Sugartown (12 page)

He looked at me for a moment that was as long as the walk across Mussolini’s office. Then he drank some of his wine and topped off the glass again and said, “I don’t like you.”

I got a wolfish grin on my face and peeled the cellophane off a fresh pack of Winstons. “For a minute there I was worried we’d never break the ice,” I said.

“There’s no smoking in here.” He turned large black eyes with no shine in them on the Starr woman. “Didn’t you tell him there’s no smoking in here?”

“Mr. Alanov has an allergy,” she explained.

I put away the pack and looked at the younger man. He was about six feet tall and well built, with a dark mariner’s beard fringing a square face. His eyes were dark and pretty and spaced evenly from his straight thick nose. They would have given him a feminine look if not for an ugly puckered jagged scar that blazed the right side of his forehead. In contrast to the older man’s printed short-sleeved shirt that left his furry arms bare, this one wore a neat black suit and a red figureless tie. Louise Starr introduced him as Andrei Sigourney, Alanov’s English translator. He smiled and said something polite and offered his hand. When I gave it back to him he didn’t wipe it off or anything. Here was a lad with manners.

Neither he nor Alanov had a Russian accent. The writer spoke with a British inflection and Sigourney might have been from Big Sur.

At the woman’s invitation I took the sofa opposite Alanov’s. This one felt like a two-by-four with a handkerchief spread over it. Hotels discourage unpaid-for guests sleeping on the furniture. She took a chair and crossed her trim ankles the way no one seems to have time to teach them anymore. Her legs were tanned too, very smooth. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing stockings, but she would be. Sigourney remained standing, with one hand resting on the back of Alanov’s sofa.

“You’re English.” The writer was leveling the contents of his glass again. He never took a sip without replacing it immediately.

“A couple of greats and a grand back, on my father’s side.” I swallowed. I hoped my throat sounded dry.

“Frosty people, the English. I went to Cambridge.”

“I keep urging Fedor to try writing in English,” the woman put in. “Andrei’s translations are excellent, but something is always lost when a man’s vision changes hands.”

“Mixed metaphor,” grumbled Alanov.

“Sorry.”

“I will never write as well in English as I do in Russian. I write on smoke and the wind currents change between languages.”

“Someone was telling me just yesterday that American and Russian are very close,” I said.

He frowned thoughtfully. His beard was designed for frowning and he looked like a bear. “It’s a good theory. But it requires fluency in both idioms, and
that
requires a lifetime, or more likely two. I’d rather blame the inevitable failures on Andrei.”

Sigourney smiled politely. He was a polite boy was Sigourney. I wondered what he was like away from Alanov. Whoever had given him that scar could tell me.

I uncrossed my legs and crossed them the other way. Cleared my dry throat.

Alanov, who was pouring again, picked up on the signal this time. He gestured with the bottle before putting it back on the cart. “My doctor has directed me to drink wine before and after meals. I can’t tell you how many doctors I went through before I found one that would prescribe wine. In any case that’s why I’m not offering you any.”

“You have an allergy,” I said.

Louise Starr changed the subject. “Mr. Walker, are you familiar with Mr. Alanov’s background?”

“Russian, isn’t it?”

“Do we need this man?” demanded the writer.

“He’s Russian,” she said, sidestepping the whole thing neatly. “He was famous in his own country as a poet and the editor of its leading literary journal years before he wrote a book titled
The Window on the Baltic
, which captured the attention of the world and resulted in his exile from the Soviet Union. It was mainly through the urging of our firm as Mr. Alanov’s American publisher that the U.S. State Department offered him asylum. Which, incidentally, is the title of his forthcoming book.”

“Tell him what it’s about,” Alanov said.

“The title, like all of Fedor Alanov’s writing, is double-edged. Although fiction, the book is a sociopolitical autobiographical treatment of his defection that attempts to show the disparity between America’s pose of democratic freedom and the internal prejudices that make such freedom impossible.”

“Tell him the plot.”

“The hero is a poet —” Belatedly she caught the sarcasm in the writer’s prodding. She settled back a little, waving a slender hand wearing an amber stone in a delicate gold setting. “Well, it’s poor form to discuss a work not yet finished. Let’s just say that it will be an important book, as well as one that will infuriate authorities on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. There are people who would prefer that it not be written. Unpleasant people.”

“Ours or theirs?” I asked.

“Ha!” Alanov struck his knee with a hairy paw, almost spilling his wine. “Excellent question. I’m beginning not to not like this young man so much after all.”

I smiled thinly.

“We think theirs,” Louise Starr said, answering my question. “Specifically, a man named Rynearson, whom we suspect of being an agent for the KGB.”

“Oh,” I said. “That kind of case.”

“Well, we don’t know that he’s a foreign agent. But he runs a large shop on East Jefferson that sells goods imported from eastern Europe and does a lot of business with representatives of Communist-bloc countries and is under federal investigation for suspicion of espionage. This much we know from our contacts in Washington.” She paused. “I should add that this is confidential information and shouldn’t leave this room.”

“Maybe we should ring down the cone of silence.”

That surprised a smile out of her, liquid white teeth sliding between pink-glossed lips. “I suppose it does sound like a plot recycled from
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. That doesn’t make it any less true.”

“There are a couple of things wrong with it,” I said. “The book is fiction, and who cares what an exiled poet has to say about politics in a work of fiction? Also, if there were ever any danger of Mr. Alanov’s writing about things better left out of the public stalls the Soviet government wouldn’t have let him leave the country in the first place.”

She nodded, glancing at young Sigourney, like a mother approving her daughter’s choice of suitor. “That’s what the people at the State Department told us when we applied to them for protection. They’re too busy trying to woo Soviet scientists and engineers to our side to worry about one writer, and a writer of fiction at that. That doesn’t change the fact that men in the employ of Eric Rynearson attempted to kidnap Mr. Alanov last week.”

“No smoking,” snapped Alanov.

“Sorry, habit.” I put away the pack again. “Go on, Miss Starr.”

“It’s Mrs.,” she corrected primly.

“F
RIDAY NIGHTS
Andrei drives Mr. Alanov to their favorite restaurant in Ypsilanti. It’s the only one in the area that serves authentic Balkan cuisine.”

“ ‘Balkan cuisine.’ ” Alanov poured again. “I love what this country does with language.”

Louise Starr ignored the interruption. “Last Friday night, a big station wagon was parked across the end of the exit ramp off US-23 at Washtenaw Avenue in Ypsilanti. It was drawn up at an angle, as if the driver had lost control and stalled it while fighting the wheel, but its flashers weren’t on and Andrei had to do some fancy driving to avoid hitting it.”

“I pulled a sharp U,” put in the young man, grinning shyly. “Just like we used to do it in the street in front of the high school.”

“I’ve guaranteed Fedor a movie sale if he’ll write the scene into his book.” Mrs. Starr smiled.

“We’ll get Burt Reynolds to play me,” said Alanov.

Sigourney said, “There was something wrong about that car’s being there just when we were. After we got pointed the other way I kept going the wrong way up the ramp. I side-swiped a car that had been behind us but I didn’t slow down or stop. Luckily it was after rush hour and we didn’t meet any more cars until we were back on the expressway and going the right direction. I pulled off at the next exit and called the police from a service station. But by the time they got there and went back to the other exit, both the station wagon and the car I had hit were gone. So far no one’s come forward to report the sideswiping.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to make waves with their insurance company,” I suggested.

“Or maybe they were working with whoever was in the other car,” said the woman, “and were there to slam the back door. Tell him the rest, Andrei.”

He put his other hand next to its mate on the back of Alanov’s sofa. “There was lettering on the side of the station wagon that showed up in my headlamps as I swung the car in that U-turn,” he said. “It was a delivery wagon belonging to Eric Rynearson’s shop on Jefferson.”

I said, “That was bright of him.”

“Rynearson is strictly an information man.” Mrs. Starr recrossed her ankles the other way. “He would make such mistakes in an active operation. Naturally he told the police that neither he nor the wagon was anywhere near Ypsilanti that night. We didn’t file a complaint. Mr. Alanov hadn’t seen the lettering and it was just Andrei’s word against Rynearson’s. The State Department was of no more help than the police.”

“What makes you think he was out to snatch Mr. Alanov?” I asked.

“We’re giving him the benefit of the doubt. He might just as well have meant to kill him. Chances are, though, he would want to get his hands on the
Asylum
manuscript first.”

They were all looking at me. Even Alanov had sipped twice from his glass without replenishing the contents. I inclined my head toward the cart loaded with bottles. “Is that for everybody, or just Mr. Alanov’s allergy?”

“Andrei, please fix Mr. Walker whatever he wants,” said Mrs. Starr.

He stiffened. “I’m a writer, not a servant.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.

“Thanks, I’ll pour my own.” I got up and walked around behind the cart and tonged some ice out of a cooler into a moderate-size tumbler. There was a jug shaped like the head of a Phillips screwdriver on the cart and I transferred some of its contents into the glass along with a squirt of seltzer without bothering to look at the label. Anything in a pinch bottle was good enough for me.

I glanced at Sigourney, busy looking down at his hands on the tight green sofa fabric. They were corded and heavily calloused for someone who got most of his exercise sitting at a typewriter. “I’d have hollered too,” I said.

He said, “I’m sorry. I just think I’ve earned better.”

“You look it. What were you before you turned translator?”

“Fisherman. My family fished the Black Sea for six generations. I was eight when my parents brought me here and we settled in California. I worked as deckhand for a charter boat service in Long Beach before coming to Detroit. I guess I’m just tired of taking orders.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Mrs. Starr told him. “Mr. Walker is our guest and you were the only one on his feet.”

“Get that on the boat?” I indicated the mark on his forehead.

He touched it with his fingertips. “Marlin spike. I was landing a beauty when he tore loose.”

“We’re going to hear the fish story again,” Alanov said.

Sigourney grinned and said nothing.

“It’s a mess,” I said, stirring the ice with a swizzle stick from a glass of them on the cart. “I don’t guess that the KGB is any more efficient than the CIA, but assuming that Mr. Alanov’s book is important enough to keep out of circulation it doesn’t soak that they’d send an amateur like Rynearson to do it in a car with his name splattered all over the side and get out-maneuvered by someone who put in his driver training laying rubber on the way to the soda fountain.”

Mrs. Starr’s eyes were sapphires in the light coming through the window, gray as it was getting. “Ordinarily, no. Which is why we’re convinced that Rynearson is acting alone, with civilians in his employ. He’s got it in his head that stopping the publication of the book will win him points in Moscow.”

“Rynearson doesn’t sound Russian.”

“Most KGB agents operating in this country are Americans in the pay of the U.S.S.R.,” Alanov said. “Foreign accents are counterproductive. He has apparently been useful to them for some time and like the rest of us is hoping for something better in his old age.”

“Hot dogs come in all nationalities.” I sat down again and inhaled good whiskey. “Who pointed you at me? James Bond I’m not.”

“That was Andrei’s idea.” Mrs. Starr smiled at him. “Since he was driving that night he spent more time with the police than anyone else. They made the recommendation.”

“Not cops,” I said. “Not me.”

“Louise was being kind.” The translator’s tone was only mildly malicious. He was getting over almost being demoted to bartender. “After she flew in from New York, we got in touch with the State Department. As you know, they weren’t encouraging, but after some stalling they came through with the information on Rynearson. I found out that the state police issue investigation licenses in Michigan, and since it was state troopers who answered my original complaint I went to them and asked who was best in the area. They were reluctant to recommend anyone. I had no idea there was so much hostility between the two professions.”

“We fill in cracks they don’t like to admit exist,” I said.

“They finally gave me a list of names. I immediately eliminated all the ex-policemen — not that I have anything against them, but chances were they were just trying to throw business toward old friends. Whenever I asked for someone who could lean hard when he had to, wear a tie where it belonged, keep his tongue in his mouth, and who was not a former cop, your name came up.”

I swirled my ice around. “I still don’t know what it is you want me to do. Bodyguards always shoot second and my exploding Scripto is in the shop.”

“My department,” said Mrs. Starr. “Mr. Alanov is delivering a series of lectures at Wayne State University. He’ll be in Detroit two more weeks, and while he’s within reach I doubt that Rynearson will be able to resist making another attempt on him. Fedor says he needs that much time to complete his book.” She looked at him.