Manhattan 62 (34 page)

“Did he? Yes, it is.”

“And your pals in the picture? Who are they?”

Forrester went to the door, opened it and called out, “Katherine? Where is that coffee, dear?”

The wife hurried into the study. “I did what you asked, dear. I hope that's all right.”

But there was no coffee.

“Well, then, thanks again for coming, Detective. Of course, I was expecting you.”

“How's that?”

“Our mutual friend, of course. He telephoned me to say that you were on your way, but you knew that, I'm sure.”

Before I could respond, sirens sounded in the street. I thought at first it was an air raid. It was the cops. I was betting Forrester had told his wife to call the police.

Edward Forrester was getting ready to turn me in, which meant he knew I was in trouble with the brass. They would arrest me, fire me, push me out into the cold, and Forrester knew it. He knew I had been coming to see him; Max Ostalsky had called him. One more time, I'd been taken in.

CHAPTER SEVEN

October 26, '62

O
STALSKY HAD PLAYED ME
yet again. This had been a double-cross all along. Ostalsky had phoned Forrester, told him that I was my way to see him. Together they had planned it. Both of them knew if the cops got me, they'd take me in, fire me, put me out to pasture; or else they'd get it out of me, what I knew. Either way it was a bad deal.

When Tommy got beat up with the baseball bat, I had found Ostalsky with him, Tommy saying, “Get rid of the friggin' Red,” and I had ignored it. The kid must have recognized him from the pier. He had said a man with white hair, but in those lights on the river, you couldn't tell, not really. Max Ostalsky had double-crossed me and I had fallen for it like a ton of bricks, as my Uncle Jack used to say.

Somebody was going to murder Adlai Stevenson on Sunday, Ostalsky had said; but why would I trust him now? Forrester would be leaving town on Sunday. He had made a point of telling me his travel plans.

*

Somehow, in that study, Forrester and the wife still there, I got my gun out of my pocket, waved it at them and ran, crashing down the long hall, into the kitchen and through the backdoor. I had figured there would be a backdoor for the garbage, and from there I could make my way to the basement.

The light in the stairwell was dim. The paint was cracked. I had dreams like this, running down the stairs, using the railing to hoist myself up and cover a flight in two or three long jumps.

In the basement, I ran past the laundry room, into a storage area, and hid behind the bicycles and baby carriages, discarded furniture, cartons marked “coats” and “toys”, crates of wine, and a stack of dusty books with fancy gold cardboard covers, all the stuff of the prosperous middle-class lives lived in the building upstairs, stuff that had been saved for a different season or because somebody could not bear to toss it out.

Forrester would tell the cops I had been bothering him, or pestering his wife. Maybe he was already on the phone to somebody he knew, Logan, the Police Commissioner, Mayor Wagner, Richard Nixon. Tell them that I had been asking improper questions during a national crisis.

In the basement wall high up were small barred windows. Somewhere in the street I heard people yelling, screaming, and I wondered if it had all started. If the nukes were coming, I didn't much want to die in that basement. I sure wasn't going to die for Ostalsky, or Forrester, whoever they were working with; it didn't matter; they were mirror images of each other.

All the deception, the falsehoods, the bullshit, the half-truths, the bare-faced lies on both sides, it was a world of intelligence that led nowhere, and the more you gathered, good stuff, bad stuff, lies about suspects when lies were required, no matter if the wrong person went to prison or fried—Homer Logan's game—it was a world that existed to service itself. Even Ostalsky's speeches about how duplicitous his world was were lies. Apart from fear, I felt nothing but fury, and disdain.

From somewhere in the cavernous basement, I heard the heavy steps of cops on the move. I knew they'd get to the basement at some point. Edward Forrester was no fool, and he was a pro. He would notice I had run through the kitchen—footprints, smell—and down the back stairs. Only a pro would have asked his wife to call the police the way he had done. He was CIA, but I guessed that he was playing both sides. Max Ostalsky had spoken of Bounine's weakness for handsome men. I wondered what Forrester's was.

Forrester and Ostalsky had buried themselves in so many layers of lies, it was hard to unravel, and for all I knew they had been working together. If Forrester intended killing Adlai Stevenson, who was going to stop him?

Forrester apparently went back and forth to the USSR like people take the Staten Island ferry. He knew all the players. Still, the little man with big glasses didn't seem the kind to get blood on his hands, though he wasn't some kind of pussy either—in the war he had flown those B-17s.

Two days.

“Where the hell is he?” A voice boomed loud into the basement.

The voices of city cops—loud, impatient and irritable— were in some idiotic way comforting. At least I knew how they worked. At least, they were not Commie spies. I ran into what I thought was a supply closet. Instead I found myself in a room without windows. Cots were stacked on the floor. On the door I saw the notice. I was in the building's fallout shelter.

I put my ear to the door.

“He's gone,” one of the cops yelled. “Who was stupid enough to miss him. Christ. Come on. Let's go.”

For the next hour, I waited around the corner from the Forresters' building and when the couple emerged, I followed them west on 12th Street, and down Sixth Avenue. She wore a black and white houndstooth checked coat, a black beret, matching gloves and she carried a large black leather handbag. Over his suit, Edward Forrester wore a tweed topcoat and a matching cap. They walked arm in arm until they reached Jefferson Market, a fancy grocery store where the windows were filled with good-looking fruit. I crept after them, making my way inside, keeping as close behind them as I could. The store was full. People shopping, kids in tow, stocking up. Maybe they were stocking up for the end of the world, if it came. Carts full of milk, bread, juice; lines had formed in front of the butcher's counter. I hid among them, all these desperate people buying groceries for the apocalypse; pushing my own shopping cart, I managed to stay out of sight of the Forresters.

They took a cart. Together, they wheeled it up one aisle and down the other, chatting as if it were a social outing, discussing various items on the shelves, heads always together. Neither one of them looked up much, except to pick a box of fancy crackers off a shelf or a bag of cookies. On Mrs Forrester's wrist was a gold charm bracelet that jangled every time she moved. I followed the noise, when I could. I couldn't hear much of what they said. Then the wife began to cry. I took a chance. I rolled my cart into the next aisle, stopped, pushed aside loaves of bread so I could see them standing in the cracker aisle. A knot of shoppers stood behind them, inpatient. The scene in the fancy store was chaotic. The Forresters never noticed me.

“Speak English for heaven's sake, please,” Forrester said.

“I want to go home, Teddy, please,” she said. “I do not want to die here in this awful country. Teddy, darling, I know we're all going to die. This crisis is getting worse, there will be nuclear war.”

“This is your home.” He was as patient now as if she was a child. “Dearest Katya, please, you like our evenings out. Soon we will meet our friends for dinner, and then a film at the Fifth Avenue Cinema, what do you say? And when this is all over we'll go for a visit to your lovely dacha and have time together?” His voice was beguiling. The wife stopped crying, and said she felt better. “Are you all right now?” he said, and she said “Yes, darling, I'm fine.”

Then, without warning, he looked in my direction, sharp, alert, as if he knew I was there. I turned my back.

Somewhere I had read that certain spies used grocery stores as a drop. They might meet and greet their connection as if unexpectedly encountering friends over their trolleys. Maybe they put information in a pack of frozen peas. Later, Max Ostalsky told me that it was true. It seemed very funny, no, crappy and small, that the fate of nations could be hidden in a package of frozen vegetables.

I crept to the next aisle and waited. If this was the life of a spy, you had to take on the humiliation as the lowest of all human life forms, with your time spent gazing at a box of Tutti Fruitti Twinkles with an elephant on the side. I tried not to sneeze. I wanted to sneeze. But the Forresters were caught up in their purchases. Conferring, they finally procured a large box of chocolate cherries. They paid, and put the cherries into a shopping bag.

Arm in arm, her charm bracelet clanking, their steps ringing out on the hard supermarket floor, they went through the door and I followed as best I could back to Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, where they waited in front of Longchamps Restaurant. Then they were waving and calling out, making a point to greet a friend who had just climbed out of a taxi. The three of them started into the restaurant, as if they were merely a trio of friends on a night out. The man was Mike Bounine.

“Match?”

“What?”

A man passing stopped and asked if I had a match, a light, and I said, “Sure”, and tossed him a pack of matches. I could see he wanted to chat. He stood there lighting his smoke. Made small talk about the weather, and finally I had to tell him to push off. He seemed offended.

Then I waited. I waited for almost an hour, on edge, nervous, unsure if I could do this, knowing I had to. No choice. No choice, I said to myself, over and over; I have to do this. And suddenly, after another twenty minutes, adrenalin coursed through my body, and I was ready. This is what always happened on a regular job. When there was nothing left to lose, I was OK. The whole week behind me, the sense that I was out of my depth, out in the cold, on a limb, all of it went. In the window of the restaurant, I saw my face. The color that had drained away was back. I tossed my smoke into the gutter.

When the Forresters emerged, Bounine in tow—or the other way around—I edged as close as I could. With the chocolates under his arm, Bounine shook Forrester's hand and kissed the wife on the cheek and turned to head uptown. The Forresters crossed Fifth Avenue, presumably on their way to the movies.

Bounine walked as fast as he could, trying hard not to run, but after a block, he broke into a trot. He moved forward; I kept behind. I couldn't tell if he saw me or not; I was guessing he had been trained to see whatever was behind him, but this was a frightened man.

He started west on 14th Street, then seemed to change his mind, and turned towards Union Square. It came to me that, for the first time on this case, I was taking some pleasure; that I was glad he was scared; I was pleased I had him cornered, especially as he entered the Union Square subway station. He fumbled for his token; I hid myself as best I could, but he was so intent on entering the station, he didn't turn around.

After Bounine disappeared down a tunnel to the platform, I put my token in the slot and followed him. No way out for you, I said to myself, as I nodded to a beat cop on the platform, letting the cop know I was one of them.

The platform was almost empty. Bouine walked to the far end of it, and then I let him see me. There was nothing for him to do, no way out.

“Sit down,” I said, indicating the worn wooden bench.“Sit.”

He looked around like a scared animal, a deer in the headlights.

“I have a gun. Just sit,” I said.

“What do you want?” Bounine put his hands in his pockets. He was shivering. It was cold in the subway station; cold and dank.

“Take your hands out. Where I can see them.”

He followed my orders, but he held onto the chocolates.

“What's in the box?”

“Chocolates.”

“Give it to me.”

“Why not?” He passed it over.

With one hand I opened the box, and found only candy.

“I like your American cherry chocolates.”

A young couple, arms linked, appeared on the platform, but they turned away from us, walking to the end where they could make out in private.

“What do you want?” Bounine's voice shook.

“I want you to tell me everything you know.”

“There is not so much.”

“Look, I went to see Edward Forrester. I talked to him. I saw the wife. The Russian wife. If you want, you can talk to me, or I can call the FBI.”

“This is a joke,” he said, but he wasn't laughing. Bounine looked worn out, a man who had given up, who had lost whatever power he had. Still, when he spotted a
man in a tweed coat, he rose.

“Sit down. Who is he? Is he one of yours?”

“Nobody.”

“Sit the fuck down, man. If he's nobody, why were you getting up.”

The tweed coat came closer. I got my ID from my pocket and showed it to him. “Please, walk away,” I said. “Do it now.”

“I don't know more than you know, please, let me go, I want to get my suitcase, and I will return to Moscow, you will never know of me.” Bounine had begun to panic. “I must get to my apartment.”

“Why?”

“I have some work to complete.”

“Listen to me, man, I'm not in the mood to take any crap now, I keep telling you and you don't believe me, but in about two minutes, I'm going to call the cop you probably saw on your way down here, and he will put cuffs on you, and together we will take you to the FBI.”

Bounine looked at me. “I don't think so. This is not so easy for you. You are not welcome by your own people, I think. You are, what do they say, out in the cold?”

“Who killed Rica Valdes?”

“It was not me.”

“Then who? I'm ready to let you off the hook, if you tell me who killed Valdes.”

“Your Mafia. Mr Luca Farigno.”

“Wrong,” I said. “Don't look at the train,” I said as it came into the station. “You're not going anywhere, you hear?”

“Please.”

“Why was your pal Forrester whispering in Adlai Stevenson's ear at the United Nations? Why were you out to dinner with the Forresters?”

The half dozen people on the platform had boarded the train, and after it left, the station was empty.

“I can help you.”

“What kind of help?” he asked, sweating now, a man in a vise, a man trapped in a place he had no one to call.

“Come on, Mike, I know about your little problem. I know your tastes. I
know.
You want your secret between us?”

“I didn't murder Valdes.”

“Come on, man, who will believe it? You set it up. You were the messenger between this Rishkova woman— the Letter Carrier, right? They call her the Letter Carrier, who provided photographs to Valdes to show Ostalsky. You watched Ostalsky from the time he arrived in New York.”