One-Eyed Jack (20 page)

The American figured he would never get a better chance. He waited until the Russian was distracted, fumbling his key into their door, and cleared his throat to make way for his most casual tone. “I, ah—the conversation with Tribute, before the terrible Russian bar.”

“Yes.”

“You’re from Kiev?”

“Let me guess,” the Russian said tiredly. “You’ve
just
noticed that I’m an ethnic Russian from Ukraine.”

“I just never knew where you were from.”

“I never knew where you were from, either.” The Russian shut the door tightly and made sure the latch was engaged before he shot the chain.

“Kansas,” the American said.

“ . . . oh.” The maid had left their drapes open. The Russian went to twitch them closed, sticking close to the wall until the window was covered. “Farm?”

“No. My father was at Leavenworth.”

“A prisoner?”

He felt his lips curve. “A legal advocate.” He jerked his chin toward the bathroom. “You want it first?”

“Go ahead.” The Russian kicked his loafers off and flopped backwards on the bed.

The American went into the bathroom and spoke over the rush of running water as he washed his face and hands. He had thought about it, and the Russian was more likely to answer him if he couldn’t see his face. Something nagged at him, that same twist of a hunch, the unsettled feeling that had haunted him ever since the Russian’s off-the-cuff comment about Oswald, and he knew his hunches well enough to trust them. “So how did you get from Kiev to Stalingrad?”

The Russian was still silent when the American came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a monogrammed hotel towel. Dark suspicion furrowed his brow. “What did she tell you?”

“To ask you about Stalingrad. That was all—”

“Why?”

The American shrugged and tossed the towel over his shoulder the way the Englishman had, already knowing he wouldn’t manage the hole-in-one. “Because it’s an interesting story?”

“What did she say about it?” The Russian stood and stripped off his coat, walking past the American, intent on the bathroom.

“That you were there.”

“And?”

“That you learned to shoot there.”

A chopped laugh rose over the sound of water. “You could say that.” The Russian mumbled around his toothbrush.

“How did you get there from Kiev?”

Spit, and rinse. The sound of gargling. “Kiev fell,
tovarishch
.”

“Oh—”

He expected the Russian to stop, but there was momentum behind his words now. They tumbled over one another as he reappeared in the bathroom doorway. “We fled with the refugees, my mother and I. My father was in the Army. Safe in Moscow, if anywhere could have been said to be safe.”

“So . . . how did you learn to shoot?”

The Russian’s blue eyes glittered under knit brows, but the thing on his lips was nearly a smile. “My mother was a sniper. She taught me.”

“You must have been—”

“I was ten years old,” the Russian said, with a shrug that slid his shoulder holster down his arms. “Big enough and old enough to fire a rifle.”

“Yes,” the American said, unbuttoning his own cuffs, his stomach churning and cold but his voice as level as he could make it. “I can imagine. So that’s why you said you could have made Oswald’s shot. That’s how you knew.”

“Yes,” the Russian said. He folded his trousers over the back of the chair and slid into the right-hand bed in his T-shirt and briefs. “I know I could have made that shot—with that rifle, even, or one no better. I know because I have.”

One-Eyed Jack and the Unquiet Grave.

Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Tribute came out of the bathroom wearing wet blue jeans and nothing else. He must have washed the blood out in the bathtub, and his bare, bony feet flexed on the rug as he stalked toward Stewart. Stewart was on his hands and knees, cleaning up shards of glass; like him, to worry that somebody might get cut. I was crouched behind him, shining a pocket Mag Lite around to make the bits glitter so he could find them more easily, and then he was handing me the splinters and I was piling them on the skirt of Tribute’s trench coat.

“Let me handle that,” Tribute said.

“Not enough.” Stewart peered over the edge of the bed like Kilroy. “Oh, your coat. I’m sorry—”

“I don’t care about the coat.” Tribute put a hand on Stewart’s shoulder to move him away from the broken glass, and started picking shards from the nap of the carpet with precise darts of his hands. “I didn’t pick it out.”

“Who did?” Stewart rose to his feet without using his hands, a controlled, powerful ascent to match the blunt question. He met Tribute’s sideways gaze and didn’t look down.

Tribute’s mouth curled at one corner, a quick sardonic flicker. “My mistress.”

Implications piled in my mind, and I found myself taking a quick inventory of anything in the room that I could smash to make a stake. Stewart looked ready for anything, too, but his voice stayed level. “Someone
sent
you here?”

No living creature could have been so still. Something—the rise and fall of his breath, the pulse at his throat—would have betrayed him. Whereas Tribute was like a wax model of himself, nothing moving but the hands. “No,” he said. “I’m actually here troubling y’all because I’m a free agent now, and I don’t want to live on the dark side any more. Which—to answer your next question, Stewart—is why I’m helping your partner. Because a lone dog can’t hold a territory. It takes a pack.”

“And you think if you help us we’ll let you stay?”

Tribute shrugged and dumped a handful of glass on the battered coat. “Jackie said so.”

Stewart shot me a look—number three, that translates
why wasn’t I consulted?

“You were indisposed,” I said.

He sighed and blew his hair out of his eyes. “King—”

“Tribute.”

“Tribute. Excuse me for putting it this way, but you’re—” Stewart stopped, his hands working. “A bloodsucker, man.”

“You gonna run all the boxing promoters out of town?”

Stewart looked at me and I looked at him.
Touché
.

Tribute shifted restlessly. “So I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said. “Something about Bugsy.”

“Irrelevant,” Stewart said. His tone prickled my hair.

“Are you sure?” And the vampire honestly looked uneasy. Tentative, jaw working as he sorted out whatever he meant to say next. “’Cause he brought Hollywood here, didn’t he? I mean, to all intents and purposes? Before he got himself killed.”

“Dammit.” Of course it wasn’t anything that I hadn’t thought already. Half a dozen times. But Bugsy was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

The son of a bitch.

“It wasn’t so much that he got himself killed,” Stewart said, as Tribute finished with the glass and stood. The last handful tinkled onto the rest, and the vampire wandered around the room absently squaring pillows and smoothing coverlets. “As that Jackie and me got him killed. Kind of on purpose.”

Tribute turned around, forgetting to look human again. He sort of floated, looking like he was made of silk draped over wires. “You shot Bugsy Siegel.”

“No . . . ” Stewart shrugged, and looked at me, helplessly.

“We made sure the Flamingo failed,” I said. “That the patrons were lucky, and the dealers weren’t. The Flamingo closed. And Bugsy couldn’t pay back the money he’d skimmed from the mob. They have a policy about that.”

Four bullets in the back of the head. Just about everybody’s seen the crime scene photos. Grim.

“But the Flamingo re-opened,” Tribute said. “And the mob moved in anyway.”

Stewart coughed. “You ever hear the expression that runs,
well, we won the battle
? The mob must have suspected there was a hex on the place. They got a Promethean to protect it, adjust its mojo, symbolically speaking, and opened it up again.”

“Huh,” Tribute said. “And it did just fine.”

“Those Magi had pretty good mojo,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “Look at Hoover. Big magic. Bigger magic than us. I don’t miss ’em—”

“I was just thinking about that,” Tribute said, and rubbed his palms against his legs before turning back to give the pillow one last fluff.

“You’re not much like the legend,” Stewart said.

Tribute looked at me rather than Stewart, blue eyes dark under the drooping forelock. “The jumpsuits were Liberace’s idea, you know. And a few good weeks buried alive—well, buried undead—will change a guy. Bring him back to his Christian roots, if you know what I mean. Never mind the school of hard knocks since.”

It caught me short. “
Weeks
?”

“Yeah.”

“How—”

A shrug rolled his shoulders forward. His head dropped and he tapped the back of his knuckles against the bridge of his nose in a gesture nobody in the Western World could miss. “I don’t know. She maybe wanted to drive me crazy. Send me back to the womb so she could bring me up all over again. Or maybe it was just that hard to get a crack at my grave. Whatever, it was October before she brought me out. They moved the grave after that to keep people from digging it up, but the body in the coffin wasn’t me.” He held his hands out as if that explained it, the fingers surprisingly fine-boned and slender.

Stewart and I just stood staring at him. He kicked away from the wall and walked over, bent over the bed, and started picking shards of glass off the coat and piling them on his palm. He dumped the first handful into the wastebasket and turned back for another one. “I haven’t got any pretensions anymore,” he said, without looking up. “I just want a place to hang my hat.”

“I’m not about to trust you,” Stewart said, very quietly.

“That’s okay,” Tribute answered. “I’m not about to ask.”

The Russian Goes Undercover.

Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The Russian and the American spent the day holed up in their hotel room, watching television and playing chess on the American’s traveling game board. In the evening, by previous arrangement, they did not reunite with the other spies. Instead, they showered and dressed in silence, locked the door behind them, descended the stairs, and stepped out onto the street thirty-eight years later, under a red sun slanting through the mask-faced buildings dotting the Strip.

After some discussion, the Russian decided it was worth the gamble to walk the short distance to the Venetian rather than taking a taxicab.

“I will trust to dramatic necessity,” he said to his partner as they followed the curved sidewalk down to the street. “I do not believe a sniper can kill me. Actually, I begin to suspect the assassin can’t kill me at all, which raises the interesting question of how
we
can kill him.”

“If only we could find a story where he
was
killed. We’d know how to do it, then.” The American’s voice was almost flirtatious—the playful tone he got when he was on the trail of something, the master strategist concealed under his ever-so-slightly swishy, cuff-fussing exterior turning some puzzle-bit from the great game over and over again, looking for the place where it fit.

“Besides, he
can
, no doubt, capture us—and I’m certain the genius of Los Angeles
could
kill us. She cannot be bound by the same rules, can she?”

“And we’ve run into one too many taxicabs that aren’t really taxicabs. Right, tovarishch?”

The Russian smiled slyly. “I shall kidnap you,” he announced, “and bring you back to Moscow for testing in their ESP program.”

“You and the Red Army,” the American replied, craning his neck back to take in the facade of the Venetian as they strolled past reproduction wrought-iron lampposts. “It’s a lot cleaner than Venice.”

“No soot,” the Russian said.

“No stink.”

“There
are
pigeons.”

“They’re probably imported specially.” The American pointed, shamelessly as a tourist. “Look at the windows on the ‘Doge’s palace.’ They’re the
right color
. That’s . . . ”

“Care to wager on whether the canals are chlorinated?” the Russian asked. They threaded through tourists and costumed resort employees and ducked inside the cool, indirectly lit hotel. Despite his theories on the efficacy of snipers where he and his partner were concerned, it eased the itch between his shoulder blades to be out from under all those sight-lines and all that sky. Their shoes clicked on marble floors; they strode beneath gilt baroque fripperies and geegaws, through arched chambers lit indirectly and frescoed with reproduction art. “Is that the
Triumph of Venice
?”

“Keep walking. No.”

For once, the Russian didn’t look at his partner, because he knew if he did he would dissolve into giggles. Which was what the American wanted, of course.

Jackie met them in the elevator. None of them spoke, but the Russian’s lips thinned arched when the door that Jackie’s key-card opened led to a luxuriously appointed split-level suite. Red daylight still glowed at the edges of the tightly drawn curtains, but the floor and desk lamps had been lit. Tribute sprawled on the cream-colored sofa, a remote control in his left hand and his stocking feet propped up on the arm, watching television with the sound turned off. Stewart sat on the right-hand of two beds, cross-legged in blue jeans, turning the pages of a tabloid-sized newspaper with apparently rapt attention.

The door clicked behind Jackie. Stewart glanced up; Tribute did not, but the Russian felt the shift in his attention like a prickle on his skin. “Are we ready?” the American asked, looking around the room.

“As ready as we’ll ever be.” Stewart flipped the paper shut—the
Las Vegas Mercury
—and unfolded himself awkwardly, stretching his legs out as his torso tipped over backward. He rocked to his feet and rolled off the bed, the Russian observing his movements closely. He didn’t limp; that would be a problem, although the Russian could hide his old injury for short periods of time, when he concentrated.

Tribute looked up, glanced toward the door, and frowned—half a second before Stewart and Jackie echoed the gesture. “Welcome back, John,” Jackie said. “Any news?”