The Sisters (35 page)

At the mouth of the Main Street canyon, on the steps of the old sandstone courthouse, G. Sprawls was about to turn to the Sisters and make an ironic comment about the best-laid plans of mice and men when the sharp crack of a rifle, a dry twig snapping in a forest, echoed over the heads of the crowd. On the roof of the warehouse, several hundred pigeons nesting in the abandoned boiler swarmed into the sky in panic.

A second twig snapped.

And then a third.

And the world was accelerated into chaos.

"It came from the warehouse,' Carroll blurted out excitedly. His cheek muscles went on a rampage. "I knew in my bones he would pick the warehouse."

On the street, the crowd spilled away in every direction. Several people fell to the ground screaming. A policeman pointed toward an upper floor of the warehouse.

"The first shot came from the grassy knoll," G. Sprowls said matter-of-factly. "I spotted the smoke from the cartridge." As if to prove his point, a motorcycle policeman skidded his machine onto the sidewalk below the hedges, and drawing his pistol, charged up the incline.

"My God," Francis said, "that means that there must have been two people shooting!"

For once, there was not the faintest trace of pained innocence on his face.

The moment was electrically charged. No one seemed quite sure what role to play. There was a father and a son, a teacher and a pupil, a betrayer and a betrayed; even a savior and a saved.

The Sleeper stared out of the window of Combes's Retreat at the prairie.

"So you told them what they wanted to know," he was saying.

It had never occurred to the Potter that he would have to justify himself to the Sleeper when he caught up with him. "Please put yourself in my shoes," he pleaded. "I had no choice. They would have loaded us on the next plane to Moscow. Aside from everything else, there was the body at the airport to answer for." Fie lifted an empty coffee cup, unconsciously measuring the thickness of its walls between his thumb and third finger. "I had Svetochka to think of," he added plaintively.

"And yourself," the Sleeper answered harshly. "Let us not forget yourself. '

"Since when is it a crime to think of yourself?" the Potter retorted.

The Sleeper turned on his teacher. "It is a crime for a teacher to betray his student."

"And what do you call it when the student betrays his teacher?" the Potter demanded. "You who are so offended by betrayals-tell me that if you can."

"So you found out about me and Svetochka," the Sleeper said wearily.

"Everyone was sleeping with her, Feliks."

"I knew that everyone was sleeping with her. I didn't know that you were."

The Sleeper drifted across the room, and then back to the bay window.

"One thing has nothing to do with the other," he said finally. "Sleeping with Svetochka was an act without consequences-for me, for her, for you as long as you didn't know about it. But betraying me to an enemy service was pregnant with consequences. ' He turned his back on the Potter and breathed on the windowpane, fogging it. "If only I had known my father was dead . . ."

"I was trying to catch up with you to tell you," the Potter whispered.

"He was dead, and you were free."

"Here's the thing," Kaat said. "It is frustrating enough to listen to the two of you argue. But to hear you argue in Russian is pure torture."

"Even if we spoke in English," the Potter told her, his eyes glued on the Sleeper, "there are things you wouldn't understand."

"He is not the hero he makes himself out to be," the Sleeper informed Kaat. "He betrayed me to get himself and his wife out of Russia."

"Then he crossed the Atlantic and trailed after you across America to try to save you," Kaat said. She looked from one to the other. "Don't you see, you're turning in circles." She stared the Sleeper in the eye.

"Vicious circles! What's done is done. The important thing is to look ahead, not back."

The Potter shook his head sadly. "You have it wrong. Piotr Borisovich has it right," he told her. "In order to look ahead, we must first look back." And he quoted Akhmatova's line, " 'My future is in my past.' "

The Sleeper nodded grimly. "We must settle the business of the betrayal before we move on," he insisted. He turned to the Potter and switched into Russian. "You expect me to fall on my knees and thank you for saving me." The Potter started to interrupt, but the Sleeper cut him off with a snap of his hand. "Don't deny it-it is written on your face. None of this would have happened if you hadn't betrayed me in the first place. That's what I can't swallow, Feliks. In my mind's eye, I try to put myself in your shoes, I really do try. But I don't see myself betraying you to get myself out. I would have killed myself first."

"You say that now," the Potter murmured- He held both hands to his stomach as if he had cramps. "But you can't be sure whose back you will climb on until you are at the foot of the wall."

"I had faith in you," the Sleeper said. "You let me down."

"I let myself down," the Potter observed acidly. He tried to muster a smile, but it only distorted his face more. "That's something else we have in common now," he added bitterly.

"I may not understand a word you say," Kaat told the Sleeper, "but you are hurting him very much. He doesn't deserve that."

The Sleeper eyed the Potter, then nodded. "I am willing to concede that you did try to undo the damage."

The Potter moaned. "I did try,' he agreed, "but I failed."

"Maybe not entirely," the Sleeper said. "You are absolutely sure that it was the Americans you betrayed me to?"

"I was contacted by someone who called himself Oskar. He was probably German, and everyone knows the Americans have the Germans in their pocket," the Potter recounted. "In Vienna, I was debriefed by someone who spoke Russian with an American accent. In any case, the lengths they went to get me out, to get access to a sleeper, only make sense if you assume the Americans are behind the whole thing."

"I might understand," Kaat announced in an exasperated voice. "If you spoke English, I might pick up a word now and then that seemed familiar."

"Your theory," the Sleeper told the Potter, "is that the Americans awakened me and sent me on a mission so that I would be caught, and the Russians would be blamed."

"That is what I thought," the Potter agreed.

The Sleeper walked across the room and sat down at the small bridge table facing the Potter. "Do you still think it?" he asked.

"I am less sure than before."

"Because of the sweepers?"

The Potter looked up sharply. "So you spotted them?"

"I had a good teacher in such matters," the Sleeper said grudgingly.

"The technique they used-lingering twenty-four hours-was straight out of the KGB sweeper manual."

"We ran into them several times also," the Potter said. "The first time they killed her cat. The last time I shot one of them in the foot. That was in the storage room of a hotel." The Potter frowned. "I recognized the man I shot. I had seen him once before. In Moscow."

The Sleeper's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Tiny wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Someone who didn't know him would have thought he was amused. "If the Americans were controlling me, as you say, how is it that the Russians were sweeping me? How did they know my route?"

"That," the Potter said, "is what the Americans call the sixty-four-dollar question."

"Go on speaking Russian if it gives you pleasure," Kaat snapped in annoyance. "To me it's all the same."

"There's another thing," the Sleeper said. "When you arrived in Vienna, you gave the American who spoke Russian with an American accent the line of poetry from Walter Whitman. But how could the Americans know where I was? How could they know where to deliver the line of Whitman poetry?"

"I told them," the Potter admitted morosely.

"How did you know?"

"From the picture postcard you sent me."

"What picture postcard?"

Now the Potter was staring at the Sleeper. The one showing the Walter Whitman plaque on the door of a house in Brooklyn Heights."

The Sleeper said quietly, "I never sent you a picture postcard. It was against regulations to contact people in the homeland while on a mission. You know

that.”

"When you have finished with the past, Kaat muttered from the bed, "be sure to let me know."

"You never finish with the past," the Potter told her. "You take it with you, like baggage."

"Who did send me on this mission?" the Sleeper asked the Potter. "Who am I working for?"

"Do you think it is important to find out?” the Potter asked.

"If we don't find out' the Sleeper said, we risk going on without baggage."

"If you don't talk English," Kaat said suddenly, "I'll scream!"

The Potter smiled faintly at his last, his best sleeper. "I think I know what we can do to find out," he said,

Kaat screamed.

The building, lighted up like a Christmas tree, could have passed for an ocean liner in mid-Atlantic, a fact that several hands arriving late from various corners of the world would have commented on if they had had time. Which they didn't. The Prince of the Realm was dead. There was a suspect in the hands of the local police. There were rumors, fueled by vague reports of an entry wound in the throat, of a second shooter still at large, though cooler heads tended to discount this possibility-Sandwiches, beer, were ordered up, delivered by a downtown caterer with a security clearance. The bottoms of barrels were being scraped for leads, theories, coincidences, pieces out of place, people who had dropped from sight, others who were too conspicuously in sight. Anything and everything was being fed into the hopper.

Except telegrams that weren't addressed to anyone or signed by anyone.

"What you make of this?" the communications assistant, fresh from the Company's Farm and eager to be useful in a crisis, asked. The night watch, his head swimming from the message load, plucked it from the board. It had the look of a normal telegram; had in fact come in over the Western Union printer. " The hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly wash again comma and ever again comma this soil'd repeat soil'd world stop,' " the night watch read out loud.

"Maybe it's a cipher." the communications assistant offered eagerly.

"Sounds more like the ravings of some crank," the night watch said. He was about to throw it into the burn basket when it occurred to him that the Company had in its employ two esoteric types known in the house as the sisters Death and Night. Could it be that the telegram was meant for them? "Listen up," the night watch instructed his communications assistant. "There are two guys up in Planning. Both have girls' first names. Carroll something, Francis something. The one who is named Francis always wears loud bow ties. Find out where they are and read this over the phone to them. Maybe they'll know what it's all about.

Now, what else do you have on that message board of yours?"

At first Francis assumed he was imagining things. Only when he lifted a tentative finger to his cheek did he realize what was actually happening. He had seen it often enough on Carroll's face to know what a twitching muscle looked like. Now he knew what it felt like.

What it felt like was exaltation rising, like a bubble in a still pond, to the surface of his imagination.

Thank goodness some idiot in Washington had had the good sense to try the telegram out on him. Francis had phoned Carroll immediately to share the good news, but Carroll was off God knew where with G. Sprowls. So as not to waste any time (who could say how long the birds would remain in the nest?}, Francis had contacted Western Union and, citing urgent government business, had gotten from the supervisor the phone number from which the telegram originated. Flashing his laminated credentials in the general direction of a nearsighted telephone-company official, Francis had gotten the address that went with the telephone number. At which point he had put in a call from a pay phone to the special number in Washington reserved for extraordinary circumstances. "The Potter has caught up with the Sleeper," he told the person on the other end who lifted the receiver without a word of greeting and simply listened.

There was a long, awkward silence on the line. Then a voice, pronouncing each word meticulously in an effort to suppress an accent, said, "How can you know this?"

Francis explained about the telegram that had arrived in Washington containing, word for word, the line from Whitman that constituted the awakening signal for the Sleeper; explained the coincidence of him and Carroll being known, within the Company, as the sisters Death and Night; explained how because of this coincidence the telegram had been routed to him. "If the Potter and the Sleeper have put their heads together."

Francis explained, "the Sleeper will know he was controlled by the Company and not his masters in Moscow. All we have to do now is arrange for them to be captured. The story they tell will eventually lead the authorities to Carroll and me. My disappearance, my written confession, the scribblings they will find hidden in my garbage pail will all confirm that the Sleeper was activated, and controlled, by the Company.

Let the Director try to deny it when he is hooked up to a lie detector!"

Once again exaltation manifested itself as a twitch of a cheek muscle.

The person on the other end of the line cleared his throat, almost as if he were embarrassed. "There is a complication," he said carefully.

It took a moment for the word to sink in, it was so unexpected. Francis repeated it to be sure he had heard correctly. "Complication?"

"The telegram that was sent to the Company was also sent to us at the embassy."

"To you?" Francis breathed into the phone. "Why would they send the awakening signal to you?"

"Several days ago, the Potter cornered one of our sweepers in a hotel,"

the voice on the phone recounted tunelessly. "Unfortunately for us, he recognized him."

"Recognized the sweeper?" Francis couldn't believe this was happening to him.

"He had seen him once before, in Moscow, some years ago, when the sweeper was given a medal," the voice said.