Lucky Bastard (45 page)

Igor stopped the car. He handed me a woman's stocking. “Here,” he said. “Put this on your head, to cover your face.” He pulled the stocking's mate over his own head. While I did as he said, he pulled a pistol from his breast—a 9 millimeter Walther, nothing but top-of-the-line for Peter's men—and checked the action.

“Get out,” Igor said.

I did as he said, turning my back to the Walther, wondering,
Why the stocking? To keep the snow white?

But there was no bullet. As soon as my feet touched the snow, Peter got out of the parked car—out of the driver's seat: He was alone. He wore his magnificent sable hat and, draped across his shoulders, his Chesterfield coat with sable lining. I walked toward him, but before I could reach him he started to walk off into the forest. I followed. I heard Igor's feet crunching the snow behind me. The path had been
shoveled;
still lost in my train of thought, I was startled awake by this surrealistic detail. I lost a step or two. I had to trot to catch up to Peter. Behind me, Igor trotted too,
crunch-crunch-crunch.

I caught up. Peter and I were side by side, marching in step. Hands clasped behind his back, Peter said, “It is over. Tomorrow they will summon me to a meeting, examine my accounts, humiliate me, reduce me three ranks to colonel, and retire me beyond the Urals at an annual pension of two thousand dollars a year.”

He spoke English. In the same language I said, “I am sorry to hear it. May I know my own fate?”

“It has not been confided to me. You may imagine it. They don't know you're here. They're looking for you in New York, under your cover name.”

“That was your man who put me on the plane?”

“Yes. That's why you're here.”

Had I only known, I could have slept on the plane.

Peter said, “You are in the last place in the world where they would look for you. So for the moment, and in the circumstances, you are in the safest place in the world—Russia. Can you imagine?”

He was amused. Greatly amused, openly amused.

This was irritating. I said, “And you? What brought about this … fall from grace?”

“They are reinventing themselves. They are getting rid of anti-Stalinists before they reinvent Stalin.”

“I thought perhaps they wanted to take over Jack for themselves.”

“If so, they are cleverer than I think. They think Jack is another of my parlor games. I have quarantined this operation from everyone.”

“How, with such a budget?”

Not a flicker, not a glance, not a word of explanation. “Take my word for it,” he said. “This operation must continue. It is the hope of the future. You understand?”

“Yes. But it cannot do so without money. Immediate—”

“Stop telling me the obvious,” Peter said. “Pay attention to orders.” He gave me a severe look.

I said, “Yes, Comrade General.”

“We must disengage, maintain the quarantine,” Peter said, ticking off items as if leaving an order for breakfast before retiring for the night. “Wait these traitors out. They will fail. And if they don't, we'll deal with them. Listen. Our time together is limited. I have an assignment for you. It is vital.”

“At your orders, Comrade General.”

He turned to face me for the first time. He was smiling. “Faithful Dmitri Alexeyivich,” he said. To me, the vestigial serf, his smile said: In tsarist times men like you were coachmen who froze to death outside while men like me finished dinner and had a virgin for dessert.

“I want you to go back to America,” he said.

I was startled. “Why? How?”

“Be quiet. Everything is arranged. Igor will see you across the frontier. You will travel by a circuitous route.” He smiled at the hackneyed phrase, transforming real drama into false drama.

“And then what?”

“Dmitri Alexeyivich, listen.”

Another rebuke. I lowered my eyes, clasped my hands. We were walking deeper and deeper into the forest on the shoveled path, white birches against white snow, not a footprint except our own. I had been away too long: Russia was far colder than Massachusetts.

Peter talked on, describing my task. He handed me an envelope. “The instructions are inside. Your contact is Escobar. He will require a recognition phrase, a number, and a name. The name is mine, in Spanish, with honorific. Give him my regards.”

Peter handed me a tiny slip of paper with a five-digit number written on it. I memorized it.

When I nodded, signifying I had committed it to memory, Peter pointed to his mouth. I rolled the paper into a pill, put it in my own mouth, salivated, and swallowed it. He handed me another. A phrase in Spanish:
Los caballeros quieren beber.
“The horsemen want to drink.” I swallowed this too.

After running the errand that required use of these bona fides, I was to return to the United States.

“Make contact with Morgan,” Peter said. “Tell her the truth, that the KGB has found me out, that it is hunting down the friends. In its death throes it is trying to destroy me. I must hide. Tell her I am safe, that I am rallying the friends. Then break contact.”

“For how long?”

“Forever. Break off. Disappear. Tell them they will be contacted by someone from me. The caller will say, ‘I come from the fisherman.'”

He was taking Jack away from me. Morgan, too. My lifework. He made no explanation or apology. A wave of nausea rose within me. I smelled it, tasted it. “Igor has a special telephone for Morgan,” Peter said. “She should have it with her at all times.”

I said, “Very well, Comrade General. Will I see you again?”

“I think not. But you have done a great thing, Dmitri Alexeyivich, greater than you know, and you will be rewarded. This creature we have created together is very, very valuable. More valuable than even you can guess. We have never had such an asset before, and we will never again have such an opportunity as this. This operation must at all costs be preserved.”

Now it was noon. An alabaster sun shed milky light on the white forest. We came to a turning in the path. A man in white, dressed like a ski trooper, waited on the trail. I looked behind us. Another one, dressed in the same way, with his back to us. Beyond him, Igor. I thought perhaps Igor was about to be shot. But no, and suddenly I understood why.

Peter said, “Go, Dmitri Alexeyivich. You do not want to meet these gentlemen.”

A nod. Our meeting was over. Also our life together. He walked onward with firm tread toward the man ahead—a large man wearing a white ski mask, and under his white hood a sable hat that was even more luxuriant than Peter's. The man behind—smaller, wearing a sheepskin cap under his hood—walked by me as if I were invisible. Very rhythmically, breathing deeply with every stroke, he was sweeping the path with a broom.

I turned around to watch him. Beyond him, Peter's footprints. He swept them away, then disappeared himself. My footprints, Igor's footprints, did not matter.

In Russian, flattened like his face by the stocking, Igor called out to me. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

We took Peter's Mercedes; he would not need it anymore. At first light the next morning we reached the Finnish frontier. For obvious reasons, no advance arrangements had been made. Crossing was a simple matter of dollars for the border guards captain, a Japanese watch for the sergeant, American ballpoint pens for the men, a bottle of French perfume for the female lieutenant. Igor distributed the baksheesh, coin of the revolution. To me he entrusted Morgan's telephone, a clever instrument no larger than a ballet slipper.

3
As Peter had promised, my return trip was circuitous. So that you know how such things are done and what a waste of motion and money tradecraft is, I will tell you I flew from Helsinki to Bahrain to Bombay, then to Singapore, Manila, and finally Quito. I continued by boat down the Amazon to Francisco de Orellana, Peru, and finally by motor canoe to my destination, Leticia, a tiny frontier town in Colombia. The famous pink dolphins sported in the brown river, raiding the nets of fishermen and causing Pepe, my guide and boatman, to laugh in fellow-feeling: “
¡Banditos!
”

In Leticia, in a little pastel concrete box of a bank, its entire front open to the weather but otherwise windowless, I met Escobar. He was a mestizo, neither Spanish nor Indian. Quite short like his YaWa mother, capaciously intelligent like his European father, and quite noticeably subtle, as people who are neither one thing nor the other often are. All this autobiography he recited while we drank a glass of mineral water before getting down to business. This happened subtly, after I answered to his satisfaction the last of a string of polite, impersonal questions he put to me. On my river trip had I eaten the famous Amazonian
tambaqu
í
, most delicious of all fishes, cooked on charcoal? Yes? Good. Had I seen the pink dolphins? The gray ones? “A poet called them the flying horses of the Amazon,” said Escobar. “
Los caballeros quieren beber
,” I replied. Escobar smiled and sent for coffee the other two people who worked in the bank. They scurried away.

Escobar was very serious now. I said, “Don Pedro sends his regards.” I recited the magic number. Escobar held out his hand. I placed Peter's letter in it. He examined the seals, opened it, and read.

With a fond but baffled smile—
That Peter!
—Escobar said, “Oh my. Such an amount.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Certainly not. Everything is perfectly in order. But you understand that we do not keep such amounts on hand here in our own safe?”

An impressive black-and-gilt safe stood in the corner, large and forbidding to any safecracker born before 1885; the bank's perimeter security system was a steel shutter secured by night with a formidable padlock.

I said, “How long will the business take?”

He tapped the letter. “Several different transfers from several different accounts will be required. One does not wish to do it all at once. Six days?”

“Very well.”

He looked at his watch. “Then you should be on your way. It isn't good to be on the Amazon at night, and even with Pepe's Evin-rudes, you will just make it to Loreto before dark. Excellent
tambaquí
in
Loreto.”

Others were out at night. The country around Leticia was controlled by guerrillas. Peter's friends—just like me, but how would they know that? Escobar looked worriedly at the westering sun. “Have you any dollars with you?”

“A few. Most of my money is in deutsche marks.”

“You should take some dollars with you,” he said. He crouched in front of the safe and twirled the dial. The door of the safe swung open with a rusty squeal. He handed me six envelopes, already stuffed and sealed.

“Each contains the right amount,” he said. “Give one if they simply show you weapons, two if a weapon is fired. Be very careful if they seem very young. The kids are often on drugs. They grew up in the camps. They don't know the meaning of restraint.”

I offered him deutsche marks in exchange for the envelopes.

“
¡Se
ñ
or!
” Escobar spread his hands, looked to heaven. “Permit me, I beg you,” he said in Spanish. His body language said, How could a man with my bona fides make such a suggestion?

4
By the time I got back to America—Rye, New Hampshire, a handsome Republican stronghold by the sea—Jack had pulled himself up in the polls. With two weeks to go, he was three points behind the front-runner, a war hero who despised him even more than the other candidates did—especially after Danny found a legless New Hampshire man who had been one of Jack's former patients from Walter Reed and induced him to make a television spot. The media agreed that Jack had the momentum. He became the story, the impossible winner, the underdog. They followed him everywhere. Because Jack was where the cameras were, the other candidates began following him too, hoping for a chance encounter, a spontaneous debate in a diner, exposure.

Morgan and I met at night in the parking lot of a McDonald's at the edge of town. Neither of us had eaten; we never did on meeting days until we could eat together. As usual we ordered a Big Mac meal, and I ate the hamburger while she consumed the large fries. We each drank a chocolate shake. Apple pie for Morgan, who had no weight problem. Such tasty food after bony, fishy
tambaqu
í and pulpy Amazonian fruit. Not to mention Aeroflot's menu. I was glad to be back in the enemy camp.

Morgan said, “We got the money.”

“I'm glad.”

She said, “Now all we have to do is stay out of jail. Are you people out of your minds?”

“Quite possibly. What do you mean?”

She said, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with a single deposit of twenty-seven million dollars? From a bank in Colombia, for Christ's sake. The IRS, the bank examiners, every gumshoe in the world will be electrified by this. How could you do this to us?”

Twenty-seven million dollars? I was amazed. How could Peter possibly pay such a sum from secret funds a day before he was scheduled to be disgraced? I concealed my feelings. Wiping ketchup from my fingers with a sodden paper napkin, I said, “I thought you said you could handle large amounts.”

“Five mill, yes. Twenty-seven is a whole different question. Danny is going apeshit. So is the governor. They're lawyers; they want to know where all this money is coming from. How am I supposed to explain this to them, let alone the bank examiners?”

I had no idea. To cover my confusion, I went on wiping my fingers. It was hopeless: There was more ketchup on the napkin than on my skin. I have a weakness for ketchup. Morgan opened her large purse and plucked a Wet One from a plastic container. “Use this, for Christ's sake.”

The wonderful American invention made me clean in an instant.

Morgan said, “What the fuck was Peter thinking of?” Tonight she was as profane as the Movement chick she used to be, a bad sign.