Requiem For a Glass Heart (37 page)

Cate could think of nothing to say to this. She lay very still and watched the tears trailing down the side of Irina’s face and running into her hair. Though her expression did not change from its passive beauty, the tears ran in frightening abundance.

Cate reached out and put her hand on Irina’s arm. She felt the other woman’s cool flesh. She reached up and touched the tears at Irina’s temples with the back of her fingers, wiping them away, feeling their warmth, feeling even, it seemed, their salty heaviness.

“You see,” Irina went on, “they are swine, these men. Boars who eat their own young, who snuffle and feed on the little bodies of their own offspring.”

She lifted her hand from her stomach and wiped the tears away from the other side of her face. She cleared her throat and then turned to Cate.

“But Catherine, for the first time I have real hope now.” She raised herself on her elbow. “I have a few more things to do for Sergei, a few things to do for this Ometov …”She
paused, her eyes on Cate, and Cate imagined she could see the green in them even through the lightless space.

“I have a simple request to make of you,” Irina said. “It is not difficult, not dangerous. You might be frightened, but you have no need to be. You must believe that.”

She stopped and waited for Cate to answer. Cate nodded.

“If I can.”

“Oh, you can. It is so simple.” She reached out and laid her hand on Cate’s hip. “If you do this for me, Catherine, in return I will promise to rid you of Valentin. I know how to do that. You can forget the man ever touched you. Neither you nor your daughter will have to fear him again.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I know things about him.”

“Blackmail?”

“Let me take care of it.”

Cate looked at her. “Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll help you.” “Good. It is done, then.”

T
HE TRANSMISSION STOPPED, OR RATHER THE VOICES CEASED.
Everyone waited. Jernigan and John Parmley sat in the main surveillance van with the red digital readout on their receiver registering a flat line. Ennis Strey waited, hunched over a notepad in the field office tech room, the voice-activated reels in front of him motionless. Ann and Erika sat across the table from Ometov, their eyes focused on him in anticipation. All waited and wondered.

Hain said nothing for a moment. Then he reached up and began flipping off toggle switches. He shut down all outgoing radio communication, took off his headphones, and turned to Leo Ometov. He looked at him a moment. Ometov slowly removed his own headphones as well and turned around in his chair.

“I suppose you would like some explanation,” Ometov said, sighing heavily. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “I swear to God, I am too worn out for this business. It is going to kill me.”

Ann and Erika both removed their headphones too. Their confusion and suspicion were clearly visible in their behavior; they were averting their eyes now, as they began to absorb the shock of what they had just heard.

Hain said nothing. He had been in the business a long
time, and he knew he didn’t have to say anything in order to get the answers Ometov knew he owed him.

Ometov looked as if the energy had been sucked out of him in one breath, and he stood wearily and walked slowly over to the glass doors to the courtyard.

Now he will turn on the light, Hain said to himself.

Ometov reached up to the light switch and turned on the light.

Hain had never seen a guy so in love with the sight of palms and bougainvillea. Ometov stood with his hands in the pockets of his frumpy suit, his hair needing a touchup with a comb. Hain thought of the pictures he had seen of the nattily groomed Krupatin. The two men did not seem to have come, from the same culture.

Ometov turned around.

“It is true,” he said. “I have been her case officer for over a year—almost two years, actually.” He looked at Ann, who had turned in her chair to watch him as he spoke. “Much of what I have been able to pass on to you has come from her. She has been a gold mine. It is true that I contacted her in exactly the way she related, at the Caffè Florian in Venice, in the Chinese room, on a rainy day.” He smiled. “She forgot to say it was November. I did promise her we would get her child away from Sergei in exchange for her cooperation. It is not true that I used the child as a carrot on a stick, a prize that Irina never would be able to obtain. The sad fact is that Sergei knows what an asset he has in that little girl. She has proved to be impossible to find. Irina thinks we are not trying, that we are deceiving her.” He shook his head. “We are simply … inept. Unequal to the task.”

He turned and regarded the palms. He talked into the glass, his reflection echoing his words back to him, his voice muted by the closeness of his face to his reflected face.

“It is not true that I have been sleeping with her.” His hesitation was slight and almost went unnoticed. “I have never touched her, though she must know how much I have wanted to.”

Hain couldn’t believe it. The man was in love with her. He couldn’t believe it because it was hackneyed and predictable and an old story in the spy business, with only slight variations from incident to incident—an old story that always surprised, always saddened, always repeated itself. When he
was dead and gone, some case officer of the future would sit in another chair in another city in another century and listen to a colleague or an asset confess that he was in love with someone he shouldn’t be in love with. And the case officer would be surprised, perhaps even shocked. The fact that this would happen again and again to unknown agents in the future was already a certainty, foretold by the enduring frailties of human nature.

“I know what you are thinking, my friend,” Ometov went on, addressing Hain now, though his back was still turned to them. “I too have been where you are sitting now, listening to this kind of story. But you know, the odd thing is, I am not ashamed of it, as I thought men were who confessed such things to me. Not a bit. I think it is because … well, probably because this business has stolen everything from me, even shame.” He stopped. “No, that is not the truth at all.” He seemed to be talking to himself in his reflection. “This business has not stolen from me—-I have whored away everything willingly. This game of secrets and lies has been a game I have played with all eagerness, wagering away anything it asked of me. Somewhere along the way I must have laid shame on the table too. Anyway, it’s gone.”

Ometov moved along the glass wall, keeping his face and his reflection near the clear smooth surface.

“But I never touched her, Curtis,” he said, “not even when I risked her life and mine to set up meetings in impossible cities at impossible hours, not even when we were alone and only one or two people in the world knew where we were. Not even then, when we were nearly lost to the universe. I never touched her. It wasn’t my integrity. I don’t know what it was. But it never happened.” He stopped. His breath made a wavering ghost beneath his nose. “It was surpassing strange to hear her talk of the things that I have so often imagined doing with her as though I had actually done them. It was as if it had indeed happened, but so long ago that I had forgotten how to remember it, forgotten the details of it. I felt a strange regret, for something I had lost but never had.”

He continued to gaze out past himself. Beyond the pane the palms hung still in the hot, breathless night. He turned around.

“I fell in love with her long before Sergei Krupatin even knew she existed. I knew her parents, as I said before, and I
knew her as a girl. I am eighteen years older than she. Sergei is ten years older than she. The summer that Sergei and I watched his father and brother die on the sand of the Black Sea, she was eight. Incredible. A dozen years later Sergei and I were well into our opposing careers and she was attending the Repin Institute to study art. Not long after that, Sergei saw her on the sidewalk.” He stopped. “That,” he said, “was a piece of black luck.”

Ometov shoved his shoulders away from the glass wall where he had been leaning and returned to the folding metal tables laden with computers and cables and telephones. He pulled out the chair he had been sitting in and sat down again. Ann was looking away, her own gaze fixed on the palms outside. Erika was staring at Ometov with a fixed, almost catatonic expression.

“The irony,” Ometov said, “is that Irina is really a very cerebral woman. Her extraordinary beauty belies her intellect. She was attracted to cerebral men. I cannot say we had begun a real affair. I would be flattering myself. But we had made a beginning. And then Sergei … well, he simply overwhelmed her. It couldn’t be helped. It was one of those things.”

Hain studied Ometov. He didn’t know what made this guy tick, but he did know he was looking at a man who had had shitty luck. It made him wonder about the ancient concept of fate.

“As for Irina’s showing up here yesterday,” Ometov said, sighing again, turning to the situation at hand, “I had no idea. I was genuinely shocked. I don’t know why she is here. To tell you the truth, I have not had any communication with her for nearly three months. I was stunned to see her here. She has given up on the idea that I will ever be able to do anything about her daughter. There is nothing I can do about it. This is one agent I have no power over whatsoever. I was lucky to have had her access to Krupatin for as long as I did.”

“But when you did recognize her,” Hain interrupted, “you had no hesitation in trying to attach Cate to her?”

“None. Why should I? Irina may have become a stale asset, but only because I have not held up my end of the agreement. She still is Krupatin’s trusted messenger. She still has the best access to him of anyone available to us. I know
she is here because Sergei wants to use her here.” He stopped and looked squarely at Hain. “But that is all I know.”

Hain stared back at him. Christ. Maybe he too was too worn out for this business.

“What about her reference to having a few more things to do for Ometov?”

Ometov was shaking his head before Hain even finished the question.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why she was saying that. I told you, I had assumed she was through with me. Our last few meetings were little more than altercations. Nothing was really accomplished because of her anger at our failure to free the child. And then—again—I have not seen her for nearly three months, until yesterday. I have no idea what she has to do for Ometov.”

“But still you feel we should let Gate, go on with this.”

“I see no reason why not. We should consider ourselves fortunate to be in the position we are in.”

“So what you’re saying,” Hain responded evenly, “is that this doesn’t change anything, the fact that you had already turned her.”

“Exactly, it changes nothing. She would not work for us now if we asked her. We know she is still working for Sergei. We want to get our hands on Sergei. She is the best way to do that.”

“Then for Irina it’s just business as usual. Krupatin still has her daughter, and she is continuing to pay the price.”

Ometov nodded. “I am afraid so.”

Hain thought a moment. “What does it look like to you, Leo? How does this thing end for her?”

“Tragically,” Ometov said honestly and without hesitation. “And she knows it. Especially now, since she has failed with me. That was an extraordinary risk for her, extraordinary. And I think it demonstrates how desperate she was that she even tried it. If Krupatin had found out, he would have killed the girl, out of fury. Irina risked her daughter’s life to save it. She didn’t lose. It was a draw. The child still lives, but she lives in Krupatin’s fouled nest.”

Again silence fell over the room. The lights on the incoming lines were blinking furiously. Hain had been ignoring them. He couldn’t much longer. Everyone wanted to know what the hell was going on. What was next.

“Tell me something, Leo,” Hain said. “The little girl— she’s Krupatin’s child, isn’t she?”

Ometov’s face sagged, weariness and dejection lining his face like seams of erosion.

“It is almost a certainty.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“No. Irina will not speak of it.”

“But she loves the child.”

“Fiercely. Irrationally.”

“And Krupatin, he doesn’t claim her.”

Ometov looked down. “He refers to the child as ‘that feces of a rape.’” He shook his head with grim resignation. “It is an insane story of Dostoevskian depths. For most people, it would be a difficult situation even to imagine. For Irina, it is only too real. It is her life.”

He had nothing else to say, and neither did Hain. The two women did not speak. The silence lingered, the four of them lost momentarily in their own thoughts. Finally Hain turned around, picked up the headset and put it on, and began flipping toggle switches, opening up the lines.

During extended undercover operations, when surveillance was unrelenting and could accurately be described as an ordeal, food was degraded to a common necessity like sleep and going to the bathroom and coffee. It kept your blood sugar up, kept the acid of too much coffee from eating a hole in your stomach, kept you from fainting. But otherwise, it was a momentary pleasure at best. Its importance was easily displaced by an unexpected transmission, which could jerk your thoughts away from food in an instant and keep them diverted for abnormal lengths of time. In the short term, food was no competition for adrenaline.

But within an hour of Ometov’s confession, no one could ignore the need for it any longer. It was Ann Loder’s turn to go out and get it. She took a list of wants and left, heading for the nearest fast-food strip, not far away.

Ometov went out to the courtyard to smoke, leaving Hain and Erika on the radios. But Hain’s eyes kept drifting to Ometov’s solitary figure roaming among the palms. After a few minutes he took off the headphones, glanced at Erika, who nodded, acknowledging he was leaving, and got up stiffly and walked to the courtyard door. He slid back the glass and
stepped outside. The muggy night air instantly wrapped around Him.

Ometov nodded at him and kept walking as Hain made his way over to him. Neither of them said anything for a while, and then Hain sat down on one of the stone benches to relieve his knees.

“Leo,” he said, grabbing the front of his own shirt and fanning it, “I’ve got to say some things.”

Ometov stopped his pacing and came over. He continued to stand, finishing his cigarette.

“Okay.”

Hain looked at him. “After we talked to Gate late this afternoon,” he said, starting slowly, “after she had been slapped around by these two unknowns, two things stuck in my mind. One, when Cate expressed some hesitation at your proposal that she tell Irina that Stepanov had beat her up, because she was afraid that Irina herself might have had been behind it somehow and would know she was lying, you assured her that that wouldn’t be the case. You said, ‘I cannot imagine how she could have known.’” Hain paused. “Now, that’s an interesting statement, Leo. How could you be so sure of that? It seems like a damned impossibility to me that you
could
have known that Irina
couldn’t
have known.