Requiem For a Glass Heart (26 page)

“Unless he doesn’t want us to talk to her.”

“How can that be?” Izvarin’s tone was shrill. The fact was—and Volkov knew this—Izvarin was almost beside himself precisely because he didn’t know what was going on. He was an inside man, very close to Krupatin, and he was not used to being treated once again like a common hireling who simply did what he was told. Long ago he had left behind that way of life, and he was frantic to know why he seemed to be in that position once again. It was as if a general had been bumped back to the level of an enlisted man. For Izvarin it was humiliating, a bad dream.

“Wait a little while and see what happens next,” Volkov cautioned. “Play Sergei’s game with a little patience. Look at Stepanov. I imagine he’s just as much in the dark as we are. It’s clear he doesn’t have a clue. Whatever’s happening, it’s got to happen this way or Sergei wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Stepanov,” Izvarin said with a surly evenness.

“Look. We are here. We have our positions. We know where we stand. All of us are lieutenants. Don’t get your nose
twisted out of shape just because you can’t read Sergei’s mind. None of us can. So relax.”

If Izvarin did not exactly relax, at least he had calmed to a smoldering silence by the time they drove back through the Touraine’s front gates and pulled into the aureate light of the porte cochere.

S
TEPANOV CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND
N
AKHIMOV AND
B
YKOV
, turned toward Cate, put a vertical forefinger up to his lips, and pointed to the bedroom.

“Listen,” he said, “why don’t you go ahead and shower? Then we’ll get a drink or something.”

He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, then returned to the bedroom and pulled the door closed behind him. Even though he was aware that the room was to be swept regularly by Jernigan’s tech team, he stood close to Cate’s face and talked in a hoarse whisper.

“What the hell was that telephone call?” he rasped.

“It was Ann—”

“Are they crazy? Are they fucking crazy!”

“Look,” Cate said, stepping back from him, “there’s no need for this stage-whispering. That was important. She wanted you to know that a woman had checked into the extra suite.”

“A woman?” Stepanov narrowed his eyes, puzzled.

“She registered as Olya Serova, but they’ve identified her as Irina Ismaylova.”

Stepanov’s eyes changed, pulled taut, then flattened, but his face did not change. “Incredible,” he said, letting his eyes
drift aside as he considered this. Then he cut them back at her. “You know about this woman?”

“Ometov’s briefed me.”

“Okay. This is very strange indeed.” He turned his head aside and wiped his face with the arm of the bathrobe. “You know what? I don’t think Krupatin is going to show up here at all.”

“Why?”

Stepanov’s eyes moved away again, as though he couldn’t look at her while he was thinking. Close to him like this, she noticed tiny pockmarks in the deep creases on either side of his unattractive mouth.

“I was very surprised,” he said, “that Izvarin apparently is as much in the dark as I am about Krupatin’s plans here. I’m sure he didn’t know about Ismaylova.” He turned and walked to a dresser, picked up a pack of cigarettes, and lighted one. “This is very goosey, what is happening here. I don’t know about this.”

“Leo wants to know if you know Bykov. Do you know anything about him?”

Stepanov nodded and held a huge inhalation of smoke inside his chest. He let it out slowly.

“Valery Volkov.” He wiped his face again. The moisture was indeed perspiration. “Another former KGB. He was a sabotage expert in Afghanistan. Years ago Sergei put him to work organizing the drug routes out of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. He was also responsible for feeding money to the radical Islamic groups in Pakistan who raised hell in different places around the world whenever Krupatin created a bloodbath to eliminate rivals and wanted it covered by some terrorist story. These people could be manipulated, and Volkov was very good at it. So he’s spent most of his time in Krupatin’s eastern business. That’s probably why Leo hasn’t come across him.”

Stepanov shook his head and began walking around the room. “Whatever Sergei is up to, he has brought together a strange crew to accomplish it.”

“Do you think they’re on to you?” Cate didn’t know whether this was a stupid question or not, but she wanted to know what he thought.

He shook his head some more. “I won’t know that until I
talk to Sergei. If he had his doubts about me, he wouldn’t tell these guys.”

“Leo told me that Irina Ismaylova had dropped out of sight,” Cate said.

“She might have dropped out of Leo’s sight, but not Sergei’s,” Stepanov said. “Not for long, anyway. When she disappeared to take the drug cure in Zurich, she was able to hide from him for nearly two years. But then he found her.”

He paced back and forth in front of the glass doors to the courtyard, looking like a figure in a museum diorama.

“And she had a baby?”

“Yeah, a baby.”

“Krupatin’s?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged; the baby didn’t interest him. “Then she really disappeared.” “What do you mean?”

“Sergei took the baby and sent it away to live with some people, and Irina just vanished. I don’t know what happened to her. I knew she wasn’t dead. People saw her, but just here and there, now and again. Nobody knew anything, and nobody was asking questions. She became another one of Sergei’s mysteries.” He pulled on his cigarette. “Shit, Sergei has a hell of a lot of mysteries.”

Cate watched Stepanov fall silent, his cigarette burning down in his hand as he stared at the floor in front of him, his body, if not his mind, momentarily stalled.

“I take it this isn’t developing as you had imagined, is it?” Cate asked.

“Oh,” Stepanov said, looking up from his preoccupation, “it’s not that. You never know how it’s going to develop with Sergei when he decides to do one of these magic operations. It’s one of his favorite techniques, and if you are around him long enough, you are not so shaken by it.” He paused and smoked, one hand jammed into the huge pocket of his robe. “Unless, of course, you start to imagine that you are not part of the plan but instead you are the object of the plan.”

He gave her another one of his grim smiles. The hand holding the cigarette rose up and he tapped himself on the chest. “And that is where I am, Catherine, wondering if I am going to be terribly surprised here.”

Cate looked at him a moment, watched him return to a deep pondering posture, holding his cigarette next to his chest
as he forgot about her. She tried to put herself in Hain’s position. What would Hain want to know right now? What questions could she ask Stepanov that they hadn’t already asked him? What questions might he be inclined to answer if she asked him, rather than Hain and Loder? What questions might he answer now, as a result of the developments of the last two hours, that he might not have answered before? Suddenly her responsibility to draw out information seemed daunting.

“Valentin,” she said, doing her best to sound like a woman rather than an agent, trying to make use of the attributes that had caused her to be chosen in the first place, “I’m going to go ahead and shower.”

He nodded, but didn’t really come out of his abstraction. Cate walked to the closet where they both had hung their clothes and began to undress. She had no idea how difficult this moment was going to be. She couldn’t even imagine it. But as she unbuttoned her blouse with her back to him, she found it to be the easiest thing in the world. It was nothing. Probably because she knew that nothing was going to result from it, and probably because the other events were so momentous that they overrode the timidity of taking off her clothes. It was pretty sobering to be in the same room with a man whom everyone clearly thought would be dead in the near future. It was not something that added an element of titillation to the situation.

But she knew that Stepanov was more used to close-range danger than she was, and she knew that it had never been a retardant to his sexual drive. She could only hope that seeing her with few or no clothes would put him in a different frame of mind. Maybe when she got out of the shower she could make a drink and they could talk. Erika had said she should try to relax with Stepanov, not be so defensive. She realized that she was going to have to be more accessible to him if she was going to get him to spill what he was thinking.

She took off her blouse and hung it on a hanger, unbuttoned the waistband of her skirt and let it fall to the floor, then hung up the skirt. Then she removed her slip and began peeling off her pantyhose. Standing with her back to him, in only her panties and bra, she took a robe off the hanger on her side of the closet and walked into the bathroom and closed the door—but only halfway. She removed her underclothes,
dropped them on the floor, and got into the shower, which was still running from Stepanov’s having turned it on fifteen minutes earlier.

As she showered, she kept an eye on the half-open door, and sure enough, as predictable as a compass needle, Stepanov appeared in the open space, not right at the door but back a little way in the room. From there he watched her, and she watched him, catching glimpses of him as he stood with one hand in his robe pocket, the other rising and falling periodically as he continued to smoke. She did not try to hide anything from him, not even the fact that she had followed his instructions and shaved between her legs.

As she finished and came out of the shower, his image disappeared, and she dried off in privacy, wondering what he was thinking in the room alone. She dried her hair but did not put on more clothes. Instead she wrapped her robe around her and went into the bedroom. Stepanov was not there. She went to the bedroom door and found him in the living room, mixing a drink.

“What are you making?” she asked.

“Gin and tonic,” he said. “A lot of gin, a splash of tonic. Do you want something?”

“I’ll take some of that,” she said. “But—”

“Less gin, more tonic.”

“That’s right.”

She noticed that the room service cart was gone, but there was still the faint, lingering odor of food. She sat on the sofa, but when Stepanov turned around he tilted his head toward the bedroom.

“Come on,” he said and walked into the room.

Cate swallowed hard, got up from the sofa, and followed him. He closed the door behind her, handed her her drink, and then walked away and sat in one of the armchairs near the French doors that led out to the garden. She moved past him and sat in an opposite armchair. He looked at her, raised his glass in a toasting gesture. She did the same, and they both drank.

“How is that?” he asked.

“Perfect. Thanks.”

Stepanov’s hair, which had been slicked back with water from his shower, had dried, loosening its coifed grip so that it was falling loosely over his ears and forehead. He ran his
fingers through it self-consciously. She may have been looking at it.

“This is a hell of a situation,” he said. He wasn’t smiling this time. It was simply a statement of his predicament.

She shrugged. “I’m not really sure what kind of a situation it is. I feel pretty much in the dark.” She took a drink. “To tell you the truth, I’m feeling a little at loose ends. This … All of this seems, well, almost random, not very well planned. I didn’t know that so much of it would have to be played by ear.”

“You haven’t worked too much undercover,” he said. “I thought so.”

She looked at him. “How does that make you feel?”

“It scares the shit out of me.” Again he wasn’t smiling.

“Why didn’t you say something to Ann, or Ometov? There were other women.”

“No. The others would have been maybes. You are a sure thing.” He drank, not sipping but drinking, until he had consumed half the tall, thin glass. He looked at her, holding the last swallow in his mouth a moment before he finally let it go down.

“You’re talking about me being bait,” she said.

He nodded. “I just don’t know how you are going to react when the shark takes a bite.” He raised his head. “That’s what you would understand if you were more experienced. I really like this phrase, ‘to play it by ear.’ That’s the way it is. You know, you have this objective. In our case, to see how much of Krupatin’s onion we can peel away. And then you have to make a decision to go for it. Everything else in between has to be played by ear.”

He looked at her. He held his glass in one hand, and with the other hand he used his forefinger and thumb to stroke the glass downward, wiping away the sweat: a continuous gesture.

“Sometimes,” he said, “the people you are playing with are tone-deaf. But you don’t discover that until it’s too late. That’s when people die.”

Cate looked at him and sipped her drink. “Where do you think I’m most likely to make a mistake with him?”

He studied her. “You may be too smart for him to believe you. You may be too interested in him.”

“He’s good-looking.”

“You can notice him, let him notice you noticing him, but don’t move in his direction. Let him come to you. You can enjoy his attention. That’s a natural reaction, but I wouldn’t ask him any questions, no matter how innocent they may seem to you. What you say and what he hears will be two different things.”

“But you said earlier you didn’t think he was coming at all.”

He turned his head aside in impatience. “Look, I was thinking with my mouth open. A mistake. There’s no doubt he will be here—Izvarin and Volkov assure that. And Irina. Everything points to that.”

He took a mouthful of his gin and looked at her bare feet. She wasn’t sure he was seeing them; he was thinking, and his eyes had focused there perhaps without his being aware of it. She felt as if she were entirely naked.

“Let’s say,” Stepanov said, “just for argument, that Sergei has discovered my … new situation, and he wants to kill me. Then what? Replace me here with one of these other two? Izvarin? Volkov?” He shook his head. “Neither of them has any experience with the U.S. I do. That’s why I’m here.” He took another drink. “More likely he has suspicions about me, maybe. These two men are here to take a look. Izvarin would like to see me disappear anyway, so of course he will say, yes, yes, the bastard’s a traitor. As for Volkov, I don’t know. He doesn’t suck up like Izvarin. I don’t know about Volkov.”

He raised his glass and finished off the gin.

“And what about Irina?”