Death Is My Comrade (10 page)

Another step. I could almost reach out and touch her. “I don't know, I haven't seen the morning line on you yet.”

“You
are
cute.” She laughed again, and then she stopped laughing and said: “I heard it on the radio.”

Just one more step was all I needed. The hardest step of all. It always is. “What, the morning line?”

“About poor Ilya. How he was shot, right there in your office. I know who did it.”

Laschenko talked for the first time, his baritone a painfully subdued sound like a man trying not to cough at a concert. “You are making a mistake, Eugenie.”

Far off I heard the wailing ululating whoop of a siren. “I suppose I ought to hurry,” Eugenie said. “Mother will be furious if I don't at least make an appearance at that party. And incidentally, Drum—” this while looking steadily at Laschenko—”will you please stop edging toward me? You make me nervous.”

Laschenko moved. He tried to get behind the lamppost. But he was a big man and the lamppost was just a lamppost. As I took the final step, the little automatic in Eugenie's hand made a sound not much louder than a cap pistol, and Laschenko grunted but remained on his feet. I grabbed Eugenie's wrist and she came against me, not struggling. I got the gun.

“You're very strong,” she said, breathing near my ear. She rubbed against me. Her breath was like a bellows. Then she bit the lobe of my ear, not gently, laughed, and made a try for the gun. She didn't get it. She backed away from me with a calculating look in her big eyes and said: “We'll have to try this again some time, under other circumstances. I'm terribly good at it.”

There was nothing I wanted to say to that.

Even minus the gun, Eugenie's exit was more impressive, if anything, than her entrance. Wiggling her bottom in the tight copper-colored sheath, she walked back to the Mercedes-Benz and climbed in. “There'll be another time, Mr. Laschenko,” she said. “I
am
going to kill you, you know.”

She started the car with a roar. I took a stride toward it. “Please don't stop me, Drum. You can tell the police I'll be at Mother's house any time after two o'clock. They can arrest me there. I've never” been arrested before,” she mused. “It ought to be fun, just this once. I'll try anything once.”

Probably she would. Probably one of these days she'd drop in on the moon and take a nibble out of it and prove it was made of green cheese.

The silver sports car sped away. I stood for a moment watching its taillights. I had that feeling you get when you've seen someone as utterly psychopathic as Eugenie in action, as if I'd just Rip-van-Winkled out of a cave and had to get used to a whole new set of mores and customs.

Laschenko made his way back to the clapboard house under his own power. Eugenie's bullet was imbedded in the fleshy part of his shoulder. He didn't say anything more about the five thousand bucks.

A black, unmarked police sedan with one of those fish-pole antennae pulled to the curb. “This is the place, Lieutenant,” someone said, and doors opened to disgorge four detective-squad bulls.

“This is the place, eh?” a familiar voice echoed.

My night was complete.

Chapter Thirteen

F
or me?” Jack Morley said.

It was Sunday morning. I was shaved, showered, dabbed with after-shave lotion and all spiffed up in a wash-and-wear suit the color they call avocado in the men's clothing stores and we used to call OD in the Army. I had a bouquet of yellow roses in my hand. A uniformed messenger had just delivered it from one of the few Washington florists that do business on Sunday. I had opened the door of my Georgetown apartment to head outside to the Chrysler and then in it to Marianne's place, when I saw Jack Morley standing there ready to knock. That was when he made that remark about the flowers. He wasn't alone. Pappy Piersall stood behind him. They were both as well-groomed as I and dressed almost identically in lampblack suits.

“For Marianne,” Pappy said. “Only you-all will have to send them, Chester.”

“Why,” I demanded, “will I have to send them?”

“We have come to fetch you to a meeting,” Pappy said.

“At Foggy Bottom,” Jack said. Foggy Bottom is the hottest place in Washington in summer. It was going to be a hot day. Foggy Bottom is also where the State Department does business.

“Will you guys cut the Gallagher and Shean routine?” I said.

But Pappy said: “Last night was a doozy.”

And Jack said: “You might have thought it ended things. It didn't.”

Last night, after Lieutenant Creel's echoing arrival,
had
been a doozy. It had everything from a flesh-wounded Semyon Laschenko who wouldn't say anything at Headquarters, to an indignant Police Commissioner Eric Mann who had been summoned from one of Washington's Saturday night parties and who wouldn't stop talking. With, of course, Creel echoing him.

It had Jack and Pappy acting in concert beautifully, as if they had rehearsed their lines, to steer the play away from Police Commissioner Mann. It had Mann in a sweat despite the air-conditioning and it had the late arrival of both Eugenie and an Under-Secretary of State who was on first-name terms with Jack. It had Eugenie, big-eyed and sheath-skirted, lapping up all the excitement as if it was a show put on just for her. It had, ultimately, no resolution.

I made a deposition and signed it the necessary four times, and so did Jack and so did Pappy. Laschenko wouldn't sign anything, and neither would Eugenie. Round about two o'clock it had Laschenko's lawyer, who said he would get a writ of habeus corpus from the first magistrate he could awaken in the wee hours of the morning. About the only thing it didn't have, which in retrospect surprised me, was Lucienne Duhamel.

It had Police Commissioner Mann talking about murder and kidnaping and the inexorable machinery of the law and then, when the Under-Secretary arrived, changing his tune to co-operation and understanding and we-all-belong-to-the-same-team. And it had a final scene which I never got to see because they sent me home to drink Jack Daniels or do whatever I had in mind to do. I drank Jack Daniels and went to bed and got myself groomed to see Marianne.

“Laschenko get his writ?” I asked now, at the apartment door, wondering how long it would take the yellow roses to wilt.

“He got it,” Jack said, “but they can't seem to serve it at the proper jail.”

“In the vernacular,” Pappy said, “he is being taken around the horn.” I scowled. I didn't get it. That meant the cops were shuttling Laschenko from police station to police station so the writ of habeus corpus couldn't catch up with him.

“What for?” I said. The cops, I knew, resorted to taking a prisoner around the horn when they were awaiting the kind of evidence that could get an indictment. But in Laschenko's case that didn't make sense.

“Well, Chester,” Pappy intoned, “it has been decided in the high stratosphere of the upper echelon of top government circles—”

“Meaning Pappy and me and a few other guys in lampblack suits,” Jack cut in.

“—that Laschenko can't hop a jet back to Russia, not for a week or so anyway.”

I asked: “Was he going back?”

“He was,” Jack said. “He had served a double mission here. One: to help get things ready for the Russian Exhibition in New York. Two: to act as host for the top brass of the American Exhibition in Moscow. They leave for Moscow on Tuesday.”

“The trouble is,” Pappy picked up the story, “we don't want Laschenko recognizing one of the members of the American team. So Laschenko goes around the horn.”

“Clear?” Jack asked me.

“Clear as the nose on his face,” Pappy answered for me.

I said: “The hell it is. What member of the American team would that be?”

“It would,” Pappy said, “be the new chief of security.”

“You,” Jack said.

I looked at him. I looked at Pappy. They'd been playing it for laughs, but they weren't kidding now.

Jack said: “Let's get over to Foggy Bottom.”

Pappy used my phone to call a messenger to deliver my yellow roses.

Their faces told you nothing.

They were the new breed of young Washington careerists, Pappy with his bland plump face and mild blue eyes, Jack dark and gaunt with his shell-rimmed glasses, and two other guys about our age I'd never seen before. One of them was the number-two man of Q Section in Central Intelligence, a slat-thin carrot-top named MacReedy. The other was a rangy ex-Davis Cupper named Larned, who was connected with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

They were waiting for us in an office on the second floor of the State Department Building at Foggy Bottom, MacReedy smoking a pipe, Larned pacing a groove in the carpet. Like Jack and Pappy, they both wore lamp-black suits. It is the uniform of the new Washington careerists, and my wash-and-wear suit made me feel like an interloper who didn't know the secret fraternal handshake.

CIA's MacReedy sucked on his pipe. “The big man will be here in a few minutes,” he told Jack after the introductions. He scowled at the pipe, tamped it out in a big copper ash tray and asked Jack: “What about Alluliev's murder? Can it stay under wraps?”

“Yes and no,” Jack told him. “The papers have it. But the story they have is that Alluliev wanted asylum in the West, was trying to barter Russian rocket secrets for it. As for Drum's office as the scene of the crime—” Jack grinned wryly—“we just change the chronology and make one Jack Morley out as a damn fool. I got there before Alluliev did. He'd contacted me in my office, I hadn't taken him seriously. I'd dropped in on Chet. Social call. Alluliev tagged after me, desperate.”

“And got conked inside the office?” Pappy asked doubtfully.

“Outside,” Jack said. “That's been taken care of.”

MacReedy said: “And the kidnaping?”

“No tie-in there, as the papers have it,” Pappy told him crisply, dropping the drawl entirely. “Commissioner Mann's co-operating straight down the line. It was a money snatch plain and simple. The thug on ice is a merchant seaman named Bock, a two-time loser who nobody's going to make a fuss over. The dead one was a Commie.”

“Leo Ring?” MacReedy asked.

Pappy nodded. “Ring was a Commie, but he didn't work up a sweat over it. The only one who knew why Ring was hired to kidnap the Baker twins is the man who did the hiring. That would be Semyon Laschenko, and friend Laschenko is busy going around the horn. You-all see how pretty it is?”

SEC's Larned kept on pacing. He hadn't said a word since the introductions. Every now and then he'd give the door an anxious look. I wondered what he was doing there. Probably, he wondered what I was doing there.

CIA's MacReedy, seated on a corner of the big desk which held down floor space in front of the window, leaned forward and jabbed his empty pipe in my direction. “You come with pretty high recommendations, Drum. Nevertheless I must ask you to keep what is discussed in this room today in strictest confidence.”

“Sure,” I said. “Okay. I gather you're putting a lid on Alluliev's murder and the kidnaping, to keep the Russian-American cultural exchange program from fizzling. That's ironic, in a way, because it's just what Semyon Laschenko wanted.”

“That's one reason,” MacReedy admitted. “But it isn't the important reason.”

Larned gave the door another anxious look. I said: “What is?”

“Ever since he won the Nobel Prize,” Jack explained, “reports have been filtering through the Iron Curtain on Vasili Rodzianko. Though it was officially denied, he wants out. Though he claims to repudiate his book, what information we have says that's a lie too. The book is a ringing denunciation of the Red way of life. Rodzianko feels as strongly about it today as he did when he wrote it. Ilya Alluliev's letter was just one source of information. I could name five or six, and so could MacReedy here, all. in considerably more detail and most of them capable of substantiation.”

“Take our word for that,” MacReedy said. “We know Rodzianko means what he wrote. We know he wants out. And since he was the Reds' fair-haired boy in literary circles for better than twenty years, that adds up to dynamite. But despite all the information we've gathered, the government's official policy was, and must remain, hands off. If Rodzianko comes out, that's great news for the West. But he's got to come out under his own power.”

“Then and only then,” Jack said, “can we think about lining up the lecture tours and Voice of America broadcasts that can stand the Russians on their ears. State and Central Intelligence are in complete accord on that.”

MacReedy, lighting his pipe, said, “Last night a way to get Rodzianko out without official government involvement was dumped in our laps.”

“Which,” Pappy told me, “is where you-all come in, Chester.”

“You mean Alluliev's murder?” I asked. “I don't get it. MacReedy claims CIA already knew the deal on Rodzianko before that but was powerless to act. How does what happened to Alluliev change anything?”

“The West wants and needs Vasili Rodzianko,” MacReedy said. “Vasili Rodzianko wants and needs the West.” He smiled thinly, grudgingly. “If this was a foreign intrigue movie, a spy picture, we'd send an agent parachuting into the suburbs of Moscow, he'd pick up Rodzianko and they'd fight their way out from behind the Iron Curtain.”

“With dogs baying at their heels and the Red Army tripping over its hobnailed boots trying to stop them,” Pappy said.

Jack shook his head. “But this isn't a spy picture. We think we have a way to get Rodzianko out, Chet.”

“How?”

Jack showed me a wolf's grin. “In a regularly scheduled airliner, with all his papers in order.”

I gave Jack a blank look. Expecting him to be as surprised as I was, I glanced at SEC's Larned. For the first time, the rangy man looked quite calm. When our eyes met, he nodded slowly. He had even stopped pacing. He. read the dial of his wrist watch and said: “The man is late.”