Winter Hawk (24 page)

There was carpet in the wide hall. The concierge, summoned by means of the speaker to one side of the door, ushered him in with slight but evident deference. Complicity smoothed his features. He would say nothing, unless directly questioned by someone more imposing than a KGB colonel. Priabin nodded meaningfully at him and took the stairs two at a time. The concierge had no interest in whom he might be visiting.

Outside the door of Rodin's apartment, he was aware of the degree of quiet luxury around him, foreign even to a colonel in his service. Foreign to him, anyway.

The carpet was thick beneath his soles, betraying where he had walked. Wool, pure wool. The door was perhaps the original one, whatever alterations had been made to the house. Paneled wood dark with stain and age. He did not remove his cap as he pressed the doorbell. First impressions—

He felt subdued by his surroundings, and needed to offer Rodin an image of immaculate authority. He must look as if he meant business, would be satisfied with nothing less than the truth, the whole truth, nothing but. . .

He pressed the bell again, held it, heard its shrill summons from beyond the door. Hoped Rodin had not passed out. He'd been sitting on the edge of his bed when Priabin left the other flat, holding his head gently like some delicate, ripened fruit. He had been awake, but in what fashion? Had Priabin left it too late? He became aware of the emptiness of the corridor and the staircase behind him. He was an intruder here, making a secret visit. He thought of Viktor Zhikin, and felt the heat of his body mount to his face; his cheeks burned. Rodin had to be awake—

He kicked the lower panel of the door, savagely. A weak, almost pleading grumble reached him from behind the door. It opened.

He saw a pale-blue carpet, flowers in a tall vase that had begun to droop and fade. Priabin straightened. Immaculate authority. He stared into Rodin's sunken eyes and saw them flinch with recognition and anxiety.

"Good evening, Lieutenant," he said with overflowing confidence. "I think it's time we had a long chat, don't you?"

He studied Rodin's features. Saw deterioration and experienced
satisfaction.
He had chosen the right moment. There was tiredness and empty loneliness; dark blue rings under the pale eyes.

"May I come in?" His hand pushed authoritatively at the door.

"I—I—what do you want?" The eyes finally narrowed against a realization of danger. "Who—what do you want?" His drugged awareness picked up disconnected phrases.

"To talk to you, Valery." His hand pushed the door further open. Large rooms beyond Rodin's narrow shoulder, pale, rich carpeting, ornaments and prints. Just as he had seen through the binoculars. It seemed to Priabin, not without irony, like a glimpse into the West from the far end of a long tunnel.

"Why?" Stubborn anger now, gathering slowly like a storm. "Get out."

"No."

He turned Rodin's body with the hand that still held his gloves, propelling him into the apartment's long hallway. Rodin accepted the inertia of his entry and moved ahead, his feet shuffling, his body leaning slightly against the strong hand's certainty, as if grateful.

Prints of hunting scenes and the French Impressionists, red walls set against an almost white carpet. An extravagance of rugs. Priabin could imagine loud rock music and laughter from past parties. He shunted Rodin into the main living room. All the time he had been whispering to him as to a child being shepherded into the dentist's office. Rodin seemed to accept the spurious comfort and the imposed situation.

As Priabin had moved through the hallway and past the rooms, he realized that the image through the binoculars had not conveyed the wealth here, the possessions, the splashes of carpet, rug, picture, vase, ornament, hi-fi, record collection. It wasn't the taste, simply the income—the influence, he corrected himself—that could obtain all these things for a mere lieutenant. Cushions, jade, heavy drapes, his thoughts catalogued.

He pushed Rodin gently into a deep beanbag of a chair. The young man, no more than twenty-two or -three, adopted a yogalike posture, arranging his robe to tidiness. His eyes were blue and blank. He seemed to be staring at his visitor's boots intently. As Priabin lifted his head, he saw the extravagant molding and the plaster frieze of shepherds around the main light fixture. The room suggested the existence of an elite beyond that of his own service. There, the wooden dacha amid the trees was the best that might be hoped for. Obscurely, the room angered him. He was not the simple son of a peasant; his father had been a schoolmaster and Party member, with a medal from the Great Patriotic War—he'd seen the red banners rise above the shattered, grandiose buildings of Berlin. Seen the Fascists finished off.

And now this. A lieutenant in the People's army with all this.

He moved closer to Valery Rodin. And sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of him.

"Tell me," he said softly, his hand touching the sleeve of Rodin s robe. 'Tell me about it." His overcoat, after he had removed it from his shoulders, lay at his side like a large, untidy dog. He placed his cap and gloves on top of it, making himself look younger, less official. Sympathy, not envy, he cautioned. Pat his arm, but gently.

Rodin's features seemed engaged in an effort to regain an attentive pattern around his nose and mouth. The cocaine, as a stimulant to the nervous system and taken, no doubt, to help him climb out of the pit of loneliness his father had condemned him to, had lost its effect. It had been defeated, to some extent, by the brandy. He was now quiescent, but deeply introverted and depressed. Priabin felt himself little different from a bomb-disposal officer approaching a suspicious device.

Rodin's pupils were like shriveled raisins in his chalky face. Acute paranoia, Priabin recalled from somewhere. Large doses of cocaine and acute paranoia. The bomb might explode; worse, it might be a complete dud and not go off at all. He continued to pat the young man's arm. Rodin did not respond to the contact. Eventually, Priabin said:

"Tell me, Valery, who's locked you up in this expensive cell?" He shook Rodin's arm gently, but the lieutenant dragged it away from his touch. He scowled because his features could not find a sneer of contempt quickly, then the look soured into a drooping snarl.

"Get out," he whispered, blinking his eyes to make them focus.

Priabin shook his head. "I know you want company, Valery," he asserted. "You're all alone here. They've seen to that, haven't they?"

Perhaps ten seconds later, Rodin nodded. Once the action had commenced, he continued to nod, like a doll. His breathing was loud and ragged; his hps quivered, and his eyes appeared damp.

"Your father?"

"Of course my bloody father!" Rodin hugged his arms around himself, turning into the beanbag, drawing his feet up. His whole body shivered. He began to sob. His voice had seemed to tire after the scream. "Always my bloody father. He made me go into the fucking army when all I wanted to be was a painter." Priabin glanced swiftly around the room. The walls displayed nothing that might have been painted by Rodin. "No good at it, anyway," Rodin pursued, "but he couldn't wait to tell me that." He looked at Priabin, who arranged his features to express syitipathy. Rodin's voice was a transmission from a distant radio station; fading, indistinct. "In the bloody army for you, my lad," Rodin mocked, his face twisted, his hand flapping in a caricature of a salute near his temple. "In the army, make a man of you." He turned once more to his listener. It seemed that he did not recognize his visitor; did not care who it was. "Never admitted it, never, never, never. All the army gives you is privileges and a chance to bugger the conscripts!"

He laughed raggedly, staring at Priabin. His attention subsided almost immediately, the world around him rushing into a vague distance. His eyes were inwardly focused, and the retreat seemed more profound. Priabin was greedy to interrupt, to begin to interrogate, yet restrained his mounting impatience. But it was a race against time.

"Worse for him, really, now I'm in the army and under his nose. He had to—to keep sweeping up after me, cleaning up the turds I leave on—his doorstep . . . art, culture, acting don't interest him. Queers are forbidden, don't talk about them. My mother knew, she understood. Couldn't bear it, but understood. He can't though, never has."

Priabin absorbed the room once more. The father paid. Every day, General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin paid. Drugs, affairs, indiscipline; the general had committed a grave error in having his son posted to Baikonur. Custody must have turned into a nightmare.

Away, he suddenly thought. The next logical step, especially now, would be to send his son away somewhere; to avoid any and all consequences of the interest he had aroused—that Sacha's murder had aroused. That was why the boy was in quarantine. He might have no other chance of talking to him; it had to be now. He had to press.

"Why did they kill Sacha?" he asked bluntly, but not without
a
sympathetic tone.

Rodin's face paled further around his open mouth.

"What?" He was attempting to concentrate, to realize that it was cold water that had been thrown over him, to wake him.

"Why did they kill Sacha, Valery?"

"I killed Sacha. / did it."

"Why, then, Valery? Had you quarreled? Out of love?"

"What?"

"Why did you kill him?"

"Sacha? I didn't."

"You said you did. Did you?"

Tears leaked from Rodin's eyes. He began nodding again like a round-based doll, tilting his whole upper body time after time.

"Yes," he breathed at last. Then: "Yes, yes, yes, yes."

"How? How did you do it?"

Would the paranoia hold? Persecution, the sense of isolation, the depth of misery, all conspirators surrounding Rodin, making him spill his little cargo of guilt.

"How?"

"Yes, how? Did you rig the car?"

"What do you mean?"

"You killed Sacha."

"I told them about him!" he cried out, then curled more tightly into the beanbag chair, into himself. He cringed away from further pain.

Priabin stood up, and Rodin shivered at his movement. The lieutenant was more deeply withdrawn than ever, almost lost to him. Priabin crossed the room, looking for the bathroom.

Bedroom, bathroom next door, he remembered. Bathroom— yes, light on; drawers, cupboards, vanity, marble-topped—my God. Aftershaves, colognes, shaving lotions, hair spray—yes, expensive makeup, French and American. Whose? Sacha's?

He opened the bathroom cabinet. Nothing he wanted there—-not the mouthwashes and the creams. Drawer? No. Second drawer? Ah, yes.

Silver spoon, bottle. He gathered the items and returned to the living room. Rodin had not moved. Priabin placed powder in the bowl of the spoon on its thin silver chain, to be worn around the neck. If he gave Rodin another dose of cocaine now, the stimulant might make him high enough, temporarily, to talk about
Lightning.
He had to be snapped out of depression into a brief nova of clarity and reckless well-being. Rodin was huddled still into the beanbag, face almost hidden; completely unaware.

The telephone rang. White powder spilled from the spoon as priabin s hand jumped with surprise. He stared at the receiver on a table near the windows. It continued to ring.

Warning?

He'd heard nothing outside. The telephone was reaching Rodins sunken consciousness. His face turned, wildly hopeful. He made as if to move.

Priabin picked up the receiver, but said nothing.

"Colonel?" Anatoly s voice.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Staff car's just drawn up outside the building, sir. Looks like the general . . . wait a minute"—he heard Mikhail's voice calling out indistinctly—"yes, sir, it's the general."

"Damnation!" he exploded. "Is he—?"

"Coming in, sir. On the steps now. Do you want—?"

"I'm coming out. Good work."

He thrust the receiver loudly back onto its rest. Half out of the beanbag, as if born from its depths, Rodin's face cracked into desperation as the call ended.

Priabin looked at him for a moment. Perhaps the concierge wouldn't inform the general, without being asked ... he might just play it safe anyway. Even the KGB could give him a lot of trouble ... no time to worry about it. Quickly, leave him.

He felt cheated and was enraged at the fact. He could have made him talk, he was certain of it, with another shot of cocaine to clear his head, loosen his tongue. He was so close—

His hand clenched into a fist.

Leave—

He hurried into the hall and to the door. Listened. Opened the door, heard footsteps below. Closed the door softly and ran up the short flight of stairs to the top floor.

Holding his breath, he watched General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin use a key to open the door of his son's flat. From the bend in the staircase, he peered down at the top of the general's cap. The door shut behind him.

"Damn—oh, damnation," he breathed, grinding his teeth. He
^w
as possessed by the certainty that he would never have another °PP0rtunity to talk to Valery Rodin about
Lightning,

Anders stood in the chill darkness. The wind from the mountains around Peshawar cut at the small exposed areas of his cheeks and