Requiem For a Glass Heart (10 page)

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON A VAN PULLED UP TO THE OFF-SITE
house and began unloading the rental furniture Hain had ordered. It was the bare minimum: a sofa and an assortment of chairs, two long folding metal tables, and a filing cabinet for the empty living room; a dining table and chairs; and a bed and a chair for each of the five bedrooms. The real luxury was that each of them did get a private bedroom and bath.

Since the deliveries already had interrupted the briefing, Ann and Cate took one of the cars and picked up sheets and blankets and pillows for the beds and towels and washcloths for the bathrooms. They stopped by a discount store and bought cheap dishes, plastic utensils, and an electric coffeepot. Then they went to a grocery store for all the necessities they could think of on short notice.

By the time they returned to the house, the tables had been set up in the living room and the files that had been scattered all over the place were being organized by Erika and put away in the filing cabinets. The tech people from the Houston field office had been over and set up computer terminals that tied them in with all the necessary Bureau communications. Two more telephones had been installed as well and were sitting on the folding tables, which had been arranged
back to back, making one large rectangular workspace facing the courtyard.

Then Neil Jernigan arrived. As squad supervisor of the Special Operations Group that would be responsible for surveillance on the arriving Russians, Jernigan wanted to know what Hain was expecting in the way of countersurveillance from Krupatin. Cate was reassured by Jernigan’s presence. She had worked with him before and knew him to be unflappable and uncommonly observant. He considered surveillance an intricate dance, a tango with feints and slides and innuendos of chase. He was an olive-skinned man with thick, straight hair and features that suggested Bombay or Delhi, though he was clearly not Indian.

Jernigan’s queries resulted in another long session in which Ometov, Jaeger, and Loder related their experiences with Krupatin’s techies. They were sophisticated. He used ex-KGB officers, which meant they used methods and technologies that weren’t altogether unfamiliar to FBI counterintelligence. But a lot had changed in Russia and it had changed fast, and people like Krupatin were no longer behind the times. He could afford the best technology, and he would have it. He could afford the best people, and he would have them.

By the time Jernigan left, the long day was beginning to wear on everyone. They all agreed to retire to their rooms to unpack and take a few minutes alone.

One of the corridors of the house had three bedrooms opening into it, and the three women moved into these. Cate’s room was at the end of the hallway on the inside corner, so that two of her windows looked out onto the house’s interior courtyard—which contained the palms Ometov had admired—while two others looked out into the dense woods at the rear of the house. One of the city’s bayous was not far away.

She unpacked her clothes, double-checked to see whether she had indeed brought anything that matched, and was relieved to find that she had packed better than she remembered. In a few minutes everything was hanging in a closet, the several dresses looking bereft and temporary and somehow a little depressing. Without any clothes chests, she had to keep her underwear in her suitcase, which she put beneath her clothes in the closet. She took the sheets out of their plastic
wrappings and made up the bed, putting the pillow at the head and the blanket across the foot. Then she went into the bathroom and spent some time scrubbing, making the place her place. As she worked, she thought about the people she had been listening to for the past several hours, and she thought about Krupatin. Once she even thought about Tavio, but she quickly shoved him back into oblivion. That was where she needed to keep him until she had enough balance, enough time, to turn around and deal with him.

When she was through cleaning, she washed her face and forearms and wiped the Back of her neck with a fresh damp washcloth. She brushed her hair and tried to make herself look like she wasn’t as tired or as tense or as confused as she really was.

She walked back into the bedroom and stopped. Her single bed reminded her of a prison cot in the center of the bare room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around. The house must have been vacant for some time, because it had that slightly chalky smell common to empty houses. She saw nails still in the walls where God knows what kind of pictures had hung, and there were scrapes against the walls at about waist height, where the back of a chair or a table had rubbed away the paint. She wanted to lie down but decided against it. The hectic loss of sleep of the previous night was taking its toll. She was weary, but her mind wouldn’t shut down for a long time now, and she found herself impatient to hear more about Krupatin.

Getting up, she smoothed her dress and walked out into the hall and back down to the main part of the house, where she found Jaeger, Ometov, and Hain opening bottles of beer that Hain was pulling out of a plastic ice chest.

“Hey,” Hain said, seeing her come in, “how about a beer? Ice cold. Your only other option is water.”

“Well, then I’ll take the beer,” she said. She was glad to see they were bottles of beer rather than cans, and when Hain popped off the top for her, the cold, sweaty bottle felt good in her hand.

Ometov was sitting in one of the newly arrived chairs looking out at the courtyard, where the sun was still burning through the trees in shafts and splinters of light. He finally had shed his suit coat and rolled his long sleeves to his elbow.

“This is June,” he said. “So it will be this hot for two more months?”

Cate grinned. “I’ve seen it: stay like this into November,” she said, sitting down near the tables.

Ometov looked at her, astonished. “November? You’re joking.”

“No, the heat’s only going to get worse during the next two or three months.”

“Into September?” Ometov couldn’t believe it.

“Krupatin picked a great time to visit,” Hain said. He was standing near the tables, looking at the computer setup.

“I just hope the bastard actually shows up,” Erika said. She was sipping unenthusiastically from a bottle of beer, and Cate guessed she was not much of a drinker of any kind of alcohol.

“I think the intelligence is good,” Ometov said. “I think the odds are good.”

“Damn right,” Hain said. “I can tell you, our budget masters wouldn’t have let us go this far if they thought the intelligence was iffy.”

“He must know he is very important here now,” Erika said. “He will be more careful. His people here—his own intelligence—must be telling him to watch his step.”

“No doubt,” Hain agreed, “and he will. But that won’t stop him from coming.”

Erika rolled her head to the side and gave a skeptical lift of her eyebrows, but she let it go. Cate wondered how Erika had gotten this assignment. She assumed the BKA had given their decision a lot of consideration. Erika Jaeger, Cate guessed, was an interesting story.

“What do you think about our little boy?” Ometov asked, looking at Cate with his amused smile, his shambling manner more apparent as he slumped in a shirt so wrinkled it looked as if he had washed it in an airplane lavatory and put it in his bag to dry.

“Before I answer that, I have a question,” Cate said.

Ometov nodded.

“What kind of man would I see if I were to meet Krupatin now, if I had no idea what he did other than that he was a businessman?”

“Ah, a good question, a very good one.” Ometov beamed. “What kind of man.” He swigged from his bottle,
staring at the bare floor. “Well, if you were to meet Sergei Krupatin today, if a friend introduced you, you would see a handsome man,” he said, looking at her. “Prematurely gray hair, a clean-cut dark mustache, a good straight nose. One scar, horizontal, here.” He drew a finger under his right eye. “He would talk to you intelligently, using passable English, and he would be very sophisticated in his manners, obviously intelligent. If you asked him his occupation, he would say something vague like ‘international commodities’ or ‘international investments.’ He would be dressed immaculately in a British tailor-made suit. If you talked to him for several hours, you would be impressed. If you talked to him all day, you would see things that would make you begin to wonder. If you talked to him for several days, you might well decide that he was not the kind of man you wanted to know, and you would avoid him in the future.”

He gestured vaguely with his beer bottle. “But of course he can be irresistibly charming, and that, along with his good looks and wealth, makes him honey to butterflies. Women do not quickly see the real Sergei, which is never far below his superficial refinement. If you were inclined to succumb to his advances, you would discover that he has a proclivity for brutal sexual involvements. Two women—that we know about—have died from his ‘affections.’ What is it your prostitutes call men like that?”

“Rough trade,” Cate said.

“Exactly. Rough trade. But that was years ago. Now his women are more respectable—a little higher up on the predatory evolutionary chain, one might say.”

“He’s never been married?” Gate asked.

Ometov smiled, and seemed delighted once again by her question.

“No,” he said softly, and then his smile faded as though he were about to discuss a great sadness. “Sergei has never been married. In fact, with one possible exception long ago, the man is incapable of forming any kind of real attachment to a woman. He just doesn’t need them, except for sex, and that is easily taken care of by anyone.”

“One possible exception,” Gate said.

“Yes.” Ometov nodded, knowing she would ask. He sighed with a melancholy tilt of his head and tried some more beer, pursing his lips at the taste of it. “Sergei was already a
big man when he met her. This was maybe ten years ago. Anyway, he was wealthy and had a lot of living behind him, a lot of bad history. He was already traveling very much out of Russia. In the autumn he was in St. Petersburg and saw a girl on the sidewalk. It was that simple. She was a student at the Repin Institute, a very prestigious academy for artists, difficult to get into. She was from a respected family of academicians—her father was a professor of literature at the University of St. Petersburg, her mother an art restoration specialist in the Hermitage Museum. A very fine family, not well off financially, but brilliant people. Good people. She was an only child.

“Krupatin courted her with all seriousness. He knew immediately, of course, that these people were at the opposite end of the cultural scale from himself. Not only was he truly in love, I think, but he knew very well that to have her on his arm, so to speak, would enhance his image, give him a patina of sophistication that he did not otherwise have.

“For a good while the ruse worked. He charmed her; he charmed her family. He lied most flamboyantly about his past and his present and created a new persona, one that he knew they wanted to believe in, one perhaps that he wished he had. These people, they didn’t see through him for a while. Remember, by this time Sergei had already discovered his London tailor. He had come a long way from Chechnya, this importer and international businessman.”

Ometov finished his beer and looked at the bottle thoughtfully. “She fell in love with him; I think it’s fair to say that. Shortly after they met she finished her six years at the Repin Institute, specializing in restoration art, like her mother. She also received a scholarship to study in a special program here in the United States. It was arranged by the Hermitage. Krupatin could not talk her out of going. She left and was gone a year.

“When she returned, he was there to meet her at the airport in St. Petersburg. He covered her with gifts, with attention. He paid for a wonderful apartment, far nicer than where she had been living with her parents. He dressed her like a society lady, treated her in a way that would have spoiled a woman twice her age. But she was an extraordinarily level-headed girl and went on with her work. She had
received a coveted position at the Hermitage—naturally, since she was groomed for it almost from the time she was a child.”

Ann Loder came into the room and got a bottle of beer from the ice chest. Ometov took the opportunity to get another. His stories seemed to create a time frame of their own. Cate noticed that now, as earlier in the afternoon, there was a reluctance on everyone’s part to interrupt his train of thought. He went back to his chair and looked out into the courtyard again.

“The next two years began in triumph and ended in tragedy,” he went on. “She was now highly trained in a specialized field. Other museums all over Europe paid to have her travel there and hold seminars on painting restoration, to give lectures, to advise. And of course she was the darling of the Hermitage, and the fact that she was in such demand was good for the prestige of the museum, and for Russia. She traveled a great deal, to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, to the National Gallery in London, to the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft in Zurich, to Venice, to Rome. To the Prado in Madrid. She was wonderfully gifted.