The Sisters (11 page)

The thin young man was in fact the Sisters' man Friday. "What makes you think I am American?" he asked. He spoke fluent Russian, but with a pronounced Brooklyn accent.

"There is always an American at the end of the line," the Potter said moodily. "Besides, Oskar spoke about his people collecting money for the information I would provide." The Potter lowered himself into a folding metal chair. "The only ones with money to spare these days are the Americans."

Thursday didn't find this comment to his taste. "You miss the point if you think of this in terms of money," he observed. "We are fighting atheistic international Communism-"

The Potter cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Spare me, if you please, your Sermon on the Mount."

The skin on Thursday s neck reddened. "Your kind could do with a little bit of Sermon on the Mount!" He burst out giggling. "Suppose," he suggested in English, a gleam in his protruding eyes, "we talk turkey."

"Suppose," the Potter agreed, though he was not quite sure what the expression meant. Reluctance welled up in him like bile. Betraying Piotr Borisovich into the hands of this giggling preacher who sat across the desk from him seemed . . . grotesque If he could stall long enough, he still had the package he had recovered from the old man's cottage.

"As I understand it," Thursday continued, switching back to Russian, leaning across his desk, flicking his tongue over his lips in expectation, "you are to show your appreciation for your deliverance by giving me three items of information."

"That is not the order of things I had in mind," the Potter said.

"Before I pay my way, I will want some indication from your superiors"-

his way of saying that he considered Thursday too junior to deal with-"concerning my and my wife's future." ("My future," Piotr Borisovich once exclaimed in a moment of intense depression-he had been quoting the poet Akhmatova at the time, and his words had made a deep impression on the Potter-"is in my past." Curiously, the old man had used the same expression the night he died.)

Thursday started to giggle again when a telephone hidden away in a desk drawer rang. He yanked open the drawer and placed the telephone on the desk. It was one of those old-fashioned European models, black, with a second earpiece that you could unhook and hold to your free ear. "Yes,"

Thursday said into the mouthpiece in English, staring all the time across the desk at the Potter with his goiter eyes. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, "I see," he said slowly. "Really,"

he said. "With a length of potter's wire?" he said. He clucked his tongue. "I wonder who could have done such a naughty thing," he said. "I appreciate the call," he said. He dropped the receiver onto its cradle and hooked the earpiece back into place. "Well," Thursday observed,

"that more or less changes everything, doesn't it?"

There was a commotion in the hangar below. Svetochka's stiletto heels beat out a panicky rhythm as she raced up the steel staircase. Homburg and Galoshes pounded up the steps after her. All three burst into the room. Svetochka lurched into the Potter's arms. Homburg, his face beet red from exertion, said, "She started to scream something about wanting to see him. There were workers around. I didn't want to attract attention, so I let her come in. She saw the light and ran up before we could stop her."

Thursday waved Svetochka to another of the folding metal chairs. She sat on the edge of it and crossed her legs. Thursday was distracted by the glimpse of thigh. "To pick up where we left off," he told the Potter, slipping into his Brooklyn-accented Russian, "you were on the verge of disclosing to me three items of information."

The Potter felt as if the four walls were pressing in on him. voices suddenly reverberated. The bulb overhead seemed unbearably bright. These were things that happened in nightmares. If only this were taking place in a dream; in a nightmare even! "I am ready to cooperate," he replied carefully, feeling his way, "as soon as we have established the framework within which each increment of cooperation is compensated by an increment of . . ."

Thursday was giggling excitedly. "You sound like a lawyer playing for time, but that is the one thing you don't have. Time, friend, is what you've run out of. An Aeroflot flight for Moscow leaves here in"-he peered at his wristwatch-"twenty-seven minutes. You and the young lady will be placed on that plane by my associates here unless you supply me with the information I want."

It dawned on Svetochka that the young man leering at her through round lenses was proposing to send them back. "You know, Feliks, you must tell him," she whispered in the voice of a schoolteacher instructing a stubborn pupil.

"Our Russian friends," Thursday continued, "will be only too happy to get their hands on you. It seems that they are investigating a murder that took place in the airport just before the plane you were on departed. A man was strangled to death in a storage room near the toilets. The only clue was a length of potter's wire found next to the body. During the war, if I remember correctly, strangling was your trademark-"

"Feliks!" Svetochka breathed. She sat back on her folding metal chair and stared at the Potter. She was very frightened. "If you go back," she moaned, "they will say that I was your accomplice. They will put both of us up against walls and shoot us!"

Thursday sensed the moment had come to mix in a carrot or two. "As soon as you've given me the three items that were agreed upon," he told the Potter in what he thought was a soothing voice, "we will arrange for you to be taken to a small hotel in Vienna. You will be very comfortable.

You will undergo the usual debriefing. At the same time, concrete arrangements will be made for your future. It is understood by everyone concerned that you will eventually want to settle in Paris." Thursday waved an arm at Homburg and Galoshes, and they backed out of the room, closing the door behind them. "Paris," Thursday added, as if it were the detail that could tip the scale, "is supposed to be beautiful in the fall."

"For God's sake," Svetochka cried, "for Svetochka's sake, tell him what he wants to know."

Thursday fought down an urge to giggle; his face contorted as if he were suppressing a yawn. He spread his hands awkwardly, palms up, as if to say: It is up to you, friend.

Carroll's cheek muscle had gone on another rampage. Francis felt giddy, as if he had flown too high without oxygen, or drunk too much champagne.

Carroll read what Francis had written on his yellow legal pad: "He is living under the assumed name of Peter Raven."

Francis reached for the pad and added, "The Potter would know the name because he was the one who worked out the legend with the sleeper."

Carroll brought a damp palm to his cheek to pacify the twitching muscle.

"The awakening signal," he scribbled on his pad, "is a line from Walt Whitman: The hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world.' The i in 'Night' is to be dotted with a microdot containing the location of a dead-letter drop.

The dead-letter drop will have in it an innocent-looking advertisement containing numbered microdots that give the details of the mission he is assigned."

Francis wrinkled up his face as if he had swallowed something bitter.

"Thursday says the Potter selected as an awakening signal a line of poetry that both he and his sleeper admired," he wrote. Out loud he added, "Shows he had bad taste. Personally I never liked Whitman. All those unbuttoned shirts! All that hair on his chest! He was a poser. It follows that his poetry is a pose.

Carroll looked at the deciphered cable again. "The sleeper is living in a brownstone at number I45 Love Apple Lane in Brooklyn Heights," he wrote.

"Do we know exactly how the Potter knew that?" Francis asked.

Carroll carefully wrote out, "Thursday says the Potter received a picture postcard in the mail one day, with a photograph of the house on it, from his sleeper. Walt Whitman once lived in the brownstone. There's a bronze plaque next to the door. 'Here lived-' That sort of thing. The sleeper couldn't resist telling the Potter he was living in Whitman's house. So he sent him a picture postcard with some banal message on it."

Francis snickered. "Having a great time. Wish you were here,' he said out loud.

Carroll did something he rarely did-he looked directly at the person he was speaking to. "We have gotten our hands on a perfect criminal," he said.

"I suppose we have," Francis agreed in a voice that held more than a trace of awe in it.

Carroll was ignoring forests and lingering over trees: what form the awakening signal would take; how it would be delivered; where the first dead-letter drop would be (Francis was partial to country drops, which is to say places rarely frequented, while Carroll, who saw safety in numbers, favored city drops); how much money should initially be given to the sleeper (Carroll and Francis planned to finance the venture on a fifty-fifty basis); making arrangements at the inn in Pennsylvania (they had already procured the rifle; one of them would have to drive out and plant it there before the sleeper arrived). Nuts and bolts. Details. The kind of thing that bored Francis to death, but gave Carroll an orgasm.

As it was a Tuesday, Francis had stopped by his apartment long enough to change into more casual clothing, then had driven downtown to his favorite delicatessen for a hot roast-beef sandwich on rye with half sour pickles on the side. Later he walked over to the movie theater two blocks farther east and bought a ticket to see Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey in Butterfield 8. He had missed the film when it first came around, and was delighted to have a chance to see it. He got there early and had no trouble finding a good seat in the smoking section. The house filled up, the lights went out, the film flashed on. Not surprisingly. Francis had difficulty concentrating on the movie. Too many thoughts competed for attention in his head. Normal intelligence activities involved, at best, small triumphs- "taste treats" is what Carroll, thinking no doubt of his candies, called them-which gave the illusion of having some impact on current events. But only one in ten thousand-a Sorge, for instance, whose information from Tokyo permitted Stalin to thin out his defenses against the Japanese and concentrate on the Germans-really affected the course of history. Well, Francis too was going to affect history.

The music built to a crescendo. The image on the screen began to fade out. Francis extracted a cigarette from a pack and reached into his jacket pocket for a book of matches. He had given up smoking years before on medical advice, and only treated himself to a cigarette at the end of his regular Tuesday-night film. As always on these occasions, there was a single match left in the book. Francis used it to light his cigarette, inhaled, tossed the empty matchbook under his seat, and smiling as if he had nothing more weighty on his conscience than the death of a rodent, headed for the entrance and the warm, moist September air.

The first people to arrive for the ad-hoc Damage Control Board meeting at the retired general's house were the Center's handymen. Wielding odd-looking devices that they plugged in and maneuvered like vacuum cleaners, they proceeded to "clean" house. What they were looking for were magnetic fields, the kind given off by hidden microphones. What they found was one earring, lost by the general's wife months before, and several coins that had slipped behind the cushions of a couch.

The general's study, on the second floor of a private house on Lenin Hills, had a splendid view of the city, and the guests who had never been up to the room before made appropriate noises of appreciation. A soccer match was in progress in the Lenin Stadium, across the river, and every once in a while a roar, not unlike the sound of surf pounding against a shore, wafted up.

"Does anyone happen to know the score?" the GRU man asked.

"One-zero in favor of Dynamo," announced the Central Committee representative, "but that was as of fifteen minutes ago."

"Did you catch the move the Bulgarian wingback put on the Dynamo goalie last week?" asked the lieutenant colonel representing the Party Control Commission. "His hips went one way and his body the other."

The KGB's Second Chief Directorate man offered around his pack of Chesterfields. "Will someone please tell me why is it we have a defection every time Spartacus has a home game? I'd like to know if there is a connection between the two.

"It's an American plot," quipped the GRU man, "to drive us crazy."

There was the sound of a thin baton tapping along the wooden floor. The people at the window exchanged glances. Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate usually sent someone over to these postmortem sessions in case of a decision to eliminate the defector. But for one of the Cousins to show up meant that they were dealing with no ordinary defection.

"This could turn out to be more interesting than the soccer game," the representative from the Politburo whispered to the others.

The blind man found a seat at the long table with his baton and settled into it. The others in the room followed suit. The general, wearing well-tailored civilian clothes with an Order of Lenin conspicuous on his breast, limped into the room and took his place at the head of the table. "The score is one-one, he announced in a gruff voice. "Zhilov scored with a bullet from thirty meters. Anyone wants mineral water, help yourselves. Don't stint. I don't pay. The state does. What's on our plate today?"

The KGB's Second Chief Directorate man, the specialist on defectors, pulled a dossier trom a plastic portfolio. "Turov," he read, "Feliks Arkantevich."

The general's eyebrows arched up. "The old novator from the sleeper school?"

"The same' acknowledged the KGB man. "He and his wife were booked onto a flight to the Crimea two days ago. Instead they wound up on a scheduled flight to Vienna. It all looks as if it was very well organized. It may have been the Israelis; Turov is a jew. It may have been one of the emigre groups working on a German leash. Whoever it was supplied him with false papers, reservations, even two people to take their places on the Crimea flight."