The Tears of Autumn (25 page)

“That grave over there is where Edward John Trelawny is buried,” Christopher said. “He snatched Shelley’s heart out of his funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio. Later Trelawny was a secret agent in Greece with Byron. He thought Byron was a romantic amateur.”

“Dung,” Klimenko said. “Let’s go over to the trees.” In shadow, surrounded by the straight stems of the cypresses, Klimenko seemed more at ease. “What arrangements have you made?” he asked.

“If what you have is valuable, I can hand you over to someone this afternoon. They’ll tell you what to expect.”

“What will that be, roughly?”

“Safe transportation to the States, debriefing, a place to stay until you’re ready to surface.”

“I don’t want money,” Klimenko said. “That has to be made plain. No money.”

“All right, I’ll tell them. What do you have with you?”

“Your interest was aroused by Weedkiller. I’ve brought you something.”

Klimenko removed his hat and turned out the sweatband. He handed Christopher three small photographs and a slip of paper with a series of numbers and letters written on it in red ink. The photographs showed two men in dark American suits and white shirts crossing a sidewalk. One of the men carried a large attaché case. The cameraman had been sitting in a car: the angle of the door showed in a corner of the picture. The faces were very clear.

“What bank in Zurich is the account number for?” Christopher asked.

“Dolder und Co., in the Bleicherweg. It’s a small bank. This was a one-time usage.”

“Who are these people?” Christopher held up the clearest photograph.

“The men who made the withdrawal. They spoke American English.”

“Names, Gherman.”

Klimenko shrugged. “They were couriers. The names they used on the hotel register were Anthony Rugged and Ronald Prince.”

“Rugged and Prince? Come on, Gherman.”

Klimenko reached into his hat and handed Christopher photocopies of two Swiss hotel registration cards. “The cards are genuine,” he said. “What do names like that suggest to you?”

“Clumsy Americanization.” Christopher looked again at the men in the photograph; they had dark, closed faces; one man’s mouth was open, as if he had been chewing gum. “Probably Ruggieri and Principi originally.”

“Something like that. I saw the passports they handed in at the hotel—genuine. Their names are Rugged and Prince.”

“What was the million dollars for?”

“I don’t know. I carried it from Stockholm. It was brought to me from Moscow by the head of my section. I made the deposit, and my instructions were to put the money in the account and leave Zurich at once. Center wanted no surveillance on the messengers.”

“Why not? Is that your standard procedure?”

“No. Do you want me to explain the whole system now? Briefly, this is the only cash transaction in any amount I’ve ever handled where no receipt was required. I couldn’t believe the irregularity of it.”

“Why would they do it this way? A million dollars.”

“Obviously security was more important than money. It was a very tight operation.”

“You must have been given a deposit slip.”

“No—they wanted no paper of any kind. Not even in the files at No. 2 Ulitza Dzerzhinskogo.” Klimenko smiled bleakly when Christopher did not react to the address of KGB headquarters, spoken aloud.

“What was the withdrawal code?” Christopher asked.

“Also spoken, not written. To make a withdrawal, one cited the number of the account and gave the codeword
tortora,
which means ‘dove’ in Italian.”

“Why Italian?”

“I’ll come to that—it was an insecure code, there’s a clue in it. But you know how incautious these administrators can be.”

“Who accepted the money at the bank?”

“One of the directors, Herr Wegel.”

“Where is his office?”

“Second floor, extreme northwest corner of the building. His name is on the door.”

“Could you sketch the layout of the office from memory?”

“Yes,” Klimenko said.

He produced a notebook and a pen and made a quick sketch, resting the pad on a gravestone as he drew.

“What’s this?” Christopher asked, pointing to a scribbled feature on one side of the sketch.

“A fireplace,” Klimenko said. “Herr Wegel had a coal fire going—he made a joke about being an unthrifty Swiss. I remember everything. I was worried about the lack of documentation.”

“So you decided to take some pictures and ask some questions?”

“Yes. I’d already decided not to go back. I thought the information might be useful.”

“Why didn’t you just take the million and run?”

“Where to? Mars? Besides, Paul, to steal official money? Why should I do such a thing? What would they think?”

Klimenko still held his hat in his hand. Astonishment drew wrinkles on his bald head: he could betray his service and his country, but he could not bear that his colleagues should think him a thief.

“This is an intriguing little mystery,” Christopher said, “but I don’t see why it should interest us. It’s incomplete. All you’ve given me is evidence of a big cash transfer and a couple of photographs. The rest is not even speculation.”

“I can speculate, if you like.”

Christopher waited.

“In the fifties, as you know, I was at the UN under deep cover as a Tass correspondent,” Klimenko said. “Mostly I handled Latin Americans—they’re easy, because they like women. Sometimes an African. My targets were all non-American, except one. I had a primary assignment targeted on a certain American group. The Latinos and the blacks were make-work. The American target was very, very difficult. I only made the recruitment three months before I was posted to Western Europe.”

“And you handed over the American asset when you left New York in 1956?”

“No, there was no handing over. I made the recruitment and told the man to go fictitious until we made contact again. It wasn’t really a recruitment. I didn’t tell him anything about his employers. We didn’t have him under discipline. He was an American patriot, he would have shot me if he had known I was a dirty Communist spy.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I represented a group in Belgium that might need work done in America. That my name was Blanchard. That the fee would be high. That he might not hear from us for years, but when he did, we’d expect action in whatever period of time we specified. I told him it might be as short a period as twenty-four hours.”

“How did you bind the recruitment?”

“I gave him one hundred thousand dollars as a retainer. We wanted him to know we were serious.”

“How did you set up the future contact?”

“Telegram and meeting. I rented a safe house in Chicago and put two unwitting people in it. The agent had the address. When he got a telegram from Naples saying, in Italian, that his uncle Giuseppe had died, he was to go to the safe house at 10:18 on the next night after the day of the week mentioned in the telegram as the day of his uncle’s death.”

“10:18—that sounds authentic,” Christopher said. “Why do you people split the clock that way?”

Klimenko was annoyed by the digression. “It’s just technique, it’s supposed to discipline agents. In czarist days no one could tell time in Russia. After the revolution, people were shot for being late. It was part of the pattern of changing everything, making a new society.”

“Who was the agent?”

“I told you it was a difficult target,” Klimenko said. “It took me three years to make contact. I wasted time. I should have realized their security is almost the same as ours. All clandestine organizations are more or less alike. When I did, I went in with almost no trouble, after I’d established my cover with them.”

“Who?”

“Franco Piccioni. He’s called Frankie Pigeon.”

“What is he?”

Klimenko laughed. “You have lived abroad for a long time, Paul. Think. What would someone called Frankie Pigeon be?”

“Mafia.”

“Yes, Chicago. Frankie is an important American.”

“But why? What would you need with him? You’ve got all the guns you need.”

“You never have all the guns you might need. You know how it is. One of the
bolshoy chirey
has an idea—do you know what that phrase means? The big boils—that’s what we call our senior officers, as if they will burst at any moment. It tells you something about the KGB. Anyway, someone had an idea in Moscow. I carried it out in the field. It was a contingency plan. Maybe someday they’d need a clean killing in the States. Then they’d have a man.”

“But it was insecure.”

“The Mafia is insecure? No one has ever convicted Frankie Pigeon of anything. It was compartmented very tightly. Frankie didn’t know who we were. He likes money, a little on the side. It wasn’t easy to find a man like Frankie—most of these gangsters won’t deal with outsiders.”

“How often did you use him?”

“Never, unless we used him last month. The idea all along was to employ him on a one-time basis against a target we couldn’t reach. He’ll never be used again.”

Klimenko was shivering violently, and Christopher felt the cold seeping through his own raincoat.

“Really, we must get under cover,” Klimenko said. “It’s getting light.”

“What was Pigeon used for?”

“That I don’t know. But consider the sum involved. Consider the date.”

“I have,” Christopher said.

“I can give you a piece of hard information, Paul. Frankie Pigeon is a sentimental man. He always spends the twelve days of Christmas in the village of Calabria where he was born. He brings his wife and children with him on Christmas Eve and stays until January 7.1 can show you on a map where he’ll be.”

“You can show me in the car,” Christopher said.

Sitting in the front seat beside Christopher, Klimenko drew a sketch of the roads leading to Frankie Pigeon’s house in the hills above Catanzaro. on the toe of the Italian boot. He handed it to Christopher.

“He takes two men with him,” he said. “I don’t know what their security arrangements are. He likes to hunt rabbits in the early morning and talk with the farmers in the evening. He goes for walks before dinner.”

“I thought you said you didn’t keep in touch.”

“I kept myself informed.”

“Is there anything else about this man Pigeon—as a person, I mean?”

“The weakness?” Klimenko said. “He’s a snob—he’s been bilked of thousands by genealogists attempting to prove that his mother’s family, the Cerruti, are bourgeoisie from the north of Italy; but all the Cerruti are Sicilian from way back, shepherds and shoemakers. That’s of no use to you.”

“Then tell me something that is useful.”

“Frankie Pigeon is a hypochondriac. He’s morbid about germs—washes his hands all the time. He has a servant who spreads sterilized towels over the floor for him to walk on in hotels. He boils his coins before he touches them, won’t handle paper money at all because of the danger of disease. You recognize the pathology—it’s common enough in murderers.”

The bleak shape of Monte Testaccio loomed above the car, with a cross mounted at its summit. “What’s the name of that hill?” Klimenko asked.

Christopher told him. “It’s made entirely of pottery—the jugs the ancient Romans used to transport wheat and honey from the eastern Mediterranean. It will appeal to your Leninist sense of irony that the Monte Testaccio, a dump, is the only remaining trace of the common people of the Roman Empire.”

Klimenko laughed, coughed, and covered his mouth. “What are the arrangements?” he asked.

Christopher gave him an address and a key. “Be ready at five o’clock, precisely on the hour. The man who comes will say his name is Edward Trelawny. You’ll reply, ‘Do you still have Shelley’s heart?’”

“Almost twelve hours. Can’t it be sooner?”

“No. One last thing, Gherman—don’t talk to anyone else about Frankie Pigeon for fourteen days. Then you can spill it.”

Klimenko was swiveling his head, watching the approaches to the car.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes. I’ll tell your friends on January 6. There’ll be no trouble filling the time with other things, Paul.”

5

Christopher began to talk while Molly was still in the room. Tom Webster gave her a cold stare and held up his palm.

Molly smiled and said, “Tell me the etiquette, Mr. Webster.”

“Tom would feel more comfortable if you went into the bedroom and read a book,” Christopher said.

When the door had closed behind Molly, Webster said, “What does she know?”

“That I’m a retired agent. She had to know what she was involved in, so I told her. She took the call from Klimenko, but she doesn’t know his name or what he is.”

“Klimenko?”

“That’s what I have for you, Tom—Gherman Klimenko. He wants to defect.”

“He’s in Rome?”

“Yes, I met him twice, last night and this morning. You can pick him up at five o’clock.”

“Why does he want to come across?”

Christopher shrugged. “He’s pleading ideological disillusionment. I think he’s just tired of the life, the way they usually are. Even Klimenko feels his motives are a little peculiar. He doesn’t want to be offered money.”

Webster stood up and looked at his watch. The phonograph was playing Molly’s new love songs at full volume and Christopher had to strain to hear Webster’s voice.

“Where is Klimenko?”

“In a minute, Tom. There are some things I need.”

“You’re bargaining with me?”

“No,” Christopher said. “I’m going to ask a favor. You can have Klimenko whether you help me or not. What would I do with him?”

Webster sat down again and peeled the cellophane from a cigar. He watched Christopher through the flame of the match. “Wolkowicz sent a cable on your doings in Saigon,” he said. “He sent somebody out to that church you visited—the cellar is full of opium.”

“Is it? Well, that’s a dividend for Wolkowicz.”

“Like Klimenko is my dividend? For a retiree you’re pretty active.”

“I’m like a reformed tart,” Christopher said. “People just won’t believe I don’t enjoy it anymore.”

“You still won’t tell me what you’re up to? Wolkowicz is in a tizzy out there, and it’s going to communicate.”

“I’ll be finished soon. Tom, I’ve gone as far as I can go alone on this. I need some support.”