Requiem For a Glass Heart (16 page)

Shrugging her beautiful shoulders hopelessly, she said, “I’m foolish.”

Bontate was not finding it easy to talk. “I loved that about you.”

“That and my lovely breasts,” she reminded him.

He nodded. “And your lovely breasts.”

One of the young men stirred slowly through the eddies of shadows at the edges of the room, moving like a trick of the eyes around behind Emilia, who chose to be oblivious to him.

Bontate lifted his pudgy chin at the cards on the game table. “So what have you learned from these?”

Emilia pulled her eyes away from him and looked down.

“Tonight, nothing. They are lying to me.”

“How do you know this?”

“They keep coming up with signs of good fortune.”

Without taking her eyes off the cards, she reached for her glass and sipped delicately from her drink. Bontate watched her.

Finally he said, “I cannot understand why you did this, Emilia. Surely you had to know it could only come to a bad end. Did you think it would last forever?”

She looked up at him with eyes swimming in glycerin.

“I often think some passionate thing will last forever, Carlo. You know that. That’s what the
passione
is all about. Believing in forever.” She paused. “It is a kind of wishful magic.” She paused again. “Tell me,
mio cam, all
those nights between my thighs … at these breasts”—she tried
to smile—“didn’t you ever think, even once, for a little moment, that it would last forever?”

The silence that followed was painful, and Irina’s heart ached as she earnestly wished that Bontate would tell a compassionate lie to this woman, who, even in their shared mercenary passions, clearly had meant something to him.

“There’s a difference in believing and wishing, ‘Ilia,” Bontate said. “And in those days, more often than you would think, I wished that it would last forever.”

It was a cruel man’s honest distinction, as close as he could come to showing compassion. Emilia seemed to recognize this, and her brave smile faltered to sadness.

Bontate reached across the game table and took both her hands in both of his, a suitor’s gesture of endearment as he looked at her fingers, her bare arms, and her generous breasts, which she had so generously given to him to enjoy.

“No regrets?” he asked.

“Oh, Carlito, there are always regrets,” she said. The cord passed over Emilia’s head so quickly and gently she never saw it.

“Addio”
Bontate said.

She lurched up in her chair, her back arched, her bosoms thrust forward and heaving—the same motions that in another context would have made Carlo Bontate’s loins ache. But these were only postures of reflex.

Bontate braced his feet against the floor as he gripped her hands and kept her arms pinned to the green baize surface. The table legs stuttered on the tile floor. As her back arched almost to the breaking point, Emilia’s eyes remained fixed on Bontate. But there was no scorn or blame in them, only acceptance and a natural fear of the coming darkness. Involuntarily she began grunting rhythmically as the garrote squeezed a deep and fatal furrow into her neck.

Bontate remained seated, his hands locked on hers, watching her face as her eyes received him, their last earthly image, before they ceased to see forever. With her arms quivering awkwardly, she finally achieved in death what a sybaritic life had denied her, a moment that lasted forever.

I
T WAS NEARLY ELEVEN-THIRTY AT NIGHT AS
W
EI’S
F
ALCON
lifted off in the Sicilian darkness and made a wide turn over the Marineo valley. Irina had been in the company of Carlo Bontate for more than eleven hours. Emotionally drained to exhaustion, she kicked off her shoes and sank back into her seat, resting her head against the rich brandy leather as she watched the occasional lights fall away through the porthole beside her. Within moments they were drifting over the dazzling lights of Palermo and then out over the dark Tyrrhenian Sea. Her mind was weak from concentration, and only moments seemed to have passed when the lights of Sardinia crept into view and then quickly gave way to the black western Mediterranean.

She closed her eyes and waited for the coast of southern France. It wouldn’t be long. She wanted to see more lights, wanted to watch them drift below her window, occupy her thoughts, distract her from the web of complicity she was weaving, which would grow increasingly complicated before she was able to rid herself of this last of Krupatin’s horrors.

She had not had any preconceptions about what she would encounter with Carlo Bontate, so she was not really taken aback by the contrast between him and Wei. There had been only Wei’s remark that the two men were vastly different,
and that could have meant so many things it was hardly of any help at all.

Nor had she had any illusions about Bontate’s ruthlessness. Krupatin’s file had prepared her for that. But the strangling of an old girlfriend whose carelessness had jeopardized one of his drug routes was an object lesson she could have done without. She did not have to be told that taking her along to witness the event was a none too subtle cautionary warning.

In practically every way, Don Carlo was more straightforward and less cryptic than Wei. He had little patience or use for veiled language, which made Irina’s task more complicated. Wei found vague language useful. It provided options, never closing doors, never committing, never cutting off possibilities. But Irina had had to be straightforward to gain Bontate’s trust, something that was very hard to do when the whole essence of her job was deception. It was the sort of thing Krupatin said she did better than anyone, a bit of perverse praise that baffled her, since she invariably suffered an overwhelming lack of confidence whenever she was required to call on these resources.

So she had spoken sincerely to the Sicilian don. She had taken yet another risk and in doing so had played yet another card in a hand that she increasingly feared was allowing her fewer and fewer options. How many cards were left in the deck? All the spent ones lay before her-—she could remember in sickening detail how she had played them—and the small stack that remained to draw from was there too. But there was no time to count, no way to calculate what her chances were with the few cards that remained.

When the earthly stars finally glittered into view again, she realized she never had taken her eyes off the porthole. What were these stars? Marseilles? Nice? Monaco? They moved in glacial time past her frame of view. Paris was not that far away. Another drama, another act, another role. It would not be so bad if anything ever lasted from these theatricals, but the whole point of them was termination. She had to step over the corpses to get off the stage, and she always exited alone. There was no one to talk to. The isolation was a torture, as was the absence of continuity. She had no one to share a memory with, but even worse, few things she wanted to remember.

There was darkness again: the French countryside. The lights had been turned down to a low glow in this luxurious cabin, which she occupied alone. She hardly had moved since she sat down, and her weariness was so all-encompassing it was the sole thing that defined her. Reaching up to her chest, she felt the small, lozenge-shaped locket hanging safely between her breasts beneath her blouse. When she moved her head slightly against the leather seat, she felt moisture beside her face. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. Was that possible, to cry without being aware of it? Apparently it was. But it was also a sign that she was fragmenting. Soma and psyche were moving apart. And she felt there was little she could do to withstand it.

She woke when the Falcon made its first steep turn on its approach to Orly. Outside her window Paris lived up to its name as the city of lights, its dazzle scattered across the night in an extravagance seldom appreciated by the earthbound.

The Bentley came to the Falcon, and Irina had to walk only a few steps on the tarmac before she was surrounded by leather once again, speeding into Paris rather than over it. The bodyguard was her chauffeur, as before, but the pretty Asian girl was nowhere in sight.

Arriving at Rue Férou, she found the street shrouded in the silence of the small hours. She was met at the front portico not by Wei but by one of the shoeless Asian maids, who accompanied her through the huge stillness of the silent house, along the marble hallways, past the ember-red and self-absorbed courtesans and up the flight of marble stairs to her room. Nothing stirred in the house but them; no sound could be heard but the sound of their own presence.

When she dismissed the maid at the door, the woman smiled and bobbed her head submissively. “Please,” she said softly and opened the door, indicating that Irina should precede her. Following Irina in, the maid closed the door behind them and went straight into the bathroom and started the water in the shower. Returning to the bedroom, she insisted on helping the weary Irina undress. Too tired to protest, Irina closed her eyes and allowed herself to be waited on.

When she was naked, she turned and walked into the bathroom and got into the shower, immediately putting her head under the falling water. She would have liked to stay
there for hours, but exhaustion lay upon her like a cape of lead. Opening her eyes to push back her hair, she was startled to see the maid in the bathroom again, also undressing. Through the spattered glass Irina watched the woman slip out of her uniform, fold it neatly, and put it on a marble bench. After taking off her underclothes, she unpinned her hair, which fell, indigo-black, against her olive skin.

Irina did not move as the maid reached for the shower door and stepped in, joining her under the spray. She did nothing as the maid took the scented soap and began lathering her from head to toe. Though it was a delicious relief from the day’s unrelenting tension and a wonderful way to shed the dust of Sicily, the shower was nonetheless a utilitarian operation. The maid did everything, as though her hands and fingers were Irina’s own, tending to the business of bathing with a thorough, practical intimacy.

Succumbing to an emotional twilight, Irina was only minimally aware of being led back to the bedroom wrapped in a large towel, which disappeared as she lay down on clean white sheets. She felt strings of oil trail across her body, filling her mind with strange scents as the small hands of the Asian began to transport her, muscle by muscle, to another plane of reality. It took only moments for the hands to lose their identity as hands and become a breath wandering over her, and then a current within her, moving through the layered muscles, coursing through the veins and arteries, until Irina arrived at the only place where she could find any peace at all—oblivion.

She woke once during the night, sobbing, fearful and aware of an approaching horror. Then she felt herself embraced, her body pulled next to another’s, a realization she grasped with a grateful yearning to be comforted. Pressing her face against the Asian’s breasts, she grasped her tiny waist. Small hands caressed her hair and neck, and a small mouth moved softly against her ear, whispering words that were unintelligible to her except for their unmistakable compassion.

C
ATE’S DECISION TO GO AHEAD WITH THE ASSIGNMENT WAS MET
with businesslike sobriety, no congratulations, no pep talk, no expressions of appreciation. It was a job, and all of them were feeling the pressure of being behind the curve. They wanted to move on.

Valentin Stepanov, who had arrived in Houston during the night, was reached at his hotel, and arrangements were made to meet him at another hotel later in the afternoon. Hain got in touch with his contacts at the Bureau’s reclusive Engineering Research Facility at Quantico and told them he was ready for their help. He was told they would send down one of their technicians with the devices as soon as possible.

After everyone had a breakfast of coffee and packaged doughnuts warmed up in the microwave, Gate was given Valentin Stepanov’s considerably thick file, and she retreated to her room to concentrate on it. Ann Loder had been responsible for putting it together, and she had done a first-rate job. The thing read like a novel. For the next two hours Gate pored over the file, taking notes and making a list of questions. Twice she got up to refill her coffee cup, and each time she looked into the living room and noted that the computers and at least one of the telephones were constantly in use.

She had no trouble concentrating on Stepanov’s dossier,
and found herself almost calm with a keen anticipation. Actually, all the butterflies had vanished when she had made her decision to go ahead with the assignment. She was, in fact, eager to get on with it.

“The thing to keep in mind about Stepanov,” Ann said, sitting at one end of the folding tables and talking over a notepad lying open in front of her, “is that he is always looking out for Stepanov. No matter what happens, that one concern never changes. He’s committed to his role as traitor—to save his skin—but he hasn’t gotten used to it yet. Since he was eighteen his life’s been tied to Krupatin’s, but he’s only been a traitor for nine months. And most of the effects of that have been long-distance, in Germany. Now he’s going to meet Krupatin face to face for the first time since we turned him.”

They were all sitting in the living room again, and Cate had Stepanov’s file in her lap, along with her questions. Hain was sitting at the far end of the folding tables, his shoulders turned away from them, a telephone pressed to his ear, his head bent, intent on the conversation. Cate had never seen anyone work telephones the way Hain did.

Erika and Leo Ometov were sitting in two swivel armchairs the rental agency had delivered, facing Cate. Everyone was drinking coffee.

“Always in his mind,” Ometov interjected, tapping his forehead with his middle finger, “is the question of whether he has been found out.”

“How do you think Krupatin would deal with it?”

“Their relationship is such that if that were the case, it is highly likely Krupatin would take care of Stepanov himself.” Ometov sipped from his mug. “But that would happen later, on Krupatin’s way out of town.”

“How does Stepanov feel about having to work with me?” Cate asked.

“He doesn’t give a damn,” Erika said in her heavily accented English, “one way or the other. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether he likes it or not.”

She was the only one who actually had worked with him in an undercover situation. During the German operation, Stepanov had flown into Munich once, on a U.S. military flight, to meet secretly with the BKA. His job was to identify a Krupatin cell leader whose identity was known only to him.
The BKA had never been able to get a photograph. Stepanov met the man at a little tavern, where the BKA was to arrest him. Something went wrong, and in the altercation Stepanov killed the man, later claiming he had had to defend himself. Erika was in the tavern at the time and wrote in her report that in her view the killing had not been necessary. She suspected that Stepanov had not wanted the man taken alive.

“Is he going to be able to do this?”

Erika grinned. “This definitely will be the most important acting job of his life. The man is like most of the con men I have known, a natural actor. He is a … what, a bullshitter. He talks a lot. He is very shrewd. Even though he is talking, he is watching you, watching how you react to what he is saying. Is he going to be good at this? Of course. This is his natural environment, like a beetle in a shit pile.” Erika lowered her gaze at Cate. “But that is the question he is asking himself about you right now. Is
she
going to be any good at this? He is going to be very skeptical of you, so be ready for him to, you know, challenge you, to see how you respond.”

“Then you think he’ll be able to fool Krupatin?”

Erika shrugged. “That’s what all of this is about. But if anybody can, he can.” Her eyes slid away, and she fanned the pages of her briefing book. “They know each other like old married people. You will be the one out of touch. Things will pass between them that you will never see. If Stepanov doesn’t fool Krupatin, you will never know it. And in my mind, that is the most dangerous situation you will face here. You will not be aware of the explosive nature of the chemicals they will be mixing with each other. The slightest little thing …” She snapped her fingers.

Cate looked down at her notes and thought a moment. Then she looked up at Ann.

“Do you really think I’m going to be able to get in close enough to be privy to anything significant? We have so little time.” She glanced at Ometov. “It just seems like such a long shot. These are big people.”

“Yes,” Ometov said immediately, nodding vigorously, “you can. Several reasons.” He held up a thumb. “One, and most important, you belong to Stepanov. All these guys have women, and when you are at Stepanov’s level, no one questions you. It is his responsibility to make sure you are clean. If you are not, there is the usual penalty—he goes to hell.”

He raised his index finger. “Two, it is true that Krupatin is obsessive about security and that this obsession is applied with savage discipline to his underlings. But at the top, as far as we can tell, they are guilty of making assumptions. Just like people at the top everywhere, they assume all the basics have already been taken care of by the time they step in to do their part. Krupatin has a number of managers at Stepanov’s level, people all over the world who he contacts routinely when he travels. He doesn’t deal with the underlings anymore. These are essentially business meetings. There is an assumption of obedience at this level, that all the way down the line everything has been taken care of beforehand. It is an incredible opportunity we have here. The first time ever.”

Hain hung up his telephone and turned around in his chair. Sipping from his mug of coffee, he listened.

“Besides,” Erika said, “girlfriends who talk have their tongues pulled out and their throats cut. In that order. That is one of the first things impressed on you when you become a girlfriend.”

“But if you can keep your mouth shut, it’s a good life to be a girlfriend,” Ometov said.

“They can’t possibly say
everything in
front of these women,” Gate protested.

“No, maybe not.” Erika shrugged. “But we know from experience they say enough. When they get comfortable with their women, they get loose tongues. You know,” she said, not afraid to display her disdain for male frailties, “it is a kind of male swaggering. Big talk. They are peacocks.”

“In this profile,” Gate said, tapping her notebook with her pencil, “Stepanov comes across as pretty smooth. What makes him sweat? Have you ever seen him strung out?”

Hain shook his head. “He’s pretty slick. When we first approached him, after we had the tapes, had him dead on, he squirmed. In fact, he was pretty rattled throughout the negotiations, up to the time he agreed to work with us. After that, after some assurances that we weren’t going to use him and then hang him out to dry, he began to level out.” He looked down thoughtfully. “As to what makes him sweat? I don’t know.”

“Krupatin,” Erika said. “I really believe that Krupatin is the only thing that scares him. Krupatin is the last great ghost before death.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s right,” Ann said. “He sure as hell didn’t flinch at any of the things we asked him to do in Brighton Beach. I mean, as far as operations went. He’d do anything.”

“Except give up the American organization,” Gate said. Ann shrugged.

“But he
is
willing to give up Krupatin,” Erika emphasized.

“No, he’s willing to help us put someone inside,” Hain clarified. “There’s a lot of difference. He’s not really giving up much, if you think about it. He’s just providing access, positioning.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Erika said, “how little or how much he is doing for us. He is under a death sentence all the same. In his eyes, by refusing to give us the organization here, he is only delaying the inevitable end. I sometimes think he is a little fatalistic about that. It’s the big gamble for him. It’s either prison now—and for the rest of his life—or a roll of the dice with Krupatin. Not much of a choice, really. But he is human, after all. He will gamble with the future. The present is too soon for him. Premature. You know, he clings to the hope that something could happen later to save the day for him. There’s always that possibility.”

“You don’t seem to think much of his odds,” Cate replied.

“No, I think he is a dead man,” Erika said, shrugging again. “You have to look at the history of stories like this. They never end well—rarely, anyway. Stepanov is a soldier, a lieutenant. We’ve used that term ourselves. Krupatin is a general. Generals survive wars, not soldiers. Behind all his bluster, Stepanov knows this.”

“These two guys coming in from London—you’ve shown their passport photos to Stepanov?” Cate asked.

“Sure.”

“Nothing?”

“No, he doesn’t recognize them. Krupatin has told him someone’s coming to advance him, but he hasn’t told him who it will be.”

“Isn’t that a little worrisome? If Stepanov’s been around so long, you’d think he’d know these two guys coming to this important meeting.”

“Yeah,” Hain agreed, nodding, “that’s worrisome. It’s
worrisome to all of us, but it’s got to really bug Stepanov. It
is
unusual that he doesn’t recognize them. No doubt about it.”

There was an awkward pause after this remark.

“Okay,” Gate said, “all these people are coming to Houston. Where are they staying?”

“We don’t know,” Ann said. “The way it works is that at prescribed times Stepanov calls his answering machine in New York. There’s a message there, too brief to trace, telling him what to do next. That’s been the routine. We have no way of knowing if these two guys know where they’re going or not.”

“What about backup?” This was the question Hain had avoided answering the evening before. Erika looked at Ann Loder, but it was Hain who responded. The buck for this operation stopped on his desk. He leveled his eyes at Cate.

“There is no backup,” he said.

No one spoke up to fill the silence. It was clear this was a bombshell they had been carefully waiting to reveal to her, and with those four words it became instantly clear for the first time how well they had played her. The hard part, the deal-breaker, had not been revealed until they had given themselves the opportunity to employ every available inducement, to present every enticement to make her want this assignment in spite of this crucial difficulty. These people knew quite well what personality types volunteered for undercover assignments. And they also knew that given the right agent, the right timing, and the right circumstance, the greatest obstacle could also become the greatest seduction.

“Go on,” Cate said. She felt as if she had just taken the first step into the damp, slippery slope of a labyrinth. She could feel all of them looking at her, but her attention was fixed on Hain.

“A number of reasons for this,” he said. “First of all, we don’t see this as a potentially volatile situation you’re stepping into. I mean, you’re not going to be buying or selling drugs or guns or laundered money. The opportunity for violence is not built into it—it’s not an integral part of the mix.”

Cate didn’t quite see it that way, but that wasn’t a surprise. It was like the issue of unequal pay for doing the same work, like arguing about the color red with a person who saw only gradations of gray.

“Second, if you’re able to get inside, we don’t want to run the risk of discovery. It’ll be a rare thing to do and we don’t
want to risk blowing it with a conventional backup structure that could interfere with your mobility. If you constantly have to try to stay in touch with a backup, there might be things you wouldn’t want to do, places you wouldn’t want to go because it would weaken or break your link with your backup. Trying to avoid these conditions could attract attention and suspicion. If there’s no backup, you’re entirely independent.”

And vulnerable, Cate thought.

“Third, the Russians’ countersurveillance is damned significant—they have a lot of cold war expertise and the finances to make it work. If Krupatin chose to bring all this into play—we don’t know if he will, but if he chose to do so—we’d have to spend a mint to put together a backup system that they wouldn’t pick up. A lot of agents, a lot of technology.”