Requiem For a Glass Heart (2 page)

“Thirty-two.”

He swallowed the whiskey and eyed her. He was indeed a good-looking man, well built, almost muscular. She guessed he was in his early forties.

“I told
you, I met her in art class,” Vera said, already undressing, dropping her clothes on the floor with routine familiarity. She got on the bed and went over to him on her knees, then bent over him and trawled a small breast across his back. “I didn’t say she was young.”

“Thirty-two
is
young,” Maikov said, looking over his shoulder at Vera. “You little cow.” She giggled. He turned back to Irina. “You want to get your clothes off, then?”

“I bought something … special,” she said, holding up her purse. “Let me slip it on.”

“Be my guest.” Maikov shrugged, pleasantly surprised that maybe there was to be a little game in this.

Irina stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, then quietly closed the door that opened into the living room. Quickly pulling a wicker clothes hamper away from the wall near the foot of an old cast-iron bathtub, she crouched down on the floor and pried at one end of a loose baseboard. It had taken her many visits to Vera’s apartment to find just the right place and then to make it accommodate her needs. When the baseboard came loose, she was relieved to
see the butt of the CZ 75, a Czech-made 9mm automatic handgun. Though she had put it there only two days before, she had worried about it ever since, fearful that some unforeseen misfortune would cause its discovery. But it was exactly as she had left it, the barrel pointing down between the wall studs, the silencer screwed into the barrel to keep the gun from falling out of sight. It was already loaded—and cocked.

Irina retrieved the pistol, not bothering to push back the baseboard or the hamper. She had calculated that she would need at least ten seconds after she opened the bathroom door. During those ten seconds Maikov must suspect nothing. She knew he would look at the door the moment he heard it open, so she laid the CZ on top of the hamper and unbuttoned the top of her dress, slipped her arms out of the sleeves, and removed her bra, letting the top of the dress fall around her waist as though she were about to step out of the skirt.

She picked up the CZ and took two deep, steady breaths. On the other side of the door Vera laughed a giddy, silly laugh and Maikov’s deep voice mumbled a few indistinguishable words. Gripping the pistol in her right hand, Irina clicked off the safety with her thumb and let her hand hang naturally at her side, hiding the gun in the drape of her dress.

Then she opened the door and stepped into the room.

Maikov and Vera were on the bed facing each other, embracing, and at the sound of the bathroom door Maikov took his face away from Vera’s breast and the two of them looked at her. Their heads were close together like those of two lovers in a photograph, cheek to cheek.

Without speaking, Irina swiftly raised both arms, brought them together to grip the CZ, and fired quickly four times. Each of the four bullets found its mark within the eighteen-inch square that contained the two faces.

She didn’t know precisely where the bullets hit—an eye, a mouth, a forehead—only that the imaginary square had exploded in successive scarlet plumes punctuated by discrete gassy bursts from the silencer. It was done.

She promptly stepped to the foot of the bed, the gun hanging at the end of her limp arm, and looked at the man and the woman. They continued to die, soft liquid sounds sighing from their flesh as the two lives slipped loose of their tenuous moorings: a subtle drawing of an extended muscle, a shallow movement in the sternum. The volume of blood and
the way it continued to surge from the bodies always surprised her. She stood rapt, holding her breath.

On her way out she shot the young bodyguard in the throat, then bent over and put the silencer in his mouth and shot him again. When she got to the front door and started down the steps, she saw that Krupatin’s faces had disappeared, leaving death behind in the dark Lincoln at the curb.

Outside in the rosy, timeless twilight, she hurried around the corner, past the Cathedral of St. Andrew, past the white Church of the Three Holy Men, through the tunnel of locust trees, to the metro station on Sredny Prospekt.

She rode the escalators down, down into the immaculate and brightly lighted subterrane, deep below the Russian spring, and within fourteen minutes she had boarded the line to the Finland Station. There she caught the last army-green train for Helsinki. It was a six-and-a-half-hour trip, and it would take the remainder of the night.

She leaned her head against the window, and as the lights of St. Petersburg receded in the everlasting dusk, she wept, wept without ceasing, until she slept.

C
ATE SAT ACROSS THE TABLE FROM AN OLD FRIEND IN A SOFTLY
lighted corner of an Italian restaurant and watched him sink deeper and deeper into gin-induced regret. Complaining was a given in his business. It came as a birthright, born of the responsibilities they accepted, of the risks they took, and of the disillusion that eventually ate away the core of far too many of them.

She hadn’t seen him in nearly eighteen months, since before Tavio’s death. He had been out of the country, and as soon as he was back he called her, wanting to get together. She was wary, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was inevitable that he would get emotional, and she would have preferred to avoid that. Her own road back to life without Tavio had been hard, and she didn’t want to see Griffin’s version of it too. She had heard that he was drinking too much again and that he had been shunted from Rome to Trieste and then eventually back to Washington and now Houston. That had taken most of a year, but Naples was still in his head as if it were yesterday.

They had finished eating an hour ago and had caught up on all the news, had covered everyone and everything except Tavio, whose absence stood between them like a pillar they
kept talking around. And Griffin had settled into the point of his evening anyway, which was drinking.

“You know,” he said, gesturing toward her with a fresh drink, clear gin in a clear glass with clear ice, “I never told you how knocked out I was when I first saw you. Tavio, he didn’t tell me anything, the sly bastard. He knew what I was thinking when he told me he had this girl he wanted me to meet. He knew I was thinking—which I was—that she was a Mexican. He loved messing with what he called ‘white-guy assumptions.’ He said we were prejudiced, every last one of us, and we didn’t even know it. Never let up on that. Just kind of slipped it in there. And he was right—I mean, about what I was thinking. You walked into that club … Remember that place? What was it?”

“Carioca.”

“That’s right!” He gestured quickly with the glass again, sloshing the gin. “Carioca! What a place … Anyway, you walked in, all pink and Scottish-looking, all that reddish hair, for Christ’s sake.” His grin was reminiscent and stupid.

Griffin was pure small-town Texas, and despite his degrees and his’ experience and his years of global traveling, he always would be small-town Texas deep down in the well that was his real nature. Tall and lean and nearly as dark as Tavio had been, he was almost at the end of his undercover career, at least in the front line of the DEA’s foreign operations. He had strung himself out to the breaking point, playing roles inside his head for so long that the distinctions between who he was and who he pretended to be were bleeding together. It was taking him longer and longer to crawl out of the skins he crawled into in Palermo or Naples or Trieste or Salonika, and the rumor was that he was beginning to make mistakes and that he had been sent to Houston until they could decide what to do with him. He was looking more and more like damaged goods, and one of the black marks on this business was that nobody really knew how to handle damaged goods. Often the men in the offices, the men who maintained distance on everything, didn’t handle this part of the business very well. In fact, it could be argued that more often than not, damaged goods were simply thrown away.

Cate looked at him and wondered how close Tavio himself had been to this. Who knew what these men really thought? She had been married to Octavio Cuevas for five
years, and though she had loved him—still loved him—and believed she knew him well, she also knew that when she married him she got only part of him. He kept a percentage— a small percentage, she hoped—to himself. But she had known that going in, and she had accepted it, though she had to admit that toward the end it had begun to have an effect on the marriage. It was nothing insurmountable. It was just that the small part he kept to himself sometimes defined more of what happened between them than she would have liked.

Griffin’s smile faded, and he stared into space with an unsteady tilt of his head.

“Working together … so long …” He cut his eyes at her, almost glared at her, and then looked away again, his eyes returning to the space where nothing was. The sweat from the ice was puddling around his glass. She didn’t say anything, but she wondered what it was about men that made them so damned romantic about their relationships with each other while at the same time they bravely proclaimed their independence from such dreamy attachments.

“I could
trust
him!” he snapped.

Cate frowned at the unexpected note of anger.

“That whole Naples thing was squirrelly,” he said. “And I knew that—but I trusted him on it. When you start doubting your own people … Well, shit, you just can’t do that.” He shook his head slowly.
“Cannot
… do that.”

Cate looked at him. “Salerno.”

“What?”

“You mean Salerno. You said Naples.”

He hesitated a second too long.

“Salerno, Naples—whatever.”

Now he had her attention. She had never known the details of the events surrounding Tavio’s death, and she had accepted that lack of closure as a grim downside of the business they were in. Because of her own career in the FBI, and because she too had worked undercover operations, she was expected to understand the realities of the job. Both Tavio’s colleagues in the DEA and her own fellow agents expected her not to pry into the particularities of operational issues. Once again, it came with the turf; you accepted the fact that there were secrets that always would remain secrets.

But something was eating at Griffin, something more than burnout.

“When I talked with Steve Lund, he told me they didn’t know what went wrong in Salerno, that they still don’t know,” she said.

“Oh, Christ! Steve Lund. Guy’s more useless than …”

“Then they do know.”

“They know more than they told you, honey, but they don’t know
anything.”

“I don’t understand that, Griffin.”

“Look. You know the big story.” Pause. “They know the small story.” Pause. “I know the tiny story.” Pause. “And Tavio, well, he knows the tiny, tiny story.” With his elbow resting on the table, he raised his hand in front of his face and showed her his forefinger and thumb squeezed tightly together. “The least little scrap of it,” he said, and his blue-green eyes squinted at her over the tops of his fingers.

In the simplicity of his inebriation, Griffin Younger had just summed up every undercover operation that used deeply embedded agents. At some point only the man deepest in understood everything, and it wasn’t a rare thing for him to keep some part of it stored forever in that small percentage of himself that he never shared with anyone.

“So tell me the tiny story you know,” Cate said flatly.

The big story—the one she knew—was that Griffin and Tavio had been working undercover on a single drug-trafficking case for almost two years. It had started small in Houston, grew larger in Colombia, and became enormous, drawing in other agencies, when it moved to Italy, where it merged into a drugs-and-arms operation utilizing the infamous “Balkan route” along which two thirds of the burgeoning worldwide heroin trade reached its Western European destinations. The case, of course, had been convoluted. While Tavio had burrowed deeper and deeper, Griffin’s role had played out. He was disengaged and installed in Rome to become Tavio’s case agent.

For nearly seven months the only communications Cate had from Tavio were through DEA back channels, and they had been rare. A call from an agent who was “out” and had seen Tavio in Brindisi.
He sends his love
, A cup of coffee with an agent who had just returned from Milan, where he had shared a meal with Tavio in the Galleria.
Tavio sends his love.
A voice she had never heard before, a DEA cryptographer at three o’clock in the morning.
Tavio sends his love.
The DEA
was a small family. Everybody knew and everybody cared.
Tavio sends his love.

And then one day when she arrived at the office she found her squad supervisor and the DEA’s Steve Lund waiting for her. Lund was visibly shaken but managed to get through the sketchy account of Tavio’s death with as little bureaucratic fuss as possible. Gate remembered the sudden pungent taste that had burst into her mouth from somewhere back behind her sinuses, and she remembered that her first thought had been a mental image of Tavio’s body in the Salerno morgue, an image that had proved to be eerily accurate when she actually saw him there, with her own eyes, twenty-two hours later. She had insisted on bringing back his body herself.

It happened—not that often, yet often enough for her to know that she had to accept it without outrage, without suspicions that there had been an egregious miscarriage of responsibilities that had cost Tavio his life. She had accepted Lund’s explanation, and she had accepted the account she had read in the inquiry files months later, when Lund was kind enough to let her see them when she asked. Because she was an FBI agent, she had been allowed access to more information than normally would have been given to a civilian wife. Aside from blind misfortune, she saw nothing in the account of Tavio’s death that prompted incredulity. But then, she wasn’t looking for anything, either. Her only interest in the details had been a desire to share Tavio’s last hours in an effort to alleviate her own pain because she hadn’t been able to be with him.

“The son of a bitch,” Griffin said, shaking his head slowly. He was looking at her, and his eyes reddened and turned oily. “He got, you know, mixed up …” His voice thickened; he stopped.

“Mixed up?”

Griffin couldn’t talk, just shook his head and tightened his lips, trying to gain control.

She didn’t want to see this. Something about his year-old grief angered her.

“What?” she said. “He was confused about something? You mean about the business in Salerno? I didn’t see anything in the file about a mix-up.”

“Mixed
up …” Griffin took a deep breath and finished off the rest of his gin. “With a woman, honey. He just the fuck
couldn’t leave them alone … Got himself killed because of it.”

His words knocked the wind out of her. She flushed hot, then grew faint with a chilling nausea that caused her forehead and the tops of her breasts to grow clammy. She fought the nausea as she watched Griffin’s face react to her expression. When he reached out to touch her hands, which lay on the table, she jerked them back.

“Them.” She heard her voice from somewhere else.

“Cate …”

She was confused by his anguished expression. Was it for her? For himself—or Tavio?

“That’s how it happened?” Her voice was a strained, disbelieving rasp. “He was set up—a woman set him up?”

Griffin looked at her, sensing through his vaporous haze that he had unleashed something, that he had made a huge mistake. But he was too drunk, too deep into the gin, to make any kind of recovery. His nod was sloppy and mournful.

Her eyes bored into him. “And there were others?”

He looked at her. “Cate …”

“There were
others!”
she screamed, causing the slumping Griffin to flinch and creating an instant silence in the restaurant, making the two of them the epicenter of attention. She could see Griffin trying to calculate through the fog. Did he dare try to placate her? He continued to gape at her, his calculations glacial and offensively obvious.

He nodded again.

“How many?”

“What?” He was honestly confused.

“How … many?” Her voice was even, seething.

“Oh, Christ, Cate.”

She could hardly control her breathing now, aware of an inward, swelling agitation.

“Always? The whole time …?”

“Oh, Christ, Cate.”

He seemed unable to say anything else. He made her sick. Without looking down., she let her left arm drop to her side and picked up her purse. Griffin was hardly conscious now, feeling the full effects of the gin, which had been creeping up on him with every fresh drink for an hour. She held her purse in her lap, making sure she had a firm grip on it. She stood slowly, and her voice started low.

“You … son … of … a … BITCH!” she shrieked, and without thinking she grabbed the edge of the tablecloth and jerked it with all her might, sending everything on the table flying across the dining room, crashing, splattering, and rattling behind her as she stalked out of the restaurant and into the sultry, mean heat of the June night.