate in a complex but genuine way.

In her suite, Irina went to the liquor cabinet in her living room and selected a single-malt scotch. She poured some over a tumbler of ice and swirled the liquor to cool it. She looked at the scattered boxes and bags of new dresses and underclothes
and perfumes and cosmetics. How many times had she done this, traveling fast, buying what she needed—more than she needed—on the way? Twelve years ago, when she was a student at the Repin Institute, her eyes firmly fixed on a career filled with the smells of paints and lacquers and canvas, of musty old storage rooms and chemically fragrant laboratories, how could she have foreseen this? Impossible. She held the cool glass to her temple. Impossible.

The doorbell chimed. She did not move. She drank from her glass and put the glass to her other temple. The doorbell chimed again.

Still holding the glass, with her long arm hanging down at her side, she walked to the door and opened it. One of the young Sicilians she had seen before stood there. He jerked his head slightly to the side, a cocky gesture that came as naturally to him as his black eyes. She was to go with him.