Rockets' Red Glare (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

The weather in Rome had cleared when Melanie Winslow’s flight from New York landed later that same morning. She cleared customs and hurried to a bank of public telephones. Her pulse rate soared as she pulled the Rome directory from its hanger, opened it to the
Ds
, and frantically turned the pages to the heading
DES
. She ran her finger down the column of names—Descano, Descenta, Descilare. The names jumped from
Desc-e
to
Desc-i
. Not a single
Desc-h
. No Deschin, not a one. Melanie let out a long breath, and admonished herself for believing, even for a moment, that it might be this easy.

She took a taxi into the city and checked into the Gregoriana, a tiny hotel that lies hidden just east of the Spanish Steps on a narrow residential street after which it is named. Its fourteen cozy rooms were coveted by those in the arts who were fond of their intimacy and the bright palette used in their decor. Melanie had stayed here once, years ago, while performing with a dance company at Teatro dell’ Opera. She was pleased to find the hotel’s ambience intact on her return.

She showered quickly, slipped into jeans, turtleneck, and leather bomber jacket, and took a taxi to the Piazza Cavour, where she rented a motor scooter.

An attendant in coveralls with SCOOT-A-LONG embroidered on the breast pocket gassed the bright green Motobecane, and gave Melanie a map of the city.

“My last one. I saved it just for you,” he said flirtatiously.

“Thanks,” Melanie replied with a smile. She settled on the scooter and, handling the controls with familiarity, started the engine, prompting the attendant to skip his orientation speech. “Maybe you can tell me how to get to the State Archives?” she asked.

“Ah,
si,
the Sapienza. You want the most direct route? Or the one where the streets have cobblestones?” he asked with a lascivious smile.

“I can see it’s time for me to be scooting along,” she said sharply. She pushed the scooter off its stand, popped the clutch, and accelerated onto Via Triboniano, which borders the west side of the piazza.

The attendant’s remark got her thinking about the first time she had rented a scooter in Italy. She was in Florence and observed to an English painter she had met that “The young women seem so spirited, so—”

“Fulfilled,” he offered somewhat smugly.

“Exactly,” she said. “They’ve been liberated. They have jobs, incomes, careers.”

“And motor scooters,” he added with an enigmatic smile. “They have motor scooters.”

Melanie didn’t understand.

Hze teased her mercilessly, and refused to explain, prompting her to rent one. And then she understood: the cobblestone streets, the steady vibration, the stimulating sensation building. As a teenager, she’d made a similar discovery galloping bareback across the New Hampshire countryside on her chestnut colt.

The airy dome of Capella di Sant’Ivo—the fourteenth-century church in Palazzo di Sapienza where Pope Boniface VIII, a Machiavellian churchman who wielded the power of his office with unscrupulous abandon, founded the University of Rome—shimmered in the afternoon light as Melanie approached on her scooter.

The state-funded institution, directly across the Tiber from the Vatican, bestows degrees in the full range of arts and sciences. In 1935, the University was awarded modern accredition and moved to more spacious quarters. Nevertheless, records are still kept at the Sapienza, which now houses the State Archives.

The courtyard between the two massive wings was clogged with traffic as Melanie cruised the grounds on the motor scooter in search of the records office. The ride and the cold air had reddened her complexion and lifted her spirits.

A sign that read
UNIVERSITA L’UFFICIO REGISTRAZIONE
got her attention. She backed off the throttle and steered the Motobecane into a
parking area that looked like a motor scooter convention. She hurried up the steps of the administration building and, after a few wrong turns in the maze of corridors, found the Records Office.

The room had Renaissance proportions and had once been a refrectory. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, its plaster darkened from centuries of burning tallow, stood several cluttered desks, rows of file cabinets, and a modern glass enclosure that created a private space for the supervisor.

Melanie paused to evaluate the student clerks behind the service counter, and approached the one she judged had the most easygoing nature of the three.

The young fellow looked up from the file cards he was methodically alphabetizing.

“Prego signora?”
he said.

“Si,”
she replied.
“Parla inglese, perfavore?
You speak English?”

He held his thumb and forefinger about a half inch apart.
“Capisco un po’
—I think,” he replied, breaking into the friendly smile she had anticipated.

Melanie smiled back, relieved. “I’m trying to find someone,” she said slowly in a louder than normal voice, making the assumption—for whatever reason most people do—that comprehension increases with volume. “He was a student here in the late thirties.”

“Thirties?” the clerk exclaimed.

He wasn’t a day over nineteen, and as far as he was concerned, she could just as well have said 1300s.

“Yes, the years just prior to the war. His name’s Deschin. Aleksei Deschin.”

Melanie took a piece of paper and pencil from the counter, and began neatly printing the name.

In the rows of gray steel cabinets behind them, another clerk was filing document folders that were in a wheeled cart. Marco Profetta had no reason to pay attention to their conversation—not until he heard Melanie say, “Deschin.” His eyes flickered at the first mention. He mused when she repeated it, then coolly resumed his filing chores, covering his reaction.

Melanie finished writing Deschin’s name on the slip of paper, and handed it to the clerk.

He stared at it blankly for a moment.

“You do have records that go back that far, don’t you?” she prompted optimistically.

The young clerk shrugged, and splayed his hands.

“Can you find out? Is there someone who might—”

“
Aspetti un momento,”
he said, interrupting her. He turned from Melanie, crossed the room, and entered the glass enclosure. A slim, fashionably attired woman was working at a computer terminal.

Melanie couldn’t hear what was being said. But she could see the clerk explaining, and the woman responding with a pained expression, and making quick little negative movements with her head. Melanie decided it was time to be more assertive, and walked around the counter to the glass enclosure.

“Tell her I’m trying to find my father,” she said, addressing the clerk. “Tell her it’s very important.”

The supervisor looked up with a slightly piqued expression. “I’m sorry, but we can’t accommodate you,” she replied coolly, in excellent English. “Current records are on the computer. Those from recent years, though inactive, are filed here as you can see. But anything from before the war—” she let the sentence trail off, shaking no with the same quick movement of her head she had used with the clerk, then resumed, “—
they
would be almost impossible to retrieve.”

“But you do have them,” Melanie said, undaunted.

“Some,” the supervisor reluctantly admitted. “But it could take days, even weeks, in the archives just to find the proper volume.
If
it wasn’t destroyed in the war. I’d like to help you, but—”

“Then please hear me out,” Melanie interrupted in a desperate voice. “The only thing I know about my father is that he was a student here. That and his name. Maybe the records
were
destroyed in the war. Maybe
he
was destroyed in it,” she added glumly. “Or maybe he fell out of bed twenty years ago and broke his neck. I don’t know. Look, I realize the chances of finding him are pretty slim. But I have to try. I have to find out as much about him as I can. And I have nowhere else to start. Nowhere. You’re all I’ve got. I’d appreciate whatever help you can give me.”

The supervisor was visibly touched, her expression more sympathetic now. “Perhaps Gianni can find the records for you,” she said, shifting her look to the clerk.

“I have class,” he said, glad to have an excuse to avoid the dank, musty caverns beneath the Sapienza. He turned to Melanie, and lifted a shoulder in an apologetic shrug.
“Ciao, Signora,”
he said as he left.

Melanie thought for a moment, then brightened with an idea. “Suppose
I
look for them?” she said, turning back to the supervisor. “If the records are in the archives, I’ll find them, believe me. I don’t care how long it takes. Would that be okay?”

The supervisor considered the suggestion for a moment, and smiled. “I don’t see why not.”

“Thank you. Really, I can’t tell you what this means to me,” Melanie said.

“There is a form you must fill out first,” the supervisor said, reverting to a more businesslike manner. “We are very cautious about releasing data on our alumni, and to whom.”

She got up from her chair, and stepped to the opening in the glass enclosure.

“Marco?” she called out to the clerk who was still filing documents in the rows of steel cabinets.
“Marco, venga qui?”

Marco didn’t look up from the folders in the cart immediately. When he did, he pointed to himself, indicating he was uncertain she was addressing him.

“Si, Marco,”
she replied.
“E mi porta un forma requisizioni?”

He closed the file drawer and came toward them in a floating saunter, using an effeminate flick of his wrist to take an information request card from the counter on the way. He had heard her call him the first time, but feigned he hadn’t. It was preferable that they didn’t know he’d been observing them from the moment he overheard Melanie say, “Deschin, Aleksei Deschin.”

The name didn’t mean anything to the clerk or the supervisor. They had no reason to know the name of the Soviet minister of culture.

But Marco Profetta did. To him it meant money.

* * * * * *

Chapter Twenty-four

The Maserati was traveling fast on the S201 Autostrada toward the city when the rain let up and the skies started to brighten.

To Andrew’s relief, no deadly gas had filled the rear compartment, and no attempt had been made to abduct him. The turn in the weather prompted him to go to Piazza dei Siena—the outdoor amphitheater in the Borghese Gardens where the horse show would be held—prior to checking in at his hotel.

Fausto adjusted his course, left the S201, cutting through the Trastavere District to Ponte Garibaldi. He crossed to the east bank of the Tiber, and headed north on the Lungotevere, the broad boulevard that snakes past the townhouses fronting the river. At Ponte Cavour, he angled into Via Ripetta, and continued to Piazza Del Popouli, just west of their new destination. There, the Maserati’s progress came to an abrupt halt. The piazza was congested with traffic. Hundreds of vehicles were gridlocked about the Hellenic obelisk at its center.

Andrew lowered the window for a better view of the limestone needle that split a backdrop of evergreens.

The sharp crack of a gunshot rang out behind him.

He spun to the rear window of the Maserati.

The tinted glass framed Santa Maria Dei Montesanto and Santa Maria Dei Miracoli, the churches that divide the streets which fan out from the
south side of the piazza. Befittingly, the baroque twins were clothed in a matching latticework of construction scaffolding.

Another gunshot echoed through the stone piazza.

As the sharp pop rang in his ears, Andrew wondered why neither pedestrians, nor workers crawling about the scaffolding, had reacted or taken cover.

Silvio Festa knew why. Silvio was the smoothly muscled construction worker using the Ram-set, a gunlike tool that anchors things to concrete. He fired it dozens of times each day, and the sharp report had become just another sound in the noisy piazza.

Silvio was ruggedly handsome; and in sweat-stained tank top, faded jeans, and tool belt slung low on his waist, he exuded a raw sexuality. Indeed, women found him irresistible. He slept with them all and bragged they were
fazzolettini di carta
—Kleenex. But one had a sassy elusiveness that captivated him, and unlike the others,
she
controlled the pace of their relationship. Silvio patiently planned to consummate it. She had been in Sicily for a few days on business. This evening, he would pick her up at the airport, take her to dinner, and fill her veins with Frascati, a smoky local wine. This evening, Dominica Maresca would be his.

Silvio pushed a spike into the barrel of the Ram-set, then opened a small steel box. It contained rows of color-coded cartridges that resembled .22 blanks. He selected a powder load, thumbed it into the chamber, inserted the breech plug, and snapped the tool closed. The muzzle had a square safety guard. He positioned it on a two-by-six he was anchoring, pressed down to release the safety, and pulled the trigger.

The Ram-set fired with a loud bang. The spike pierced the hardened lumber, pinning it to the concrete.

Silvio stepped back from his work, thinking about his elusive woman, thinking about Dominica’s long limbs wrapped around him, her generous mouth devouring his, and went about reloading.

Fausto had finally maneuvered the black Maserati through the traffic jam in the piazza. He made a right into the Viale del Mauro Torto, the main road that runs just inside the wall of the Gardens, and accelerated beneath a tunnel of evergreens.

The Fiat in which Gorodin and Kovlek were following was still locked in traffic. They watched the Maserati zigzagging between the angled vehicles up ahead, losing visual contact when it exited the piazza through the arched gateway at the north end.

Kovlek leaned on the horn in frustration.

The driver of the car in front of him stabbed an arm out the window and gave him the finger.

Gorodin was too tired to be angry, and broke into an amused smile.

“Where’s Churcher staying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Kovlek replied, feeling chagrined and trying to hide it. “A hotel, I imagine. I don’t know which one.”

“Okay, head for the Embassy,” Gorodin said wearily, his tone born of severe jet lag.

“My orders are to maintain surveillance,” Kovlek protested, angered by Gorodin’s lethargy.

“So are mine, comrade,” Gorodin replied. “But the fact remains—we haven’t.”

“Which means we do whatever is necessary to reestablish contact,” Kovlek snapped. “And I don’t see how returning to the Embassy will accomplish that.”

Gorodin had anticipated the rivalry. It was always this way between the two agencies. GRU and KGB were no different than other organizations when it came to territorial imperatives. He was tired, and had hoped to stave it off. But he knew exactly how to reestablish contact with Andrew Churcher, and decided to dispense with Kovlek quickly.

“Pull over there,” he said in a commanding tone, pointing to a line of taxis at a stand.

“What?” Kovlek blurted indignantly.

“Drive aimlessly in search of Churcher if you wish, comrade, but you’ll do it alone. I’ll be at the Embassy. And I guarantee you, within minutes of arriving I’ll know where to pick up his trail.”

Kovlek looked surprised.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Gorodin continued. “Before leaving to resume surveillance, I’ll be sure to inform your
rezident
of Churcher’s whereabouts”—he paused, letting Kovlek chew on the barb before he gaffed him—“in case, for some absurd reason, he’d want you to continue backing me up.”

Gorodin smiled as Kovlek angrily downshifted the Fiat and turned the wheel hard, pulling out of the piazza into a street that led to the Embassy.

* * * * * *

Fausto sat patiently behind the wheel of the Maserati that was parked in the entrance tunnel of Piazza Dei Siena. Within a few days, the amphitheater in the southeast quadrant of the Borghese Gardens would be overrun with international horse traders. The clatter of hooves, prancing before the breeders private boxes, would fill the air.

But now it was empty and silent.

The red clay was still moist from the rain. The musky scent mixed with the fragrance wafting from the pine forest that surrounded the fourteenth-century castle.

Andrew was standing alone in the show ring in front of the massive stone door, thinking McKendrick would be proud of him. As exclusive agent for the prized, and therefore higher priced, Soviet Arabians, this was where he would be competing for millions of dollars in orders. And like a battlefield commander on a reconnaissance mission, he was getting a feel for the terrain on which he would soon be fighting. But at the moment, Andrew’s capacity for strategic planning was limited. He was tired, and wanted nothing more than to curl up in a sleeping bag on the bed of pine needles that lay beneath the towering trees.

He settled for Suite 610 in The Hassler-Villa Medici, the superdeluxe hotel perched imperiously above Piazza de Spagna on Via Sistina. The luxurious cluster of rooms in the northwest corner had been his father’s private enclave whenever he was in Rome. The broad expanse of windows overlooked the dome-studded southern half of the city.

It was just after 3
P.M.
when Andrew checked in and found a stack of phone messages; one was from Giancarlo Borsa. Andrew went to the suite and locked the door behind the departing bellman. The phone was on a credenza next to the bed. He took a banana from a bowl of fruit, and deftly slipped it into the telephone cradle as he removed the receiver to make certain the pins remained depressed, and a connection was not made.

He unscrewed the plastic mouthpiece exposing the diaphragm. No bugging device or additional wiring indicating a tap was visible. He turned the receiver over, and shook it gently. The diaphragm dropped into his palm with the same result. He reassembled the receiver and hung it back on the cradle.

Then Andrew went about the room examining picture frames, lamps, headboard, television, chandelier, a vase of flowers; but found no listening devices. It struck him that the flowers had no scent. He leaned closer to an Astramarium, one of dozens of the hybrid lilies in the arrangement. The speckled blossoms looked authentic. They felt authentic, too. But they were made of silk, as were all the others in the vase. Each a brilliant example of the flower-maker’s art.

From the moment he entered the suite, Andrew had assumed that the flowers were neutralizing the aroma of furniture polish, cleansers, and starch that make hotel rooms the world over smell the same. But they
weren’t. The competing fragrance, he realized, was the vestige of a familiar perfume.

The exotic blend of essences took Andrew back to that day at the auction in Tersk. And he knew that his father’s woman, the aristocratic Russian swathed in sable, the one whom Theodor Churcher had allowed to outbid him, the one whose face Andrew couldn’t recall, had been here—in his hotel room, that afternoon.

The phone rang.

Andrew was deep in concentration, and jumped at the sound. He let it ring again, then scooped up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Churcher?” The voice was dusky—a woman’s accented English.

“Speaking,” he replied.

The woman said, “This is the housekeeper. The writing equipment you requested is in the desk,” and hung up.

Andrew listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, then lowered the receiver to its cradle. He was puzzled. He hadn’t made any special equipment requests. The gilded antique desk stood against the north wall. He lowered the hinged front that served as a writing surface, revealing a portable typewriter inside. A sheet of paper had been rolled halfway into the platen. Andrew studied it for a moment, then grasped the knob on the side of the typewriter and turned it slowly, rolling the sheet upwards. Four clicks brought the tops of letters into view. A snap of his wrist revealed the single line that had been typed across the page—and then rolled back behind the platen to conceal the message. It read:

HE WAS MURDERED. I KNOW WHY. PIAZZA DI TREVI. 6PM.

The phone rang again. A single, startling ring.

Andrew backed his way across the room, unable to take his eyes off the typewriter.

His hand found the phone and lifted it.

No one was on the line.

* * * * * *