The Sisters (16 page)

The last months at the school were spent working up the Sleeper's legend-the identity under which he would penetrate and live in the United States. (It was at this point that the wild-eyed Uzbek took the Sleeper in hand and taught him how to make mobiles.) Together the Potter and the Sleeper pored over source books compiled over the years by KGB

agents in the United States, working out addresses where the Sleeper had lived as a child, places he had vacationed at, descriptions of his parents and the location of their tombstones, the names and descriptions of neighbors, of schools he had attended, of jobs he had worked at, of his bosses and coworkers, even of girls he had dated. No item was too small to include in the Sleeper's biography; it was the odd detail, the Potter stressed again and again, that would convince an interrogator that a suspect was telling the truth. The fact that someone lisped when he talked, that a girl wore padded brassieres, that a drugstore where the Sleeper had worked as a fountain clerk specialized in egg creams (which the Sleeper learned how to make in case anyone should ever ask him), were priceless pearls in the necklace of the Sleeper's new identity.

Through it all the two men developed a relationship that provided the Potter with the son he had never been able to father, and the Sleeper with a surrogate father. As the Potter had predicted, the Sleeper found himself attacking his studies with an ardor designed to impress his mentor and earn his approval. And the Potter discovered in his last, best sleeper the rarest of Soviet birds-a kindred spirit.

From the moment that they consecrated their budding friendship-when each, in turn, uttered something which, if reported to the authorities, could get him fired or jailed or even shot-there had been an unspoken complicity between them. For each of them, the part of their relationship that had to do with friendship outweighed the part of their relationship that had to do with work.

Eventually the Potter took the Sleeper to the American warehouse located in the basement of one of the KGB's safe houses, which is the point at which Piotr Borisovich understood that school was almost out. The Potter supplied him with American clothes, and instructed him to wear them so that when he was infiltrated into America they would no longer be new.

Cracking open a bottle of Bison vodka that night, the Potter presented to his pupil a scroll announcing that he had been appointed a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. The Sleeper was touched, not so much by the rank, but by the fact that he owed the appointment to the novator.

When it came time to leave, the Potter accompanied the Sleeper to the airport in his chauffeured limousine. In the parking lot near the terminal, they both became tense. They started off toward the terminal together, not daring to look at one another, the Potter walking as if he were following a coffin. The Sleeper indicated with a gesture that it would be better if he went on alone. He could see that the Potter was at a loss for words; was fearful that if he found them, whatever he said would sound foolish. The Sleeper emitted a thin, brittle laugh and turned on his heel and stalked off. He could feel the Potter's eyes boring into him; could sense the depth of the affection in the Potter's regard. But when he gave in and glanced back, the Potter had already turned toward his limousine.

The Sleeper understood that both of them suspected their paths would never cross again.

That there was a Man Friday network was due to a peculiar quirk of office egos. The young assistants had the security clearances of their masters, but the status of field mice, which meant that they didn't have the rank to take meals in the senior dining room, or the grace to eat with the groundlings. The result was a cozy Man Friday clubroom on the fourth floor, with a soft-drink vending machine in one corner and a pool table on which many a man Friday sharpened his eye.

"Eight ball in the side pocket," said the Deputy Director's man Friday, whose name was Harry. "What's this about your Potter skipping town before the farmers could milk him?"

Thursday watched with bulging eyes as Harry drew a bead on the eight ball. "How did you hear about it?" he asked.

Harry dispatched the cue ball into the eight ball, and the eight ball into the side pocket. "Four ball straight in," he said. "The Sisters' Op Proposal updater passed through the Deputy Director's in basket, which just happens to be on my desk." With a flick of his wrist, he sank the four ball.

"Yeah, well, the Austrians were about as amateur as they come," Thursday explained. He giggled at the thought of how amateur they had been.

"And the Potter, obviously, was an old pro," Harry added with more than a trace of arrogance as he surveyed the table for another shot.

"That was it exactly,' Thursday agreed quickly. "The amateurs versus the old pro."

"Seven ball is dead in the corner," announced Harry.

Thursday squinted at the seven ball. "I've got five bucks says it's not."

"You're on." Leaning over the table, the Deputy Director's man Friday sent the cue ball into the one ball, and the seven, which was touching the one, was propelled straight into the corner pocket.

"Shit," said the Sisters' man Friday.

"You were in Vienna, weren't you?" Harry asked casually. "Fourteen in the side."

Thursday sensed that some of the blame for the loss of the Potter's warm body might rub off on him. "It was a German show,' he said defensively.

"I was only there to skim off the cream."

"Oh?" Harry seemed mildly surprised. "There was no mention of any cream in the Sisters updater.' He shot and missed.

Thursday shrugged. "I don't know what's in the updater," he said, "but I got what I was sent to get." He studied the table for a shot, but couldn't find one. "I'll play safe," he announced.

"And what is it you were sent to get?" Harry asked.

"Listen," Thursday said uneasily, "I work for the Sisters."

"Just between us," Harry coaxed, "I'm curious to know what the cream was."

Thursday tapped the cue ball lightly, burying it behind a group of balls next to the cushion. He giggled with pleasure at the shot. "If it'll get no further than this room," he said.

Two old hags lugging enormous plastic shopping hags were systematically searching through garbage cans in the alley behind the Brooklyn Eagle Building, and the Sleeper had to wait until they finished their scavenging before he could approach the dead-letter drop. He counted down four garages from the corner, then slipped between the wooden fence that marked the limit of the garden behind the Eagle Building and the side of the garage, and began searching for the brick with the word

"Mother" chalked on it. It will all boil down, the Potter had once told him with an embarrassed smile, to whether, when you search for your first set of instructions, you do so with a sense of urgency. The Sleeper had been struck by the Potter's choice of words at the time. Why urgency? he had asked curiously. Because urgency, the Potter had replied, is what modern war has lost. My principal task as novator, as I see it, is to instil in my sleepers the sense of urgency that was present when the person you were shooting at was also shooting at you.

The Sleeper found the brick, opened his pocket-knife and began to pry it out with the blade. To his satisfaction, he discovered he was working with a sense of urgency; his pulse pounded, his skin tingled with urgency. For a fleeting moment he thought he might lose control of his bladder in his desire to get to the heart of the dead-letter drop, He worked the brick free and bent to peer into the hole. There was nothing in it; no instructions, no war to go to, shooting or otherwise. He reached in and searched the drop with his fingertips- and found the small, squat metallic capsule wedged into a crack at the back of the opening. The capsule had been dulled with black shoe polish so as not to attract attention. The Sleeper replaced the brick, unscrewed the capsule, removed the scrap of paper and threw the capsule into the space behind the garage full of bottle shards and rusted tins.

At first glance, the message looked like a printed advertisement for a Brooklyn firm specializing in cleaning coat furnaces. But the paper felt odd to the touch- probably because it had been coated with potassium permanganate, a normal precaution to make sure it would ignite when exposed to the slightest heat.

Back home in his workshop, the Sleeper examined the leaflet with a magnifying glass, spotted three i's with dots that looked suspiciously thick, and went to work. He carefully pried the dots off" with an Xacto blade, then deposited them one at a time on the lens of his microdot reader.

Once again his skin tingled with a sense of urgency.

The microdots were numbered. The first instructed him to pack a bag and leave home within one hour of having read the order. It listed an interim destination, and told him what kind of transportation to use. It also told him what kind of weapon he would find at the interim destination.

The second microdot identified his ultimate destination, and specified his itinerary and the pace at which he should travel in order to arrive there on a specific day. It cautioned that he was not to arrive early.

The third microdot identified the target, listed the day and hour of his arrival in the city, traced the routes he could take to get from the airport to the luncheon site, discussed in very general terms angles of fire, distances at which the weapon could be considered accurate, how many shots the Sleeper might reasonably expect to fire, escape routes from the scene of the crime and, eventually, from the country. On completion of the mission, the microdot added, the Sleeper would be repatriated to the Motherland and sent into luxurious retirement. This was to be his first, and last, assignment.

The Sleeper read the name of the target again to make sure he had gotten it right. Any levelheaded person would panic at the idea; panic, it seemed to him, was the only sensible response to such an order. Did he really believe that he would go through with it? But if he didn't at least try to obey his orders, his father would suffer. So, too, would his surrogate father, the Potter; for it was a principle of the sleeper school that the Potter's career was tied to the success or failure of his students.

Overhead, one of the Sleeper's mobiles swayed gently in currents of air.

The beak-shaped end of it dipped like a duck drinking from a puddle, until the fulcrum worked its magic and the beak lifted. The whole business of spying, the Sleeper realized, was a kind of mobile: the Potter, his wife, the Sleeper, his father, the Merchants in Moscow who thought up projects for him. But where in all this was the fulcrum to be found?

The Sleeper struck a match and brought the flame near the edge of the printed leaflet. The paper exploded into flame with a whooshing sound and he had to drop it in the sink to avoid being singed. A stinging odor filled the attic. The Sleeper opened a window to air it out.

"What's that smell?" Millie called from the upstairs bedroom. "Kaat, something's burning in the attic. Come quickly! Kaat!"

Kaat and Millie came racing up the stairs to the door of the attic workshop, Kaat with her soft sandal tread, Millie with her spiked heels stabbing the floorboards. "Peter?" Kaat called through the locked door.

"Open up," Millie chimed in. She banged a fist against the door,

"I'm coming," called the Sleeper. He quickly copied off his itinerary on the back of an envelope, put his microdot reader away, ran some water in the basin and washed the three microdots and the ashes down the drain.

Then he opened the door for the two women.

"What's up?" Kaat said, sniffing away as if she were hunting truffles, relieved to see that the entire attic was not going up in flames.

"He's not up!" Millie joked, glancing lewdly at the Sleeper's crotch. "I suppose there has to be a first time for everything," she added with a sigh.

"Don't be vulgar," Kaat snapped at Millie.

Millie, who was four years younger and a head shorter than Kaat, pouted.

"What's vulgar about an erection?" she demanded. Her nostrils, which were large to begin with, flared. "Vulgarity is in the ear of the be-listener. Anyway, that's what my math teacher always used to say."

"Your math teacher said that?" asked the Sleeper.

Millie shrugged innocently. "After class. In bed," she said.

Kaat had the impression that Millie knew just what effect she was creating. "I thought you suffered from aculculia," Kaat remarked.

"Another one of your A words," the Sleeper groaned in despair.

"I love her A words," Millie declared with passion.

"Aculculia is a mental block against arithmetic," explained Kaat.

"I did have a block against arithmetic," Millie said. "That's why I slept with the teacher."

Kaat had to laugh at that.

Millie laughed too. "Do you have any new A words?" she asked.

"Two," replied Kaat. "I found out that I'm an aelurophile, which means cat lover. And that I'm amphierotic, which means I can be aroused by members in good standing of either sex."

Millie said, "You're too much, Kaat. Don't you think she's too much.

Peter?"

The Sleeper nodded dutifully. "I always thought Kaat was too much," he agreed.

"I'm not sure it sounds like a compliment when you say it like that,"

Kaat noted.

"Listen, it's only two-thirty," Millie pointed out. She slipped into what she thought of as her Katharine Hepburn voice. "What if we all moseyed on down to the master bedroom for a roll in the hay?"

"What does that mean, 'moseyed'?" asked the Sleeper.

"I'm only good at A words," Kaat observed maliciously.

"You don't know what 'mosey' means?" Millie asked incredulously.

The Sleeper shook his head.

"It means to sort of stroll, to meander, to make your way slowly. It's a cowboy word. You do know what 'roll in the hay' means?"

The Sleeper laughed. "I know what it means. But I haven't got time. I have to go on a trip."

"Go where?" Kaat wanted to know.

"You never said anything about going on a trip," Millie muttered. She clearly had her heart set on a roll in the hay.