The Sisters (26 page)

"I don't ever want to get involved again," Jerry Orr was saying,

"because it takes too much out of me. Emotionally, I mean. I like people who are just passing through, if you see what I mean.

The Greyhound picked up speed as it crossed the high plateau on which Terre Haute was planted. Long fields stretched off like religious wafers to the horizon. It occurred to the Sleeper that if the world were really flat, the horizon he could see from the window of the bus might be the bitter end of it. Soon after, the Wabash was behind them and the bus was heading down Route 70 into Illinois. The Sleeper thought about the man he was travelling across the country to kill. He had seen a photograph of him in a copy of Newsweek discarded on a bench at the bus terminal.

He seemed like a decent enough man, fiddling with the button of his suit jacket, eyeing the camera with sardonic detachment. The Sleeper shrugged away the image of the man he would see, if all went according to plan, through the telescopic sight on his rifle. He felt devoid of energy; of hope. He remembered another snatch of Walter Whitman. "The past and present wilt ... I have drained them." Which left the future. To get his mind of it, he reached across and brushed the back of Jerry Orr's wrist with his fingertips. "I'll be in St. Louis for two clays and two nights," he told her. And he added pointedly, "I'm just passing through, if you see what I mean," The faint smile on Jerry Orr's face brightened.

She saw what he meant.

Kaat had gone into mourning for her dead cat. "Why would they want to kill her?' she cried, biting furiously on a fingernail. The Potter's answer-that they hadn't wanted to kill her cat; they had wanted to kill them -didn't diminish her sense of loss. The fact that the cat was dead and buried (in a trench by the side of a back road, covered with gravel and dead leaves) and they were alive seemed to impress her more than anything the Potter could offer her in the way of comfort. Then, almost six hours to the minute after the bullet pierced the back of the car and lodged by pure chance in the cat's body, she shook herself the way a dog does when it comes in out of the rain. "Here's the thing," she said in a serious voice, and it was evident to the Potter that she had stopped thinking about the cat and started thinking about herself. "I want out.

I'm not made for this kind of adventure. I have butterflies in my stomach just thinking about what happened."

She saw the confusion on the Potter's face as he tried to figure out how someone could have butterflies in the stomach. "It means I'm nervous,"

she explained in exasperation. "It means I have gas. It means I fart all the time."

The Potter had seen people crack before, and with less cause; had been surprised that she had not cracked sooner. "A night's rest, perhaps." he muttered, as if sleep could solve her problem, could dissipate the gas, could restore her sense of her own dignity, could give her the courage to go on.

"Park me somewhere," she pleaded, and her voice had the unmistakable vibrations of tear in it. "Park me anywhere.

"And Piotr Borisovich?"

She avoided his eye and concentrated on a fingernail.

"Look," he said finally-the Chevrolet's headlights had just picked up a sign indicating they were crossing the border into Indiana-"if I can catch up with Piotr and talk to him, maybe I can save his life."

"Why is someone trying to kill him?" Kaat asked in a voice so devoid of inquisitiveness it was obvious she would have been just as happy if he didn't answer.

"Piotr Borisovich is an espionage agent," the Potter said in a whisper, as if he were afraid of being overheard. "He has been sent on a mission, that much is obvious. This is what I think: whoever sent him on this mission wants Piotr to be caught, so that the blame for the mission will fall on the Russians."

"What am I doing here?' Kaat mumbled, staring out of her side of the car.

"It was your idea to come," the Potter blurted out. "I need you. Believe me, if you please. If you please?"

The Potter was squinting into the headlights of an oncoming car. When it passed, he glanced quickly at her. "It is important for me," he said suddenly. "I must save him." And he repeated, "It you please? He is the son I never had."

Kaat looked straight into his eyes as it she could see through them to some dark center, some remote corner where he would not give any more of himself away.

The moment passed. He turned back to the highway. "Stay, please, at least until he makes one more phone call to your friend in Brooklyn, New York," he said in a flat voice.

"Why not?" she replied, moved by his physical ugliness; by his need for her; above all by the difficulty he had expressing it.

After she agreed, the Potter broached the subject of the car. "You want me to steal an automobile that belongs to someone else?" Kaat exploded when lie first raised the possibility.

"We cannot keep driving around in this one," the Potter insisted, and he explained some of the facts of life to Kaat. There were two men behind them who would presumably mount a spare tire in place of the flat tire with the bullet hole in it, and start out after them. If they managed to catch up with them they would kill the Potter, and then feel obliged to deal with any witnesses in a similar way.

Kaat asked how the two men in the Dodge could possibly find them, given the twists and turns the Potter had taken in the hour after the incident at the crossroad. "We don't have any idea where we are going," she pointed out with irreproachable logic, "so how can they know where we're going?"

It was a reasonable question, to which the Potter offered a reasonable explanation. They had run into the two men in the Dodge right after they had almost caught up with the Sleeper; they had most likely been spotted making inquiries at the inn with the curious name of Seventh Heaven.

Which meant that whoever had awakened the Sleeper and dispatched him on his mission had been covering his tracks with what the professionals called sweepers. And that, in turn, meant that every time they managed to get close to the Sleeper, they risked a new run-in with the men in the Dodge. Driving around in the Chevrolet would only make matters easier for the sweepers.

Kaat still wasn't convinced about the need for a new car until the Potter told her how; she would steal it-at which point she made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and waxed enthusiastic about the idea and began peering eagerly through the front window looking for a suitable location. On the outskirts of a small town in southern Indiana they found what they were looking for. a low, modern circular structure with pulsating neon arrows pointing the way from the main road, and raucous rock music filling the night around it.

The parking lot in back of the nightclub already held more than three dozen cars. The Potter drew up on the far edge of the lot, near a line of trees, and cut the motor. He rummaged around in the trunk for the tool kit that came with the tire iron, found a screwdriver in it and began to remove the Chevrolet's license plates. Once he had them off he told Kaat he was ready if she was. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, unbuttoned, at the Potter's suggestion-he had a mania for details like this-another button of her shirt, and went around to plant herself on the curb near the front door of the nightclub.

Within minutes a red two-door Ford pulled up and two girls spilled from its doors. The Potter, watching from the corner of the nightclub, waved Kaat off; he wanted a newer, heavier car, also one that was more subdued and less likely to attract attention. The boy who was driving the Ford honked his horn at the girls as they disappeared through the door of the nightclub, and gunning his engine, raced off to park in the lot.

The Potter let lour more cars go by before he found one that appealed to him. Eventually a blue four-door Chrysler eased to a stop in front of the entrance. A girl and a boy emerged from the back seat, a second girl from the front seat. They were well dressed, slightly older than the other clients of the nightclub; they gave the impression of college kids who had borrowed a car from one of their parents for a night of slumming.

The Potter pointed at the car and nodded vigorously. Kaat mustered a toothy smile and trotted around to the driver's side. "There's a new service starting tonight," she informed the driver. "We park your car for you, and bring it around when you're ready to leave." And she added,

"There's no charge, but if you'd like to give me something for my trouble, I won't say-no."

The boy behind the wheel hesitated, then caught sight of his girl observing him. Not wanting to appear unsophisticated, he climbed out of the car, fished a dollar bill from his shirt pocket, handed it to Kaat with a nod and went off to join his friends. Kaat slid in behind the wheel and drove the Chrysler over to where the Chevrolet was parked. The Potter appeared a moment later and began attaching the license plates from the Chevrolet.

"I don't believe it!" Kaat exclaimed as they sped away from the nightclub in the Chrysler. "I actually did it. Me! I stole a car!" She pressed her hands to her ears in exhilaration. "In my next incarnation,"

she abruptly announced, her eyes pressed shut as if she were visualizing it, "I want to do that kind of thing more often. I want to not suppress farts and not set the hair of dead people and not obey the law all the goddamned time." She slid down in the seat so that her head rested on the back of it, kicked off her shoes and propped her feet up on the dashboard. "Do people steal cars in Russia?" she asked after a while.

"There aren't that many cars in Russia to steal," the Potter replied with a laugh. "There is very little crime in the ordinary sense of the word-muggings, bank robberies, burglaries. On the other hand, everyone steals from the state whenever they can. People work less and accept their full salary. They take bribes for doing what they are supposed to do anyway. You might say that we have no crime, but more than our share of corruption."

The way he said it made her turn her head toward him. "Why do you serve the state if there is so much corruption?" she asked softly.

The Potter waved a hand in irritation; she didn't understand at all. He was a Chekist from the old school; he had made his commitment to Leninism early in life, and stuck to it even when the excesses of the cult of the personality became apparent. If there had been a viable alternative, he had never been aware of it. Western democracies were decadent; they weighed competing philosophies rather than deciding where the rights of the matter lay. Stalinism, moreover, was not the inevitable result of Leninism, but an aberration. Mankind's best-for the Potter, its only-hope rested in the idealistic seeds buried within Leninism. But how could he explain all this to her? He decided to try; it suddenly seemed important to tell her who he was.

"The roots of the Russian state are idealistic," he said. "Because things have taken a bad turn is no reason for someone to abandon the original dream. All dreams turn sour at some point. Only the faint of heart, or those whose original commitment was self-serving, lose faith.

That is something you, being American, should understand better than most people. Your country started out with idealistic roots too, but your 'All men are created equal' didn't include Negroes. It took a civil war to bring them into the mainstream of the country's idealism. You still haven't solved the problem completely. But the important thing is that you are evolving. My country will evolve too. It will move closer to a situation in which its actions match the idealism of its founders."

"You believe that? You believe Russia will rediscover its idealistic roots?"

The Potter said quietly, "I am obliged to believe it."

"What about Peter?" she asked after a moment's reflection. She appeared to wince at the memory of a pain when she pronounced his name. "Does he believe in Russia? Does he think what he is doing will help it evolve?

"We both of us thought that what we were doing would help it survive,"

the Potter replied, thinking of the unlaundered years, "and as long as it survived, it would evolve."

Kaat reached over to rest her hand on the Potter's, but he jerked it away. It wasn't that he was afraid of physical contact with her; it was more a matter of wanting it too much.

They continued on in a westerly direction, one of them driving, the other dozing in the passenger seat. They stopped at an all-night diner next to a drive-in movie, and Kaat phoned Millie back in Brooklyn, but she hadn't heard anything more from Peter. The Potter was afraid they had lost him forever, but Kaat remained hopeful. She found a road map and spread it across her knees and dangled her grandmother's ring over it, and announced that they should continue west. They stopped in a cheap motel, slept four hours, ate breakfast at a truckers watering hole, then continued on west. By noon they had made it as far as Indianapolis. Kaat disappeared into a telephone booth while the Potter downed a cheeseburger, and emerged a few moments later shaking her head in disappointment.

They slept outside Indianapolis that night in a motel with a sign that said "No dogs" and had yellowish powder sprinkled on the sides of the cabins to discourage the strays that did show up. As soon as they settled into their room, Kaat phoned Millie, but all she got was the tape-recording machine. "It's me again," she said into it. "I'll call back." She wandered into the bathroom and the Potter heard her drawing a bath, heard also (his ear was fine-tuned to such things) that she didn't throw the lock on the door. Could he-dared he-take it as an invitation?

In their cheap motel the night before, he had dreamed that his bed was a raft tossing about on a turbulent sea, surrounded by a circular horizon as sharp and as menacing as a razor blade. His mouth had felt parched, and it was only when he looked over, still in his dream, at the next raft and saw the naked woman clinging to it that he identified his thirst. What he wanted, he had realized with surprise, was to take her in his mouth as if she were a wet sponge, to suck the last drop of moisture from her. Now, listening to her in the bathroom-the toilet flushed, the water stopped running in the tub, a body settled gingerly into it-lie permitted himself the luxury of imagining Kaat's body: of composing it the way a police artist puts together a composite portrait of a criminal: pointed breasts with insolent nipples, a visible rib cage, lean thighs, a soft bed of pubic hair, a flat backside that arched smoothly up to thin, bony shoulders. He felt the stirring of an erection-but only the stirring! He was, he reminded himself with a tired shrug, tied up irrevocably to that pier of old age.