The Sisters (34 page)

Kaat looked at the Potter in awe. "How can you know all these things?"

"He will not come here until the last minute to avoid the possibility of running into anyone," the Potter continued in a low voice. He seemed to have forgotten that Kaat was next to him, and talked to himself. "In three hours and forty-five minutes, he will be standing where we are standing now. He will hear the cheers coming from Main Street, indicating the motorcade is approaching. The limousine will come into view, turn under the warehouse and pass directly under here. The guards accompanying the target will start to relax when they spot the freeway entrance ahead. Piotr Borisovich will aim for the jugular, as he did during the war." A distant look obscured the Potter's normally alert gaze. "Piotr Borisovich's father talked about myths just before he died.

In one way or another, he said, all of us are acting out myths. Even Piotr Borisovich. Especially Piotr Borisovich," he said.

"What myths is Piotr Borisovich acting out?" Kaat wanted to know.

"What day are we today?" the Potter asked.

"Twenty-two November. Why?"

The Potter imagined he could hear the cheering of the crowds lining the canyon on Main Street, announcing the approach of the motorcade. "Have you ever noticed how autumn always makes people uneasy?" the Potter asked. "The days grow shorter and colder. Leaves fall from the trees and decay on the ground. The wind picks up and takes on a cutting edge. The clouds overhead appear to be lower and thicker and heavier than usual.

The mountains on the horizon seem closer, more menacing. In ancient times the peasants began to worry that they had offended God. It was usually toward the end of autumn that they sacrificed their prince so that he could ascend to heaven and intercede with God, could make sure that spring would come again." The Potter took Kaat's elbow and drew her away from the line of bushes. "I remember something else Piotr Borisovich's father told me. He said he thought Piotr Borisovich was meant to be a prince, or kill a prince."

Looking out from the window of his room on the fourth floor, Francis observed with a feeling of infinite detachment-he had imagined the moment so many times, he felt as if he were watching an old film-the security precautions along the route the Prince of the Realm would soon take. He could make out a burly policeman armed with binoculars and a walkie-talkie on the roof across the way- Below, workmen in overalls were re-, moving wooden police barriers from an open truck and stacking them next to the curb; at noon they would be used to close off the cross streets to traffic.

The phone next to the bed rang. Francis picked up the receiver. "Do you see what I see?" a voice asked.

Francis almost convinced himself that he could hear a facial muscle twitching in excitement. "You mean the cop with binoculars across the street?" Francis asked.

"They were pulling up manhole covers and looking for bombs earlier,"

Carroll said. He sounded as if he were feverish. Slurring his words, he hissed into the phone, "Poor saps. When Francis didn't respond, he asked, "What are you going to do now?" As if knowing how Francis planned to while away the morning would help him do the same.

"I am going to select an appropriate necktie to wear," Francis replied.

And when Carroll finally hung up, he did exactly that. Picking the bow tie was, in fact, Francis' major preoccupation of the morning. He took one with mauve polka dots from his canvas tie case and held it up to his neck so he could see it in the mirror. It wasn't quite what he was looking for. He tried a solid-colored one next, a particularly generously cut bow tie in a washed-out orange silk. He eventually settled on one of his favorites, a pale green bow tie with rust-colored pinstripes running horizontally through it. Francis pulled up his collar, and with several deft hand-over-hand gestures knotted the tie, then adjusted the collar and studied the effect in the mirror. If he could save only one of his ties, this one would definitely be it. He detested the idea of abandoning the others, but he recognized the necessity and, as was his habit, bowed to it. If everything went according to plan, if the Sleeper were caught in or after the act, Francis would immediately dial the phone number he had been given before he left Washington. And wearing only the clothes on his back, the pale green bow tie with rust-colored pinstripes around his neck, the shoes on his feet and the Cheshire cat's pained smile that hinted at nothing more morally compromising than the death of an occasional rodent, he would disappear, within the hour, from the face of the earth.

Carrying a long, thin package wrapped in brown paper, Khanda turned up for work at the warehouse a few minutes early that morning.

"What you got yourself there, a fishing rod?" one of the older hands who passed Khanda in the stairwell asked.

"It's curtain rods, Khanda explained briefly, 'for my room."

"Too bad it ain't a high-powered rifle to put a hole through that son of a bitch who's supposed to he passing by today," the other man said.

"I got nothing against him, Khanda mid.

"Well, I reckon that makes you the only one in the whole entire state who don't," the other said, and muttering under his breath about how the punishment ought to fit the crime, and the crime was high treason, he went on about his business.

Using the stairway instead of the elevator to avoid other workers, Khanda made his way to the sixth floor. Near the window he had picked out, he shoved aside some cartons and slid the curtain rods in behind them. It occurred to him, as he went downstairs to report to work, that this was his last day on the job: that if things went well, he might never have to work another day in his entire life.

A teenager outside the window of the motel room was walking across the gravel driveway in thick motorcycle boots. Watching from behind the half-drawn shades, Appleyard softly imitated the sound until he thought he had it right. Then he took a deep breath and did it at full volume.

It sounded as if someone were walking across gravel inside the room.

Ourcq limped out of the bathroom on his wooden crutches. "Maybe you should fucking phone again," he said.

Appleyard stopped making the sound of a boot crunching on gravel- "He specifically said he would call us when he knew something," he reminded Ourcq.

"What I wouldn't give to get my fucking paws on him," Ourcq said. He leaned the crutches against the wall and sat down heavily on the bed, careful to keep his weight off his bad foot.

"What would you give?" Appleyard asked, his eyebrows dancing in curiosity.

"I would give a fucking year of my life," Ourcq replied with obvious sincerity. "I would give my fucking right arm. It is just not right to shoot somebody in the fucking foot. It causes too much fucking pain."

Appleyard came to the conclusion that the wound had had a humanizing effect on his partner; for the first time in memory, he seemed to hate the person he might have to kill. "If he had not shot you in the foot,"

Applevard pointed out, "he might have shot you in the head." He cocked his forefinger as if it were a pistol and produced a perfect imitation of a gun going off. "At least," he added, "where there is pain there is life.

"Now you are imitating the sound of a fucking intellectual.'" Ourcq said in disgust. "Do me a fucking favor, go back to doing somebody walking on fucking gravel."

It was twenty minutes to noon when the Potter went to pick up the Chrysler at the garage on Elm Street. One block to the south, crowds were already forming along the route. According to the newspaper clipping, the motorcade would jog past the red-brick warehouse-and the bushes on the rise just after it-at about twelve-thirty. The Sleeper, the Potter calculated, would wait until the last minute before taking up position. The Potter planned to pull the Chrysler into the parking lot next to the rise at twelve-twenty-five, and drive off with the Sleeper before the motorcade emerged from the Main Street canyon.

Kaat went into the garage to give the stub to the man on duty. Five minutes later she came hurrying out to the street with a strange look on her face; the last time the Potter remembered seeing it was when she had turned to stare at the lifeless body of her cat on the hack seat of the car.

"What is happening, if you please?" the Potter asked in alarm.

"Here's the thing," Kaat said. "The attendant called on his intercom, and the man who moves the cars called back to say that the Chrysler had a flat tire They said that for ten dollars they would fix it, so I told them to go ahead and do it."

The Potter stepped out into the street to see the time atop the brick warehouse at the end of Elm Street.

"Thirteen minutes to twelve," he said when he returned to the sidewalk.

He made a quick calculation. "I am counting on the car to get the Sleeper to safety," he told Kaat. "Go back in and tell them you are in a hurry. Tell them you will give them twenty dollars if they will change the tire and get the Chrysler down quickly."

Kaat ducked back into the garage. The Putter paced up and down the sidewalk in front of it. Every once in a while he would step into the gutter and glance nervously at the time atop the brick warehouse. At one minute after twelve, Kaat appeared at the entrance of the garage. "They say they're bringing it down any minute," she called. She hunched her shoulders in frustration and returned to the garage.

On the side street that led to Main Street, the police were starting to drag wooden barriers over to block cross traffic. The Potter looked at the clock on the roof of the warehouse again. He had just made up his mind to go on foot and let Kaat follow him in the Chrysler when she dashed out of the garage. "It's on the elevator," she called, and raced back in.

It was twelve-seventeen when Kaat gunned the Chrysler out of the garage into Elm Street. The Potter jumped into the passenger seat. Before the door had slammed shut, Kaat had thrown the car into gear and started north so that they could come around behind the warehouse to the parking lot where, according to the Potter, the Sleeper would just be taking up position behind the hedges.

Khanda felt as if time were trickling away in a kind of suspended slow motion. When he held his wristwatch to his ear to check if it was stilt working, the spaces between the seconds seemed to be abnormally long,, as if the moment were so exquisite it had to be drawn out. He glanced back at the cartons he had dragged over to form a wall so that anyone who happened to mount to the sixth floor wouldn't catch sight of him sitting in front of the partly open window, the homemade sling of his Italian military rifle wrapped around his left arm. The act of entwining himself in the sling had created the final intimacy between the shooter and the rifle-from that moment on, there had been no turning back.

He had decided to stay well away from the window when the motorcade appeared out of Main Street and headed directly for the warehouse, to reduce the possibility that any of the security people accompanying the Prince might spot him up ahead. Only when the limousine turned under the warehouse and started toward the overpass and the freeway, when the security people had their backs to the warehouse, would he move into firing position. He had placed three cartons on the floor next to the window, one on top of the other, and he planned to brace the rifle on the top box when he shot.

Outside, the canyons of Main Street formed a giant echo chamber.

Somewhere up this echo chamber, people were cheering. It sounded to Khanda like surf beating against a distant shore. He worked the bolt of the rifle, throwing the first round into the chamber. Then he brought his wristwatch to his ear again. The spaces between the ticks seemed even longer than before

No matter. In a minute or two he would speed time up. He would accelerate it into chaos.

Slipping through the open parking lot behind the line of hedges, his viola-da-gamba case tucked casually under one arm, the Sleeper sensed the wave of excitement approaching, like a groundswell, from Main Street. From his experiences in the war, he knew that he would soon reorder reality. When you looked at someone with the naked eye, you automatically put him into context; you related him to the world around.

But when you observed someone through a scope fixed on top of a rifle, you detached him from the world around you, you isolated him; you created a very special relationship between the two of you, even if only one of you was aware of it.

The first vehicle in the motorcade emerged from the Main Street canyon.

The Sleeper, alone at the edge of the parking lot, crouched and rested the viola-da-gamha case on the ground and undid the catches that held the lid. Cheers welled up from the crowd as the Prince's limousine came into view, then slowly jogged right toward the warehouse.

Moving with the deliberation of a sleepwalker, the Sleeper prepared the instrument that would detach the Prince from reality.

The Potter and Kaat had been delayed by the traffic backed up on Houston Street. It was twelve-twenty-nine by the time Kaat maneuvered the Chrysler into the parking lot behind the warehouse. "Wait here, if you please," the Potter instructed Kaat with unaccustomed sharpness, and he leapt from the car and darted between the parked automobiles toward the row of hedges at the far end of the lot.

On the street below, the Prince's limousine jogged left underneath the slightly open window on the sixth floor of the warehouse and headed toward the freeway. The Prince lifted a hand and waved at the people lining the route, and the crowd cheered back.

Crouched amid the hedges, the Sleeper worked the bolt, throwing a round into the chamber. Then he raised the sniper scope to his eye and sighted on the jugular of the target coming into view.

Breathing heavily, the Potter came around the front of a pickup truck and saw the familiar figure crouching in the hedges ahead, the right knee on the ground, the left elbow braced on the raised left knee, the rifle extended in the classical firing position used by the Red Army.

"Piotr Borisovich," the Potter gasped, and then he filled his lungs with air and opened his mouth and cried out the name of the son he had always wanted with all the force he could find in his body. "Piotr Borisovichr But even to his own ear his voice seemed lost in the roar of the crowd saluting the passage of the Prince.