Requiem For a Glass Heart (21 page)

They traveled around the city in cars as they tested the devices. Cate transmitted while walking in a crowd at a shopping mall, while sitting next to the noisy kitchen in a diner, and even while watching computer play in a video arcade. Hain, almost giddy with satisfaction, pronounced the equipment superior to anything he had ever seen.

After an additional half-hour of questions by Cate and Hain, Alan Geller left his direct-line number with them and flew back to Virginia.

Cate covered the rods with a patch and went outside into the courtyard to think. It was late, but she had to have some down time before she could ever hope to close her eyes and sleep.

T
HE NIGHT HOURS FINALLY SWALLOWED ENOUGH OF THE DAY’S
heat to make the evening merely unpleasant rather than miserable. The temperature and humidity were just below the point where people would perspire when simply sitting still.

Cate sat in one of the wrought-iron chairs looking toward the house, where the others were still talking. When she left, the conversation turned to speculation about what Sergei Krupatin would do next and how he would do it. As she watched them leaning toward one another over the tables, nursing cups of coffee, Leo Ometov’s shambling figure stood up in the dim light of the living room. He stretched to his full height for a moment to relieve his weary back and then stepped to the courtyard door and pushed it open. He came outside, closing the door behind him. After pausing for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness, he reached into his coat pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. As he dug into the pack, he started toward Cate.

“If you would prefer to think alone …” He gestured tentatively with a cigarette as he approached her.

“No, of course not,” she replied, though she really didn’t know how she felt about it one way or the other. “I wasn’t aware that you smoked,” she lied, remembering seeing him
smoke the night before when she had looked out her window and seen him here in the courtyard with Hain and Ann Loder.

“Not inside,” he said with one of his most genuine smiles. “I am in self-imposed exile.”

He lighted the cigarette, sat down in a wrought-iron chair near her, and turned obliquely to the house.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, blowing smoke into the still, heavy air.

“Eager,” she said. “Which, I confess, rather surprises me.”

Ometov lifted his head in a half-nod. “I understand that. This kind of work is exhilarating. It is challenging to match your intelligence and cunning against a formidable adversary. But losing has such … threatening consequences.” He smoked for a moment. “The old axiom is true, after all, that some people are never more alive than when they are most at risk of dying.”

“Jesus,” she said.

Ometov laughed softly. She could see his face in the reflected light from the house, and for some reason it was comforting to see him laugh.

“You didn’t have much to contribute to the brainstorming going on in there,” she said. “I’m guessing you didn’t want to say what you were thinking.”

“Oh? No, nothing so mysterious. I don’t really know what I think Sergei is going to do. I’ll simply have to wait-wait until Sergei gives me some more information.”

“And you’re sure he’ll do that?”

“Oh, most definitely. It is unavoidable.”

“Unavoidable.”

“Of course. If you live, you produce information about yourself. Information is a by-product of living.”

“Like making a choice.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s impossible not to make choices. Even refusing to make them is choosing. Life is making choices. Little ones. Momentous ones.”

“Precisely like that, yes.” He smoked. “And Sergei will make a choice soon, and then he will produce some information for me.” He laughed softly again.

“May I ask you a personal question?”

“Please do.” He smiled. “I may not answer it, but you may certainly ask.”

“I sense that for you, pursuing Krupatin is more than a job.” She paused. “That it’s personal.”

“Ahh.” Ometov raised his head and tilted it back slightly toward the sky. “Okay, an observation.”

Cate waited, but Ometov did not say anything else. He simply stared across the courtyard, his cigarette lifted beside his face as his elbow rested on the arm of the chair. She sensed that he was not pondering whether to address her question but rather how to address it.

“Of course it is personal,” he said. “I told you of my friends and their daughter. That can cut very close to the soul, you know.”

“I was thinking … more personal than that, perhaps.”

“Really?” He looked at her. There was no smile this time as he regarded her across the distance of a few feet in the anemic light. “That’s good. You are very observant, Catherine.” He looked at her. “Cate. Diminutive. Russians are very enthusiastic users of the diminutive as well, like Americans. But it has lost its intent, I think, over the years, the diminutive. It was originally meant, you know, to be an endearment, but over time … Well, to me it often now seems more utilitarian than endearing. As though we do not have the time to pronounce an entire name. Which is too bad. The entire name is often very beautiful.”

Cate said nothing. Ometov’s aside was simply a setup for his response. She had come to appreciate his reflective manner of speaking. He was sitting with his legs crossed, and once he seemed as if he were going to swing his leg and then caught himself.

“I told you the story about Sergei’s smuggling exploits off the coast of the Crimea, when his father was killed.” Cate nodded.

“I was a young lieutenant then, in the Soviet army. I was the one who recruited the cousin who betrayed them. I say recruited … I bribed him, offered him certain concessions. It was my patrol that cornered Sergei and his father and brothers late that day. Only by a minute chance misfortune did we miss getting them all. A mistake in signals, a misbegotten chain of events. Bad luck. All the things that are too familiar
to military men everywhere, the little, things that cause the great disasters.

“I was a new officer, with responsibility for this patrol for only four months, but my first sergeant had been on the Black Sea coast for six years. He was intimate with the Krupatins, in the way that enemies are intimate. Sometimes they can be closer than lovers.” He paused to smoke and think about this last remark.

“Anyway, there was a lengthy exchange of gunfire before we captured Krupatin’s father and brother. We lost two men. One of these men just happened to be a good friend of my first sergeant. The sergeant was livid that the trap had not succeeded in catching all of them. And he was overwrought about the deaths. He and the Krupatins had harassed each other up and down the coast for six years, and for this sergeant, this was the last straw. He knew Sergei and his brothers were hiding in the cliffs, and he decided to torture our captives to draw them out.

“When he proposed this to me, I refused him. And then something happened that all young lieutenants fear when they are put in charge of an older, more experienced group of men. Without anyone’s saying so, they refused to obey my order. They were going to do what they wanted to do regardless of my directive. All the men stood there beside the sea and glared at me, daring me to try to enforce my command of refusal. Two of their own were lying there dead on the beach beside us, caked with sand and blood. If I tried to stop them, I would lose my life. I knew it. They knew it.”

“Then you didn’t even try to stop them.”

He shook his head. “No. Of course, that is what I should have done. I mean, it would have been the honorable thing, from a military discipline standpoint. But when it came right down to that moment of my death, I was a coward. It was either my life or the lives of those two men kneeling on the sand.” He stopped, then shook his head slowly.

“No, actually that wasn’t even the choice. My men were going to kill those two smugglers regardless of whether I died or not. So as the sun fell slowly into the cold waters of the Black Sea, I watched them do it. I watched them drag the father and son up and down the beach between a gauntlet, each soldier jabbing his bayonet into them as they passed by, like jackals snapping at a wounded, dying prey. The sergeant
was screaming up at the rocks, ranting, foaming at the mouth, shrieking with each jab of the bayonets, taunting Sergei, who was hiding in the cliffs as his father and brother were sliced and jabbed to shreds, until they were no longer recognizable as human beings, just meat, some rags of flesh dragged behind the truck and caked in bloody sand. It was the longest dusk of my life.”

Ometov dropped the end of his cigarette on the tiles of the courtyard and put his foot on it. He didn’t grind out the burning cigarette, just put his foot on it. He sighed heavily, as though the story had drained him of oxygen.

“After that,” he said, pulling another cigarette out of the pack, “I was no longer any good as a lieutenant. Of course we all lied about what happened. That coast patrol was a kind of outpost. Whatever we said was what went into the reports. No one had any sympathy with the smugglers anyway. They were considered vermin. The headquarters in Moscow didn’t ask many questions about how we conducted ourselves in that remote region.” He lighted the other cigarette.

“I put in for an immediate transfer, naturally. But I was there for another miserable year before I was sent back to civilization in Moscow, my obligatory tour in the outposts completed.” He blew smoke into the dark and watched it lift up into the palms.

“These palms are wonderful,” he said. “They remind me of Istanbul. Istanbul when I was a young man.”

“Was that all there was to the incident?”

He shook his head. “No. The man I recruited, remember, was Sergei’s cousin. I told you what happened to him. And the outraged sergeant—he had been in the outposts far too long. Eventually he made it back to civilization too. He was a career enlisted man, a brutal man with a brute’s intellect. Sergei knew him well, since they had been adversaries so long. So when Krupatin eventually made it to Moscow too, after he became important in the criminal world there, he looked up his old friend the sergeant. It was only dumb accident that I ever knew what happened to him.

“After the army I joined the Moscow militia—our police. Because I was educated, I rose quickly. I became a director in intelligence. It was there that I came across the sergeant’s name after he died. He was murdered, either by Krupatin or at Krupatin’s directive. I suspect Sergei was there. The sergeant’s
body was found in a section of Moscow that ‘belonged’ to Sergei, in a warehouse. He was hanging from a winch on meathooks. They had lowered him upright into a vat of some kind of acid, I don’t remember what kind. He was alive when they did it. They submerged him up to just above his navel in the vat. He had thrashed about there while it melted his flesh away from his bones. It took a while—they made sure of that. Then, when he was mostly a skeleton below the waist, they raised him up, and the rest of his viscera just fell out the bottom of his rib cage.”

Ometov smoked.

Cate could not avoid asking the obvious question. She doubted whether Ometov expected her to.

“Has he tried to kill you too?”

“He killed three other men who were there on the beach that late afternoon. Again, they were enemies a long time before I came to the outpost.” He sighed. “As for me, I don’t know. He has never made any attempt to kill me.” He shrugged. “He probably never even knew who I was. Or maybe he saw everything that happened. Maybe he knew I was against it, tried to stop it, but didn’t try hard enough. He couldn’t blame me for that. After all, he did the same thing. I wouldn’t give up my life to save his father and brother, and he wouldn’t either. He hid in the rocks and watched. And I watched from the sand.”

W
HEN THEY BOARDED
K
RUPATIN’S
G
ULFSTREAM
V, WHICH WAS hangared at the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, Irina went straight to her cabin, took a couple of sleeping pills, removed her clothes, and went to bed. For more than three quarters of the trip she was lost in a fitful oblivion, a dark angel in flight from the demons within and the Satan traveling with her.

Nine hours later she surfaced from a restless unconsciousness and lay drowsily among the sheets, passing in and out of the present until the leaden edges of the pills’ effects wore off, leaving her more numb than rested. After a while she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet to urinate, she bent forward and held her head in her hands, trying to steady the floating sensation in her brain. After finishing, she straightened up and let her arms hang limp at her side as she leaned her head back against the bulkhead, her eyes closed. She didn’t know why she hadn’t taken the whole bottle of tablets so that she could have slipped mercifully from sleep into eternity.

Opening her eyes, she summoned her strength, stood up, and went about the business of washing and cleaning up. When she was finished, she pulled on a silk robe she found hanging on the back of the bathroom door and stepped into
the main cabin, where Krupatin was smoking a cigarette and watching a soccer game on television.

He glanced at her with lingering disinterest as she groggily collapsed into one of the plush leather seats and pulled her feet up under her. She stared out the porthole beside her. After a moment Krupatin flipped off the television and pressed a button that summoned a steward. He ordered a fresh pot of hot tea and stared at Irina. His left arm rested on a desk built into the cabin wall, papers scattered over its surface.

“You look like hell,” he said, puffing on the cigarette. He was still wearing his suit trousers, and his deep blue shirt with its white collar was wrinkled and undone at the sleeves and neck.

Irina ran her fingers through her hair and continued looking out the window. Blue sky and clouds down near the sea.

“Where are we?”

“Approaching the Caicos Islands. Cuba dead ahead.” “How much longer?”

“An hour, an hour and a half.” She felt him studying her. “You’d better pull yourself together,” he said. “If that’s possible anymore.”

She ignored him. The sky below was Caribbean blue, the clouds Viennese white.

He turned and picked up a passport from his desk and tossed it at her. She flinched when it hit her lap. The little green booklet slid off the silk covering her thighs and fell on the floor. Unfolding her legs, she reached down and picked it up. When she opened it, she saw her photograph and the name Helen C. Kurner, Mexico City, DF.

“Kurner?”

“A lot of Germans live in Mexico City,” Krupatin explained.

“And you are Mr. Kurner?” she asked wearily.

“Until we cross the border.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll let you know.”

She looked away, out the porthole again. The huge Gulf-stream slipped through the sky like a world unto itself, a small, beautiful hell, luxurious and barren.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Just look
pretty and be pleasant. You don’t have to think at all until we cross the border.”

“I don’t have any clothes,” she said. “I had only the one other dress in Paris.”

“You can get some more in Houston.”

It didn’t really matter; she only wanted to complain. By now she was used to buying clothes and then suddenly walking away from them. She had left complete wardrobes all over the European continent.

The steward arrived with the tea and served Krupatin first—English china cups and saucers, silver sugar tongs, fresh cream, and chocolate-covered strawberries on two little silver trays. Krupatin popped a strawberry into his mouth and began preparing his tea in silence.

Irina watched him, holding her cup and saucer in her lap, her feet once again folded up in the seat. The desolation she felt was indescribable. Being alone with him in the cabin of this airplane was like being buried with him in a coffin. She desperately yearned for the presence of others, anyone who might absorb or deflect some of the malignancy he exuded. She wished that the steward, however groveling he might be, would return, move about the cabin, do anything rather than leave her alone with this creature.

“When do Wei and Bontate arrive in Houston?” she asked.

Krupatin shook his head. “I don’t know. We have an appointment in two days. What they do until then is no concern of mine. I don’t give a damn, so long as they show up when they are supposed to.”

Even though he had just eaten three of the chocolate-covered strawberries, he popped a sugar cube into his mouth and sucked his tea through it, as was his habit. Irina watched him. Though he was tending to gain weight, he was still handsome, still self-absorbed. But the thing that caught her attention now was his self-contained silence. Usually when they met between assignments he was loquacious, either because he was ebullient about what she had done—having rid him of some real or imagined thorn—or because he was slightly giddy with anticipation at what she was about to do. Either way, death animated him, even at a distance. She knew from experience that his familiarity with death, his intimacy with it, was closely aligned with his sexuality. Long ago she had realized
that the emotions he experienced from each were actually indistinguishable to him. It was a volatile confusion of passions.

But now he was brooding, and his insistence that it was not necessary for her to be privy to events until just before they happened alerted her to a new development, one that she instinctively read as a threat.

As he sipped his tea he pretended to study some papers on his desk, ignoring her. This would have satisfied her perfectly if it weren’t for the nagging suspicion that if she neglected to address this behavior, it would be at her own peril.

“Sergei,” she said, surprised at the weakness of her voice, “do you have no doubts about what we are about to do?”

He looked around at her. “We?” His face was expressionless. “I am doing this. You are only an extension of me. I am doing this.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Not even a second’s doubt.” He looked at her for a long moment. “Tell me,” he said, swiveling his chair around to face her, holding his cup of tea in one hand. “Which one of our partners troubles you the most?”

“Troubles me?”

“Who do you think will be the most difficult to hit?”

She made a quick, radical calculation. “Wei.”

“Really?”

He seemed surprised, a reaction that made Irina’s heart lurch.

“Why?” he asked. “He’s attracted to you.”

“That’s why,” she said. “No matter what his attraction, he is not going to lose his head. He will always be suspicious that what he wants might very well have a lethal consequence.”

He looked at her a moment. “Then that should make you all the more desirable.”

The remark said more about Krupatin than Wei.

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “All I know is, it makes my job more dangerous.”

Krupatin nodded and sipped his tea, his eyes never leaving her. It was as if now that he had deigned to acknowledge her, she was the only thing he wanted to see. And her own stupidity hadn’t helped any. In her drug-lagged state she hadn’t paid attention to her gown, and Krupatin had picked
up on her carelessness. Instinctively she wanted to cover herself where the slippery silk had fallen away from her thigh, but she knew that such a reflex would bring his attention to her reluctance to have him look at her. So she sat there, afraid to protest in even the smallest way with a modest gesture, while his eyes sucked at her as if she were one of his sugar cubes.

“We will talk about the details later,” he said. “But you ought to think about this: we cannot afford to let either of them get away. At the faintest hint of something fishy, they both have to go. Getting only one of them is not good enough.” He sipped from his cup. “So you see, it’s not a consideration.”

“Did you think I thought it was a consideration?”

“I don’t waste time wondering what you think,” he said. “I’m just telling you.”

The jet hissed over the tiny Caicos Islands, a silver fleck against the sun over Cuba. It turned a few degrees north and slipped into the clear bright sky over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Irina was not a fatalist. She would not be in the position she found herself in now if she were. But she did recognize the foul breath of dread, and she smelled it now, like the staleness of dead flowers in a vase of cloudy, stagnant water. It was the odor of the end of her life, and it came from the mouth of Satan, staring at her naked thigh.

They landed under a low, hot Mexican sun a few miles inland from the coast, on an isolated airstrip flanked by sugarcane fields. A new but dusty Land Rover waited at the end of the strip for them, along with a glistening clean pearl-gray Mercedes.

When Krupatin stepped out of the Gulfstream, he was met by a thin, silver-haired Mexican in a rumpled white linen suit and a white shirt open at the neck. The Mexican was flanked by two gun-toting guards. Krupatin spoke to him, and then the two men moved a few steps nearer the tall stalks of sugarcane and held a brief discussion. After a subdued conversation, the Mexican tossed his head in the direction of the Mercedes, reached into his pocket, and took out a set of keys, which he gave to Krupatin.

They unloaded what they needed from the plane and put
it into the Mercedes. Krupatin visited with his pilot, and then he and Irina got into the Mercedes and the Land Rover pulled out in front of them. They followed it along a dirt road away from the sugarcane fields and the airstrip to a paved highway.

Within fifteen minutes they were negotiating the tight, narrow streets of the port of Tampico. Eventually they made their way out again to the coastal highway, which followed the beaches north past shaggy palms and dunes clustered with woody sea grapes. After a while the Land Rover slowed and Krupatin passed it. But it stayed behind them in the distance, making sure they did not fall victim to the occasional criminal opportunists who were becoming increasingly evident on Mexico’s isolated highways. The guards would stay with them all the way to the border.

The afternoon was turning hazy and pale. Irina knew that on the other side of Mexico the sun was just now balanced on the horizon. But here the light already had softened to mauve above the gray-green surf, and a bruised evening was approaching, dragging the night along with it.