Manhattan 62 (23 page)

When you work crime as a city detective, things eventually fit together, more or less; if not, you can tweak them, give them a little shove, reorder the circumstances, pray for a good DA to prosecute. You consider motivation, circumstance, opportunity, forensics; you apply logic, and then things fall in, more or less.

While I stuck the key in the ignition, it hit me hard. I was no spy. I had none of that kind of subtlety. Except for a few movies I had seen, I had no knowledge of burrowing deep and waiting for people to reveal their flaws so you could expose them, no understanding of saboteurs or provocateurs, of double agents, or moles or sleepers or cutouts, or whatever the hell they called it all.

With this business of Ostalsky, a KGB agent murdering a Cuban, I was in over my head, unable to even work through the evidence. Before I had left my apartment, I had called my boss and told him I was going fishing like he wanted.

“God bless you. God bless us all, if we make it through this week.” Murphy had a sentimental streak.

How could I have misjudged the Russian? But everyone had liked him. He had been a good actor; his likeability was a role, a cover, something he had been taught. He had been taught well.

When I parked and ran into Pennsylvania Station, it was mobbed. People surged from the tracks underground. They circulated and sat, and read, and slept, in the immense lobby, with its pink marble and columns, like too many extras in a period movie, ancient Rome in the middle of Manhattan.

For a split second, I felt terror. This was the kind of place you could hide a bomb. It had happened before when the Mad Bomber was terrorizing the city; it could happen again—would happen.

In Penn Station, a killer could hide, in the toilets, in some of the out-of-use waiting rooms, under tarps at the building sites. It was huge and there were also warrens of offices and storage rooms where old luggage went when nobody claimed it. This was a place for an assassination, if you used the right weapon; use a knife, use a wire for strangling, then stash the body in a hundred abandoned places.

Every time a departing train was announced, the crowd surged forward. Where was Ostalsky? Was he dead? Why had he called me? Why did this murderous Russki want me to know where he was?

Suddenly, it came to me. The word—assassination. I had read it in Ostalsky's notebook. Not for a long time, not since Lincoln, had we done this kind of thing; Lincoln or the other president, what the hell was his name?

We didn't do that kind of thing any more, did we? The Russians did it; maybe those Banana Republics in South America—not us, not the Americans.

Ostalsky knew what was coming, he knew, and he needed help. He was scared.

CHAPTER SEVEN

October 23, '62

T
HE HANDS ON MY
watch seemed to move too fast, as if out of control, speeding ahead, making me crazy while I tried to search the immense station. Some of it was already under tarps, ready for the boneyard, as they planned on tearing it all down. I knew I was too late to find Ostalsky, but I searched the place anyway, running in and out of the shops, crashing into waiting rooms, people cursing me, knowing that he would not have stayed long enough for me to get him. He was on the run, and he would have moved on to Washington, or Moscow, or gone to ground, God knew where. He had been calling me to say goodbye, but why? What reason did he have to stop and call? I didn't believe all his words of friendship and thanks, not again, not anymore.

“Watch out.” I had bumped into a woman who dropped her shopping bags from Orbach's. She yelled at me some more, and I ran again.

On the lower level of the station, the trains departed and arrived, sucking people in, and pushing them out of the glass and steel train sheds. Even at this hour, the station filled and emptied constantly, wave after wave of passengers coming and going. Everybody instinctively looked up at the big clock—it was 9.21— as the hands moved the minutes forward.

“It's getting late,” said a voice. The fat man I had seen with Bounine outside the hospital was standing next to me.

He wore the same expensive camel-hair coat, his stomach straining against the belt. He could have been a banker or a lawyer, and like many large guys, he moved lightly. He raised his
Wall Street Journal
to his face, as if to inspect the closing prices on his stocks.

When he put the paper down, I saw he was relatively young, about forty, not more, but with jowls that, in a few years, would grow fat as his stomach, and drop like a basset hound's. He wore horn-rimmed glasses.

He caught my eye. “May I help you with something?” he said, tipping his hat. “Are you perhaps lost? It's quite easy to get lost here, would you not agree?” he said. “It's happened to me quite a few times.”

“I'm good.”

“Are you coming or going?” he said.

I played the game. “Waiting for a friend. You?”

“It's sad that they will soon tear down this wonderful train station, don't you think so? I have heard the waiting room upstairs was compared to the Roman Baths of Caracalla.”

“Very sad.”

“Are you interested in architecture, then, in the preservation of old cities? I understand your lovely first lady, Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy, is quite a force in this area.” He examined his gold watch. He removed his fine brown leather gloves, extracted a pack of foreign cigarettes, opened it and offered it to me. “These are quite tasty,” he said. Two of his fingers were missing.

“The Great Patriotic War,” he said. “We all lost something.”

Had he somehow followed me from Columbia? I accepted a cigarette, and let him light it.

“The weather has changed suddenly, don't you think? Such lovely Indian summer, and now it's quite chill. Chilly.” He corrected himself. “What do you say? Is that usual?”

“What do I say about what?”

“This weather.”

“Do you visit New York often?” Only clichés fell out of my mouth. I wanted him to make a move first.

“Yes. Sure. It is normal. I come here as often as possible for you have very fine theatre and concerts. On some occasions my wife accompanies me as well. In fact, I have been here to see the ballet. My wife is a musician,” he added, maybe to let me know it wasn't a pick-up, that he wasn't queer. “She plays the cello.”

“Where are you from?”

“Washington DC,” he said, and, glancing at the clock, added, “I have only five minutes before my train departs.”

“But have you got something to tell me? This isn't an accident, is it? Our meeting?” I was impatient. “I saw you with Bounine outside Columbia.”

“Yes.” He put out his hand. “If you come to Washington, please look for me. Here is my telephone number,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a little blue leather case. From it, he removed a card and handed it to me. I examined it. In elegant script, it read Mr Gennadi Ustinov. It was engraved.

“As you see, my name is Gennadi Mikhailovich Ustinov. I work at the Soviet Embassy,” he said.

“Pat Wynne.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You knew my name, didn't you?”

“Yes. It's written on the return address of the envelope in your pocket.” He was right. There was an envelope sticking out of my jacket pocket that I'd meant to mail to my cousin in Liverpool for her birthday and had forgotten. “Please, shall we sit down?” He gestured for me to follow him to a bench in the waiting area. He sat. I sat next to him. A group of suburban women took the rest of the space. Ustinov then looked around the cavernous hall, got up again, and led me to an empty corner, where his back was against the wall.

This was a man who always preferred his back against the wall. You could see that. From his black leather attaché case he removed a copy of the
Journal-American.
He folded it so I could see the story about the dead man on the pier, with a photograph.

“You knew I was coming?”

Ustinov lowered his voice. “Our mutual friend mentioned he had telephoned you, and thought you might make your way here.”

“Enough games,” I said.

“But this is a sort of game, is it not? Or call it magic. Things appear. They disappear. People as well.”

“Look, I'm just a dumb New York policeman, just tell me what's going on, and where Max Ostalsky is.”

“Who?”

“Stop.” I got up. I was furious now. I felt in my pocket for the gun. “Stop fucking around, man. You know who I mean and you know where he is.”

He looked across the hall and removed his hat and put it back.

“Do you want to say why you were standing on the sidewalk with Mike Bounine up at Columbia?” I asked him. “It didn't look all that friendly to me.”

He grinned now. “Is that what he calls himself here? Mike? Very, what would you say, charming? Mike, this is quite a piece of news.”

“Is it? Why? It's what he told me. Don't you people have nicknames over there? Is it against the law?”

“It is not. Certainly, we have many. This Mike, he, too, comes from the Soviet Union, like me, you know that, of course. We are compatriots. I stopped to say hello.” “Outside a hospital on 168th Street? Really?”

“As I have said, I work in Washington where I have a job at the embassy. Cultural attaché,” he said. “If you will ask why I was in New York, for the truth, I tell you I was here to attend to something for our famous Bolshoi Ballet Company. Several of our dancers left their slippers behind, and I must send them off to Chicago. Now I am waiting for my return train.”

“Come on, you're telling me it's about ballet shoes? You think I was born yesterday?”

“I do not imagine this. But it is true. Our ballet company has gone on tour, and the ladies cannot dance without their pink satin shoes. This was important. I have been on 39th Street at the Metropolitan Opera House to arrange for these shoes to be sent.”

“Ballet shoes.” I was looking for answers to a homicide, and this joker gives me ballet. “Listen, I'm going.”

“Please sit down again.”

Shifting closer to Ustinov, I let him know I had a gun. I was carrying my personal weapon, the one I kept at home, though it would not have pleased my boss.

Ustinov seemed not to notice, or to care. He was a secure man. “The ballet shoes were a cover.” Then he turned to look at me. “Wait, please.” He looked out into the crowd again, and as he did, I saw that he was looking at a man with a thick neck in a tan raincoat and a checkered flat cap standing under the clock.

“What did Ostalsky tell you?”

“He says he needs help.”

“So you just stepped up.”

“Our families are close. This is a difficult time. We go for a ride on the Circle Line boat, a nice quiet place to talk in the middle of a cold day. Poor Max, he looks out at Manhattan passing across the water and I see how much he likes this city, and he tells me he is in trouble, that the Americans think he killed a man on the piers. Somebody told the police. He even leans out over the railing of the boat and, to tell the truth, for a moment I think he's going to jump into the river. I grab him as tight as I can, but he just points to a pier and I see in his face how melancholy he has become. ‘They are hunting me,' he says. I have known Maxim Stepanovich since he was a child. He didn't do it, Detective Wynne.”

“Oh, please. You're going to tell me you baby-sat for him, that you taught him his first little magic tricks, to pull money out of people's ears.”

He looked surprised. “How did you know? Yes, all this is true.”

“Why would I believe you? Why are your own people on his tail? Is this about Cuba?”

“Yes. And other things.”

“What other things.”

Ustinov lowered his voice. “There are people in my country who want a nuclear war, and the same is true of people in your country, I know this.”

“Yeah, so? How do you know? Your job is ballet slippers, isn't it?”

“There are other, more informal jobs, too. I frequently meet with many officials of the United States, but not formally. Just, so to say, friends who might have a cigarette together on a park bench, or a bite to eat in a restaurant they both like, perhaps an accidental meeting on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.”

“But not accidental?”

“Not quite. You probably understand that by telling you these things it is a risk for me.”

“I don't know anything about Washington politics. Who is it you have these meetings with?”

“That I cannot tell you. Just understand there are good people on both sides, who do not want war, but also the others.”

“Military guys.”

“You know?”

“I read
Fail-Safe
last week, for Christ's sake.”

“This book tells the truth. I can't say any more. But I think that Max has found himself involved with all of this by accident.”

“Somebody is using him. Framing him.”

“It's possible,” said Ustinov. “May I give you some advice?”

“Sure.” I was angry, and I was on edge. Where was Max? If he had killed before and somebody got in his way, he would do it again. I had no idea what to make of this fat man with the soft voice and mild manner.

“Stay away from Bounine,” said Ustinov. “I think he has, how would you say, gone off the rails, Detective. I'm afraid he has, how do they say, problems that he cannot solve. Personal problems, do you understand what this means? I have a feeling he will not be welcome here in the United States very much longer.”

“Or in your country?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is that why you went to see him?”

“You could say this.”

“What kind of problems. Women? Money?”

Ustinov smiled sadly. “No ideology can protect from certain desires, I'm afraid. But no, not women or money.”

“Spell it out for me.” I guessed Ustinov was a lot more senior than he had said. In some way he was Bounine's superior. I smoked, and followed his gaze as he looked at the departure board overhead.