The Sisters (20 page)

The men around the table exchanged looks. "Well," said the man without cufflinks, "do we buy from him, or do we bury him?"

The man with the gold-rim glasses burst into guttural laughter. "For five thousand dollars, we can't go wrong." He gestured to the man on his right. "Pay him, Frankie. Eugene, remove the bullets from your gun and give it to him."

Eugene didn't like the idea of parting with his pistol; it was an Italian Beretta, .22-caliber, that he had won in a crap game the previous year, and he had become attached to it. "Why does it have to be my gun?" he whined.

The Italian who held the plates looked up sharply. Eugene puffed up his cheeks and let out the air in an annoyed burst. Then he removed the clip from his Beretta and thumbed the bullets out of it into his palm before reinserting the empty clip back into the pistol.

The Italian who thought he recognized the Potter was staring at him curiously. Suddenly his face brightened. "I know where I seen you before," he said. "It was here, in this room. Seven, maybe eight years ago. You were a buyer then, not a seller. How the mighty have fallen."

Pocketing the money and the pistol, the Potter turned toward the door.

Eugene still blocked his way, and seemed in no mood to move.

"He is a Russian secret agent," the man who recognized the Potter announced to the others.

"Get out of my way," the Potter ordered Eugene in a low voice that he hoped was full of menace.

"Maybe you think you can make me," Eugene shot back, caressing the knuckles of one hand with the palm of the other.

"Leave him leave," the man who had identified the Potter ordered.

Eugene reluctantly stepped to one side. With a last look over his shoulder, the Potter left the room. He fled along the corridor, down the staircase through the bar-the bartender was nowhere in sight-into the street. The neon sizzled over his head like the rattle of a snake. The night air sent a chill through the Potter, and he realized he had been sweating profusely-from fear, probably, though he hadn't been aware of it at the time. Fear to him implied that there was hope. This was an illusion he didn't harbor.

He ducked into the alleyway and saw the Chevy and waved to Kaat. She waved back, though her waving had an agitated aspect to it, and then the Potter realized she wasn't waving, but pointing, and he turned back to see the hulking figure of the bartender advancing toward him in a shuffling step used by wrestlers when they stalk an opponent. He was gripping one of those American baseball bats in both hands, and thrashing it about in front of him with short snaps of his thick wrists.

"What I am going to break first is your ankles," he called in an excited voice. "Then I am going to break your kneecaps. Then your rib cage. Then your wrists. Then your neck. Then your skull." He laughed hysterically, shuffling forward all the while. "You were wrong about how much it costs to bury someone. I work cut-rate. A package deal is what I offer. The body, buried, for twenty-five hundred dollars. Niggers, foreigners, I do for the fun of it."

The Potter backed away until he was up against the front grille of the Chevrolet. Swinging the baseball bat, grinning into the darkness, the bartender closed in on him. A loss of nerve hit the Potter-it manifested itself as a sudden weakness in his knees, a ringing in his ears. It was not only a question of the violence that would be done to him, but to the girl in the car behind him: having disposed of the Potter, the bartender would then feel obliged to attend to the eyewitness. The bartender was so close now that the Potter imagined that he could feel the rush of air that preceded the swishing bat. The Potter knew he had to move, to do something, but for the life of him he couldn't see what he could do. The bartender was too big, too methodical. And then Kaat, behind the wheel of the Chevrolet, switched on the car's high beams and leaned on the horn. Startled, blinded, the bartender jerked an arm up in front of his eyes. The Potter stepped forward and kicked him sharply in the crotch. The big man groaned and doubled over. The bat clattered to the pavement. The Potter moved around behind the kneeling figure, took a grip on his thick neck and began to squeeze. Gasping, the bartender tried to pry the Potter's fingers loose, but the years of kneading clay had strengthened them into a vise. After a while the bartender went limp in the Potter's oustretched arms. He let the corpse slip to the ground. Kaat flicked off the high beams, and the Potter could see her peering out at him from the window of the Chevrolet. Violence is in my blood, he wanted to tell her, but the pale mask of a face that stared back at him seemed to say that that was something she knew already.

Khanda arrived in the designated city at the end of the first week of October, and using the alias O, Lee settled into a one-story rooming house in a run-down section of town. One block away, past a yellow-brick self-service laundry and a pharmacy with a parking lot next to it full of pickup trucks, he could make out the center of the city rising from the flat like a wart. He had bought a street map of the city and had traced the two possible routes from the airport to the luncheon site, one in blue, one in red. In the days that followed, he went over the routes again and again, and eventually compiled a list of buildings from which he could get a shot at the target no matter which of the two routes was finally selected. Several of the possibilities he ruled out because of the nature of the business conducted in them, he stood precious little chance of getting a job in a bank, or an insurance company, for instance. Eventually he narrowed the possibilities down to two buildings. On the thirteenth, he put on a tie and jacket and presented himself at the employment office of a lumber company whose top floors dominated the route between the airport and the city proper. He was interviewed by a wispy woman with a harelip who became suspicious at his failure to produce references from previous jobs. His application was turned down.

On the fifteenth of the month he made an application for work in his second choice, a rust-colored brick warehouse on the corner of Houston and Elm that dominated a roughly diamond-shaped plaza through which the target would have to pass on his way to the luncheon. The building had been constructed at the turn of the century as railroad offices, had been turned into a branch office of a plow company, and only recently been converted into a warehouse. Khanda, again wearing a tie and jacket, sensed that he was making a good impression on the woman who interviewed him this time. He explained away his lack of references by saying that he had attempted free-lance journalism since his discharge from the Marines. The interviewer asked when he could start, assuming his application for employment was accepted. Khanda flashed a boyish smile and replied eagerly, "First thing tomorrow morning." The interviewer smiled back. And Khanda knew he had the job.

Thursday spotted the item in the New York Daily News, to which he subscribed at office expense so he could follow the comic strips. A minor-league left-fielder who had made it up to the majors for three months and four days almost two decades before had been found murdered near the New Jersey docks. "It's the way he was killed," Thursday told the Sisters when he showed them the item.

Francis, who was wearing a new orange polka-dot bow tie that seemed almost fluorescent, screwed up his nose in disgust. "I abhor physical violence," he observed. He handed the newspaper, with the item circled in red, across to Carroll, who was spitting a piece of caramel laced with pistachio into his palm. Carroll read the article casually. Then his brow furrowed, and he read the article a second time. "You don't think it's him?" he asked Thursday, staring at a point on the wall over his right shoulder.

"During the war," Thursday recounted in that smug way he had of offering up footnotes to history, "he left a trail of strangled German corpses.

The British claimed there were eight, The Germans-our Germans-listed eleven in his dossier. Then there was the little matter"- here Thursday capped a giggle before it could leak to the surface-"of the man who was strangled in the airport just about the time our friend the Potter enplaned for the Free World."

Francis waved a hand vaguely, as if he were trying to discourage a fly from touching down near him. His wrist was limp, a sure sign that he was not convinced.

Thursday seemed offended. "I took the initiative of phoning a lieutenant in homicide whom I had some dealings with, the one who was assisting us in our inquiries, as the British like to say, when we tried to make the suicide of the Bulgarian diplomat's wife look like murder in order to hook the diplomat. Anyway, my source says that the late left-fielder worked as a bartender in a watering hole frequented by members of the Mafia; that the man who killed him had been dealing with the very same mafiosi; that one of them, known to the imaginative New York City Police Department as Luigi the Lean, recognized him as a Russian who had been around years before trying to purchase a rifle with a U.S. Army night sight on it. Luigi also told my source that the Russian's car was parked in a nearby alleyway, exactly where the body of the late left-fielder was eventually discovered; that the car had two passengers, a young woman and a pussycat."

Carroll astonished everyone in the room by whinnying. "It's the Potter, all right," he concluded.

"How on earth did he get from that hotel room in Vienna to the docks of New Jersey?" Francis wanted to know.

"The Potter has always been a resourceful man," Carroll pointed out. He turned on Thursday with such ferocity that the poor man had the urge to duck. "Did you body-search him when he arrived in Vienna?" Carroll demanded. "Did you at least go through his belongings?"

Thursday grimaced. "I assumed our German friends would tend to routine matters like that," he replied lamely.

"You assumed," Carroll sneered.

Francis said stoically, "A man like the Potter would have squirreled away a supply of Western currency, spare passports, a kilo or two of cocaine even, for that proverbial rainy day."

"That's probably what he was doing down at the docks," Carroll concluded. "Trading in his cocaine for greenbacks."

"And the late left-fielder made the mistake of trying to increase his employers' profits," Francis guessed.

Thursday eyed Carroll's box of candies; considering that he had been the one to spot the crucial item in the newspaper, he thought that Carroll might break with tradition and offer him one. But Carroll had other things on his mind. "You can slink back to your cubbyhole," he instructed Thursday. "We'll whistle when we need you."

As soon as the door closed behind their man Friday, Francis said to Carroll, "What do you think?"

"What I think . . ."he began, and then, motioning with his head toward a wall, he reached for pencil and paper. "What I think," he scribbled on a legal pad, "is that he came to warn the Sleeper and found him gone."

"What if," Francis wrote, "he tracks the Sleeper down?"

"The only people in the world," Carroll wrote, "who know where the Sleeper is going, and what route he is taking, are in this room. How could he track him down?"

"How could he get from Vienna to New York?" Francis wrote in turn-and Carroll could almost hear his exasperation. "He is a resourceful man, you said it yourself," Francis wrote. "What if the Sleeper told someone where he was going? What if he left footprints?"

Carroll shook his head. "The Sleeper's not one of those who leaves traces everywhere he crawls-like a snail does when it crosses a leaf.

You are jumping at shadows," Carroll concluded.

Francis took the pencil, hesitated, then bent his head and wrote, "You are sure?"

Carroll, staring at the wall over Francis' shoulder, nodded. "I'm sure,"

he said out loud.

Francis waved a hand vaguely. Once again his wrist was limp; once again he was not convinced. He began collecting the leaves of yellow paper with the intention of" shredding them before he left the office.

Carroll turned his attention back to the box of candy. "Damned pistachios will be the death of me," he muttered under his breath as he fumbled with the tinfoil of another candy.

It was not Francis' usual night to take in a film, but a nagging doubt lurking like a migraine behind his forehead persuaded him he ought to.

Francis liked neat packages. The Potter turning up in America represented a complication. People had to be notified. Contingency plans had to be drawn. Precautions had to be taken.

Later, Francis wouldn't even remember what film he had seen that night, so deep was his absorption with the problem at hand. He stared at the screen in the filtered darkness without registering the images. He listened to the dialogue without making any sense of the words. When the final freeze frame faded and the houselights came up, he had more or less put everything into perspective. He reached into his pocket for the cigarette he ritually smoked at the end of a film. He used the single match left in the book to light it and discarded the empty matchbook under his seat. The sweepers could clean up after him, he reassured himself. Taking a deep, distasteful drag (how he longed to give up smoking entirely), he casually sauntered (Francis prided himself on his ability to saunter; he thought of it as a dying art) up the center aisle toward the exit.

Killers, the Potter liked to tell his student sleepers when he was initiating them into the theory and practice of espionage, almost always came in twos. Which was another way of saying that if someone was worth killing, he (or-why not?-she) was worth killing well. If one assassin failed, so the conventional wisdom went, the second might be able to profit from the confusion caused by the first attempt and carry out the assignment. The classical example of this, of course, was the assassination of Czar Alexander II in I88I. The first bomb thrower managed to wound some guards and horses. When Alexander made the mistake of stepping out of the carriage to survey the damage, the second bomber nailed him.

Both the Soviet and the American espionage services tended to have their killers work in tandem. Two of the best in the business, known in professional circles as the Canadians because of their nationality, were vacationing in Ottawa after successfully carrying out an assignment from the Romanian counterespionage service to "neutralize" a Romanian exile.