Death Is My Comrade (11 page)

Then MacReedy looked concerned. “He wouldn't back out?”

Larned shook his head. “He'll be here.”

MacReedy sucked on his pipe some more. It made bubbling noises. Jack and Pappy began to talk about the Washington Senators' Murderers' Row. MacReedy and Larned discussed a mutual fund in which MacReedy had invested some money. I thought about Marianne and the twins.

Came a polite knock at the door. Larned jumped to answer it.

Mike Rodin's red-haired green-eyed girl Friday, looking like a million bucks on ice in a green raw-silk dress, drifted into the room.

“Miss Champion,” Larned said.

“Mr. Larned.”

She looked at him frostily. No love was lost there. I remembered that her boss had been getting his lumps from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Larned waited at the door, not shutting it. Mike Rodin, looking as fit and healthy as his publicity pictures, strode into the room. I recalled how I'd had to hold him out of the Marienbad water yesterday while Miss Champion shot a hypo into his arm. Whatever had hit him, the recovery was amazing. His broad shoulders back, his waist sucked in, his pugnacious jaw outthrust, his shaved head and slanting eyes giving him that Oriental look, Mike Rodin came into the room as if he owned it.

“Where's the Secretary?” he snapped.

“I'm representing the State Department, Mr. Rodin,” Jack said. “My name is Morley.”

Rodin nodded his head half an inch, and gave it another half-inch nod when he saw me. He smiled at SEC's Larned as if one of these days he intended to have him with an apple in his mouth for dinner. He said: “I understand that the SEC, the Justice Department and the Immigration people are about ready to deport me.” Larned looked down at the floor apologetically. Mike Rodin raised his eyebrows at Pappy. “You Immigration, young man?”

“Special Agent, FBI. Piersall's the name.”

Rodin gave Pappy the same sort of smile he had given Larned, and said: “Don't think I couldn't fight my way out of this. The only time Mike Rodin gets deported is when Mike Rodin wants to be deported. I could have SEC singing a different tune inside of a week, if I wanted to.”

“The case the Commission has against you,” Larned said stiffly, “is air-tight.”

MacReedy just looked at him, and Larned started pacing again. Mike Rodin snapped at Pappy: “As for proving I entered the States illegally twenty-odd years ago, Piersall, you'd have a gay old time trying to do that. Right?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Rodin,” Pappy said cheerfully.

Mike Rodin grumbled: “Just to get the record straight, I have not been frightened or intimidated by any bureaucratic shenanigans. I am here only because I want to be here.”

I figured he might go on beating his chest all morning, and I still wanted to see Marianne. I said: “Why would that be, Mr. Rodin?”

“Drum, yesterday you said you had a letter from my daughter. Early this morning the Secretary of State called and read the letter to me. He also said that the State Department and the CIA had several intelligence reports corroborating the contents of that letter. That's why I'm here. It is the
only
reason I'm here.”

Miss Champion's green eyes never left Mike Rodin's face while he spoke. He went on: “I'm going to do you people a favor. I'm going to get Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia.” He glowered in turn at me, at Larned, at Mac-Reedy, Jack and Pappy. Still glowering, he said, “Don't think I can't do it.”

I said suddenly: “Well, well, well. Rodin—Rodzianko. I'll be damned.”

“He's sharp,” Mike Rodin said grudgingly. Then,
sotto voce
to me: “I was born in Tula, Russia, fifty-nine years ago. Name: Mikhail Rodzianko. Parents dead. I have a brother named Vasili. I hear he writes books. He thinks I'm dead. I fled Russia during the White counter-revolution in the early twenties. I was a White, Mr. Drum. Our parents in Tula owned a large farm. They were executed for that reason and no other. I spent one year in Krasnoyarsk Krai. That is a labor camp in Central Siberia. There was a riot. I escaped. It was assumed that I died. My barracks, you see, had been gutted by fire.” Rodin smiled at Pappy. “This is, of course, off the record.”

Miss Champion touched Mike Rodin's hand. “Does it matter now?” For some reason her voice broke on the words.

Mike Rodin shrugged. “I made my way from Vladivostok to Shanghai to Hong Kong. Worked my way across the Pacific on a freighter.” He smiled at Pappy again. “Next stop: Mexico. By 1931, I was in the United States. Is that what you suspected, Drum?”

“It was only a guess. The name.”

Mike Rodin turned to Jack. “Do you have a picture of Vasili Rodzianko here, of my brother?”

Without a word Jack produced a dust jacket of Vasili Rodziariko's Nobel Prize-winning book. Taking up the entire back was a head-and-shoulders photo-portrait of Vasili Rodzianko. He looked a few years younger than Mike Rodin and he had thick white hair. But the slanting eyes and the stubborn, outthrust jaw were the same. Mike Rodin took the picture, covered it from the forehead up with his hand.

When he did that, the similarity between his face and the photograph on the dust jacket was astonishing.

Mike Rodin dropped the dust jacket on the desk and looked at his watch. “If I'm leaving for Moscow on Tuesday,” he said calmly, “there are about five hundred things I have to do between now and then. So if you gentlemen will excuse me? Miss Champion can arrange the details on my behalf.”

She said: “I ought to go with you—Mike.”

He gave her a scathing look, raked the rest of us with his eyes so as not to make us feel left out, took three big strides toward the door, slammed it behind him and was gone.

Jack asked Miss Champion: “Well, does he or doesn't he?”

“He approves of Mr. Drum,” she said coolly. “He'd have told me if he didn't.”

Jack sighed. “The first hurdle.”

“The second, Chester,” Pappy said, “is you.”

“You saw the picture, Drum,” MacReedy told me. “Shave off Rodzianko's hair and they almost look like twins. Rodin will change places with his brother. He will have a valid American passport, and a Russian visa. Vasili Rodzianko will leave Russia with them.”

“What,” I asked, “happens to Mike Rodin?”

Jack said: “He stays on in his brother's place, until Vasili Rodzianko crosses the border.”

“That's great for Rodzianko,” I said. “But what about Rodin? What happens then?”

“It doesn't really matter,” Miss Champion said bitterly. Her eyes were shining with tears. She turned her back to us and stood at the window.

Larned told me: “Mike Rodin is dying, Drum. He has an incurable bone cancer. Surgery is impossible and it's spread too far for radiation to help. He has, at the outside, six months to live.”

“So what happens to him, what happens after the impersonation is discovered,” MacReedy said, “doesn't matter. By then, if things go smoothly, you and Vasili Rodzianko would have flown out of Russia.”

I think I smiled. “Me and Vasili Rodzianko,” I said. “Why don't you give me something easy to do, like kidnaping Krushchev?”

Pappy laughed. Jack smiled. MacReedy and Larned looked, respectively, studious and grim.

Miss Champion turned around. Her green eyes were all right now. “Mike—Mr. Rodin—has gone over all this with me. He can change places with his brother, Mr. Drum, but he'll need help. For one thing, he is a sick man. For another, Vasili Rodzianko hasn't seen him in more than thirty years, and thinks he is dead. For a third, there is the matter of actually making the switch. And most important, in the event of—shall we say—unforeseen complications, someone will have to be on hand to help Vasili Rodzianko escape from Russia.” Her eyes got shiny again. “It would be a tragedy if Mr. Rodin were to sacrifice the last few months of his life for nothing.”

“That's where you come in, Chet,” Jack told me earnestly. “You'll be listed with the Exhibition team as Chief of Security. That will be your official capacity. You won't be a government employee because the Exhibit is sponsored by private interests this year. You will have no government connection whatever.”

“In case we don't make it,” I said.

“Okay, in case you don't make it. You'll be on your own over there. After a few days it will be arranged for you and ‘Mike Rodin' to fly home on a regularly scheduled SAS liner via Helsinki, and it ought to work out like that.”

“You can see,” MacReedy took it up smoothly, before I could get a word in edgewise, “why we couldn't send a CIA agent. With the exception of this meeting here, the mission is one with which the government wants no official connection.”

“I didn't know your boys carried around sandwich signs,” I said.

MacReedy reddened. “Morley suggested your name, Drum. I never heard of you till this morning. You've gone on undercover missions for the State Department before, and Morley said—”

Miss Champion cut him off. “If Mr. Drum is afraid to go, please don't twist his delicate little arm. We'll find someone else.”

Jack scowled at her, and got a frosty stare right back. There was only one man in Miss Champion's life. The rest of us were dirt. “Here's the point, Chet,” Jack said. “This is not a government mission. It won't even be paid for in government funds, and I don't have to tell you no CIA agent or State Department man can accept private employment. Besides, the best agent in the world is often a one-shooter, provided he has the background. Which I don't have to tell you you have.”

“What they mean, Mr. Drum,” Miss Champion said coolly, “is that because you are in business for yourself and because you happen to qualify, you are more expendable than a full-time agent.”

“Don't you like anybody?” I asked her.

Inadvertently her eyes moved to the door. As good an answer as I was likely to get.

“For any other agent,” Jack said, “we'd have to invent a cover. You've got a natural one. You're a private eye with something of an international reputation. You'd be just the man private business interests might be expected to select as chief of security for the “Moscow Exhibit.”

“They didn't—until now,” I said dryly.

MacReedy asked, a little impatiently, “Do you want the job or don't you?”

“I haven't been offered a job. But suppose I say yes. Suppose I say yes and Laschenko gets to Russia while I'm there.”

“You'd be dead,” Pappy said matter-of-factly. “But he won't get there. We'll keep him on ice.”

Miss Champion inserted a cigarette in a long black holder, and lit it. “You say you haven't been offered a job. Here is the offer: a magnanimous offer, I think, from a very brave man.” Her red lips parted to blow a smoke ring. “All expenses, Mr. Drum—and ten thousand dollars.”

I looked at her for a moment. It was not the kind of offer you could say no to right away. My rates, nudged up by inflation, are a hundred dollars a day. But a private eye does not work every day, five days a week.

But there were Marianne and the twins. I hadn't seen Marianne yet. I had seen Mrs. Gower come for the twins last night. There wasn't any message for me. And come to think of it, it was strange that Marianne hadn't called this morning either. What had Pappy said?
You ought to marry the girl.

It wasn't that. I had tried marriage once and it hadn't worked. But I liked to think Marianne needed me, and all of a sudden the fact that she hadn't called was beginning to gnaw at me. If she didn't watch herself, Dr. Nickerson had told me, she could be a very sick girl. If that had happened, now, and if there was anything I could do, I wasn't about to go traipsing off to Russia.

Cut it out, I told myself. You're acting like an old lady. Nothing's wrong with Marianne.

“All expenses, Mr. Drum,” Miss Champion said again, as if taunting me to refuse the offer, “and ten thousand dollars.”

And MacReedy said: “I don't want to wave the flag at you, Drum, but if the West can succeed in getting Vasili Rodzianko out he'll put the lie to the Russian claim that he repudiated his book. I don't have to tell you what that can mean in the neutralist countries, especially since Rodzianko's name has been highly touted by the Russians themselves for twenty years now. And I don't have to tell you what it can mean in the Red satellite countries.” Mac-Reedy repeated: “So I don't want to wave the flag at you—”

“Then don't. There's a moral question involved in squelching a murder investigation, too, but you people spent the first ten minutes here gloating over how you managed that.”

“But it's an open-and-shut case,” MacReedy protested. “Laschenko killed Alluliev, and he has diplomatic immunity. It's open and shut, I tell you.”

I went to the door. “No murder investigation ever was or ever will be.”

Jack came right after me. “You turning down this job?”

“I don't know. I'll have to let you know.”

Miss Champion's smile was almost sweet.

“Today,” MacReedy said. “Let us know today.”

I nodded. Miss Champion looked contemptuous, Larned indifferent, MacReedy disappointed, Jack troubled. The only one who smiled as I got out of there was Pappy.

He said: “If you shake a leg you can get over there right after those yellow roses.”

I shook a leg.

Chapter Fourteen

M
rs. Gower opened the door for me. There were stars in her eyes. You could have driven a truck through her smile.

“If I were twenty years younger, Chester Drum,” she said, “I'd give Mrs. Baker a run for her money.” She stood on tiptoe and grabbed at my lapels and planted a moist kiss on my cheek.

Marianne's voice, behind her, sounded strained. “Who is it, Mrs. Gower?”

“Oh, a fellow named Prince Charming.”