Tool of the Trade (13 page)

They finally showed up, Roberta Bender with a man much shorter than she, almost a dwarf, skinny. They stood at the crosswalk, obediently waiting for the light to change. I rolled the coat’s sleeve up past the watch and turned it on. Maximum gain against the traffic noise.

For some reason I had not expected it to be easy. It wasn’t going to be. The first thing that went wrong was an unexpected wrinkle, something that had never happened with the watch before. As they passed me, I stood up and followed them into the Common. When there was no one within earshot, I stepped between them. “Tarakan,” I said, “will you answer some questions for me?”

“All right,” he said.

“What?” Bender said. “Who is this man? Don’t tell him anything!”

“All right,” he said again.

“Shut up, Roberta. Don’t say another word until I’m gone.” She nodded. “Tarakan, what’s your real name?”

“I cannot tell you anything.”

“Yes, you can. She didn’t know what she was saying. You can talk to me. What is your name?”

He looked from her to me and made a strangled
noise. Absolute orders that conflicted. I turned to Bender. “Tell him to answer me.” She made a similar strangled noise. With my careless syntax, I had effectively silenced both of them!

Start over. “All right. Both of you forget everything that's happened in the past sixty seconds.”

They both gave a little stagger. “Who are you?” Bender demanded.

“A friend. You will both answer all of my questions.” They nodded. “Let’s walk.” I asked the cockroach what his real name was; he said Igor Melentev. I wrote it down.

“Igor, where is Valerie Foley being held?”

“Someplace in the Washington area. All I have is a phone number.”

“Give it to me.”

“I don’t have it memorized. It’s back at my apartment.” He gave me the address, a fairly sleazy area near Chinatown. We walked to a cabstand, and I had us delivered to a location a few blocks from Igor’s place.

It was a good area for a cockroach to live in. Triple-X theaters and massage parlors. Sidewalks more slept on than swept. Everywhere the excrement of large dogs. One hoped.

He rented the second-floor loft of a tenement that was otherwise used only as a warehouse. We had to edge single-file through the vestibule, which was stacked high with dusty boxes, and inch carefully up the unlit stairs. The air was mildew and mold and damp concrete.

He unlocked the door to his loft and fluorescent lights flicked into momentarily blinding brilliance. The large room was neat and spare, mostly empty space. Cot, chair, desk, filing cabinet clustered at one
end of a thousand square feet of brown indoor-outdoor carpet. No bookcase, radio, television; no real sense of habitation.

“It’s over here.” He led us to the desk, set down his glasses, and opened the drawer. He pulled a Colt Woodsman with a homemade silencer and pointed it at my face. “Who are you?”

“Put that gun away,” I said.

“That won’t work.” Without looking away from me he touched his glasses. “These glasses have a built-in hearing aid. It has been working only intermittently today. I find that when I can hear clearly,. I have to do what you say. That must be Foley’s secret weapon. You work for him, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you’re just the one we’ve been waiting for. Roberta, come here. There’s some strapping tape in the bottom drawer. Tie him up.”

So I was not the only careless person in the room. When she came up beside him, I said, “
Take the gun!”
—and she made a grab for it.

He got off one shot before she grasped the weapon. The report was like a cap pistol; the bullet whirred past my ear. Then two more wild shots, one ricocheting crazily, while he struggled with the large woman, and then I had the Browning out, one loud blast. The center of his nose blossomed and his head rocked back, spraying brains. He staggered sideways and fell across the desk with a horrible groan. Roberta was screaming at the top of her lungs. I got a good sight picture between her eyes but didn’t shoot. “
Shut up!
” I yelled, twice. The second time, she was inhaling and heard me. She quieted but continued to pant and whimper, staring at the dying body as it rustled and spilled. She was trying to cram her fist into her mouth.

I checked to make sure there were no blood spots on her clothing and led her to the door. “When you go out of this door, you will forget everything that has happened since meeting Tarakan today. You will go home, call in sick, and sleep for the rest of the day.” I opened the door and gently pushed her out.

Speed. There was an address book in the drawer from which he’d taken the gun. I pocketed it and then dumped everything on the floor; try to make it look like a burglary. I took his wallet and the silenced pistol. Wiped my fingerprints off drawer handles and ran out the door and down the dark stairs, almost breaking my neck on the last one. Went down the musty hall to a back entrance and stepped out into an alley. No sirens. Not a sound; no sign of life. Perhaps a single gunshot was not that much of a novelty here. Without hurrying, I walked to the Washington Street T stop and took the subway back to my hotel.

That was when the reaction set in. I almost fainted in the elevator. I just managed to get inside the room, where I fell on the bed fully clothed and shook for several minutes.

Then I called Room Service and asked for a double brandy. Locked all the armaments in the closet and took a quick hot-cold-shower. I was just finished dressing when the drink came. I tipped the boy more than the drink cost and, as soon as the door closed, drank half of it in a gulp. Then I sat to sip at it and leaf through the address book, on the off chance that he had been telling the truth.

He evidently was. There were no names, just initials—but only one number had the Washington area code, 202.

He let me think about that razor blade and his prestidigitation for two days. I received nothing but water for those two days and, with the exception of bathroom breaks, was kept handcuffed to the chair the whole time. It did give me time to think, though it was hard to think of anything constructive.

I wondered who was taking my classes. Where Nick was. What kind of winter it had been. Where the police were. How long they were going to keep me alive. Where the FBI was. How my parents were taking it. Where the CIA was. Where Nick was.

And over and over, why did they want Nick so badly? He obviously hadn’t told me everything. Was that just spy-stuff secrecy, or was it something so terrible he thought I couldn’t handle it? Or couldn’t be trusted.

The woman who was watching me left, and the fat man came back, moving with the same weird, silent
grace as before. Staring at me. “What’s your name?” I asked, to break the spell. He sat down and smiled. “The CIA has been calling me the Scalpel, which is funny. I’ve never used a scalpel.”

“Just that razor blade.”

“No, that was a new one. Never used.” He set a heavy pistol on the table. “Do you know where this comes from?”

“Is it Nick’s?”

“Yes. So let us have no foolishness about him not being involved with guns.”

“But that’s a target pistol, isn’t it? He used to coach—”

“Yes, it is a target pistol. It’s also the weapon of choice for most assassinations performed by organized crime. They should know what works best, don’t you think?”

“Nick could never murder anybody.”

“We know differently. You know differently.”

“You’re wrong. I’ve know him since…”

He leaned across the table and slowly began unbuttoning my blouse. I shrank away, but the chair was bolted to the floor. “You’re going to add sexual battery to kidnapping?” I asked.

“It would make no difference, would it? In terms of punishment.” He undid the last button and spread the blouse open. I wasn’t wearing a bra. “But no, I’m not interested in you…that way. Though I compliment you on having kept your shape. Handball, is it?”

“Yes.”

“And self-defense, your dossier says; one reason you’re kept handcuffed.” He continued to inspect me, with a pouty kind of smile. He had the lips of a fat baby.

“So what’s the point in undressing me? I’m beyond being embarrassed. If you want to see my body, you can come in while I’m bathing. I certainly can’t stop you.” Actually, only the female guard had been with me in the bathroom, and always with eyes averted.

He produced a cigarette from the air and lit it carefully with a wooden match. It was one of those thick French cigarettes with the yellow paper. It smelled like compost burning. He squinted at me through the rising fumes.

He moved the cigarette to the corner of his mouth by a sensual rolling of the lips. “I also know that your academic specialty is abnormal psychology. Perhaps you can help me. With a personal problem.”

“Go ahead.”

“Some thirty years ago, I was castrated.”

“My God. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was done with anesthesia.”

“By the State?”

“In a sense,” he said, or perhaps “in essence.” He glanced around for an ashtray and, finding none, gently rolled the ash of his cigarette onto the tabletop. “It was an internal-security measure by the KGB, perhaps not sanctioned by the Party. I agreed to the operation.”

“Rather than die.”

“That was the implication. Let me explain.” He stood up and walked a couple of paces away, and spoke with his back to me.

“When I was younger, I was a sadist. I mean that in the precise clinical way: a person who can only be sexually aroused by inflicting pain on his partner.”

My heart started to hammer. Could he be making this up to scare me?

“I grew up on a farm. My first sexual encounters
were with animals. Once a sheep tried to get away from me, and I killed it. The blood was… exciting beyond expression. I made it a practice. Hurting them, sometimes killing them.

“When I was older, after Stalin, I sought out partners who did not mind pain, or enjoyed it. Most of them were other young men, though I preferred women. Older women. I would have liked you.” I was not especially grateful.

“I was accepted by the MGB, which was one of the KGB’s predecessors, and after a couple of years they posted me to Germany. That was a godsend, since prostitutes there were often amenable to sadism, and there was no… political problems. In Russia I was often afraid that one of my partners would exploit our relationship.

“After a few years, though, my superiors evidently got suspicious. I hired a prostitute from my usual source. As it turned out, she was actually one of our agents from another city. She played the part with enthusiasm. But once she had ample evidence of my proclivities, she revealed who she was and ordered me to stop. It was bad timing on her part. As much out of anger as desire, I killed her. She was the only one I ever killed. Of course I wasn’t able to cover it up.

“But for various reasons I was valuable to the NKVD. So I was allowed to be castrated as an experiment in… attitude adjustment. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know what to think. I hope it’s a fantasy you’re using in order to scare—”

“No.” He turned around and slowly exposed himself: crotch as featureless as a plastic doll’s. Catheter and bag, no penis. As he methodically redressed, he
continued. “So I am no longer a sadist in the strictest sense of the word. My only sexual activity is a periodic shot of testosterone, to prevent glandular imbalance.

“However, I find I do still take a sort of detached pleasure in inflicting pain. And I know a great deal about people’s reactions to pain.” He leaned over the table toward me. The burning cigarette was about a foot from my bare chest.

“If you’re trying to frighten me,” I said, “you’ve succeeded. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” The quaver in my voice was genuine. “I’m no hero, heroine.”

“That is a problem.” He moved the cigarette closer; I could feel the heat from its ember on my left breast. “People
will
tell you whatever they think you want to hear. Rather than the truth.”

The chair back creaked with the force of my retreat from the coal, as he brought it to within an inch of the nipple. I closed my eyes tight and even so had to turn away. A crawling, tingling sensation raced up and down my back; my guts churned. “I’m going to be sick,” I said through clenched jaws.

“Not very. You haven’t eaten in two days.” But he took the cigarette away. I opened my eyes and saw him take a long drag on it and then drop it and grind it out on the floor. He had a grotesque, earnest expression.

“Do you understand?” he said quietly. “I can cause you so much pain that even after it stops, you will want to die rather than live with the memory of it.” He began to button up my blouse. “And I can withhold death indefinitely.”

He straightened my collar and touched my cheek with his warm, dry hand. “I hope you can see that it is
an impersonal process. I am a technician charged with extracting reliable information. What’s at stake is so important that whether you live or die, or whether I do, means absolutely nothing. Your happiness or agonies are meaningless. Do you understand?”

“What is at stake?”

He stabbed with a thumbnail, not hard, at a pressure point under my cheekbone. It caused an electrifying spark of pain, like the dentist touching a nerve. “I asked whether you understood.”

“Yes. I do.” What did I know about sadism that I could possibly use as a defense? What could anybody know that would apply to this man’s bizarre case?

“It could be that
everything
is at stake. Your husband is a wild card. He even has the CIA terrified.”

“That sounds incredible.”

“The KGB is not happy with him, either. While he was in Paris, he killed two agents assigned to interrogate him.”

“They must have done something awful.”

“Your loyalty is touching. But as far as we can tell, they did nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing like what you are going through.”

“I see.” I could go through rather less and cheerfully kill anyone responsible.

“The
way
he killed them is especially interesting. One of them lived long enough to describe it, and that’s what has the CIA and the KGB upset. It interests me, personally, very much.” He paused.