The Proxy Assassin (16 page)

The Princess had all the right answers but my fevered brain kept replaying the same scene. Captain Dragomir being torn to pieces by machine guns as he fired his service weapon at the enemy.

The enemy. A slippery concept on this occasion. Sorin Dragomir's enemy was Soviet Communism. In the abstract. In the particular it was Princess Stela Varadja. He had kidnapped her son. So I kept pressing, asking her who she had recruited to help her and her son slip out the window and down the long road to the airstrip.

“Lucian, he was from Palace Guard, like Sorin. He fears the Blue Caps, wants to go away, go away to America.”

“And you promised him a flight out?”

“Da.”

“And what happened to him? Where did he go?”

“When the shootings started he ran away.”

“And if he hadn't fled, how did you intend to get him onboard the plane?”

Stela shrugged.

I had no way to confirm this story but Lucian, who had driven me in his hay truck to the unfinished airstrip, did seem a bit of a nail-biter. He'd spent so much time checking the mirror for a tail that I twice had to grab the wheel to keep us from veering off the road. That Stela didn't make any excuse for her callous behavior inclined me to believe her.

I didn't ask her any more questions that night. I wrapped myself in a blanket against the cold, stretched out my legs and nodded off.

-----

We
landed at a military airbase just before dawn and were immediately bundled into a large van with a tall bespectacled man who introduced himself as Stanley. I didn't know if he was CIA or OPC or State Department and I didn't ask. No point. I was just along for the ride.

We were seated with our backs to the driver. There were no windows. It was a polite way of being blindfolded.

Stanley sat across from us in the back of the van. He seemed a bit puzzled at my traveling companions, a woman and a small child. All I had told STINGRAY was that I was bringing along two high value assets. When I introduced Stanley to the fetching Princess Stela Varadja he slid me a glance.

I replied with a weary head shake.
This is not what you think it is
.

He made polite inquiries about our flight, not wanting to debrief me in the presence of the mystery woman. I figured that would take place at the CIA station in… “Where the hell are we anyway?”

A mischievous grin from Stanley. “You'll see.”

We drove about ninety minutes, the last thirty minutes or so filled with stops and starts and honking horns. Little Vlad got cranky despite Stela's attempts to soothe him. She looked beat.

“I'll take him,” I said. She handed him over gladly.

The kid couldn't have been over fifty pounds but he weighed a ton. He writhed in my grasp. I had to hold him at arm's length to keep him from clawing my face. I hoisted him high above my head and smiled up at him as he bawled.

“Hey there, big stuff, I hear ya. You've been bounced around from pillar to post.”

I tossed him up a few inches and caught him. He stopped bawling. I did it again, higher this time. He smiled.

I
waited until we were stopped at another intersection. The van had a high ceiling, high enough for me to stand up. So I tossed the boy king up high, jumped to my feet – Stela's look was sheer horror – and caught him at waist level as he plummeted downward.

Young Vlad looked glassy-eyed for a moment. Then he giggled.

“Ya see,” I said, “you get to like it.”

The van parked a few minutes later. Our driver opened the side door and we crawled out. My legs felt wobbly when they hit the pavement. We were in a narrow back alley behind a four-story, polished stone building of classic Renaissance architecture. A stunner.

The driver handed me Stela's suitcase and got back in the van. There didn't look to be an entrance on this side of the building but Stanley led us to a rust colored steel door cut into the stone. He used two keys on two locks. We entered a small chamber where we faced another steel door. Stanley inserted a pin key into a metal pad next to the door.

We waited. Stela with her sleeping son on her shoulder. Me flexing my neck and shoulders, trying to shake off the long trip. The steel door opened. Damned if it wasn't an elevator.

We crowded in. Stanley pushed a button – there was only one – and up we went. When the door opened we entered a wide, plushly carpeted corridor.

This weren't no CIA station. I saw only two doors in the long hallway. One close, on the right. One far, on the left.

Stanley led us to the close one, its hinges on the outside, no handle, no keyhole. It popped open when he stuck a plastic card into a slot.

We walked into a foyer with a kitchen behind it. A kitchen containing more marble and granite than Westminster Abbey. To the left was a living room with red leather chairs, white linen sofas lined with gold braid, and a crystal chandelier for Chrissakes. The bay windows were covered with flouncy lace.

I marched over to the first window and threw open the drapes. Pink dawn bathed the basilica of St. Peter's Cathedral.

Holy
shit. Rome!

Stanley smiled at my goofy grin. “They say this was Mussolini's bachelor pad, his
imbottitura di scapolo
.”

“Really?”

“That's what they say,” said Mr. Stanley. His thick black frame glasses made his eyeballs look like fat goldfish in a bowl.

“And what do you say?”

“Our Italian friends have a stormy relationship with the truth.”

We were warmly welcomed by a tiny middle-aged housekeeper a moment later. She shook our hands vigorously and cooed over little Vlad.

I expected Stanley to take this opportunity to escort me to a back room and ask endless questions while he took copious notes. But he asked only one question as he pulled me along on his way out the door.

“What is the condition of our friend?”

Amateurs. Me included. This operation had been such a yank job that no one had taken two seconds to give Dragomir a code name.

“Our friend, if you're referring to Captain Sorin Dragomir, is dead.”

Stanley nodded cheerily and said, “Duly noted.”

It was all I could do not to slug him.

“Take a day to recuperate,” said Stanley, patting me on the back in fatherly fashion. “Maria will take good care of you.”

He didn't tell me not to leave the apartment as he let himself out the vacuum-locked door with his plastic card. No need. Place was a cell with lace curtains.

Maria
cooked up scrambled eggs and something that looked like bacon but wasn't and something that looked like toast but was smaller and crunchier. Whatever it was it hit the spot.

After breakfast she showed us to our separate quarters, each with its own bathroom. I let Stela have the larger room, Benito's boudoir as it were.

Maria told us to pile our dirty clothes outside our doors, then she retired to her room further down the hall. I gave PS and her son first crack at the hot water and wandered off to case the joint.

The windows in the living room opened out. The pantry was well stocked. So was the liquor cabinet. The keyless door was beyond my ken.

Five years ago I would've knotted bed sheets and rappelled down the side of the building to show my independence. But we had plenty of food and booze and a good cook. Yeah, it was involuntary confinement, but it beat a Romanian barn stall all to hell.

I took a hot soak in a Roman tub. The coating of grime on my body turned the water brown so I drained the tub and took a scalding shower. I dried off with fluffy towels and donned a monogrammed robe. Somebody had a sense of humor. The monogram read
.

I studied my face in the mirror. The swelling was down, the bruises now more gray and yellow than black and blue. Finding the bathroom fully stocked, I shaved off my scraggly beard – which took forever – brushed my teeth and combed my hair with something that was either hair tonic or aftershave. A new man!

I
dropped my stinking heap of clothes in the hall and eyed the king size bed. It called to me, murmured sweet nothings in my ear. But something was wrong, something was missing.

My little arsenal sat atop the mahogany bureau. What else, what else?

Dragomir's pocket watch, that's what. I had stuck it in my pants pocket for safekeeping. It would not do to have Maria run it through the wash cycle. I went back to the stinking pile and retrieved it, put it on the nightstand next to me and sacked out at precisely 8:39 a.m. Romanian time.

-----

My eyes popped open three hours later. I went to the bathroom and splashed myself awake. Maria had deposited my freshly laundered clothes on the bureau next to my little arsenal.

I should have shoved all that stuff in a drawer but I'd been too tired to think straight. I could only imagine what Maria thought. What kind of nut travels with a steak knife, a sap and a century-old six gun in a cowboy holster?

And I could only imagine what Frank Wisner would think of me when I greeted him in a flannel shirt and moleskin pants suitable for duck hunting. An outfit he himself might have left behind at the stone cottage.

I pulled on my clothes, shoes and socks and followed the aroma of strong coffee down the hall. I saw an odd tableau in the living room. Maria the housekeeper was down on all fours wrassling with young Vlad, who fought her playful advances with grim determination.

Stela stood by a bay window in her slip and, the late morning sun made clear, nothing else. She had one high-arched foot planted on the sill, and was bending over to embrace her knee.

I
wanted to question her further in order to make sense of the odd sequence of events that had brought us here. But now was not the time. Watching the Princess do ballet exercises in her underwear would be, shall we say, unhelpful to my concentration.

I went to the kitchen, poured some mud and returned to my room, unnoticed.

The coffee, as in Romania, was strong. How is it that hard charging, high achieving Yanks drink coffee so weak you can see the bottom of the cup while Italians and Romanians down pitch-black jet fuel all day long and never get anything done?

They oughtta do a study. In the meantime I had a bigger bone to chew on.

I had assumed the traitor who compromised the operation was Guy Burgess or one of Wisner's poorly-vetted new hires. But the U.S. had invaded sovereign territory on a covert mission. The Reds could have blown the plane to bits and we couldn't say boo. Why didn't they?

Who wanted on that plane as much as I did?

Princess Stela Varadja.

Was her heated confrontation with the Blue Caps playacting for my benefit?

I mulled it over. Stela was a survivor, sure, but a cutthroat killer? I couldn't picture it.

If betraying the operation was her only ticket out, maybe. Mothers will do most anything to save their kids. But the operation
was
her means of escape. Her only other motive to betray us that I could think of was a fanatical devotion to the cause of World Communism. And that didn't make a lick of sense.

Could be the NKVD kill squad didn't attack the C-45 because they knew they didn't have to, because they knew they could let it be. The rules of engagement for the C-45 crew would have been the same as the OPC mission briefers had instructed me. ‘Do not fire unless fired upon.'

If the Blue
Caps knew that going in, they would know the C-45 crew wouldn't use their weapons even when the kill squad took down the truck. They would know they could ignore the plane and concentrate on getting what they wanted – the cargo. Let the plane crew return home in defeat.

No one in Romania, Stela included, knew the OPC rules of engagement. The rat, therefore, was in D.C.

That was where my black coffee logic led me anyway.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in less seemly pursuits. Picturing the Princess and me at the bay window together, the basilica of St. Peter's rimmed in scarlet, our cheeks pink with wine, performing strenuous and acrobatic ballet exercises.

-----

Maria served us a late dinner that evening.
Vitello piccata
, which was tart with lemon and sweet with wine, and
orcchiette
pasta, which looked like tiny ears. It was delicious though I couldn't say why. It didn't have a speck of tomato sauce.

We sat at a small round table squeezed into the back of the kitchen, the only dining area in the big apartment. It really was a bachelor pad.

Little Vlad, who sat propped up on a pillow across from me, looked vexed by these strange vittles. Maria had cut his veal into bite-sized pieces but the boy king wasn't interested.

His mother gently prompted him to eat his food. Nothing doing. She picked him up and put him on her lap. He squirmed. She tried to feed him a spoonful of the
orcchiette
. He turned his head away. She tried again. He pushed her hand away, hard, scattering pasta shells all down his front.

Stela gave a little shriek. The boy slithered out of her grasp, hit the floor and scuttled madly toward freedom between chair legs and crossed ankles.