The Tourist (3 page)

"I don't--"

Charles cut her off before she could argue: "We'll talk with the SOVA, but you need to call Vienna. Now. Check Frank's office. See what's missing. Find out what was on his computer before he left." He slipped into his shirt, his wet body bleeding the white cotton gray. Angela started fooling with her phone, but her fingers had trouble with the buttons. Charles took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.

"This is serious. Okay? But don't freak out until we know everything. And let's not tell the Slovenes about the body. We don't want them holding us for questioning."

Again, she nodded.

Charles let go of her and grabbed his jacket, pants, and shoes, then began walking back up the pier, toward the shore. From her boat, her chubby knees to her chin, the Italian woman let out a low whistle. "Bello," she said.

4

An hour and a half later, they were preparing to leave again. Charles wanted to drive, but Angela put up a fight. It was the shock--without him having to say a word, she'd put it together herself. Frank Dawdle, her beloved boss, had killed Leo Bernard, killed Dusan Maskovic, and walked off with three million dollars of the U.S. government's money.

The most damning piece of evidence came from her call to Vienna. The hard drive of Dawdle's computer was missing. Based on power usage, the in-house computer expert believed it had been removed sometime Friday morning, just before Frank and Leo departed for Slovenia. Despite this, she clung to a new, hopeful theory: The Slovenes were responsible. Frank might have taken his hard drive, but he would only have done so under coercion. His old SOVA buddies were threatening him. When they met with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head, she glared across the Hotel Slovenia table while the old man gobbled a plate of fried calamari and explained that he'd spent Friday night with Frank Dawdle, drinking in his room.

"What do you mean--you visited him?" she said. "Didn't you have work to do?"

Krizan paused over his food, holding his fork loosely. He had an angular face that seemed to expand when he shrugged in his exaggerated Balkan manner. "We're old friends, Miss Yates. Old spies. Drinking together until the early morning is what we do. Besides, I'd heard about Charlotte. I offered sympathy in a bottle."

"Charlotte?" asked Charles.

"His wife," Krizan said, then corrected: "Ex-wife." Angela nodded.

"She left him about six months ago. He took it pretty hard."

"Tragic," said Krizan.

To Charles, the picture was nearly complete. "What did he tell you about his visit here?"

"Nothing. I asked, of course, many times. But he'd only wink at me. Now, I'm beginning to wish he'd trusted me."

"Me, too."

"Is he in trouble?" Krizan said this without any visible worry. Charles shook his head. Angela's cell phone rang, and she left the table.

"There's a bitter woman," said Krizan, nodding at her backside. "You know what Frank calls her?"

Charles didn't.

"My blue-eyed wonder." He grinned. "Lovely man, but he wouldn't know a lesbian if she punched him in the nose."

Charles leaned closer as Krizan dug into his calamari. "You can't think of anything else?"

"It's hard when you won't tell me what this is about," he said, then chewed. "But no. He seemed very normal to me." Near the door, Angela pressed a palm against one ear so she could better hear the caller. Charles got up and shook Krizan's hand. "Thanks for your help."

"If Frank
is
in trouble," said Krizan, holding on to him a moment longer than was polite, "then I hope you'll be fair with him. He's put in a lot of good years for your country. If he's slipped up in the autumn of his life, then who's to blame him?" That exaggerated shrug returned, and he let Charles go. "We can't keep to perfection one hundred percent of the time. None of us are God."

Charles left Krizan to his philosophizing and reached Angela as she hung up, her face red.

"What is it?"

"That was Max."

"Who?"

"He's the embassy night clerk. In Vienna. On Thursday night, one of Frank's informers sent in information about a Russian we're watching. Big oligarch. Roman Ugrimov."

Charles knew about Ugrimov--a businessman who'd left Russia to save his skin, but kept influential contacts there as he spread his diversified portfolio around the world. "What kind of information?"

"The blackmail kind." She paused. "He's a pedophile."

"Might be a coincidence," Charles said as they left the restaurant, entering the long socialist-mauve lobby, where three SOVA agents stood around, watching out for their boss.

"Maybe. But yesterday Ugrimov moved into his new house. In Venice." Again, Charles stopped, and Angela had to walk back to him. Staring at the bright lobby windows, the final pieces fitted together. He said, "That's just across the water. With a boat, it's ideal."

"I suppose, but--"

"What does someone with three million dollars in stolen money need most?" Charles cut in. "He needs a new name. A man with Roman Ugrimov's connections could easily supply papers. If persuaded." She didn't answer, only stared at him.

"One more call," he said. "Get someone to check with the harbormasters in Venice. Find out if any boats were abandoned in the last two days."

They waited for the callback in a central cafe that had yet to adjust to the postcommunist foreigners who now shared their thirtymile coastline. Behind the zinc counter a heavy matron in a coffeeand-beer-splattered apron served Lasko Pivo on tap to underpaid dockworkers. The woman seemed annoyed by Angela's request for a cappuccino, and when it arrived it turned out to be a too-sweet instant mix. Charles convinced her to just drink it, then asked why she hadn't told h i m that Frank's wife had walked out on him.

She took another sip and made a face. "Lots of people get divorced."

"It's one of the most stressful things there is," he said. "Divorces change people. Often, they get an urge to start again at zero and redo their lives, but better." He rubbed his nose. "Maybe Frank decided he should've been working for the other side all along."

"There is no other side anymore."

"Sure there is. Himself."

She didn't seem convinced of anything yet. Her phone rang, and as she listened she shook her head in anger--at Frank, at Charles, at herself. Rome station told her that on Sunday morning a boat with Dubrovnik registration tags had been found floating just beyond the Lido's docks. "They say there's blood inside," the station chief explained.

After she'd hung up, Charles offered to drive--he didn't want her Austrian habits slowing them down. In reply, Angela showed him her stiff middle finger.

He won out in the end, though, because once they were among the tangled hills of the upper peninsula, she started to cry. He got her to pull over, and they switched seats. Near the Italian border, she tried to explain away her hysterical behavior.

"It's hard. You work years teaching yourself to trust a few people. Not many, but just enough to get by. And once you do trust them, there's no going back. There can't be. Because how else can you do your job?" Charles let that sit without replying, but wondered if this was his own problem. The idea of trusting anyone besides the man who called him with assignments had long ago been proven untenable. Maybe the human body just couldn't take that level of suspicion.

After showing their passports and crossing into Italy, he took out his cell phone and dialed. He talked a moment to Grainger and repeated back the information he'd received: "Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. Third door."

"What was that?" Angela asked when he hung up. He dialed a second number. After a few rings, Bogdan Krizan warily said, "Da?"

"Go to the docks across from the Hotel Slovenia. Number fortyseven. In the water you'll find a Bosnian Serb named Dusan Maskovic. You've got that?"

Krizan breathed heavily. "This is about Frank?" Charles hung up.

5

It took three hours to reach Venice and hire a water-taxi--a motoscafo. By five thirty they were at the Lido docks. A sulking young Carabiniere with a wishful mustache was waiting by the abandoned motorboat--the Venetians had been told to expect visitors, but to not set up a welcome party. He raised the red police tape for them, but didn't follow them aboard. It was all there--the Dubrovnik registration papers, the filthy cabin littered with spare engine parts, and, in one corner, a brown splash of sun-dried blood. They didn't spend long on it. The only things Frank Dawdle had left in that boat were his fingerprints and the chronology of the killing. Standing in the middle of the cabin, Charles held out two fingers in an imitation pistol.

"Shoots him here, then drags him out." He squatted to indicate where the oil on the floor had been smeared, with faint traces of blood. "Maybe he tied that metal tubing to him on the boat, or maybe in the water. It doesn't matter."

"No," said Angela, eyeing him. "It doesn't." They found no shell casings. It was possible the casings had fallen into Portoroz Bay, but it was also possible that Frank had followed Company procedure and collected them, even though he'd left his prints. Panic, maybe, but that, too, didn't matter.

They thanked the Carabiniere, who muttered "Prego" while staring at Angela's breasts, then found the motoscafo driver waiting on the dock with an unlit cigarette between his lips. Behind him, the sun was low. He informed them that the meter was still running, and it had passed 150,000

lire. He seemed very pleased when neither passenger made a fuss. It took another twenty minutes to ride back up the Grand Canal, the bumpy path taking them up to the Cannaregio district, where the Russian businessman, Roman Ugrimov, had just moved in. "He's into everything," Angela explained. "Russian utilities, Austrian land development--even a South African gold mine."

He squinted in the hot breeze at a passing vaporetto full of tourists.

"Moved to Vienna two years ago, didn't he?"

"That's when we started investigating. Lots of dirt, but nothing sticks."

"Ugrimov's security is tight?"

"Unbelievable. Frank wanted evidence of his pedophilia. He travels with a thirteen-year-old niece. But she's no niece. We're sure of that."

"How do you get dirt on him?"

Angela gripped the edge of the rocking boat to keep balanced. "Frank found a source. He really is quite good at his job."

"That's what worries me."

He paid the driver once they'd reached the vaporetto stop at Ca' d'Oro, tipping him handsomely, and they broke through crowds of milling tourists to reach the maze of empty backstreets. Finally, after some guesswork, they found the open area--not quite a square--of Rio Terra Barba Fruttariol. Roman Ugrimov's palazzo was a dilapidated but ornate corner building that rose up high. It opened onto Barba Fruttariol, but the long, covered terrace that Angela gazed at, shielding her eyes with a hand, wrapped around to a side street. "Impressive," she said.

"A lot of ex-KGB live in impressive houses."

"KGB?" She stared at him. "You already know about this guy. I low?" Charles touched the envelope of Dexedrine in his pocket for comfort.

"I hear things."

"Oh. I don't have clearance.

Charles didn't bother answering. "You want to run this, then?"

"I'd rather you did. I don't carry a Company ID."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Angela said as she rang the front bell. She showed her State Department ID to a bald, cliche-ridden bodyguard with a wired earplug and asked to speak with Roman Ugrimov. The large man spoke Russian into his lapel, listened to an answer, then walked them up a dim, steep stairwell of worn stone. At the top, he unlocked a heavy wooden door.

Ugrimov's apartment seemed to have been flown in direct from Manhattan: shimmering wood floors, modern designer furniture, plasma television, and double-paned sliding doors leading to a long terrace that overlooked an evening panorama of Venetian rooftops to the Grand Canal. Even Charles had to admit it was breathtaking.

Ugrimov himself was seated at a steel table in a high-backed chair, reading from a notebook computer. He smiled at them, feigning surprise, and got up with an outstretched hand. "The first visitors to my new home," he said in easy English. "Welcome."

He was tall, fiftyish, with wavy gray hair and a bright smile. Despite heavy eyes that matched Charles's, he had a youthful vitality about him. After the introductions, he led them to the overdesigned sofas. "Now, please. Tell me what I can do for my American friends." Angela handed over her photograph of Frank Dawdle. Ugrimov slipped on some wide Ralph Lauren bifocals and tilted it in the failing evening light.

"Who's this supposed to be?"

"He works for the American government," said Angela.

"CIA, too?"

"We're just embassy staff. He's been missing three days."

"Oh." Ugrimov handed back the photo. "That must be troubling."

"It is," Angela said. "You're sure he hasn't come to see you?"

"Nikolai," said Ugrimov, and in Russian asked, "Have we had any visitors?"

The bodyguard rolled out his lower lip and shook his head. Ugrimov shrugged. "Nothing, I'm afraid. Perhaps you can tell me why you think he would come here. I don't know this man, do I?" Charles said, "He was looking into your life just before he disappeared."

"Oh," the Russian said again. He raised a finger. "You're telling me that someone at the American embassy in Vienna has been looking into my life and works?"

"You'd be insulted if they didn't," said Charles. Ugrimov grinned. "Okay. Let me offer some drinks. Or are you on the job?"

To Charles's annoyance, Angela said, "We're on the job," and stood. She handed over a business card. "If Mr. Dawdle does get in contact with you, then please call me."

"I'll be sure to do that." He turned to Charles. "Do svidaniya." Charles repeated the Russian farewell back to him.

Once they were down the steps and in the dark street, the air moist and still warm, Angela yawned again and said, "What was that?"

"What?"

"How'd he know you spoke Russian?"

"I'm telling you, I need a new name." Charles looked up the length of the street. "The Russian community's not so big."