Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation, Vol. 2 (19 page)

Jana nodded. All she could do was hope.

T
he very tanned man filled up an extraordinary amount of space. It was not that he was so large. His presence alone managed to substitute for volume. As he stood next to the shop window watching the reflections from across the street, the pedestrians gave him a wide berth. It was not because he appeared fearsome, but because he was “
formidable,
” as the French might say, someone with whom you would not trifle.

The man had picked this window deliberately. It even had a mirror in one segment of its display case, which fit his needs better than the other windows on the street. He had been standing on the same spot for an hour, actually enjoying the show that passed by.

He viewed people as if they were in a performance being staged just for him. Some were good actors; some were bad actors. He would, in time, remove the bad actors from his stage. After all, they were just objects to amuse him, to please him, to do his bidding. If they didn’t, he would make sure that they could no longer act on his stage. It was all very simple.

The man would occasionally move his head slightly, catching different reflective angles. One of his slight turns caught her coming down the street. He knew her at once, the description and the small picture sent to him fitting her like a stencil.

She was not too tall or short and carried herself well, shoulders back and head erect, without looking masculine. She had an overall air of confidence without losing her femininity. A good combination for a woman police officer. He would have to think carefully about his approach to the problem she presented.

She went into her hotel, and almost immediately the man saw Tutungian. A new element in the play. The watcher was momentarily angry with himself for not taking into account that the policewoman might be followed.

He shifted his feet, angling for a different view of the reflections in the window, irritated that he might have given himself away. He had moved too quickly. Moving objects are perceived more readily than stationary ones. The movement catches the eye, particularly the eyes of those who are anxious about their own safety. Tutungian was one of them.

The man quickly shed his anger. He was rarely angry at himself, and seldom stayed angry at others. Anger is a wasteful emotion that only drains you. Besides, everyone was an object, and who could get angry over objects? Tutungian, though, was a man who suffered deep angers and nurtured longterm revenge. Too bad for Tutungian, not to understand and use his time in a wiser way.

He watched even more closely. No reaction from Tutungian. Good. Tutungian had
not
seen him. He was pleased. If the man had been in Tutungian’s place, he would have discovered the watcher. One of the major differences between himself and people like Tutungian.

Tutungian walked past the hotel, loitered for a while, then went inside. The tanned man did not have to see Tutungian’s actions to know what he was doing. He had waited until the policewoman cleared the lobby, then gone inside to book a room at the same hotel, on the floor where the woman was staying. Tutungian would already have her room number. He’d make an excuse as to why he wanted the particular floor she was staying on without mentioning her name. Some silly excuse would do: superstition, lucky number, anything would be acceptable to the room clerk. Then, a false passport when he registered, as he explained why his bags would arrive later.

The man thought for a moment, the thought pleasing him. He made a small wager with himself that he was right: The false name that Tutungian was using would begin with an A for his given name and a T for his surname. One of the consistent mistakes that Tutungian made was the egotism that drove him to wear monogrammed shirts. Therefore, his passport and his registration required the initials A.T., matching the shirt. Otherwise the clerk might notice the difference.

There was a positive aspect to this, the man granted Tutungian: A matching monogram always eased the methodical minds of desk clerks. No man would go through the trouble of having a falsely monogrammed shirt. Ergo, he had to be the real A.T.

Twenty minutes later, Tutungian left the hotel, time enough for him to have checked in, gone up to his room to avoid leaving the hotel immediately after checking in, then come down through the lobby. He headed down the block, no cares, not paying any real attention to people on the street. He was no longer following the policewoman. Tutungian’s defenses would be down. He was the stalker, not the quarry.

Tutungian never saw the tanned, healthy-looking man fall in behind him. Even if he had been alert, he would not have seen him. The man was too adroit at losing himself on a street through years of practice undergone through necessity. Tutungian’s unawareness simply made it easier for the man to keep company with him, and easier for him to remove this actor from the stage. It was merely a question of how and when.

T
he fax was waiting for Jana at the desk when she picked up her key. It was from Trokan, two pages, including a caution that it was not to be shared with anyone except Levitin. She read it through, than called Levitin’s room, asking him to come down to her room.

Everything one does revolves around motivation, she thought. Fanatics have a warped abundance of it; businessmen, the most successful of them, have nearly as much as fanatics; nations have it as the sum total of their people’s desires, often skewed badly through the centuries, so they devour and conquer other peoples. For individuals, it varied. She read the fax again and wondered how Levitin’s motivation might have warped him.

Jana heard the knock and admitted Levitin. He sat on the easy chair, slouching, trying to stretch out his long legs.

“I’m still tired. Jet lag is catching up with me.” He yawned. “I called you for breakfast, but you were out.”

“I saw my son-in-law.”

“So, will you now get to see your daughter and grandchild in Nice?”

Jana’s mouth immediately became dry, her teeth involuntarily clamping together. She stifled a retort, angry at his invasion of her private space. Levitin, on the other hand, made himself even more comfortable, stretching out farther, giving out an audible groan of pleasure. She snapped out a command: “Take your shoes off if you are going to put those large feet of yours on my bed!!”

Levitin showed no emotional response to Jana’s irritation, merely wiggling out of his shoes, dropping them to the floor. She noticed that he was wearing athletic socks, rather incongruous with his formal attire of suit and tie.

“And you need to wear dark socks to coordinate with your other clothes.” Her commanding tone softened and dropped down a notch, losing its edge.

“You are not my mother,” Levitin pointed out.

“Why white socks? You are generally fairly careful about your dress.” Before he answered her, Jana came up with it. “You are allergic to the miserable dyes in Russian socks, so you wear white. Or, your feet are allergic to artificial fibers, so you wear cotton.”

“You are still being my mother,” he reminded her. “And you are being irritable with me because I checked your background and picked up something you don’t want people to know about.”

“You’re right.” Jana wet her finger and ticked the air, scoring one for the Russian. “Now, am I right about the socks?”

He ticked the air, giving her a point. “Right on, in your entire analysis.”

“Feet have to be taken care of.”

“And the eyes and teeth. My mother, now you.”

“And what part did your sister play in teaching you?” This time it was Levitin’s turn to respond, his face tightening, his lips thinning.

“Researching me this time.”

“I apologize. We have both been slightly uncivil. I needed answers. I knew you were holding back. So I checked.”

“My exact reason for checking on you.”

The edge in Jana’s voice came back. “My hope of seeing my daughter and granddaughter has nothing to do with this case.”

“Your son-in-law may.”

“How did you reach that conclusion?”

“He’s in the middle of everyone involved. He knows all the participants. He even knows the people in the photograph you stole from Foch’s house.”

Jana had considered Jeremy’s connections to all of these people. Only, her thoughts had not reached the category of possible criminality and a need to investigate him.

“You want to consider him as a possible suspect?” She wondered if Levitin had established a hard connection between Jeremy and Koba. “Evidence, please. What concrete items do you have?”

“None. Just that we have to think of all the possibilities so we don’t overlook any.”

“Agreed.” Jana decided to get all the problematic areas laid out. “I received a fax about your sister. And about you. Your sister first. So, tell me about her.”

Levitin had prepared himself for Jana’s questions. He sank even deeper in the chair so that he was almost horizontal. He hesitated, not sure where to begin, than decided to start with the worst.

“My sister, like all young women who now grow up in Moscow, was exposed to cocaine at a party. She used it again, and again. And so became addicted.”

“You tried to help,” Jana guessed. “Your family tried to help. The authorities tried to help. Nothing worked. She disappeared.”

“Worse.” Levitin pursed his lips, hurting, thinking about it. “We knew she went into prostitution. We knew that she was on the street. I looked for her, my mother looked for her, my uncle looked for her. Nothing.”

“Your uncle is the minister who sent you here?”

“Families take care of each other.” His somber mood was broken by an embarrassed giggle. “How do you think I rose so fast in my profession? I’m smart, but nobody is that smart.” He scratched a foot, then put it back on the bed. “I talked to the minister, my uncle, and he sent me here.”

“Why here?”

“We know my sister left Moscow. She saw a woman who was an old school chum before she went. The friend told me that Alexandra, my sister, told her she was coming to France. This conference, then, was the perfect cover for me. I have come, on the surface, to attend this meeting, not to look for my sister.” He scratched the other foot. “Then I found you were a delegate, and I recognized a possible ally.”

Jana came to a rather sad conclusion: Neither of them had come any closer to what they really wanted. She studied Levitin. There was still something awry. Levitin’s face betrayed too much satisfaction. One item, she thought, at least one item in his head he had not told her about: a witness, a piece of evidence he hadn’t revealed, something. Jana decided to push him.

“You found something in Strasbourg?” His expression changed enough to reinforce her belief. “What is it?”

He tried to look blank.

“Levitin, I don’t have time to pretend. You have found some small item.”

He tried to deepen the look of innocence. It only succeeded in making him appear vacuous.

“Levitin, you have made me tired enough.” She kicked at his chair, moving it enough so that he landed on the floor with a small thump. He looked up at her with wide eyes as if to say, “What did I do?”

“Time to give it up, Levitin.”

He thought about her demand and finally nodded. “You have it.”

It was her turn to look blank.

“You have it with you,” he insisted.

“I have it now?”

“Yes.”

Jana went over all the aspects of the case, everything she had done in Ukraine, at the conference. Then she realized the answer. Jana went to her purse, found the photograph she had taken from Foch’s house, the one with her daughter and Jeremy and the others and looked at it closely. No doubt. It was there. She pointed to the woman on the arm of the Czech diplomat who had committed suicide. The facial resemblance was now clear.

“Your sister!”

“My sister,” he acknowledged. Levitin stared at the photograph, happy at seeing her, unhappy at seeing her there.

Ambivalence is a part of human nature.

T
utungian carefully applied pomade to his hair, not too much or it would look greasy, a larger amount on the sides to give his face a slimmer look. When he finished, he stepped back from the mirror for a longer view, then capped the tube and carried it with him into the living room, slipping it into his shaving kit.

Tutungian had already shipped his luggage off; the room looked as empty as when he had arrived. He checked his jacket side pocket. The gloves were still there. He patted his inside breast pocket. Yes, the thin wire with ends attached to the small bar-handles was neatly coiled within. The handles were important. Tutungian had once garroted a rival gangster without using handles and the garrote had cut into his palms when he tightened the wire around the man’s throat. No reason to let that happen again.

There was a knock at the door, and he heard the landlady calling for him. “Monsieur Tillo.
Le taxi est arrivé.
” He enjoyed hearing her use the name he had given her when he rented the small apartment.

“
Merci,
Madame.” He exhausted most of his small knowledge of French with his use of the minimal “oui,” “non,” and “merci.” Tutungian was uncomfortable here. He was always uneasy when he was forced to leave his country. He had no desire to be here; but until his business was concluded, he had no choice if he wanted to return home eventually. His employer did not react positively to independent conduct or mistakes.

Tutungian took a last look around. Satisfied upon his second examination that he had left nothing, Tutungian walked to the door and, with his usual caution, opened it, stepping to the side, ready for whoever might be waiting out there for him. Nothing. He stepped into the hall, then relaxed. It was always the most dangerous time, coming out of an apartment. You could never be assured there was no one lying in wait until you actually took the first step.