The Red Horseman (2 page)

“No. She got out that name right up front, so I
wouldn’t call her anything else.”

Rita waited for him to tell her more, but when it
became obvious he wasn’t going to, she
remarked, “She’s very pretty.”

Toad merely grunted.

“Are YOU going to tell me what she said?”

“No.

Rita seemed to accept that with good grace. And she
had gotten out of the car without being asked. She was a
player, Toad told himself, a class act, every inch
the professional Judith Farrell was. Perhaps he
should have been nicer to Farrell.

This thought was still tripping across the synapses when
Rita remarked, “I think You’re still in love with
her. Not like you love me, but you care for her a lot.
That was obvious to her, too. If you didn’t care you
would have been nic-was

“Shut up!” Toad snarled.

“Listen, husband of mine. In three years of
marriage neither one of us has told the other to shut
up. I don’t think-was

“I’m sorry. I retract that.”

“I feel like I’m trapped in a soap opera,”
Rita said. After a pause she added, “And I
don’t like it.”

No fool, Toad Tarkington decided to let
her have the last word.

Later, as they waited for a traffic light,
Rita asked in a normal tone of voice, “So
what does Elizabeth Thorn do for the
Mossad?”

Toad considered before answering. He decided
maybe the truth was best.

“Five years ago she was running a hit
squad. Maybe she still is. She’s a
professional killer. An assassin.”

Toad awoke at dawn on Saturday and took
his clothes into the kitchen to dress so he wouldn’t wake
Rita. After enough coffee had dripped through to make a
cup, he poured himself some and went out into the backyard
of the little tract home he and Rita had purchased
last year near Andrews Air Force Base. The
morning was expectant, still, with the diffused sunlight
hinting of the heat to come in a few hours. Not even the
sound of jet engines of planes from the base. Too
early yet. Someone somewhere was burning last fall’s
leaves, even though it was against the law, and the faint
smell seemed to make the coffee more pungent.

Judith Farrell. Here.

Although he would never admit it to Rita, seeing
Judith had been a jolt.

And Rita knew anyway. Blast women! All
that crap about body language and nonverbal speech
that they expected men to sweat bullets acquiring was
just the latest nasty turn in the eternal war
between the sexes. And if by some miracle you got it they
would think of something else you needed to know to meet tomorrow’s
sensitivity standards. If you suffered from the curse
of the y chromosome. Aagh!

He sat sipping coffee and pondering the male
dilemma.

After a bit his mind turned to Judith
Farrell’s message for Jake Grafton.
Probably Farrell hadn’t tried to contact him
when he was home alone because even he and Rita never
knew when that would be. This was his first free Saturday
this month. That crap about brushing her off…

Well, it was true, he would have.

Someone told Farrell-told the Mossad–that
he and Rita had tickets to that play last night.
Who?

He tried to recall just when and to whom at the
office he might have mentioned that he and Rita were going
last night. It was hazy, but he seemed to recall
that the play had been discussed several times by different
people, and he may have said he had tickets.

He purchased the tickets over a month ago
by calling a commercial ticket outlet and ordering
them. And there was no telling to whom Rita might have
mentioned the planned evening out. It was
certainly no secret.

So that was a dead end. Frustrated, he went
inside and poured himself another cup of coffee.

He got out the envelope and looked again at the
photo.

A very ordinary photo of a very ordinary man..
He held the negative up to the light. It was the
negative of the photo, apparently. Given
to prove the genuineness of the photo.

Okay, so what was there about the photograph that
made it significant?

Toad studied it at a distance of twelve inches’
The guy’s sitting in front of a restaurant.
Where? No way to tell. When? Nothing there either.

Well, Jake Grafton would know what to do with
it.

Grafton always knew how to handle hot
potatoes, a quality that Toad had long ago
concluded was instinctive. The guy could be tossed
blindfolded into a snake pit and still avoid the
poisonous ones.

The water began running in the bathroom. Rita
must be taking a shower.

He replaced the photo and negative in the
envelope and put it into his shirt pocket.

Toad was outside trimming weeds along the fence
when Rita appeared in the door wearing a flight
suit, her hair braided into a bun that was pinned to the
back of her head.

“I’m leaving, Toad.”

He paused and leaned on the fence. “Back for
supper?”

“Yes. Are you going to call Admiral
Grafton?”

“I dunno. Haven’t decided.”

“You are, then.”

Toad resumed the chore of cutting weeds, trying
not to let his temper show.

Rita laughed. He tossed the hedge shears down
and turned his back on her.

In a few seconds she appeared in front of
him. “I love you, Toad-man.”

He snorted. comI’m gonna ditch you and run
off with ol’ Lizzie Thorn.

Won’t be nothing here tonight when you get home
except my dirty underwear and busted tennis
racket.”

She stretched on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.
“See you this evening, lover.”

The numbers … the numbers appalled
him, shocked him, mesmerized him.

He wrote them on the back of an old
envelope that he used as a bookmark.

The stupendous, incomprehensible quantity of
human misery represented by the numbers numbed
him, made it impossible to pick up the book again and
continue reading.

Jake Grafton stared out the window at the swaying
trees in the yard without seeing them, played with his
mechanical pencil, ran his fingers yet again through his
thinning hair.

And he looked again at the envelope. Fifteen
million Russians died fighting the Germans
during World War 1. Fifteen million! Dead!
No wonder the nation came apart at the seams. No
wonder they dragged the czar from his palace and put him
and his family against the wall.

Fifteen million!

The new republic was doomed. The Bolsheviks
plunged the land into a five-year civil war, a
hell of violence, famine and disease that cost another
fifteen million lives. Another fifteen
million!

Then came Josef Stalin and the forced
collectivization of Soviet
agriculture. Here the number was nebulous, an
educated guess. One historian estimated six
million families were murdered or starved
to death-another believed at least ten million men,
women, and children perished; young and old, vigorous and
infirm, those struggling to live and those waiting to die.
The Red Army had gone through thousands of square
miles robbing the peasants of every crumb, every
animal, every Potato and cabbage and edible kernel,
then scaled the districts and waited for every last human
to starve.

Ten million! A conservative estimate,
Jake thought.

Then came the purges. Under Josef Stalin-and
they had called the fourth Ivan “the
Terrible!”-Soviet citizens were worked as slave
labor until they died or were shot in wholesale
lots because they might not be loyal to their Communist
masters. The secret police murder squads had
quotas.

And they filled them. Through the use of show trials
and extorted confessions, the soul-numbing terror was
injected into every nook and cranny of Soviet life.
Citizens in all walks of life denounced one
another in a paranoid hysteria that fed on
human sacrifice. Those who survived the horror
had a word for it: liquidation.

Over twenty million human beings were
liquidated, possibly as many as forty million.
Only God knew the real number and He had
kept the secret.

World War II’-THE raging furnace of war,
famine and disease consumed another twenty-five
million Soviet citizens. Twenty-five
million!

The numbers totaled eighty-five million
minimum. Jake Grafton added the numbers three
times. It was too much.

The human mind could not grasp the significance
of the numerals on the back of the tattered envelope.

Eighty-five million human lives.

It was like trying to comprehend how many stars were in a
galaxy, how many galaxies were in the universe.

“Jake?” His wife stood in the doorway.

“Amy and I are going to the Crystal City
mall. Won’t You come with us?”

He stared at her. She was of medium height, with
traces of gray in her dark hair. She had her
purse in her hand.

“The mall . . .”

“Amy wants to drive.” The youngster had just received
her learner’s permit and was now driving the family
car, but only when Jake was in the front seat with
her. Callie had announced that her nerves were not up
to that challenge and refused the honor.

Jake Grafton rose to his feet and glanced
out the window.

Outside the sun shone weakly from a high, hazy
sky. On TOP-THIS June Saturday all
over America baseball games were in progress,
people were riding bicycles, shopping, buying groceries,
mowing yards, enjoying the balmy temperatures of
June and contemplating the prospect of the whole
summer ahead.

The envelope and its numbers seemed as far away
from this reality as casualty figures from the Spanish
Inquisition.

“Okay,” Jake Grafton told his wife.

He eyed the envelope one last time, then slid it
between the pages of the book. With the book closed the
numbers were hidden; only the top half inch of the
envelope was visible.

Eighty-five million people.

But they were all long dead, as dead as the
pharaohs.

their corpses. Only the numbers survived.

The earth soaked up their tears and blood and
recycled He turned off the light as he left the
room.

Toad Tarkington called after the Graftons
returned from the mall. Callie invited him
to dinner. Five minutes later she answered the
phone again.

“Jack Yocke, Mrs. Grafton. I’m
leaving for an overseas assignment on Monday and I
wondered if I could stop by and chat with your husband this
evening.”

“Why don’t you come to dinner, Jack? Around
six-thirty.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

Callie was amused. She enjoyed entertaining, and
Jack Yocke, a reporter for the Washington
Post, was a frequent guest. Jake habitually
avoided reporters, but Yocke had become a
family friend through an unusual set of
circumstances. And he had never yet turned down a
dinner invitation.

Friends or not, he had the most important
commodity in Washington-access–and he knew
precisely what that was worth. Callie
undoubtedly knew too, Yocke thought: if she ever
thought he had taken advantage of her hospitality
she was perfectly capable of slamming the door in his
face.

“No trouble, Jack,” she told him now. “Where
are you going?”

“Moscow! It’s my first overseas assignment.”
The enthusiasm in his voice was tangible.

Callie stifled a laugh. Yocke had been
maneuvering desperately for two years to get an
overseas assignment. Other than a short jaunt
to Cuba, he had spent most of his five years at
the Post on the metro beat covering police and
local politics. “Good things come to those who
wait,” she told him.

“Actually,” Yocke said, lowering his voice
conspiratorially, “I got the nod because our number
two man over there had a family emergency and had
to come home. My biggest asset is that I’m
single.”

“And you’ve been asking for an overseas
assignment.”

“Begging might be a better word.”

“Moscow? He’s going to Moscow?” Jake
Grafton repeated when his wife went into the
study to give him the news.

Callie nodded. “Moscow. It’s dangerous
over there, I know, but this is a big break for him
Professionally.” She left the room to see about
dinner.

“He’ll certainly have plenty to write about,”
Jake Grafton remarked to himself as he surveyed
the piles of books, newspapers and magazines
strewn over the desk and credenza.

He was reading everything he could lay hands on these
days about the Soviet Union, the superpower that had
collapsed less than two years ago and was now
racked by turmoil. Like a ramshackle old house
that had withstood the winds and storms long past its time,
the Communist empire fell suddenly, imploded,
shattered like old crystal all in a heap. Now
ethnic feuds, runaway inflation, famine and a
gradual disintegration of the social order were fueling
the expanding flames.

“Plenty,” Grafton muttered listlessly.

Yocke’s enthusiasm for his new adventure set
the tone at dinner. Almost thirty, tall and lean,
he regarded his new assignment as a great
challenge. “I can’t stand to go into that District
Building one more time. This is my chance to get
out of metro once and for all.

His chance to get famous, Jake Grafton thought,
but he didn’t hold that against him didn’t say it.
The young reporter oozed ambition, and the one of the
essential ingredients to a life of great accom im.
Ambition seemed to plishments. Lincoln had it, and
Churchill, Roosevelt…

Hitter. Josef Stalin.

Grafton played with his food as Jack Yocke
talked about Russia. Toad Tarkington seemed
preoccupied and quieter than usual. Tonight he
listened to Yocke without comment.

“It’s hard to imagine the Russian empire
without a powerful bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy was firmly entrenched by 1650 and
became indispensable under Peter the Great.

It was the tool the czars used to administer the
empire, to run the state. The Bolsheviks just
adopted it pen and paper clips when they took over.
The problem at the end was that the bureaucracy lost the
capability of providing. The infernal machine just
ground to a halt and nothing on this earth could get it
started again without the direct application of force.”