Requiem For a Glass Heart (23 page)

V
ALENTIN
S
TEPANOV MANEUVERED THE RENTED
C
ADILLAC OUT
of the parking lot of the Town and Country Mall and worked his way to the entry of the Sam Houston Parkway, where the driving was not complicated, he said, and they could talk. They headed south.

“So, I need to know about your legend,” he said.

She nodded. “Catherine Miles …”

“Miles? M-i-l-e-s?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“I’m an assistant manager in the personnel office of an international architectural firm,” she said, and told him how she had used this before and how it was covered by backup.

Stepanov listened to her elaboration and seemed satisfied, nodding and mumbling his assent.

“Okay, good,” he said. “So how did we meet? At a hotel bar. I have told you I am with a firm that promotes international business cooperatives, and I am here doing that, blah, blah. This is the fifth time we are together. You are staying with me at the Touraine rather than at your home because it is fun. When I am in town, I take you to fancy restaurants, buy you things, pay for everything. You get to stay in luxury hotels instead of your dreary duplex or whatever it is. It’s like a
working girl’s vacation when I come to town. We party. We have good sex. You just pack up a bag and move in with me for a week or so. This time we were lucky, because you had some time off—what, it’s … when you have worked extra time and you can take off?”

“Comp time.”

“Exactly. So you see, it is basically a good time. Nothing more. I don’t tell you all that much. You are not asking a lot of questions. Both of us are in it just for the good time.”

“Is Krupatin going to question this at all? It’s a little hard to believe he’s not going to be suspicious of me.”

“Oh, he will be suspicious. Sergei would be suspicious if I did not have a woman with me. He would think, what is the matter, Valentin always has a woman. What does this mean, no woman? What is going on here?”

He shook his head, checked the rearview mirror, and changed lanes.

“What can you tell me about Grigori Izvarin?” Cate asked. “What’s his background?”

“Grigori is the son of an old friend who is now dead, someone who helped us out in the early Moscow days. He is thirty-two years old, one of the next generation of KGB agents—the generation that never happened. But he had all the training and was active for five or six years—not a long time by those standards—before the so-called empire blew to shit. Of course, all the time he was on Sergei’s payroll. Sergei always kept four or five KGB on his payroll.

“You will have to watch Gori. He thinks Krupatin is God, and he wants to be Jesus Christ. But he is a watchful Jesus, and he sees a Judas in every face. I have had my share of run-ins with him. The bastard is viciously amibitious. And you know, no matter how smart a man is, that kind of slavish devotion is flattering. Gori is making headway with Sergei, he’s coming up in the ranks.”

“So he’s here to make sure Krupatin’s not walking into something.”

“Yes, I think so. But even if that is not his specific job here, that is always on his mind.” “They’re going to have guns.” “Of course.”

“How are they going to get them?”

“Those people I come down here to see, they have explosives
and firearms connections. That will be their job. They have already been contacted.”

Stepanov changed lanes again. Gate guessed they would be driving for a while because he was curious about being tailed. He obviously wasn’t trying to dry-clean himself. He was just curious. It was the kind of thing he did without even thinking.

After a few minutes he looked at her. “How are you going to communicate with your people?”

“Telephone.”

“Oh, that’s ingenious,” he said with mock admiration.

“It’s safe,” she said.

“I guess there’s not much to say anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are probably small little FBI agents hiding inside your pants.” He laughed, but it wasn’t altogether comfortable.

“I’m covered well enough,” she said.

“That’s good. When you get killed, I want them to know it was not my fault.”

“I understand you picked me from a photograph.”

“That’s right, the same way I pick out a piece of meat at the butcher’s. Something nice and pink. Something I can really get into.”

“In your dreams,” she said, and forced herself to smile at him. An easy, inviting smile, something he would like. And he did.

He laughed again, looking at her, this time a genuine laugh that snowed surprise at her jest, and then smoothly and quickly he exited off the parkway. Without explanation he pulled into a service station, parked to one side of the drive, and got out of the car. She waited and watched him walk to a telephone booth, step in, close the door, and put a quarter in the slot.

“He’s …” She stopped. She was going to tell them what he was doing, and then she remembered Jernigan’s advice not half an hour before. Was Stepanov giving her a chance to hang herself, or did he really have business on the telephone? He even had his back turned to her, giving her permission to go ahead and talk. He was making it too easy. She kept her mouth shut, wondering where he might have hidden a tape recorder in the car.

He remained with his back to her for nearly ten minutes. Cate waited in silence and wondered what they were thinking in the tech room in the field office, in the off-site, in Jernigan’s car. It would be a long time—if ever—before she would get used to her broadcasting condition. She still couldn’t get over the fact that she had let this happen to her, that she had simply walked into it with everything hanging out as if she were Mata Hari. Christ.

Finally Stepanov hung up the telephone and walked back to the car, jangling his car keys, which she had noticed he had taken with him. Old habits.

“Did you have a nice time?” she asked as he shut the door.

“I can’t always explain everything I do,” he said, turning the ignition, starting the car. “Get used to it.” He pulled out of the service station and at the next opportunity got back on the parkway.

“Aside from your people,” he said casually, “have you seen any other surveillance?”

She looked at him. Then she smiled slowly. “You haven’t seen our people, Valentin.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a mystery,” she said. “Get used to it.”

Stepanov laughed openly. “Okay,” he said, “okay.”

They continued on the parkway, this time going back the way they had come, Stepanov again driving casually, switching lanes, watching his rearview mirror. She didn’t exactly understand what he was doing. His maneuvers were too cursory for dry-cleaning, and yet they were more deliberate than aimless wandering.

They went on talking. He asked her about her family, and as she talked he stopped her occasionally to ask, “Is that Catherine Miles you are talking about, or Cate?” It was both and neither.

A good undercover agent, Tavio always had said, never left his real self behind. The new self was just a thinly disguised old self. This trick had two functions. First, you didn’t have to memorize a whole new personality with a whole new set of personal facts from birthdate to that very moment. Essentially, you were still you, with only a few facts changed so you could assume a new identity with a reasonable amount of comfort. Catherine Miles and Cate Cuevas had the same
favorite color, liked the same kind of music, saw the same movies, had the same taste in clothes, bought the same kinds of foods at the supermarket. So ninety percent of the time, when she was answering Stepanov’s questions, she was answering them honestly, accurately, naturally, without having to keep a tally of lies. This created no tension, no memory problems.

The second function to this trick was that you never identified too closely with your new associates. This was one of Tavio’s cardinal rules. Too many times, he said, he had seen undercover agents, men and women who had been under a long time, forget their essential selves. Sometimes in this business you came to realize that some people who did horrible things were, in all honesty, likable. It was easy to get next to them and to like being next to them.

But, Tavio said, that was the way to destruction. Gate Cuevas did not like the same people Catherine Miles liked, and it was essential to her survival that she never like the same people. Cate Cuevas never forgot who she was, never forgot what her standards were, who her friends were, where her loyalties lay. Catherine Miles might eventually get to like Valentin Stepanov, even sympathize with him, as she learned more about his personal history, the way life had been unfair to him. But Cate Cuevas would not and could not.

Ninety percent of the time, Cate and Catherine could be friends; they even could be the best of friends. But that last ten percent would alienate them forever; it was the territory of moral values. The smallest part became in fact the defining part. Like a drop of gentian violet, it was the dye that prescribed the differences that gave meaning to a life, the differences that gave meaning to believing or disbelieving. That last ten percent was, in the end, all that mattered.

“What about you, Valentin? Have you forgotten who you were?”

He did not answer quickly. They had left the parkway, having traveled again over the same territory. Then, at Cate’s suggestion, they turned onto the Southwest Freeway and headed downtown. Once there, they came back out again onto the West Loop, not that far from the Chateau Touraine.

“Have I forgotten who I was?” he asked. “Who I
was?”

As Cate looked at his profile, she realized he was not a handsome man after all His features were coarse. A slightly
too large nose, a slightly too small mouth. His lips did not have smooth lines but had too much of an upward tweak in the center, where the dimple underneath his nose formed a too-delicate juncture. He had heavy jowls. His body was bulky, conveying strength without the grace of a well-defined musculature. He was more buffalo than athlete. His eyes were forgettable—almost. Physically they were not striking, but if you looked at them closely, separated them from the rest of his features, you could see an emptiness in them that was disconcerting. It was not what she could see there that gave her a momentary shudder; it was what she didn’t see. Something was missing, something that distinguished a human eye from an animal’s. If his eyes conveyed anything at all, they conveyed a realization of damnation. It was a sobering thing to see. It was even frightening, as though she were allowed to speak with a man who was guaranteed to go to hell. And knew it.

“As a matter of fact …”he said, and he paused, and his face took on a momentary difference, as if he were delving far, far back into himself, as if the question were absolutely original to him and his thoughts were thoughts that were surprising. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have.”

Then he laughed, a dry laugh lacking joy or amusement but genuine all the same. He laughed a long time.

“T
HREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE MILES,”
K
RUPATIN SAID
, bending over the map in the restaurant. They were having a late breakfast. “That’s … five hundred fifty-five kilometers. Good God, nearly six hours!”

He slapped down his pen on the restaurant table and took another sip of coffee. His suit had a few sharp creases at odd angles in it, because he hadn’t bothered to unpack it before collapsing on the bed early that morning. He was not wearing a tie with his white shirt, but his face was freshly shaven.

Irina didn’t pay much attention to him. She was looking out the window at the palm trees, finishing the last bites of her pancakes.

“It has to take that long,” Krupatin added, thinking out loud. “The state police are supposed to be strict bastards about speeding.”

There was a breeze outside, and the deep green palm fronds rocked and lilted like hula dancers against the bright blue sky.

Krupatin looked at his watch. “That will put us in Houston about six o’clock or so, seven o’clock if we stop to eat. Not night yet, this time of year.”

Krupatin’s trademark, Irina thought as she watched a
maid in a white uniform push her cleaning cart along the loggia on the other side of the swimming pool. He knew everything he had to know to do what he had to do. Speed limits on the highways. Time changes. Daylight savings time. She knew about that too, a strange concept. She did her homework too. Krupatin was thorough, but he was thorough for Krupatin. He did not pursue his efficient planning beyond his own interests.

“You know how we are going?” he asked, looking at her, nodding at the Texas map on the table.

He knew she did. She had memorized the highways, the intersections. But the map had no marks on it. That was an old habit too.

“You don’t have much to say.” He glowered at her.

She took her eyes off the calm scene outside and looked at him.

“What can I say, Sergei? I don’t know anything.”

“It’s for your own good,” Krupatin said matter-of-factly, popping a last bite of bacon into his mouth. “If this doesn’t go by the mark, it will fall apart. The only way I can control it is to do everything myself. As much as I can, anyway.” He wiped his hands on his napkin. “You ought to understand that. That’s the way you work, isn’t it?”

“All alone, huh? No boys?”

He raised his head in a half-nod. “And a few boys.” He leveled his eyes at her. “Incidentally, they don’t know any more than you do. That’s just the way this has to be.”

A waitress came by their table and filled their coffee cup, then moved on.

Krupatin glared after her. “I don’t believe this. This is the third time she’s done that. She doesn’t even ask. She just comes up behind you and … Christ. That’s goddamned irritating.” He lighted a cigarette and pushed the coffee away. “Christ.”

She studied him. “What kind of time frame are we working with?”

“I think you’ve asked that.”

“I don’t remember. What kind of an answer did I get?”

“I’ll let you know.”

They looked at each other. She was having to swallow a matrix of emotions. Fear. Anger. Impatience. Fear was foremost, but it was complicated by a ferocious will to survive. At
times, at black times, she doubted she would ever be rid of the embrace of his dark wing. At other times, when she thought of Félia, she imagined herself crawling out of an abyss, her daughter’s face in the distance before her, small and pale and yearning. At those moments her resolve to be free of him was fierce and irrepressible.

But even when her resolve was at its strongest, she had to admit to herself that she was suffocating under the weight of what she was doing. In the beginning, after each of the first two killings, she had vomited immediately, on the spot, leaving the contents of her stomach behind with the bodies. After the next two she had managed to hold on to her nerves until she was well away, until she was alone, down on her knees in a public bathroom, in a train station. She still remembered the smell of the public toilets and the hollow sound of her own retching echoing off the tile walls.

Her instincts, however, sobered her. She knew if she was not able to control herself she would make a mistake, a fatal mistake. The margins for error in this business were thin and brittle. So she called on the only greater power she knew. Much to her shame, she prayed for strength. Before each of the next jobs, if she was in St. Petersburg, she went to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, through the woods to Trinity Cathedral. The church was often crowded, foggy with incense, glimmering with candles, worshipers kneeling and praying, kissing icons, moaning their faith in mumbled prayer. So did she. She implored the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for the will to kill without anguish, to steal lives to save a life, to murder again and again in order to preserve again and again. She implored the icons, their gold and silver glinting in a vast hazy gloam of lifted prayers. The faces of all the madonnas and all the angels became Félia’s, peering down at her through the smoke of candles and incense in gratitude for salvation through the delivering hand of Irina’s executions.

The next two times the killing itself was easier, but she was entirely unprepared for what happened to her afterward.

The first time it happened was in Prague. She met her man in a coffeehouse near the Charles Bridge. They had coffee and pastries, then walked to his car, parked in one of the tight, narrow streets nearby. It was summer. Dusk. His hand was under her dress, fumbling at the elastic of her pants, his
face burrowed in her breasts. She slipped the hypodermic needle into his neck. The cyanide gave him time only to recoil. He gaped at her, and the single word “Greta” escaped through the rising phlegm in his throat. The name hit her face like a strew of blood. Greta? She had studied her target thoroughly, as always. There was no wife named Greta. No daughter. No sister. No mistress named Greta. The identity of this woman whose name was the last word spoken by a man she had killed began to haunt her. She began to look for the name in newspapers, listen for it in overheard conversations on trains, in restaurants, on the street. She dreamed of faceless women. It was months before she could shake loose of it. After much prayer, incense, and candles.

Then she had to kill a woman in Bern. When the woman answered the doorbell at her house in a secluded section of the city, Irina shot her in the face. The blast sent the woman sprawling backward, her arms windmilling as she reflexively tried to maintain her balance even in the moment of her death. This odd, moribund ballet stuck in Irina’s mind. Again it populated her dreams; people everywhere were windmilling their arms in death. She had one vivid, gruesome dream in which she visited a city where the head of every tenth person she met exploded, and they windmilled backward, staggering for balance. The other citizens of the city paid no attention to this and went on about their business with unconcern.

Then without warning the fixations stopped, and the killing became a cold routine. She killed with no more feeling for her victims than if they were soap bubbles that she clapped into extinction between her hands. She continued to pray for this soothing insentience. Félia continued to live, ignorant of her absent mother’s sins on her behalf, ignorant of the money that piled up in the accounts in her name in the Credit Suisse in Bern, in the Banca Svizzera Italiana in Zurich.

“For God’s sake,” Krupatin was hissing in a stage whisper, “what the fuck are you
doing?”

He was looking at her hands. She looked down and saw that she had pushed one of the tines of her fork through the thin weblike skin that separated the base of her forefinger and middle finger. Blood and syrup were running down the back of her hand.

“You stupid …” Krupatin was looking at her the way he might look at a new Mercedes whose engine had inexplicably
burned up. The failure was infuriatingly inconvenient for him. Her psychosis was enormously discommodious.

“Relax, Sergei,” she said with equanimity, withdrawing the fork from her hand and laying it down. Casually she wet her napkin in her water glass and wiped her hand, daubing at the wound to stanch the blood.

Krupatin gathered up his map and picked up the ticket. “Fucking crazy cow,” he muttered, and got up from the table and went to the cashier to pay.

They drove north in the midday heat, across the long stretch of coastal plains and ranchland to Kingsville, turning slightly eastward, roughly following the coastline that lay just out of sight beyond the hazy horizon to the east.

Krupatin never took his eyes off the highway. Irina followed the map closely and otherwise gazed out the window at the alien land. The large Mercedes, heavy and comfortable, lazed along the highway at the posted speed limit, a pace that seemed to make the landscape crawl by, stretching out the long afternoon interminably. Four hours later they stopped at a truck stop outside Victoria. They refueled the car, bought hamburgers to take with them, and pulled back onto the highway. They were still a hundred and thirty miles away from where they wanted to be.

The Houston skyline had been in front of them for over half an hour, sitting on the horizon like a mirage, growing imperceptibly, its size swelling without appearing to do so like the surreptitious movement of the minute hand on a clock. The highway traffic increased; suburbs rose out of the coastal plains in the distance all around them, far off at first, then creeping closer to the highway until they were moving through a solid outlying civilization, the subdivisions and businesses gradually thickening to become urban instead of suburban, and they were suddenly in the city, its architecture softening, turning slate blue in the paling light of the lowering sun.

They were on an expressway, and Irina noticed Krupatin watching for an exit, something suitable for his purposes, which he had yet to share with her. Finally he switched lanes and entered the down ramp of an exit onto an access road. The tall, unlighted neon sign of a restaurant loomed ahead of
them, and Krupatin pulled off the access road and into the parking lot.

Turning off the ignition, he reached over the back of the seat and picked up one of the briefcases. He flipped it open and put it on the seat between them. The roar of the traffic above them throbbed like Irina’s own heartbeat.

“Okay, now you will need to use your Olya Serova documents,” Krupatin said, “They’ve been put in your largest suitcase, along with the address book that was brought to you. The address book is important.”

He reached inside the briefcase and took out several strapped bundles of cash.

“Five thousand dollars.” He handed the money to her. “Do you remember Valentin Stepanov?”

“Of course.”

“He will be staying at the Chateau Touraine also, and so will Grigori Izvarin, who will be registered as Anton Nakhimov, and Valery Volkov, who will be registered as Rudolf Bykov. Nakhimov will be holding a suite for you in his name. You will get a taxi from here.”

“Then they are expecting me?”

“Izvarin and Volkov know that one other person is coming. They don’t know it is you. Stepanov knows that two of my people will meet him there, but he doesn’t know who.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll be staying somewhere else. None of you will be able to reach me, none of you will know where I am. This has to be the situation in order for Wei and Bontate to be convinced of my intentions. You have to be the actual conduit.”

“And Stepanov?”

“He will have a job to do too,” Krupatin said, slamming down the lid on the briefcase and snapping the latches shut. “There’s really nothing for you to worry about for a while. At the proper time I will let you know our means of communication.”

“Where will I be meeting Wei and Bontate?”

“I don’t know. They will make their own arrangements. They know where you will be staying. That was all worked out ahead of time. They will contact you.”

“After I arrive at the hotel, do I contact Grigori and Valery, or do I wait to hear from them?”

“You should contact them,” he said. “You will tell them
that I intend to remain out of the picture here, that I will communicate with them through you.”

“Grigori is not going to like that.”

“Just tell him. Tell them they may have to wait several days before I will have any instructions for them.”

“Do they know about Wei and Bontate?”

“No.”

“Then what do they think they are doing here?”

“I just told them to be here and that they would receive instructions when they arrived.”

He reached into his suit pocket, pulled out a checkbook, and gave it to her.

“This is on a London account. It’s unlimited, and the authorization can easily be checked by any store. When you buy new clothes, choose well. I want you to be very smart, very fashionable.” He took the keys out of the ignition. “I’ll carry your bags to the restaurant.”