The Bourne Deception (27 page)

It began in the early hours of the morning, just past two o’clock, as Oserov boasted to Arkadin afterward.

“With great stealth I broke into their head enforcer’s house, tied him up, and forced him to watch what I did to his family,” Oserov told Arkadin later.

When he was finished, he dragged his victim into the kitchen, where he went to work on him using the fire-reddened tip of a carving knife he slid from a wooden rack. The pain of what Oserov did to him hammered the enforcer out of his state of shock and he began screaming until Oserov cut out his tongue.

An hour later, Oserov was finished. He left him in a pool of his own blood and vomit, alive, but just barely. When the enforcer’s associates came for him as they did each morning to begin their daily patrol, they found the front door flung open, which led them to the abattoir inside. It was then, and only then, that Mikhail Tarkanian entered Nizhny Tagil. By then, the criminals were in such a frenzy that they’d all but forgotten about Arkadin.

“Lev Antonin, I think I can provide the solution to your problem,”

Tarkanian said to the new head of Stas’s gang when he met with him in his office. There were seven heavily armed men standing guard. “I’ll find this killer for you and take care of him.”

“Who are you, stranger? Why would you do this?” Lev Antonin squinted at him suspiciously. He had a gray face with long ears and stubble on his chin and cheeks. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“Who I am is of no importance, except to say that I’m intimately familiar with men such as your murderer,” Tarkanian replied without hesitation. “And as to why I’m here the answer is simple: I want Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

At once Antonin’s expression changed from suspicious to enraged. “And why would you want that fucking whoremonger, that shit-faced miscreant?”

“That’s my business,” Tarkanian said mildly. “Your business is keeping your people alive.”

This was true. Antonin was a pragmatic man, with none of the mad fire that had burned within his predecessor. Tarkanian could read him like a comic book: Clearly, he was all too aware that the current of fear lapping at the knees of his men was undermining both their effectiveness and his authority. He also knew that once fear made its presence felt, it spread like wildfire. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to give away the farm. Arkadin’s head on a platter was what they’d all dreamed of since Arkadin had killed Kuzin and set their world ablaze with bullets and death. Letting go of that dream wouldn’t endear him to his rank and file.

He scrubbed his face with his hands and said, “Fine, but you’ll bring me the killer’s head so all my men can see for themselves the end of this filth. And then if you can find that bastard Arkadin you can have him.”

Naturally enough, Tarkanian did not believe this Neanderthal. He recognized the greed in his yellow eyes and intuited that it was not enough for him to be given the head of the murderer; he wanted Arkadin as well. The two bloody heads would cement his power over his people for all time.

“What Lev Antonin wanted was irrelevant,” Tarkanian told Arkadin afterward. “I had planned for such a treacherous eventuality.”

It would have amused Oserov no end to “find the murderer” for the baboon named Lev Antonin and bring him the freshly cut head, but no, he was to be denied this pleasure. He scowled when Tarkanian told him that Tarkanian himself would find and deliver the “murderer” to Antonin.

“To take the fury out of your heart, I have another assignment for you,”

Tarkanian told him. “A much more important job that only you can do.”

“I strongly suspect he doubted that very much,” Tarkanian told Arkadin later, “but when he heard what I wanted him to do a smirk spread across his face. Poor bastard, he couldn’t help it.”

Tarkanian needed someone to bring to Lev Antonin. But not just anyone—he had to look like a murderer. Moving through the twilit streets of Nizhny Tagil, Tarkanian scoured the bars for a likely victim. Now and again he was forced to sidestep puddles as big as small ponds, caused by the deluge that had only recently been reduced to a light mist. As it had been since dawn the claustrophobically low sky was a dull gray, but now it was marred here and there by bruises of yellow and lavender, as if the storm had brutalized the day.

Tarkanian parked himself outside the most raucous of bars and lit a harsh Turkish cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaling it in a gray cloud as thick as those above his head. Night gathered around him like an acolyte as the drunken laughter spilled out to him, along with the shattering of glass and the chunky exhalations of a fistfight. A moment later a big man, bleeding from the nose and several cuts on his face, staggered out onto the sidewalk.

As he bent over, hands on knees, wheezing and retching, Tarkanian ground out his cigarette under his boot heel, walked over, and delivered a vicious chop to the exposed back of the man’s neck. The drunk pitched forward, hitting his forehead on the pavement with a satisfying smack.

Tarkanian grabbed him under the arms and pulled him into the alley. If any passersby noticed what he was up to none of them gave the slightest indication. All of them hurried on about their business without even a glance in his direction. Life in Nizhny Tagil had trained them to ignore anything that wasn’t their business. It was the only way to keep healthy in this city.

In the deepening shadows of the stinking alley, Tarkanian checked his watch. There was no way to contact Oserov; he’d just have to hope he’d accomplished his part of the plan.

Fifteen minutes later he walked into a bakery and bought the largest layer cake in the glass case. Back in the alley, he dumped the cake and, lifting the man’s severed head by his beer-and blood-damp hair, placed it carefully in the cake box. The glassy eyes stared blankly back at him until he lowered the lid.

Across town he was admitted to Lev Antonin’s office, where the boss was still guarded by his seven heavily armed goons.

“Lev Antonin, as promised I brought you a present,” he said as he placed the box on Antonin’s desk. On the way over, it had grown surprisingly heavy.

Antonin looked from him to the box, evincing little enthusiasm. Signaling to one of his bodyguards, he had him open the box. Then he stood up and peered inside.

“Who the fuck is this?” he asked.

“The murderer.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mikhail Gorbachev,” Tarkanian said sardonically, “how the hell should I know?”

Antonin’s face was particularly ugly when he smirked. “If you don’t know his name, how d’you know he’s the one?”

“I caught him in the act,” Tarkanian said. “He had broken into your house, he was about to kill your wife and children.”

Antonin’s face darkened and, snatching up the phone, he dialed a number. His face relaxed somewhat when he heard his wife’s voice.

“Are you all right? Is everyone safe?” He frowned. “What do you mean?

What—? Who the fuck is this? Where’s my wife?” His face had grown dark again and he looked at Tarkanian. “What the fuck is going on?”

Tarkanian kept his voice calm and even. “Your family is safe, Lev Antonin, and they’ll remain safe as long as I have free passage to take Arkadin. If you interfere in any way—”

“I’ll surround the house, my men will break in—”

“And your wife and three children will die.”

Antonin whipped out a Stechkin handgun and aimed it at Tarkanian. “I’ll shoot you right here where you stand, and I promise your death won’t be quick.”

“In that event, your wife and children will die.” Tarkanian’s voice had an edge now. “Whatever you do to me will be done to them.”

Antonin glared at Tarkanian, then dropped the Stechkin on the desktop next to the cake box. He looked ready to tear his hair out.

“The idea with Neanderthals,” Tarkanian said to Arkadin later, “is to lead them by the hand through all their possible responses, showing them the futility of each one.”

He said, “Listen to me, Lev Antonin, you have what we bargained for. If you still want everything, try to remember that pigs get slaughtered.”

Then Tarkanian left the office to find Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.

Tracy Atherton and Alonzo Pecunia Zuigapresented themselves on the front steps of Don Fernando Hererra’s house at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, bathed in brilliant sunshine amplified by a virtually cloudless sky.

Bourne, with his spade beard and new hairstyle, had shopped for clothes suitable for a distinguished professor from Madrid. Their last stop was an optician’s, where he purchased a pair of contact lenses the color of the professor’s eyes.

Hererra lived in the Santa Cruz
barrio
of Seville, in a beautiful threestory stucco house painted white and yellow, whose upper-story windows were guarded by magnificent wrought-iron balconies. Its facade formed one side of a small plaza in the center of which was an old well that had been turned into an octagonal fountain. Small haberdashery and crockery shops lined the other three sides, their quaint fronts shaded by palm and orange trees.

The door opened at their knock, and when Tracy gave him their names a well-dressed young man escorted them into the high-ceilinged wood-and-marble entryway. There were fresh white and yellow flowers in a tall porcelain vase on a polished fruitwood table in the center, while on a marquetry sideboard an engraved silver bowl was filled to overflowing with fragrant oranges.

A piano melody, soft and sinuous, came to them. They could see an Old World drawing room with a wall of ebony bookshelves illuminated by raking light from a line of French doors that led out onto an inner courtyard. There was an elegant escritoire, a matching pair of sofas of cinnamon-colored leather, a sideboard on which were arranged five delicate orchids, like girls at a beauty pageant. But the drawing room was dominated by an antique spinet piano behind which sat a large man with an enormous shock of luxuriant white hair brushed straight back off his wide, intelligent forehead. His body was bent in an attitude of exacting concentration, and there was a pencil gripped between his teeth so that he looked like he was in pain. In fact, he was composing a song with a rather florid melody that owed a debt to any number of Iberian virtuosos, as well as to certain flamenco folk tunes.

As they entered, he looked up. Don Hererra had startling blue, slightly exophthalmic eyes, making him look something like a praying mantis as he rose, unfolding from the piano bench in stages. He had dark, leathery skin, wind-burned and sun-wrinkled, marking him as an inveterate outdoorsman. His body was lean and flat, as if he had been constructed in two dimensions instead of three. He appeared to wear the years he’d spent in the Colombian oil fields as a second skin.

Taking the pencil from between his teeth, he smiled warmly. “Ah, my distinguished guests, what a pleasure.” He kissed the back of Tracy’s hand and shook Bourne’s. “Dear lady. And Professor, it’s an honor to welcome you both to my house.” He gestured toward one of the leather sofas. “Please make yourselves comfortable.” He was dressed in an open-neck white shirt under an immaculate cream-colored suit of lightweight silk that looked soft as a baby’s cheek. “Would you care for sherry, or something stronger, perhaps?”

“Sherry and some Garrotxa, perhaps, if you have it,” Bourne said, playing his part to the hilt.

“An excellent idea,” Hererra proclaimed, calling in the young man for the order. He wagged a long, tapered forefinger at Bourne. “I like the way your palate works, Professor.”

Bourne looked fatuously pleased, while Tracy carefully hid her amusement from the older man.

The young man arrived carrying a chased silver salver on which was set a cut-crystal decanter of sherry, three glasses of the same cut crystal, along with a platter of the sheep cheese, crackers, and a wedge of deep orange quince jelly. He set the salver down on a low table and departed as silently as he had come.

Their host poured the sherry and handed out the glasses. Hererra raised his glass, and they followed suit.

“To the unsullied pursuit of scholarly inquiry.” Don Hererra sipped his sherry, and Bourne and Tracy tasted theirs. As they ate the cheese and quince jelly, he said, “So tell me your opinion. Is the world, in fact, going to war against Iran?”

“I don’t have enough information to make a judgment,” Tracy said, “but in my opinion Iran has been flaunting their nuclear program in our faces for too long.”

Don Hererra nodded sagely. “I think finally the United States has gotten it right. This time, Iran has provoked us too far. But to contemplate another world war, well, to sum up, war is bad for business for most, but uncommonly good for a few.” He swung around. “And Professor, what is your learned opinion?”

“When it comes to politics,” Bourne said, “I maintain a strictly neutral posture.”

“But surely, sir, on such a grave issue that affects us all, you must come down on one side or the other.”

“I assure you, Don Hererra, I’m far more interested in the Goya than I am in Iran.”

The Colombian gave him a disappointed look, but then wasted no more time in getting down to business. “Seńorita Atherton, I have given you full access to my unearthed treasure, and now you have brought with you the Prado’s—and by extension all of Spain’s—leading expert on Goya. So.” He spread his hands.

“What is the verdict?”

Tracy, smiling noncommittally, said, “Professor Zuiga, why don’t you provide the answer?”

“Don Hererra,” Bourne said, taking his cue, “the painting in your possession, attributed to Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, is in fact not painted by him at all.”

Hererra frowned and for a moment his lips pursed. “Do you mean to tell me, Professor Zuiga, that I have been harboring a fake?”

“That depends on your definition of a fake,” Bourne said.

“With all due respect, Professor, either it is a fake or it isn’t.”

“You may look at it that way, Professor, but there are others. Let me explain by saying that the painting, though by no means commanding the price you have set on it, is far from worthless. You see, tests I’ve made confirm that it was produced in Goya’s studio. It may even have been sketched out by the master himself before he died. In any event, there can be little doubt that the design is his. The actual painting, however, lacks the particular slightly mad attack of his brushstrokes, though it mimics these quite convincingly even to the trained eye.”