Requiem For a Glass Heart (9 page)

“What are you talking about?” Erika frowned.

“In very simple terms, these people are approached by Krupatin’s lieutenants and are given a choice. Either they do a job or a wife is brutally raped and murdered by thugs. Either they do a job or a child disappears. Either they do a job or an elderly parent dies in a house fire. They are told they have to do it only once, only one job—a piece of knowledge that helps them rationalize the choice they have to make. They say to themselves, this is a war without uniforms; this is a struggle for survival. It is either this one man or my daughter. Either one executive or my wife, one banker or my parents. And if they ever doubt the seriousness of Krupatin’s threat, he gives them a taste. A cousin dies, a next-door neighbor, a good friend. After the taste, they all believe. And they all decide to do the job.”

I
RINA LAY BESIDE THE DEVIL IN THE DARK.
T
HERE WERE ROSES
on trellises across the front of the windows, and the street-lamps cast their shadows against the wall like a tracery of black rosettes, the long, climbing stems reduced to vague spiderwebs of gray.

She lay on her side, and behind her the Devil stirred in his sleep. Desolate in her depression, she felt like a long-reformed whore who after years of abstinence had returned again to loveless sheets, preferring even one moment of counterfeit affection to endless nights of genuine loneliness. Nothing compared to moral failure in its resulting isolation. For momentary comfort you were left with only the sour aftertaste of everlasting regret.

She looked at the clock: it was one-thirty. Carefully she laid back the sheet and got out of bed, hoping he would not awaken. It would be too cruel to have to look at him now, to have to talk to him immediately after.

She walked into the bathroom, squatted on the bidet, and washed herself, washed with soap, dry-eyed and dolorous, feeling ugly in her nakedness, the chill tile as unforgiving as glass underneath her bare feet. When she was through she dried and then washed her face, again using soap, rinsing over and over until her skin felt oilless and clean, perhaps the only
clean thing about her. She took a new dressing gown off the hook behind the bathroom door and slipped it on, turned off the light, and walked through the darkness of the bedroom and out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

In the kitchen she turned on a small lamp on the cabinet counter and began heating water to make a cup of tea. She leaned against the counter and waited in the dim light for the water to get hot, and when it was ready she poured it into a blue porcelain pot. Within moments the smoky aroma of lap-sang souchong was penetrating the smudgy corners of the large square room, and its fragrance carried her to places, so many places, where she had gathered memories, sweet and ugly, a library of emotions that she never had managed to put in order, never managed to organize. Everything was there, but it was bedlam; she never knew what she would find when she went looking.

She poured the tea into a cup and took it outside to the garden. The bricks were damp on her bare feet, and there was a layer of damp air around her legs as she walked to a table and chairs and sat down. The city sounds were distant at this hour, muffled by the dense vegetation of other gardens all along the street. Pulling her feet up into the big comfortable chair, she wrapped her gown around her feet and hugged her legs. The smell of plants and damp soil hung in the dark, occasionally punctuated by a waft of the strong tea, its aroma prowling the air around her in invisible tendrils.

Suddenly the kitchen door opened and Krupatin stood there, his silhouette backlit by the frail light of the kitchen. He peered out. He was dressed.

“Irina?”

She could hardly bring herself to speak. “Yes.” Her voice was weak and died out in the cushion of the vegetation and the night.

Krupatin lighted a cigarette, and for a moment his face flickered like a carnival mask, then went black. “Just a minute,” he said, and he turned back into the kitchen.

Her heart sank, and tears of exhaustion and frustration welled in her eyes.

Krupatin appeared in the doorway again, carrying a cup of tea. The cigarette glowed in his mouth as he approached her along the brick walk.

“It’s almost too dark,” he said, the unintended double
entendre losing all meaning for her except its metaphorical sense, which seemed an omen.

He made his way to her and sat down in a garden chair across the table from her.

“We might as well talk now,” he said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and blowing a luminous plume into the still air. “I was going to come back tomorrow, but, well, now we’re here. Now is the best time.”

He lifted his cup and blew over the top of the tea. The nearly exhausted light from the kitchen door highlighted his silhouette, creating a gold seam that outlined the shoulders of his suit, his head, the edges of his arm when he lifted it to smoke or sip tea. She could see lumps of sugar lining the edge of his saucer. When he turned his head slightly, the side of his face was gilded.

“This meeting—in Houston, Texas, did I tell you that?”

“No.”

“It was very difficult to arrange. Wei’s people and Bontate’s people and mine have been talking forever. Talking, talking. They’re cautious bastards, both of them. But they smell a lot of money. Mmmmmm …”He pulled on his cigarette. “And you know how that is. As the potential profit rises, so does the temptation to take risks. Still, they’re not your average men, these two. Cautious—to a fault, I hope.”

He gave a humorous snort at this, put a sugar cube in his mouth, and lifted the teacup. She heard him sucking the liquid through the porous cube. Though he was wearing his suit, he had not put on his tie, and she noticed that his hair was neatly combed. He was very handsome, rakish in the casual way he wore his tailored suit. She found his every move hateful.

“We have established an elaborate system of rules for this meeting,” he continued. “Bontate insists on certain things; Wei responds with requirements of his own. I accommodate. Then I insist on some things too, of course, and they accommodate, or counterpropose. We go back and forth, back and forth, gradually arriving at something with which everyone is equally uneasy.”

“Whose idea was this meeting?” Irina asked.

He paused. “Wei’s. He has these big ideas about cooperation. A consortium.”

Irina sipped her tea. Krupatin continued.

“As time went on and I saw how much Wei wanted this
thing,” he said, putting out his cigarette, “I outcautioned their caution. I said, look, I’ve made some serious moves in the U.S. recently, and as far as the law enforcement officials there are concerned, I am somebody to watch. Wei knows this, of course. Our moves there have given us a big bite of a lot of things-—that’s why Wei wants us involved in this consortium idea of his.”

Krupatin’s silhouette was immobile, one forearm resting on the table, his fingers on the teacup.

“I insisted on a low profile. I said I couldn’t be driving all over Houston to meetings.”

“Why did they choose Houston?”

Krupatin paused again. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew her questions were making him impatient.

“That was Wei’s idea too. Houston has a huge Asian population. He thinks his people will be less obvious there.”

“Less obvious than New York, than Los Angeles?”

“What? What the hell does it matter? Why are you asking these questions?”

“I wanted to know, Sergei, that’s all.”

There was a longer silence this time. His face, lost in the shadows, could tell her nothing.

“I told them,” he went on. “I said, when we are down to the last conversation, to the final agreement where everything is spelled out, then I will show up and do my part. Until then, I said, I want all of the negotiations from my side to be handled by my most trusted emissary. This emissary, I said, will do all the legwork, all the preliminary negotiating.”

He stopped, his silhouette motionless. Then he raised an arm and pointed at her, gold rippling down the length of his dark suit.

She looked at him. Not being able to see his face was beginning to bother her. His arm was still extended toward her.

“What is it?” she said.

“You are my emissary. Olya Serova.”

She couldn’t believe it; it was an absurd idea. “You’re crazy.”

“No, this is perfect,” he said, dropping his arm.

“This is your big plan? This is how I’m supposed to get close to them?”

“Absolutely. I will send you back and forth, back and
forth. They’ll get used to you. Your coming and going will become routine to their subordinates. You will become familiar to all of them. Familiarity. That’s the key to this, Irina. ‘Oh, it’s Krupatin’s woman. Yes, yes. Go through.’ That’s the idea.”

“That’s insane, Sergei. They’re not going to get that used to me in the short time it will take to do this—what, a week, two weeks?”

Krupatin’s silhouette shrugged. “Whatever it takes. But listen, Irina, I’m not going
to
wait until the last minute to introduce you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Wei is in Paris. He wants to meet you.”

“Oh, my God. No, this is just too stupid.”

“It’s already been decided,” Krupatin said flatly.

“And Bontate?”

“The day after. You will fly from Paris to Palermo.”

“To Palermo?”

“It’s all been arranged.”

She stared across at him. “And what did you tell them about me? You have known these men for a year now. You have done business with them. How in the hell did you explain me to them when they have never seen me or heard of me all this time? And I’m supposed to be your most trusted emissary? They can’t possibly believe such a thing.”

“They believe,” Krupatin said. “I told them, I said, this woman is the only one I trust to do this. I want her to meet you before we all get together in Houston. I want her to see for herself the two men she will be dealing with in the U.S.”

“But what am I supposed to say to them, for God’s sake? They’re going to ask me business questions. They’re going to try to trip me up, catch me in some mistake.”

“No,” Krupatin said. “Because you come from me, you already have authority. You don’t need to prove yourself to them. If they try to do that, don’t fall for it. The point is, I am sending you to look
them
over, not the other way around. The way I see it, you just go to visit. You have a couple of meals with them, pretend you are just trying to get a feel for them. Make them like you, feel comfortable with you.”

“That’s it? You don’t have any specific directions for me, no objective?”

“Not for these trips, Irina. Whatever you fabricate, do it
to suit yourself. Say whatever you must to make yourself comfortable, whatever will put you at ease when you meet them in Houston. When you come back from Paris, from Palermo, we will meet, and you can brief me. Then we will put our heads together and work out the details for the rest of it.”

And what if I refuse?
The question hardly formed in her mind, much less on her lips. This was madness. Her heart was beating irregularly, and she felt moisture beading at her hairline. This could be the end of her. It was highly unlikely that she would come away alive from such a bold plan. And Krupatin, of course, was well aware of this.

She looked at him. “Sergei …”

“Irina.” His voice stopped her, and he paused to take another cigarette out of his pocket and light it. The carnival mask again. And again the immediate darkness. “Irina,” he said, the smoke thickening his voice and rolling from his mouth into the damp London night, “I am prepared to make this your last one.”

She was stunned again. Did she believe this? She didn’t. Even if she could believe it, it was in fact a worthless promise, because the odds of her surviving this kind of operation were, surely, nonexistent. And what if he did mean it? What was she going to do, get him to sign such a promise and have it notarized? What was a promise from a man like this? He was prepared to make this the last one? He
was prepared?
What did that mean? What did it mean when Satan spoke to you and told you he was prepared to strike a bargain? How much more absurd could life become? And what did this mean? It meant that she was lost, that’s what it meant.

Irina felt the chill moving about beneath her chair, prowling along the bricks. South Kensington slept while Irina sat in a garden chair with her bare feet tucked up under her dressing gown, talking to the Devil.

“You will receive your tickets to Paris tomorrow,” Krupatin said, making the ember of his cigarette glow like a small red eye in the center of the black place where his face should have been. This time when he blew the smoke into the air, the side of his face caught the gilt light in an uneven contour for just a brief moment and then was gone. “For the trip to Palermo, you will be informed when the time comes.”

Krupatin was silent a moment, and then he leaned for
ward and put his elbow on the table between them. The raised hand held the cigarette.

“Listen to me, Irina. Listen to me.” The ember on the cigarette danced in the dark between them as he motioned with his hand. “This is the most important thing you have ever done. Do this right, and it’s over for you. All of it. You won’t have to worry about it anymore.” He hesitated. “Don’t throw this away. You can do it. You’re probably the only one who can. If you’ve ever done anything right in your life, it should be this. Believe me.”

She was so dumbstruck, so numb, she hardly comprehended his words, which surely must have been distorted both in meaning and in tone, because to her his promise sounded like a death knell. There was nothing she could do.

She sat in the garden in the dark long after he was gone.