Requiem For a Glass Heart (31 page)

I
RINA LAY AWAKE, STARING ACROSS THE ROOM WHICH DISAPPEARED
through gray into darkness, waiting for the sleeping pills to take effect. Not much of the night was left, but even though she was physically exhausted, she was almost giddy with nerves, her skin atingle, her mind racing. Her thoughts were a moil of possibilities, creating what-ifs, abloom with omens and intimations.

For the past hour she had been going over and over the meeting at Wei’s house, his well-rehearsed recitation of planned cooperative projects, and her subsequent meeting with Carlo Bontate, who, though he had been as cautious as she had expected, had been immediately receptive to her proposal and had even made the surprising suggestion of enlisting the help of Valery Volkov. This was the wildest set of circumstances in which she had ever been involved. Krupatin, she knew, favored complicated operations involving numerous persons and schedules and contingencies; his people did not find fast-breaking changes unnerving, or if they did, at least they knew change was characteristic of his way of doing business. But she, having worked in self-imposed isolation for the past few years, found the situation appallingly uncertain.

Now, in addition to Krupatin’s signature complexity, she
had added her own conspiracy and created a maze within a maze within a labyrinth.

But of course it was not lost on her that the principals in this operational ordeal were well in the background. A lot of people were involved, it was true, but the only ones who weren’t seriously exposed were the three men deep behind the scenes. And that was at the heart of her sleeplessness. It made her nauseous to contemplate what she knew of similar occasions in other countries. True, the United States was different from other countries, but these men were the same wherever they were. In Munich, in Moscow, and once in Prague, a string of deaths had followed similar convocations. They were surgical deaths, deaths intended to eliminate cutouts, leaving no chance of a connection to the men at the top. She saw no reason to believe this time would be different. Especially since Krupatin was intending to end the lives of Wei and Bontate. Few intermediaries would survive this. If they didn’t die immediately in Houston, they would die in a week, in ten days, in another country.

She put a hand flat on her abdomen and tried to think of something other than these gaseous fears. She thought of the woman she had just met. Catherine. Irina had met many
mafiya
women, but this one was a bit of a surprise. Irina didn’t know whether to be suspicious of her or simply to accept her singularity as the attribute of cultural differences. All the other women had been Russian or at least European. Were Americans all that different? She would have thought that Russian men would seek out similar women everywhere, especially Stepanov, who was so aggressively licentious.

But this woman seemed actually to have a personality. She was even—she seemed to be—contemplative. Irina would describe her as vulnerable if she didn’t know that such a person would not be appreciated in Stepanov’s company. Their paths might cross, but they would never converge. Vulnerable women did not survive in Stepanov’s environment.

And yet—it was unmistakable—she did not appear to be a woman who was letting Stepanov between her legs merely for money and good times. She did not have the manner of a
mafiya
woman, self-occupied, opportunistic, intellectually shallow. So what was Stepanov doing with her?

It could be that this woman had not seen enough of him yet. She had said that she had been with him only a few times,
and tonight she seemed genuinely disappointed at his boorish drunkenness. Some women would have welcomed it so they could be done with him and turn on the television or entertain a younger man after he passed out. But this woman had been sitting there alone, in silence. Maybe she had been wondering what in the hell she was doing there.

Irina did not have the typical personality of the
mafiya
woman either, and she knew how Catherine must have felt because her own early days with Krupatin were still repulsively fresh in her memory. Perhaps such women were taken in because these men made it so easy to become profligate. No physical desire was too expensive or outrageous to be out of reach. Luxury was a daily companion, a moment-by-moment enticement that became a habit, just as much as the sex and drink and drugs became habits. You hated yourself, yet it was curiously difficult to break away from it all.

But Irina had been younger when she first caught Krupatin’s attention, a decade younger than this woman, and Krupatin was more handsome than Stepanov. Also, she had to admit, he was a charismatic figure, and could be as charming as a prince. Stepanov, however, was neither handsome nor charming. It didn’t make any sense at all that a woman of such obvious intelligence and beauty would freely choose to spend even one evening with such a man.

Unless she was desperate for money. Irina knew many women who had done far worse things than selling their sex because they were desperate for money. Or—unless she found herself in the same situation as Irina. It made no sense, unless she had no choice.

Now, coming into the verge of drugged sleep, this last idea seized her fading consciousness like a sudden spark and ignited her approaching dream. It was a torturous dream from the beginning, filled with treachery and betrayal and violence, a woman and a crying child. In the manner of dreams it was discordant and illogical and riddled with discontinuities, yet it possessed symbols and circumstances familiar to her from other fitful nights. The desperate woman tries to save the child from a myriad of minacious crises, but success is always just beyond her grasp. Though the child’s ruin is never confirmed before her eyes, the woman is aware that she has failed. The child is doomed.

Sometimes in these oneiric horrorscapes the woman bore
Irina’s own face, though she did not understand the woman to be herself, and the child was faceless. At other times the child’s face was that of her tiny daughter Félia, but the woman never quite turned her head enough for Irina to see who she was. But now, in this restless, medicated vision, Irina was startled to see that the woman was Catherine—her face stricken and anguished at being unable to save the child. The threat to the toddler was vague, a menacing darkness where death, or worse, waited for her and toward which she was being drawn. The child was so frightened that her crying was hysterical. She gasped for breath, her eyes wild with terror, her small body stretched tautly toward the woman with Catherine’s face.

S
HE COULDN’T HAVE SLEPT MORE THAN THREE HOURS BEFORE SHE
began to wake, coming to the surface in a steady glide, her dreams streaming past her face like spiderwebs. And even as she surfaced she knew that she was waking before she should, before the medicine had run its course. When she tried to open her eyes, her lids labored as though tiny weights were dangling from them, gray leaden baubles left behind by sleep’s creatures, who had scattered in fright.

Struggling against unconsciousness, she twisted and rolled to the side, and when she opened her eyes, she faced the windows and the pewter light of predawn. Exhausted, she stared at the slaty panes of the French doors. From the corner of her eye she caught a drifting movement. Flinching, she twisted and fell back and looked up at Krupatin staring at her from the foot of the bed.

“Oh … damn,” she said, her voice thick with sleep and the dregs of medication.

He moved around to the side of the bed, to the dark side away from the windows, and she felt the bed move as he leaned on it. Suddenly he flung back the covers. She lay there naked. But he didn’t touch her. Struggling to bring herself around, she rolled the other way again, away from him, and
managed to swing her feet off the bed and sit up on the edge, facing the wan light from the French doors.

“Where’s the CD?” he said from behind her.

She leaned sideways and reached across to the nightstand. Picking up the address book, she opened it. Earlier she had taken a razor blade and cut the leather along the inside seam. The thin slit made a perfect pocket for the CD, which fit snugly and securely. Lifting the leather lip slightly, she pulled out the CD and turned and tossed the shiny disk onto the bed.

Without speaking, Krupatin picked it up and sat down in a chair nearby. She could hear the clicking sounds as he put it into a player, put on the headphones. Then everything grew quiet as he listened.

She stared at the gray light. She didn’t know how he got into her suite, but she wasn’t surprised that he had managed to do so. Probably he had bribed someone on the staff. He did that everywhere. No matter how big his finances got, no matter how much of his time was taken up with accountants and bankers, he never forgot that the only reason the world still functioned at all was that there was always a working class. A king did not carry out his own chamber pot; he hired a menial to do it for him. The important thing about this mundane fact was that for
x
number of minutes every day, that menial had access to the most powerful figure in the kingdom, and often with uncommon freedom. Sergei understood the resentments of the menials who carried the world’s shit, and he adroitly took advantage of them. If they were willing to do him favors, he didn’t mind paying them as if they were kings themselves.

Irina didn’t move. Her body seemed to possess an elephant’s density. She stared at the waking sky, at the huge ashen clouds that she could just now see looming in the lifting darkness, massive clouds from the gulf, moving inland like great drifting mountains.

“Shit.”

She flinched again. Krupatin clicked off the player.

“That goddamn Chinese is an impertinent bastard,” he said from the darkness of the room behind her. “Ticking off his ‘proposals’ in his phony British accent. I can just see him sitting there, cool and prissy in his stupid clothes. Always dressed like he’s attending a perpetual dinner party. Christ!”

His voice moved. She guessed he was getting up out of the chair.

“And Bontate. Well, at least he’s a practical man. I guess he tolerated this pompous Chinese as a gesture of deference. But Carlo, he’s smart enough to know I would never go for these absurd arrangements. Did Wei really think I would concede to these things? Did they think the Colombians were going to go for this? He says their accountants told them this would be to their advantage. Of course! Imbecile!”

Krupatin moved to the foot of the bed again.

“What could he be thinking? I have a very profitable arrangement with the Mexicans and the Colombians already. Why would I want to give it all up for this Chinese pipe dream? Volkov is already running a fortune in the Pakistani heroin routes—that will someday rival the Latin business, maybe overtake it. Wei knows that. The fucker is greedy for it. He’s trying to get to me with this fairy-tale megashit of his.”

Krupatin was wound up. She guessed he had been awake all night. She wanted to stand but couldn’t bring her muscles to respond.

He came around the end of the bed to the side where she was sitting. He kicked a chair around with his foot and sat down by the French doors, looking at her in the pale light coming from behind his shoulder. She was slumping on the edge of the bed and felt ugly. He stared at her.

“Sleeping pills,” he said.

She nodded and ran her fingers into her hair, sweeping it hack out of her face.

“Let me wash my face,” she said. “If we’re going to talk, I might as well try to understand what you are saying.”

In the bathroom she ran cold water and splashed her face. She splashed her chest and under her arms and her stomach. She washed out her mouth and brushed her teeth. After drying off, she ran a brush through her hair and took one of the chateau’s robes off a hook on the wall and wrapped it around her. Then she went back into the bedroom, where Krupatin was still sitting in the chair by the French doors. He was smoking. She came around and got onto the bed, moved the pillows out of her way, and sat upright against the headboard.

“So how is it going so far?” he asked.

“Okay. So far.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that so far everything is okay.”

Krupatin smoked. Tolerant, for the moment.

“Do you think you can do this?” he asked.

“I can do it. How do you
want
me to do it?”

He tilted his head at the nightstand.

“I saw how you used the address book for the CD,” he said. “Very clever.” He nodded. “Actually, I have used it for my purposes also. Pick it up.”

Puzzled, Irina reached again for the book on the night-stand.

“It is a very expensive address book,” he said, relishing this fact. “You will see that it has a small brass rod that forms a rigid spine. Though it is wrapped in leather, the rod has been left revealed at top and bottom, a decorative touch. And a practical touch. The top of the rod is threaded, manufactured with the precision of a surgical instrument. German. Turn on the lamp.”

Irina switched on the lamp. A warm glow flooded the stand, washed over the covers of the bed, and burnished Krupatin’s face. She saw the heavy swags of flesh under his eyes. He had indeed lost a lot of sleep.

He stood and stepped over to the bed and took the address book from her. Bending over the nightstand, he carefully unscrewed the top end of the brass rod and tilted it down in front of the digital clock. Four small, elliptical, honey-colored capsules spilled out onto the wood and rolled about in wobbly circles. With his forefinger Krupatin touched one of them, demonstrating its soft, slightly sticky texture. He touched another and watched it wobble.

Then he picked them up with the tips of his fingers, returned them one at a time to the tube, and screwed the brass cap back in place. He turned out the lamp, tossed the address book in her lap, and returned to his chair. Sitting down again, he lighted another cigarette.

“Those four capsules,” he said, “contain powerful bacteria in gel form. The gel is not water-soluble. It dissolves only when it comes in contact with certain gastric fluids. It has to be swallowed. Symptoms do not appear for three days. They are irreversible. Death usually occurs within five days.”

Irina stared at Krupatin’s face in the gray light. Bacteria. She had heard rumors of his efforts to buy from the Soviet Union’s chemical and germ warfare stockpiles. But those rumors circulated everywhere about everyone. She should not have discounted them.

“Therefore,” he went on, “you have in your possession the solution to problem number one, how to kill Wei-—he is going to be first—and not be put at immediate risk. With these,” he said, nodding at the address book, “you can kill him, and he himself will not even know he’s dead.”

So Krupatin had indeed come up with a method of assassination that would enable her to be safely away from the man before there could be any possible suspicion that anything had happened. The only difficult part would be the cunning required to administer it.

Now Irina was truly puzzled. She had assumed that Sergei was sending her on a suicide mission, that he intended for her to be killed in the process of assassinating her targets. It seemed now that she might have been wrong. There was still risk, to be sure, but there always had been. Also, there was still Carlo Bontate. Had Krupatin planned for her to die while she was taking care of him? How could he have planned that?

“That’s very clever,” she conceded. “What about Carlo Bontate?”

Krupatin sucked on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the still air, where it whorled and loitered above them. The room was growing lighter by the moment, though it changed with such subtlety it was hardly discernible.

“All in good time,” he said. “Tell me, is Wei still in rut for you?”

“He has asked me to come to his place tonight.”

“Oh.” Krupatin grinned, his teeth showing in the gray gloom. “The greedy slope. I hope he has a good appetite. Don’t let him hump you. I would like to know that he
didn’t
get what was coming to him before he died.”

He laughed, and his laughter sounded dry in the pearly light of dawn.

“And what about Carlo? How did he seem when you met him last night?”

Irina tensed. Did Krupatin know about the second meeting? Was he testing her?

“The same way he seemed when I saw him in Marineo,” she said. “Quiet. Skeptical. Like a man who knows so much more than he is saying.”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Krupatin scoffed. “Have you spoken to Izvarin and Volkov?”

“No. There hasn’t been time.”

“Do it this morning.”

She paused. “Sergei, I don’t like all these people here. Those two, Stepanov. I have never had to do my work with others around. What are you doing?”

“Are you nervous?”

“Very.”

“Have you talked to Stepanov?”

“I tried to,” she said. She told him about going to Stepanov’s suite, finding him asleep. She told him about talking to the woman.

“He brought this woman with him?” Krupatin asked.

“No. She lives here.”

“Well, that’s no surprise, is it?”

She looked at him. “So he has been coming here on business?”

Krupatin nodded. “We are trying to expand beyond the Northeast. Nothing big right now, but it’s promising.”

“Then there are others here as well?”

“We have people here, yes. Valentin comes down here from New York to work with them.”

This was chilling information. Her own assassin could come from anywhere, not just from these few men she knew but from faces she would never recognize.

“You want me to talk to Izvarin and Volkov,” she said. “What am I supposed to say to them? I don’t know why they are here.”

“They
don’t know why they are here.” Krupatin smirked. “Tell them I will be in touch with them soon.”

“And Stepanov?”

“The same.”

Irina didn’t know why, but Krupatin was clearly stalling. Nothing could be done about it. It was his game, his rules. But she definitely did not like being the pivotal element in his deadly charade, the point around which the plot turned, and the only onstage character to whom all the actors looked for their cues.

“And what kind of response do I give Wei and Bontate?”

“You have my response to Wei,” he said, gesturing with his cigarette to the address book.

“I have to tell them something.”

“If they press you, tell them I am working on a response. Otherwise, don’t tell them anything.”

She said nothing for a moment, and Krupatin simply stared at her, smoking.

“And you are just going to show up in my suite like this?” she asked.

“Something like this.” He ground out his cigarette. “Keep the address book with you at all times. Under the K’s there is a name, Walter Kralik. If you have to get in touch with me, use that number, leaving off the country and city codes and reversing the first three digits. Call me. Leave a number and a time you want me to call it.”

“Walter Kralik.”

“Yes.”

“Otherwise, you want me to go ahead tonight”—she held up the address book—“with this?”

“Absolutely.” He ground out his cigarette. “I have to go. It’s getting light.”