Manhattan 62 (24 page)

“My train leaves for Washington in several minutes, so I must board now.” Ustinov rose, and put out his hand. “Be careful, Detective, please. I know you have been kind to my friend.” He turned just slightly, and I saw the man with the checkered cap. His shoes looked like a cop's; rubber-soled, they were heavy and had been repaired more than once.

“Yours?”

“I'm sorry? What was that, Detective?”

“How did you know I was a detective?”

“The envelope in your pocket.”

“It only has my name. No title.”

He didn't answer. Again, Ustinov looked around. Again, he lowered his voice; he spoke so softly this time, I could barely hear. “Your friend needs your help. He needs it very much. He is not a bad man. Help him if you can. Please. You have my telephone number.”

“Who the hell are you really?” I thought about grabbing Ustinov's lapels, but I held back. “Tell me what the hell is going on, and where Ostalsky is. You know, don't you? Where is he? Did you know I'd be here? You knew, you were with him when he called me. Weren't you?”

“I will miss my train.”

I put my face into Ustninov's. “Tell me.”

“I must go.”

I caught his sleeve, but he extracted it from my grasp. “You're a foreign agent, I could get you arrested.”

“I am an official cultural attaché. I have the protection of my country. I didn't tail you, as you put it.”

“Where is Ostalsky?”

The goon in the cap and tan coat edged closer. His face was hard and expressionless, like Russians in a bad movie. Maybe they hired these Ivans because they would scare you with their looks alone. He looked like the kind of man—I had met a few of ours—who would kill you if there was a reason, and sometimes if there was none. Sometimes, these men did it from boredom.

Ivan moved closer to us, within reach of Ustinov. From where he stood now, he could hear us talking.

Ustinov straightened up, bowed slightly, a courtly old-fashioned bow, and replaced his hat.

“My friend needs you, please help him, he is a good man,” he said. “He wouldn't tell me where he has gone, for my own protection, but he said you would know. You would know because the two of you had been there before. He phones you, says goodbye only in case somebody is listening,” says Ustinov. “Detective?”

“Yeah?”

He lowered his voice, glancing around as if to see who might be listening. “If you can avoid a certain Captain Logan, it would be quite a good idea.”

“How do you know Logan?”

But Ustinov only offered me his hand, and I shook it and then, as he buttoned his coat, he felt in his pocket for his ticket. He walked steadily towards his train, with the man in the raincoat following him. He never looked back, just went calmly towards the tracks and the train that he believed would take him home, his camel-hair overcoat billowing behind him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

October 23, '62

“
H
ELLO,
P
AT
.”

“What goddamn assassination?” I said.

I found Max Ostalsky in the warehouse near the High Line, sitting on an empty chicken crate in the dark, a gun in his hand. It was eleven, Tuesday night, about an hour after I'd left Penn Station. The place was bare and cold. The concrete walls dripped. It was the place the Cuban girl, Susana Reyes, had camped out before she was slaughtered, and it still stank of rotting fowl—chicken or turkey—and piss.

“Some kind of warehouse,” Ustinov had said, when I asked where Ostalsky was, and I had driven from Penn Station like a crazy man, soon as it hit me: the High Line.

The street-side door to the warehouse was missing. The cops must have yanked the door off when we were searching for clues to Susana's murder. All that was left were some yellow strips of police tape and cigarette butts the detectives would have tossed onto the floor.

Max knew the place; I had shown it to him. All the questions he had asked me about the High Line case, all the pestering.

I went up the stairs. Most of the doors were bolted and nailed shut except on the fourth floor where I had found Susana's little encampment, the faulty heater, a nest of newspaper. The door had been removed. For a moment, I listened, but all I heard was the wind, and the rats. I took a breath and went in.

A couple of empties rolled under my feet, glass clinking on the concrete floor. Used needles. Dope addicts came here to shoot up, drunks to sleep it off.

I didn't see the rat until it ran over my foot, looking for food. I never got used to rats. Cockroaches you could smash, you could even enjoy the cracking of the shells. They say cockroaches can survive nuclear war. Rats, I hated; hated the teeth, the paws.

During the war, I had seen a Navy poster that showed a rat who looked like Emperor Hirohito, and he was nibbling cheese out of a trap labeled Army, Navy, Civilian with the words: ALASKA: DEATH TRAP FOR THE JAP. I was eight. I asked my pop what it meant. “It means them Japs are dirty rats, kiddo. You understand?”

Feeling the animal getting at the flesh of my leg, I shook it off. A match struck.

It was then, in the light from the match, that I saw him. Ostalsky was sitting on that crate, near the rusted heater. A snub-nose nickel-plated .38 special, same as most cops used, same as me, was in his hand. He held it like a man who understood guns. The fact that he had used a .22 on the dead man didn't mean much. This was the kind of killer who knew his way around every weapon. He had been trained.

Yeah, sure, maybe Ostalsky spoke good English. He laughed a lot. He liked the movies, and good American shoes. He had willingly played a fool, a clown, grinning and laughing at himself trying to learn the local customs: how to buy a hot dog; how to do the Twist; how to drink whisky. He had not been sent to America just to learn about
Moby-Dick,
or listen to Gerry Mulligan, or make friends in the park with a gullible cop who loved James Brown. The encounter in Washington Square had not been accidental. I had read this in Ostalsky's diary. Max Ostalsky had been sent to use us.

The dark was playing tricks on me. I had trouble judging distance and, fumbling forward, I tripped over a paint can. When he struck a second match, I realized Ostalsky was only a few feet away, sitting on the wooden crate, back against the wall, elbows on his knees, the gun aimed at my heart.

Through the broken window behind him, I could now just see the tracks along the High Line, thirty feet above the street. He must have ditched his FBI tail, climbed up the ladder to the viaduct, stumbled along the tracks, onto the loading dock, into the warehouse through the window.

The only light came from the moon; distant, cold, half obscured by a reef of clouds over the river. Fall. Winter soon.

“I'm so sorry, Pat,” Ostalsky said. “But would you mind giving me your weapon? I'd like not to have to ask, but I must do this. Please.” A rueful smile crossed his face. “I didn't mean for a thing like this to happen, not at all. Forgive me. Can you tell me anything of what's happening? Cuba?” His right hand was bandaged with an old rag, and bloodstained.

“Your killing hand?”

Max looked at it. “I cut it. When I broke the window to get in. I was left-handed as a child, they tried to cure me of this, so I can use both.”

“Very handy.” I was scared, but I was mad as hell. I wanted to punch out his lights and throw him in a holding cell for a long long time, and then watch him fry in the electric chair. But he had the weapon, and I understood he would have no scruples about using it.

“Right now, please, Pat. Your pistol.”

He had changed. All that soft charm, the humor, the exuberance, was gone. He was quiet and polite, but behind the glasses, his eyes were focused and hard. He had shot the man on the pier—a man who had been his friend— had stuck a pistol in his ear and pulled the trigger. He had ripped his tongue out, wrapped his head in duct tape, maybe while he was still alive. He had stuffed the body in a black bag and dumped him on the pier. I had put my hand on the corpse, I had felt inside the wound, felt the flesh, the shattered bone.

I took my gun out of the holster, and slid it across the floor. Without looking down, he picked it up. “There's another empty box just there, that one that says Purdue Broiler Chickens? Won't you sit down?” He gestured to a wooden crate a few feet from where he sat. “You'll be more comfortable, though it's damp like hell in here. The smell is quite bad.” He shifted his weight, and buttoned his jacket with one hand. “I'm sorry it's so cold.”

“Yeah? That suit looks warm enough.”

He was wearing the heavy gray suit I had first seen him in. He had left his new clothes behind—I had seen them in the closet on 10th Street—as if shedding a skin, leaving behind his American self. Only the loafers remained. Maybe he had forgotten. Maybe he couldn't give them up.

With one hand he got a cigarette out of his pocket. Examining it, he said, “My last Lucky Strike. Please tell me the news.”

“We're probably going to war. Your people have been shipping nukes to Cuba,” I said. “I brought you a couple of packs.” I reached for my pocket.

“Don't do that. I'm sorry, Pat. Keep your hands, if you won't mind, out of your pockets, would you?”

Even in the dim warehouse I could see how tired he looked. Maybe if I could get him talking, it would change things. The more time passed, the less likely he was to shoot me. Talk, you bastard. Talk to me.

“You knew I'd come, didn't you?” I said. “Isn't that why you chose this place? Didn't you send me a message? Did you think I'd help you, or I'd go easier on you than the FBI?”

He was silent.

“Are you planning to kill me?”

“I hope not,” he said.

Could I jump him? He was tired. I got up off the box and stretched.

“Sit down, please.”

If he didn't kill me now, I'd get a better sense of his intentions. I stayed standing. Stretched again. I heard him cock the gun. I sat down. A rat ran across the space between us.

“You got in the way. You told the police I killed this man you found on the pier last Tuesday night. It seems so long ago, a week and a day already.” He rubbed his eyes. “Yes, it's Tuesday now, isn't it?” He seemed uncertain. “I'm just a bit tired. Yes. You should have let it be, Pat.”

“How did you get the gun?”

“In your country it is quite easy. No problem, as you say.”

“But you didn't buy it yourself?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I assume you know how to use that thing.”

A rueful smile passed over his face. “Actually, I was on the Soviet shooting team.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“We were very good. Sadly I was not at the competition this year in Cairo. I would like to have seen Egypt, Pat. The Pyramids, the temples at Luxor, the tomb of Tutankhamen, these were things I dream of seeing from the time I was a boy. I came here instead.”

“What kind of pistol did you shoot?”

“Similar to a .22. Easy enough to make it look like I shot Valdes for somebody who knew about my sporting achievements in the USSR. You know what? I wish I could have seen more of America. New Orleans. San Francisco. Chicago. Well, it was never possible.”

“Your bosses wouldn't allow it.”

“You're right.”

“Who are you going to assassinate?”

“What? Nobody. Nobody.”

“Is it Bounine, then? Does he run you, are you his creature?”

“Although I would like to have seen the Wild West, as they call it. Perhaps I could have been a gunslinger of old western style?”

I was under no delusion about Ostalsky, who was a cold-blooded killer, and I wasn't laughing.

“You think this is funny? Does it make you laugh? You think this is one of those quaint American ideas that you can turn into one of your little ironic jokes?” I said.

“I am not ironic.”

“No? What are you, then? A trained murderer? A killing machine? What else did they teach you?”

“Do you want to know?”

“I'm not in any goddamn hurry, am I, Max? I know you killed Rica Valdes on Pier 46. I told my boss, and he'll have his men on your case, the FBI too, and as for your own goons, how come you're hiding from them? How come you don't go to your bosses and say, I need help. This makes me feel they're not one bit goddamn happy with you, isn't that so?” I was bluffing, but it was all I had. “So entertain me.”

The large rat scampered across the floor between us, and began to run around in frantic circles.

“We are in the rat race now, don't you think, Pat?” said Max, laughing. He aimed his pistol and shot the rat, but it didn't die. Max shot it again. Now it was dead.

The action startled me.

Max stared at the dead rat, stretched out his foot and kicked it away. “They taught us everything you would imagine,” he said. “Languages. How to behave in a foreign country, to find your way around, to elude a tail, to see quickly who might be following you, their tactics. How to adapt to the culture, even which type of telephone might be used. We had a great deal of physical training, of course, and we were taught the use of weapons. Technical stuff, too, such as how to use radios, code, all that you would think. Did you know we make the world's very best pen for invisible writing? It's true. I should have procured one for you as a gift.”

“Adapting to the culture didn't turn out the way you thought, did it? America wasn't what you had been taught.” “You're right.”

“Propaganda. Brainwashing. Blackmail?”

“Sure. The brainwashing, as you call it, is more specialized. It's more to the Chinese tastes. Propaganda, naturally, how to detect what is real and what is not in foreign propaganda, although I suppose you could say propaganda depends on who is looking at it. But, yes, we are taught this, and also how to provoke, if necessary.”