The Sisters (30 page)
"Excuse Svetochka," it read in English, "for the trouble she has caused.
She is not wanting to stay here and she is not willing to go back, so she is going to put herself to sleep."
The Viennese detective who investigated the death was mildly curious how a woman could have pried open the doors to the elevator shaft. One of the uniformed policemen accompanying him managed to do it, but he was an amateur wrestler. The chief of detectives who read the preliminary report asked the detective to retype it leaving out his doubts about whether Svetochka had the strength to pry open the doors, or the ability to write a suicide note in English when she couldn't speak it. Quite obviously, the Viennese police were happy to accept the note, and the suicide of a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union, at face value. Why muddy the water? the superintendent in charge of homicides said when he closed the case.
G. Sprowls received reports of Oskur's disappearance and the deaths of the two Germans and Svetochka in the overnight pouch,shredded the only copies in existence, then dispatched Thursday's orders, in triplicate, through the interoffice routing system. The Sisters' former man Friday was cooling his heels in a basement cubbyhole, wading through piles of transcripts of obituaries from provincial Soviet newspapers and matching up the names with those of former members of the Politburo and Central Committee. The fact that he could discern no rhyme or reason in what he was doing didn't make the chore any easier, so that when the orders arrived sending him overseas, he barely glanced at the fine print to see where exactly he was off to. Anything, he decided, would be better than reading Russian obituaries in a stuffy basement cubbyhole. It was only after he had countersigned the orders, and returned the pink copy to the originating desk, that he bothered to identify his new post. "You will proceed, on a priority-one voucher via a military-air-transport flight out of Edwards Air Force Base, to Bangkok," the orders read, "where you will report to the adjutant station chief, Bangkok, for further assignment to listening post Echo-Charlie-Hotel, situated on the Cambodian-South Vietnamese frontier, I.7 kilometers from the Ho Chi Minh trail. On arrival you will relieve the acting post chief, and file a full KIA report on the circumstances surrounding the death of your predecessor, as well as carry out to the best of your abilities the mission of the listening post as set forth in the listening-post operating-procedure annex to these orders."
Thursday's case officer, an older woman with a cigarette dangling from her lips and ashes dropping on the papers that passed across her desk, supplied him with a voucher for per diem funds to cover his travel expenses until his arrival in Bangkok. She also asked him to till out and sign a standard next-of-kin form, and identify his beneficiaries in the event anything happened to him in the field. Thursday protested that he had never given the matter of beneficiaries much thought. The case officer brushed ashes off the appropriate form with the back of her hand and suggested that the time had come to do so. You are not going to a tea party, she informed him in a voice that was anything but motherly.
The last two people we sent out to Echo-Charlie-Hotel came back in pine boxes.
In pine boxes, Thursday repeated, and he astonished the case officer studying him through a haze of cigarette smoke by giggling uncontrollably.
G. Sprowls's damp half-smile evaporated when the case officer phoned him to confirm that Thursday was off and running. He produced an index card with the words "Loose Ends" typed at the top, and carefully erased Thursday's name. Four other names had already been erased. All of them had "died of measles," Company argot for killing someone and making the death look natural. Which left three names on the card. The Potter, Feliks Aricantevich Turov, was the next on the list. G. Sprowls had put out discreet feelers. It was only a matter of time before his sources would locate the Potter. Then he would erase his name from the card too, and concentrate on the last two loose ends.
G. Sprowls looked up suddenly from the index card. A chilling thought had appeared on the horizon of his consciousness. He had caught sight of it while it was still a vague menace, too distant to define. He watched it draw closer. And then a shudder threaded its way down his spinal column as he identified it. If Francis could lie to the black box about his name, he could also have been lying when he claimed that he had not had any contact with agents or representatives of another country.
The sign in the window of the Chinese health-food restaurant announced, in ridiculous lettering with Chinese curlicues, that it was under new management. "We should at least give it a try," Carroll insisted, and he led the way past the new owner, smiling uncertainly from his seat behind the cigarette counter, to their usual booth in the far corner.
They spent a long time studying the menu, made sure the waiter understood that they didn't want any monosodium glutamate sprinkled on their dishes, and then ordered, Carroll with undisguised enthusiasm, Francis with undisguised suspicion. Waiting for the food to come, they discussed the weather, the film Francis had seen the previous Tuesday, Carroll's sister's recent menopausal outburst when she discovered that he was throwing out socks instead of giving them to her to darn; in short, they discussed everything but. Until Carroll, midway through his plate of wild rice and steamed shrimp, slammed his chopsticks down on the table so loudly that the owner, watching them out of the corner of his eye for some sign that they were enjoying the food, looked over with an anguished expression on his face. Francis smiled innocently in his direction, and nodded encouragingly, and the owner, appeased, turned back to his abacus and toyed with it as if it were strung with worry beads.
"The way I see it," Carroll said quietly, staring off into space, "is that what we had before was a brilliant operation for which we could never get credit. Now our masters are bound to see our talents in a new light."
Francis gestured with the back of his hand. "Raises, promotions, don't interest me anymore. I am too old to appreciate that sort of thing."
"I’m not talking about raises or promotions," Car-roll hissed. "I'm talking about the plots we can hatch now that we have credit in the bank. The next time we come up with a scheme, the doors in the Athenaeum will open to us of their own accord. Listen to me, Francis. Between us, you and I can stop the hemorrhage that is sucking the lifeblood out of this country. America can return to being America the beautiful.
Francis toyed with his Chinese cabbage, which he found overcooked and underspiced. "What made you tell them?" he wanted to know.
"Pure instinct," Carroll replied without a trace of modesty. Modesty, in his book, was for people who had something to he modest about. "I knew the Director would have to be on our side." He leaned toward Francis. "I remember when you first noticed there was a pattern to his off-the-cuff'
remarks. That thing he said about it being two minutes to midnight, for instance. Or about the need for unleashing the Company. And how what the Director was really saying with the business about Churchill and the Dardanelles was that we desperately needed leaders who were not soft on Communism." In an unusual gesture that Francis found almost touching, Carroll shifted his eyes and actually focused on him across the table.
"I have to hand it to you, Francis. You were the one who ignited the fuse. Without you, there would have been no scheme in the first place."
"You were the one who came up with the idea of using a Soviet sleeper,'
Francis said graciously. He had never been one to hog credit, and he wasn't about to start now.
"But you thought of getting the Potter to give us a sleeper," Carroll reminded him. He shifted his gaze back to some undefined spot on the wall. "We are a perfect couple," he concluded. "We complement each other. Where you see forest, I see trees,"
Francis nodded in agreement- "What we are," he said with a touch of pride, "is the sisters Death and Night."
Carroll leaned back in his seat and breathed in and out with evident emotion. "That's us," he said quietly. "The sisters Death and Night."
"That is certainly us," Francis agreed with an innocent smile.
It was not the First time in his professional life that Francis was moved to reflect on the role that luck played in any operation. With good luck things could go right instead of wrong. With incredible luck they might go very right indeed. And a stroke of incredible hick, in the form of Carroll's "pure instinct that the Director would go along with them, had just come Francis' way. He looked up from his yellow legal pad and tried to recall the exact words Carroll had used to describe the meeting in the Athenaeum, then bent his head and continued writing. Not typing: he knew the day would come when handwriting experts would be called in to verify that Francis himself was the author of the notes in question. Carroll, he wrote, had delivered his report on the operation to the Director himself, in the presence of the Deputy Director and the Company’s erstwhile utility infielder, G. Sprowls. Let them wriggle out of that when they Were hooked up to the little black box, Francis thought. Carroll had reminded the Director that he had personally authorized the operation. "If I authorized an operation, I won t hack away from it now," the Director had said. And the meeting had ended on a suitably conspiratorial note. "As far as I am concerned, gentlemen, the Director had announced, "this meeting never took place." "What meeting," the Deputy Director had asked innocently, "are you talking about?
Francis felt a wave of exhilaration pass through his chest. For a moment he thought he might have trouble breathing, the sensation was so strong.
The Athenaeum was locked into the conspiracy by a stroke of incredible luck. Now they would be trapped by the truth, as revealed by the scratching styluses of a lie-detector machine.
Francis dated the sheet of yellow paper, scribbled across the top,
"Notes on conversation with Carroll in Chinese restaurant then folded it in half and added it to the pile of office papers that he was supposed to have shredded. They were all stuffed into the false bottom of the kitchen garbage pail. The time was fast approaching, Francis realized, when he and his friends would have to organize his own death, along with a trail of evidence that led investigators to the treasure trove of incriminating notes in the bottom of the pail.
For once, Francis enjoyed the Tuesday-night movie enormously. It was a musical comedy starring Judy Garland, for whom he had a lingering soft spot. She had a way of belting out songs that took his breath away; she conveyed the impression that she was ready to explode if she couldn't sing. When "The End" finally appeared on the screen, Francis was in love again, with the result that he almost forgot why he had come. Only when the people around him started to head for the exits did he remember to light up the cigarette. As usual, he used the last match in the book to do it, then casually dropped the empty match book under his seat and, still preoccupied with Judy Garland, headed up the aisle.
From his seat in the third row of the balcony, G. Sprowls observed the people on the main floor. A short man with wavy hair moved toward the aisle past the seat Francis had been in. Then a young couple. Then an older man with a young woman, probably his daughter, judging from the care they took to avoid touching. Then two middle-aged women, one with bleached blond hair piled in a knot on the back of her head, the second with short straight hair and an open handbag hanging from a strap over her shoulder. As the second woman came abreast of the seat Francis had used, the handbag slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor, and several things in it spilled out. Laughing in embarrassment, the woman bent and stuffed the spilled items back into her handbag, and then hurried after her bleached-blond friend up the aisle.
As she passed underneath the balcony, G. Sprowls stood up and took a good look at the woman with the open handbag over her shoulder. All that remained for him to do now was attack the photo albums that the Company kept in the Identities Section, piled up on shelves as if some doting great-grandfather were keeping track of his progeny. Somewhere in one of those books G. Sprowls would come across the photo of the woman he had seen at the Judy Garland film. And then he would know what else Francis, his features frozen in an expression of pained innocence, had been lying about as the styluses scratched away in the black box behind his back.
To the Potter, it seemed as if America consisted of an endless string of small towns with curious names (Wish-bone, Adam's Apple, Point Blank) and main streets inevitably named Main Street. Between towns there were billboards in the middle of nowhere advertising things he had no interest in: radio stations, beers, tractors, mobile homes, even advertising space on the billboard in question. Sometimes he and Kaat would pass a single home, hundreds of miles from open water, with a boat up on chocks in the yard. Once they spotted a run-down bar that advertised "bad whiskey,” once a run-down church with a sign planted on the lawn that read, "Everybody ought to know Jesus." America, the Potter decided, was seeded with drive-in movies and trailer camps and baseball diamonds, and, most of all, discount stores; if you drove long enough and far enough, he commented to Kaat, you would get the impression that everything in the country was sold at a discount.
Kaat spent a great deal of time explaining things to the Potter: a sign that said "Soft Shoulders," for instance; or a Negro teenager overheard in the diner calling another Negro boy "Mother"; or an advertisement in front of a bank that said, "Throckmorton Savings and Loan Talks Turkey."
The Potter remembered that Thursday had used the same expression in Vienna. How do you talk when you talk turkey? the Potter asked Kaat, and when she told him he broke into a smile for the first time since he had shot one of the sweepers in the foot. You should smile more, Kaat commented. The Potter asked her why, and she said the first thing that came into her head: that it made him look less arachnoid-another one of her A words, which meant "cobwebby." Which made him smile again.
