Requiem For a Glass Heart (36 page)

O
F COURSE IT WAS NO TROUBLE AT ALL TO MOVE HER THINGS OUT
of Stepanov’s suite. Irina quickly slipped on a dress and the two women went downstairs, gathered Cate’s toiletries and clothes, and took them up by the stairwell in order to encounter as few people as possible. When they got back to Irina’s suite, the long summer day was ending and the evening light was turning sapphire through the French windows in the bedroom, where they put Cate’s clothes away. Her department store fare looked colorless alongside Irina’s French and Italian labels.

“Would you care for another drink?” Irina asked as they were closing the closet door.

“Sure,” Cate said. “That would be nice.”

“Okay, good. Why don’t you wait here, then? I will get it for us.”

Cate went to the French windows and looked out at the city lights emerging from the falling dusk. She had never felt so unstable in her life, as though absolutely anything could happen, as though the only things that
could
happen would be unexpected things. From this moment on, everything was going to be a surprise. With her eyes wide open, she had walked straight into the darkness.

She heard Irina come into the bedroom behind her but
continued looking at the nightscape, taking one moment more to enjoy a view of the city that was real and beautiful. It was not a mirage or a hallucination. It was simply the city at dusk.

When she turned around, Irina was standing beside her bed, slipping out of the simple shift she had put on to go downstairs. She was completely naked except for a locket on a chain around her neck, and Cate was struck anew by her extraordinary physical beauty. Her body was flawless.

“I have to change clothes,” she said, tossing the dress on the bed. Then, without making a sound, she formed a shushing gesture with her lips and opened her hands palms outward to Cate, cautioning her to be quiet.

Cate frowned, and a warm dread swept through her. It must have shown on her face, for Irina quickly made a pacifying gesture and approached her.

Reaching out, she put her fingers on the buttons of Cate’s blouse and began undoing them, her face close enough to Cate’s for Cate to see the fine downy hairs on the side of her jaw below her ears. Cate started to protest, but Irina gestured quickly again, raising one hand, stopping her, her eyes saying it was all right, placating, calming.

Cate was genuinely confused. What in the hell was she supposed to do about this? In fact, what was this? Irina’s green eyes looked into Cate’s as she opened the unbuttoned blouse and leaned in so that their cheeks actually brushed, and Cate could smell the soft fragrance of sachet as Irina slipped the blouse off her shoulders.

Tossing the blouse on the bed, Irina moved her hands to the waistband of Cate’s skirt and undid the buttons there, still with her eyes fixed on Cate’s. The material fell to the floor. They were very close. Cate hesitated and then stepped out of the skirt. She could feel a curious humming begin in her body as she stood breast to breast with this beautiful woman, still unsure of where the next moment would take them.

Irina reached up and put her long fingers into the center of Cate’s bra and found the hook. She undid it and slowly pulled the material away from Cate’s breasts, the backs of her ringers tracing across the surface of Gate’s skin.

Cate was petrified. She was. But she was also finding the encounter unmistakably erotic. Her senses were alert to every slight brush of flesh on flesh, aware even of Irina’s breath on her nipples as Irina drew the bra straps off her shoulders.

Then Irina stepped back. Holding Cate with her eyes, she began feeling along the seams of Cate’s bra, tracing the seams of the cups, then the straps, feeling the snap in the center. Satisfied, she dropped the bra on the floor, bent her knees slightly, and picked up Cate’s skirt. Again she began going over the seams, drawing the hem through her fingers and then doing the same to the waistband.

It was only when she dropped the skirt too and picked up the blouse that Cate realized what was happening. Irina was searching for a wire. The thought jump-started her heart and almost caused her to stagger. As she stood there naked except for her panties, the implants in her arms seemed to swell to manifest dimensions. Feeling that she had to speak or she would faint, she managed to find her response in Catherine’s personality.

“What … what are you doing? What is this?”

“I apologize,” Irina said, dropping the blouse also. “But I have known these people a long time. I have learned to distrust everyone. Suspicion is second nature to me. I hope you understand that. You must not think of it as a personal insult.”

Would Catherine take it personally? Would Catherine know
what
she shouldn’t take personally?

“I don’t think I understand what’s going on here,” Cate said. “What are you doing, feeling my clothes?”

“I have discovered, Catherine, that sometimes people put electronic devices in their clothes. Listening devices.” Her eyes didn’t move from Cate’s.

“Oh,” Cate said. “I see.”

“And there is one other thing,” Irina said. “I will explain first. In Russia, in Eastern Europe, and I suppose everywhere, there are all the time assassinations among those in the crime world. Some of these assassins can be very clever. Some are women. Women have been known to hide many things—cyanide capsules, razors, piano wires …”

As she said this, she put her hands on Cate’s hips and slid her fingers into the sides of her panties. Pushing her hands downward over Cate’s hips, she crouched slowly and peeled the panties down her thighs, pausing at the appearance of the poppy tattoo, then continuing down to Cate’s ankles. As she rose to stand, she paused again at the red flower, put her finger on it, felt it. Then she stood.

“Will you turn around, please?”

Cate obliged, haltingly, and turned to the French windows and the dusk, which was deepening from purple to black. She felt Irina’s body press up against her backside as the woman reached around in front of her with her right arm, her hand skirting downward over the flat of Cate’s stomach and between her legs.

The complex of emotions Cate felt was impossible to unravel: panic because Irina’s arm was inches away from the implants, excitement at the sensation of Irina’s breath on her neck, confusion at the erogenous sensations of Irina’s fingers inside her, and finally, fear at the sudden realization that this woman was more dangerous than she had been led to believe. Again a wash of warmth spread over her, and she felt perspiration pop to the surface of her flesh. For a moment she thought her legs were going to fail her, and indeed she must have bobbled, because immediately she felt Irina’s left arm encircle her waist and hold her firmly until she finished with her right hand.

When Irina moved away, Cate immediately felt the coolness on her damp skin where their two bodies had been together for those few brief moments. She didn’t turn around; she didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t sure what she had done. If anything. The intense combination of unexpected eroticism and sudden fear had actually weakened her, and when Irina spoke, the sound of her voice had the effect of startling Cate to her senses, almost as if she had been snapped out of a trance.

“Catherine,” Irina said, “I am sorry if that embarrassed you. Are you all right?”

Cate nodded.

“I am sorry, but it was necessary for me to know for sure.”

Cate nodded again—she couldn’t speak—and turned around. Irina was standing at the side of the bed, still naked, holding both glasses. She handed Cate her drink, the ice in the glass rattling softly. They had not turned on the lights, so the room was suffused with a deepening cobalt blue coming from the large windows. Cate was grateful for the failing light. It obscured her bare arms, where she feared Irina would detect the telltale ripples of the implants, and it obscured her face, where she was sure her confusion was clearly written. Somehow
even though she had told herself over and over that she was Catherine, not Cate, she had not been able to protect herself from the surprise of her own reactions to what had just happened.

She was relieved to have the drink Irina had given her and eagerly swallowed several large mouthfuls of gin and tonic.

Aside from her pummeled emotions, there was another disconcerting result of what had just happened. Regardless of what Ometov had told her about Irina, it was now clear to Cate that she was dealing with a woman who was far more sinister than Ometov had led her to believe. Either Ometov had been naive about her—which Cate found difficult to believe-—or he had withheld information. This woman was intimately familiar with the Russian
mafiya’s
darker side. The strip search had been chillingly thorough, but the more sobering aspect of it was that Irina had felt it necessary to search Cate not only for a wire but also for a possible assassination weapon. Did she fear assassination, then? From whom? Certainly not from Krupatin. She was supposedly on an errand for him. Then from whom? And how long had she had to live with this particular suspicion? And why?

Cate took another drink of gin and tried to calm herself. She tried to put everything into a proper perspective. She tried to maintain her emotional equilibrium. Most of all, she tried to tell herself to be analytical. She had to remember to play the role of someone emotionally rattled while maintaining a calm, critical inner balance. This was the beginning of the “stretch,” the challenge that she knew had been lying in wait for her.

Irina pushed her clothes off onto the floor and crawled onto the bed, reclining on her side on the damask cover, facing the French windows. Her long limbs were hazily visible in the dim light. Her voice was low, and her accent seemed, in an odd way, soothing to Cate.

“Come on, Catherine, get on the bed,” Irina said. “I want to talk to you. There is much you need to understand before we can do what we have to do.”

T
HEY LAY ON THEIR STOMACHS, PROPPED ON THEIR ELBOWS
, holding their drinks, and looked out the French doors at the last hour of evening. The room was lighted only by the pale castoff light of the city, which, visible through the ornate iron railings of the balcony, seemed in a far other country. Irina’s husky accented voice completed the sense that Cate had been transported out of place, out of time, to an elsewhere she had never imagined.

In a matter-of-fact voice, Irina began telling Cate how she came to be where she was. Her story was essentially the same story that Leo Ometov had told Cate and the others only a few days before. Had it been only a few days? But Irina’s version was full of details, memories of a college student, of a young woman flattered by the sophisticated attentions of an older man, of a promising career in a prestigious profession, of a love turned to obsession, of hopes soured, of dreams denied, of a life spiraling out of control.

Sometimes Irina would pause to remember; sometimes she would pause to take a drink and press the cold glass to her temple. At one point her long bare leg drifted over to Cate’s and her foot absently rubbed the side of Cate’s foot, a gesture that seemed to reflect a desire not to be alone with her memories.

Then suddenly Irina’s story took a turn that caused the hair to prickle on Cate’s arms. Actually, it wasn’t a turn away from Ometov’s account, it was rather a refraction of it.

“So, after two years of running,” she said, “of being free of Sergei and recovering my self-respect, I was once again dragged back into his life. But now everything was different. Sergei loved me still, but he also hated me. This is not a contradiction but a paradox. A person can feel both emotions toward another. I know this. Sergei could not tolerate what I had done. It was not the money I had stolen. No, that was so little money to him. It was the fact that I wanted so badly to be away from him. He could not bear to think that I found him revolting.”

She reached down and put her empty glass on the floor beside the bed and hung her head, letting her long buttery hair stream down over her head, almost touching the floor. She stayed that way, rocking her head from side to side, her hair swaying, stretching the tendons in her neck, which must have begun to ache. Then she slung her head up and back, swinging her hair out of her face. She looked at Cate.

“Then he made sure I never again would leave him,” she said. She reached over and took one of Cate’s hands and brought it to the locket that dangled around her neck.

“Hold this,” she said, wrapping Cate’s fingers around the oval locket. “It is too dark for you to see the picture I carry here, but I think you can feel the innocence of the face inside, the face of my daughter, Félia.”

She was quiet a moment, holding Cate’s hand, which held her daughter. Then she released her grip, and Cate did too, and the locket swung from Irina’s neck, throwing off a pale glint in the blue light.

“He took my baby,” Irina said, “my little Félia, and gave her to a family I did not know. She would be safe, he said, as long as I did what he wanted.”

She stared out at the city, at the lost light of night.

“I cannot tell you how this happened,” she continued. “I mean, of course, I could, I remember it as vividly as I remember—” She caught herself. “But I cannot say the words to describe it. It would kill me. I can only think these words. I cannot say them. Even thinking them causes me to die a little every time. I die every day. Every day.”

Cate turned her head slightly to see Irina’s pale profile in the soft light. Her cheeks glistened. But she went on.

“Sergei’s behavior toward me was schizophrenic. One moment he wanted me above all else, the next he could not bear to have me around him. And even when he wanted me— and he always wanted me in a sexual way—he was cruel. But through all this, one thing remained the same: he trusted me. Because of Félia. He knew I would do whatever I was told to do because I would never jeopardize her.

“So I became a messenger for him, a courier. There were many, many times when he needed someone to travel for him, to deliver this or that, to receive something, to confirm that something was true. I became his black angel, messenger to all the other devils in his empire. For a while I traveled constantly, and I got to know many of his lieutenants. I kept my mouth shut. I did what I was told. But I kept my eyes open, too. I learned where all the skeletons were hidden. I learned everything about his organization—-who was discontented, who was happy, who was on the way up, who was on the way out. Sergei ran his empire like Caligula. He could cause someone to die simply by frowning.” She sighed. “And that is still what I am doing now.”

She stopped and rolled over on her side, propped her head on her hand, elbow on the bed, and looked at Cate.

“But that is not all I am doing,” she said, pausing, regarding Cate a moment. Then she went on.

“A little more than a year ago I was in the Caffè Florian in Venice. Have you ever been to Venice? No? Such a beautiful city. So beautiful. Anyway, I remember this morning perfectly, the way one does with hopeful moments that later turn into great disappointments. I had one of the small alcoves all to myself—
il cinese.
It was the off-season, cold and wet outside, with a heavy mist drifting across St. Mark’s Square. I was half dreaming, lingering over a cup of espresso near a window, watching people here and there lean into the mist as they hurried across the square.

“A man came down the corridor and stopped. I was aware of him but paid no attention. “‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘May I join you?’ This was Leonid Ometov, a very high official in Russia’s Ministry of the Interior. Years ago he was a dear friend of my parents’, before they died, which happened a few years before this took place. At the time we knew him
he was in Soviet military intelligence, but I had not seen him in years, and it took me a moment to recognize him. In fact, he had to introduce himself.”

Ometov! Gate felt a momentary disequilibrium. For an instant she imagined what must be going on in the off-site. The silence. The stunned silence. Suddenly the options were wide open again. It was possible, just possible, that everything had changed. Uncertainty became an ever larger part of the mix. She swallowed, and clung to every word as Irina continued.

“Of course he could join me, I said. I was delighted to see him, but secretly I was-mortified. First, it is difficult for Russians to relax around anyone who is in any form of intelligence work, whether it is in the Soviet Union or in the present Republic of Russia. We suffered too much from these people in the past fifty years. But more important, I guessed immediately what he was doing there. It was no coincidence. Russians do not believe in coincidence. I knew this meeting was the culmination of a long, intricate intelligence operation. For him to be able to walk casually into the Florian and sit down with me like this meant that his agents were all over the place, in the square, in the cafe … I knew Ometov was surrounded by an invisible circle of agents who made sure it was safe for him. And I knew that they knew that I was alone, and that my business for this trip already was behind me. I was taking a day of relaxation just for myself.”

Irina paused, remembering. Now and again Cate could see the moist glint of her eye reflected in the oblique light from the French doors.

“To give him credit,” Irina went on, “he read all of this passing over my face in that first moment and did not insult me by trying to pretend he did not have business with me. We chatted for a moment, waiting for his coffee to arrive, and when it did and the waiter left, he did not toy with me.

“He said he knew what I had been doing for the last two years. His people had got onto me about that long ago, and by now they had a detailed dossier on me. The proposition was very simple. They wanted me to inform on Sergei. They wanted a long-term relationship so they could create a detailed picture of his organization, of his international contacts, of his plans for the future. They knew I was his main
communications conduit and wanted everything that passed through me. They wanted to know everything I knew.

“If I agreed to cooperate, he said, after six months they would rescue my daughter, give her back to me, and provide me with a new identity, and I could disappear. I could go where I wished.

“I was ecstatic. Frightened, to be sure, but here was hope, real hope, from an unexpected source. Ometov told me that I would have the rest of the day to think it over. If I wished to go ahead with it, I should call a certain number. He would then meet me that night at the hotel where I was staying, and we would talk about the details.

“That evening I called the number as directed, and he appeared at my hotel as promised. We talked about how this operation could work. We went over all the possibilities. By this time I already had developed considerable undercover skills on my own, and it was their awareness of this that encouraged his people to believe that I might actually be able to operate successfully as a double agent.”

Irina sighed hugely and rolled onto her back, one foot on the bed, knee in the air, her hands resting on the flat of her stomach. She stared up into the darkness of the high ceiling.

“Before he left that night, of course, he began to intimate other interests. His hand found a delicate position on my leg, here, and an innocuous touch became a caress. I had nothing to gain by denying him. I let him have what he wanted. It was nothing to me. I was full of hope. What was his greedy appetite compared to what I had to gain?”

She paused, her eyes wide open, looking up into a space without light where there was nothing to see.

“Even then,” she said, “with all I had been through, I was capable of hoping. I should have known. I should have been more cynical. As I looked back on it later, I realized that it must have been Félia. A child does that to you. Even when the dark is blackest, when it is the most impenetrable and hopeless, a child can make you imagine a glimmer of light.”

A pall fell over Cate in the silence that followed. Good God. How much of this was she supposed to believe? Why would Irina lie about any of this? If, as they all were wanting to believe, she had in fact gained Irina’s confidence, why would Irina lie to her at all? Rather, why would she lie to Catherine?

If she was telling the truth, why had Ometov withheld this information from the FBI? Or had he? Maybe they had simply withheld it from her? If they had, why would they? And could Cate believe what Irina said about Ometov, that he had taken sexual advantage of her? Cate could not reconcile this portrayal with the kind, if shrewd, man she had gotten to know in the past few days. There was truth here, to be sure, but could it all be true? What could she believe? What
should
she believe, and what should she reject?

Cate put her own glass on the floor also and turned on her side to face Irina. She looked at Irina’s handsome profile once more, at the line of her long, fine body. To possess such beauty and not be destroyed by it, a woman had to be wiser than a philosopher. Irina was intelligent, without a doubt, but she had not always been wise. Wisdom, Cate guessed, was a very rare thing anyway, and most of mankind, including herself, probably would not recognize it in another person if they saw it. But intelligence was recognizable, and Irina was intelligent. Unfortunately, it had not saved her from the serpents attracted to the accident of her loveliness.

“What happened?” Cate asked. Her own voice sounded oddly out of place in the context of this space and this story, which belonged so entirely to Irina. “You didn’t get your daughter, but you said that you were still working for this man, this Krupatin. And you’re still a double agent?”

“A triple agent, a quadruple agent—I don’t know anymore,” Irina said dismissively. She turned her head and looked at Cate. “After six months Ometov said, oh, it is impossible to stop at this point. You will have to work with us a little longer. We are at a crucial point in understanding Krupatin’s German operations, just a little longer. Later he would say, you are too valuable to us. We are too close to understanding important facts about the Asian connection to stop now. Later, when I was desperate, near a nervous breakdown from worrying about my daughter and the pressures of my new responsibilities, he told me they had tried to locate her but Krupatin had moved her. They had begun an intensive search to find her. They were doing their best. They wanted very much to help me.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing.” Irina turned her face toward the ceiling and the darkness again. “I now believe he never intended to rescue
Félia. Of necessity, as you can imagine, our meetings always have been very secret. He tells me the information he wants regarding Krupatin. He makes more promises to me. Spins more lies. Then, of course, he wants between my legs. I have never refused him. There is too much at stake. I think only of Félia. Always.”

“Didn’t Krupatin ever allow you to see her?”

“Yes. About every four or five months he allows me to see her.” Irina stopped. “The last time, oh, it was so sad.” Her voice grew hoarse. “The child, I think, is beginning to forget who I am. I am like, I think, a vague friend, someone whose face and smell comes into her little life so seldom that she finds it difficult to remember me from one time to the other. I tell her stories about when we were together, before Sergei found us, of what it was like for us. She was too young then actually to remember, I know, but if she remembers me at all, it will be from these stories, which perhaps she will remember like fairy tales. The last time I talked to her, I looked into her eyes very deeply, saying to her never to forget me, to remember my eyes, my mouth, the sound of my voice, my smell. But I think she was puzzled by my passionate manner. Maybe I even frightened her a little.” She paused. “It breaks my heart.”