The Company: A Novel of the CIA (127 page)

"I have seen the future," Torriti muttered aloud, "and it needs work!" The Sorcerer was still digesting his first impressions—could this really be the Socialist prototype that had threatened to "bury" (to use Khrushchev's term) the Western democracies?—when he thrust his arms into an Aquascutum and ventured out into the cool Moscow evening. He went through some basic tradecraft drills—the KGB was demoralized and underfunded but it was still there!—ducking between two buildings on the Arbat and waiting in the shadows of the garbage bin behind one of them to see if he was being followed, then trudging through labyrinthian alleyways crammed with corrugated private garages until he came to a wide boulevard. He stepped off the curb and raised a forefinger. Sure enough a gypsy cab screeched to a stop within seconds. Torriti had a hard time fitting his bulk through the narrow rear door of the Russian-manufactured Fiat; once inside he produced the index card with an address written in Cyrillic, along with a recently minted ten-dollar bill. The driver, a young man who looked as if he were suffering from terminal acne, turned out to be a Russian kamikaze; he snatched both items out of Torriti's fingers and, cackling at the fury he aroused in other drivers as he corkscrewed through traffic, took his passenger on as wild a ride as the Sorcerer had ever experienced. Jammed into the back seat, he shut his eyes and fought the queasiness that comes when the viscera slush like bilge water through the abdominal cavity. After what seemed like an eternity, he heard the screech of brakes and felt the automobile skid to a stop. Pushing open the back door, abandoning ship with an adroitness that came from terror, he sniffed at the burnt rubber in the air. It took a minute or two before he got his land legs back. He heard the faint sound of Vienna waltzes booming from loudspeakers a football field away. Pulling a moth-eaten scarf up around his neck, he started toward the brilliant lights illuminating the Park of Rest and Culture, an immense amusement mall on the outskirts of the city where, during the winter months, whole avenues were flooded so that ice skaters could skim along for kilometers on end.

Even after the spring thaw, so Torriti had been informed, there were barnfires blazing on the edge of the avenues every so often. His insteps were aching by the time he shambled over to the fourth fire from the right, burning in an enormous industrial drum. A handful of joggers and roller skaters stood around it, warming their hands, passing around a flask, chatting amiably. On the avenue, under the blinding lights, teenage girls in thigh-length skirts and woolen stockings strolled in lock step with other girls, boys walked backward before their girlfriends, small children tottered along hand in hand with a parent. A thin man of medium height, wearing a windbreaker and a peaked worker's cap, came over from the avenue and held his hands over the fire, toasting one side and then the other. After a moment he looked hard at Torriti. Then, turning, he walked away from the drum. The Sorcerer pulled a flask from the pocket of the Aquascutum and fortified himself with a shot of cheap Scotch. Warmed by the alcohol, he backed away from the group and nonchalantly trailed after the figure in the windbreaker. He caught up with him in the penumbra between a stand of pitch-dark fir trees and the blaze of incandescence from a spotlight atop a crane.

"So that you, Kritzky?" Torriti demanded.

Leo was put off by his tone. "You haven't changed," he shot back.

"I've changed, sport. Fatter. Older. Wiser. Lonelier. Nervouser. More afraid of dying. Less afraid of death."

"I remember you in your heyday," Leo said. "I remember you tearing some secret stuff that came over the ticker out of Bobby Kennedy's hand—it was right after the Bay of Pigs. I remember you telling him where he could shove it."

The Sorcerer blew his nose between two fingers onto the ground. "Made a big mistake," he allowed.

"How's that?"

"Bobby was his brother's son of a bitch, okay, but he wasn't a spy for the Russians. You fucking were. I must have been slowing down not to see it. Ought to have told you where to shove it."

"Yeah. Well, here we are."

"Here is where we are," Torriti acknowledged.

"You still drink your way through the day?"

"You still lie your way through the day?"

Leo managed a forlorn smile. "You always treat your sources this way?"

"My Apprentice said you got ahold of a mole inside this Gorbachev thing. He told me to milk you. He didn't say nothing about climbing into bed with you."

From the loud speakers fixed to telephone poles came the sound of the Red Army chorus bellowing out "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" in what might have been English. Leo stepped closer to the Sorcerer and handed him an old envelope with a grocery list on one side. "I have seven more names to add to the ones I gave Jack," he hollered over the music. "They're written on the inside of the envelope in lemon juice. You pass an iron over it—"

Torriti was offended. "I wasn't born yesterday, sport. I was developing lemon juice before you went to work for the Russians."

"One of the new conspirators is the commander of the elite paratrooper unit in the Ryazan Airborne Division," Leo went on. "Another is the commander of the KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division."

"The plot sickens," Torriti shouted back with a sneer.

"There's more. It's written inside facing the list of names. Are you sober enough to remember—this is important?"

The Sorcerer leaned toward Leo and exhaled into his face. "I was sober enough to make it to this workers' paradise. Sober enough to find you here."

"The plotters have made contact with right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. For starters there's something called the August 21 Group in Madrid. There's Le Pens National Front in France. There are splinter groups in Germany and Italy and Austria and Serbia and Croatia and Rumania and Poland. They plan to dole out money to these groups, once all the funds have been transferred to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. The idea is to orchestrate a wave of international support for the coup against Gorbachev. They plan to present Gorbachev as a bungler who was running Russia into the ground, and the putsch as a patriotic effort to put the country back on its feet. If enough voices across Europe repeat this line the public may begin to think there's some truth in it."

The Sorcerer crumpled the envelope in his fist and stashed it in a pocket. "Where, when do we meet again?" he wanted to know.

"Where are you staying?"

Torriti told him.

"What's your cover?"

"I came armed with a briefcase full of John Deere brochures. Between drinks I'm trying to find someone who wants to import American tractors."

Leo thought a moment. "Okay. If I think we need to meet I'll have a bottle of Scotch delivered to room 505, along with a note thanking you for the John Deere material. The note will be written in ink. Between the lines, in lemon juice, I'll name a time and a place you can find easily."

Torriti started to walk away, then turned back with an afterthought. "Don't send up any of those imported Scotches. I prefer the cheap shit that disinfects the throat."

"Worried about germs?" Leo asked.

"Been inoculated against germs," Torriti snapped. "It's the traitors who make me sick to my stomach."

The Druzhba Hotel made the Ukraine look like the Ritz, or so the Sorcerer decided as he pushed through the mirrored door into the shabby lobby filled with tarnished mirrors and ceiling-to-floor window drapes that must have been put up before the Revolution and hadn't been dry cleaned since. Faded didn't begin to describe them. Pity the poor visitor who might be allergic to dust! Slaloming between ashtrays overflowing with everything but ashes, Torriti approached the main and only desk. "You probably speak English," he told the pasty platinum blonde copying off passport numbers onto a ledger.

The woman, wearing a skin-tight dress made of Army surplus camouflage material, replied without looking up. "Not."

The Sorcerer turned to the half dozen men sitting around the lobby. They were all dressed in identical ankle-length belted leather coats, thick-soled black shoes and dark fedoras with narrow brims. It looked like a casting call for one of Torriti's all-time favorite films, James Cagney's
The Public Enemy
, circa 1931. "Anybody here speak English?" he called.

The woman answered for them. "Not."

"How am I supposed to ask for information if nobody speaks English?" the Sorcerer demanded in exasperation.

"Study Russian," she suggested. "It could be useful in Russia."

"You do speak English!"

"Not."

"Why do I get the feeling I've fallen through the looking glass?" Torriti remarked to nobody in particular.

The woman raised her heavily made-up eyes. "Anybody you want," she ventured, "is not here."

It dawned on the Sorcerer that the thing to do in an insane asylum is humor the inmates. "I don't want anybody," he announced. "I want somebody named Rappaport. Endel Rappaport."

"Yob tvoyu mat," someone called out.

The platinum blonde translated. "He says you, Fuck your mother."

The others giggled at this. Torriti grasped that he was being incited to riot, and a riot would not bring him closer to Endel Rappaport, so he controlled his temper and forced himself to giggle with them.

"Rappaport is a Jew name," one of the extras sitting around the lobby decided.

Torriti pirouetted on a heel to face the speaker. "Is that right?" he said innocently.

The man, a dark-skinned giant with Central Asian eyes, came across the threadbare carpet. "Which sends you to Endel Rappaport?"

"Which which?" the platinum blonde echoed.

"We have a mutual friend. A Rabbi, as a matter of fact, though he has long since given up Rabbi-ing on a daily basis."

"Name?" insisted the man.

"Ezra."

"Ezra his Christian or family name?"

Torriti kept his face expressionless, lest the inmates take offense. Wait till Ezra Ben Ezra learned he had a Christian name! "Both."

"Floor number four," the man said, snapping his head in the direction of the ancient elevator next to the ancient staircase.

"Which door?"

"Any doors, all doors," said the blonde. "He rents the floor."

Backing carefully toward the elevator, Torriti pulled the grille open and thumbed the ivory button with a Roman numeral four on it. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a motor groaned into reluctant activity. The elevator jerked several times in aborted departures, then started with infinitesimal slowness to rise. Two men were waiting on the fourth floor. One of them opened the grille. The other frisked the Sorcerer very professionally, checking the small of his back and his ankles (where he carried the snub-nosed .38 Detective Special in his salad days), as well as the creases in his crotch under his testicles. Satisfied, he nodded to his partner, who pulled a latchkey from a pocket and opened an armor-plated door.

Torriti ambled into a spacious, brightly lit room decorated in Finish imports; stainless steel chairs were gathered around a stainless steel table. Two lean men with vigilant Asian eyes lounged against a lacquered wall. A short, elegantly dressed man with fine white hair leapt from one of the chairs to bow from the waist toward Torriti. His eyes, only half open, fixed themselves intently on the visitor. "You are preceded by your legend, Mr. Sorcerer," he said. "Ben Ezra said me who you used to be. People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week. If you please," he said, nodding toward a chair. "What would give you pleasure?"

Torriti settled heavily into one of the Finish chairs and discovered it was surprisingly comfortable. "A glass," he said.

Endel Rappaport, who must have been pushing eighty, said something in a strange language and, thrusting a fist out of a cuff, pointed with a pinkie. (Torriti couldn't help but notice that it was the only finger remaining on his hand.) One of the men along the wall sprang to attention and threw open the doors of a closet crammed with liquor bottles and glasses. He brought over a crystal goblet. The Sorcerer pulled his flask from an inside pocket and measured out a short Scotch. Rappaport, his maimed hand buried deep in a blazer pocket, returned to his place at the head of the table. "Any friend of Ben Ezra's—" he said, and waved his good hand to indicate that there was no need to complete the sentence. "In your wildest imagination what do you hope I can do for you?"

Torriti glanced at the bodyguards along the wall. Rappaport pursed his lips, a gesture that made him appear gnome-like. "My guardian angels are Uighurs," he informed the Sorcerer. "They speak only Turkic."

"In my wildest imagination I see you arranging to kill eight or ten people for me."

Rappaport didn't flinch. "I sit in awe in the face of such candidness. In Russia people tend to equivocate. So: the going price to have someone killed is between fifteen and twenty-five thousand American dollars, depending."

"On what?"

"On how important he is, which in turn indicates what kind of protection he is likely to have."

The Sorcerer gnawed on the inside of a cheek. Only half in jest he asked, "You being Jewish, me being a friend of the Rabbi's—doesn't that get me a discount?"

"The fee I accept from you will be used to compensate those who could not care less that I am Jewish and you were sent by the Rabbi," Rappaport said quietly. "When it comes time to calculate my honorarium, I will deal directly with Ben Ezra."

Torriti couldn't quite get a handle on Rappaport. How had such an obviously genteel man become a caid in the Moscow underworld? He decided it would help if he knew more about his host. "They had a go at you at some point," he remarked. He pointed with his chins. "I saw the fingers."

"What you saw was the absence of fingers. What a quaint expression you employ—yes, they had a go at me. To begin to understand Russia, you need to know that the average Russian anti-Semite is only remotely related to anti-Semites in the West. Here they are not satisfied with harassing Jews or persecuting Jews, with expelling them from music schools or apartments or cities or even the country. Here they are only satisfied if they can whet an ax and personally sink it into your flesh." Rappaport started to elaborate, then gestured with his good hand; again the sentence didn't need to be finished. "Regarding your request: you will surely have a list."