Death Is My Comrade (12 page)

“Hey,” I protested, “cut it out.”

“Listen,” Mrs. Gower said in a whisper, “are you doing anything today? I don't want to be a busybody, but Mrs. Baker can use some fun. You know, in Rock Creek Park, or maybe a drive down to Virginia or something? She's been acting funny. She won't let the twins out of her sight. I'm sure it's nothing a day in the—”

“Chet?” Marianne called. “Is that you, Chet?”

“I ought to mind my own business,” Mrs. Gower went on, not smiling now, “but several times she started to call you, at least she said she was going to call you, and each time she hung up, and once I caught her at the phone looking like she was ready to cry.”

Marianne was waiting in the doorway of the nursery, a finger to her lips. “They're sleeping.”

I took her hand, led her through the hall to the living room. Mrs. Gower sailed past us into the kitchen and started clattering pots and pans in there.

Marianne was wearing a light blue blouse and a dark blue skirt. Her blond hair hung loose, framing the deep tan of her face. She wore no makeup. She didn't need any. But there were smudges under her eyes and when she tried to smile her full lower lip trembled.

“The flowers are lovely,” she said. They had been arranged in a cut-glass vase on the piano.

“I had some business,” I said. “I would have been over earlier. I've been thinking of you all morning.”

Still holding her hand, I pulled her toward me. She was pliant in my arms, but passive as I kissed her. After a while her lips formed words an inch from my mouth. “I wish you wouldn't do that. I … Chet, there aren't any words to thank you for what you did last night. But I just want you to know that I.…” She started to cry. She turned around so I wouldn't see.

I touched her shoulder. She didn't turn back toward me. I placed my hands on the curves of her hips. I kissed the nape of her neck. I could feel her stiffen.

“I said I wish you wouldn't do that.”

“What's the matter?”

“Now you're mad at me.”

“I'm not mad at you.”

“Then mad at yourself. That's worse.”

“I've got nothing against myself,” I said lightly. “Mrs. Gower thinks I'm Prince Charming.”

Marianne turned and smiled a little, then she sat down on the piano bench with her back to me. The fragrance of the yellow roses filled the room.

“I couldn't sleep all night,” Marianne said slowly. “Even after Mrs. Gower brought the twins back. I was thinking.” She ran a finger from the high notes to the low on the piano, softly. Back again. Her shoulders lifted as she took a deep breath. “Chet?” Her voice was very small. I could hardly hear the words. “Chet, do you … want to marry me?”

“I don't know,” I said quickly, without thinking.

High notes to the low again. “Used merchandise. That's what I get for asking. Shameless hussy.”

“Marianne, I—”

“I know. Chester Drum isn't the marrying kind. Think nothing of it, my dear sir. It is a habit with me. Whenever I get an eligible male alone for five minutes I up and pop the question.” Her voice was thin and high and ready to break. “I've had just offers and offers. They all say yes.”

“Cut it out, Marianne.”

“Then say no.”

“I don't want to say no.”

“Then say yes. But if you said yes I would then say you have to get a nice sane and safe job somewhere like—”

“Like Wally had?”

Then Marianne really started to cry. I'd wanted her to. She was torturing herself. I stood behind her and put both hands on her shoulders and kneaded the flesh there.

“Make me a drink,” she said after a while. “As hairy as an orang-utang.”

“It's too early in the day.”

She swung around on the piano stool. There were tears on her cheeks. “I had it all planned,” she said. “Damn it, why couldn't you just say no?”

The words came slowly. I had used them once, years ago, to someone else, and they'd brought nothing but grief. “Because I love you, Marianne.”

She shut her eyes. The faintest of smiles touched her lips. “But you won't marry me?”

“Not on your terms. I can't.”

“And if I said yes—on your terms?”

“You wouldn't.”

“I couldn't. I have the twins. After Wally, I thought I was immune. I loved the twins, sure, but I thought there was a little place way down deep, my special place, and no matter what happened, ever, to anyone, I could go down there and be all right. But I died last night, Chet. I died a hundred times.” She asked abruptly, opening those brown eyes of hers that always surprised you, framed as they were by the platinum blond of her hair: “Your work is more important to you than anything in the world, isn't it?”

“That's the wrong way to put it. It's what I am. It's me. That's all. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you and the twins. You know that.”

Marianne's smile was fleeting and wistful. She must have known we were going around in circles. “Then prove it—by giving up your work. I couldn't take it, not now, not any more, waiting nights, not knowing where you are or who's going after you with a gun, or those trips you take.”

“Could you see me as a white-collar worker behind a desk?”

For the first time Marianne's smile was genuine. “With a pot belly, telling stale jokes at the water cooler and getting a little bit drunk at the company Christmas party? No. No, I couldn't. That wouldn't be Chester Drum.”

I felt awkward, watching the smile fade from Marianne's face. I asked lightly: “So where do we go from here?”

“I don't know.”

“Status quo ante?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. We'd just wind up hurting each other.” Marianne's voice got high and thin again but her tone was flippant which, knowing Marianne, meant she was trying her damnedest not to cry. “Besides, they tell me I'm a very eligible widow-gal type. And the twins need a family, a real family with a father and all. One of these days I'm liable to up and get married. The only thing the lucky man won't get,” Marianne went on, still lightly, still trying her damnedest not to cry, “is much of a dowry. Wally's insurance came to ten thousand, or twenty with double indemnity. But I couldn't work for six months, and money goes so fast in Washington, and there's Mrs. Gower to pay, and
View
doesn't exactly load down its staffers with gold.”

“Why don't you request a transfer?”

“You shouldn't have to ask me that.”

There were no more words for a while. I remembered Mrs. Gower's suggestion. “How about a spin down to tidewater V.A.? There's a place I know serves the biggest—”

“I'd rather not, Chet. Not today.”

“Walk in Rock Creek Park, then?”

“I think I'd rather just stay home with the twins, thanks.”

We talked for a while longer, inconsequentially, and then Marianne walked me to the door. I started to take her into my arms.

“I wish you wouldn't—” she began. Then my mouth closed on hers. At first she was stiff and then suddenly not stiff at all but holding me fiercely and one of us, or maybe both of us, made a little deep-throated sound as her body fitted itself against mine and her lips parted.

“That's enough, I think,” she said shakily after a while, drawing her face back far enough to talk. Her eyes looked up at me. “You're implacable even when you kiss.”

“Or when I'm in love.”

As I went across the sidewalk to my car Marianne called after me: “Status quo ante.”

Then she blew me a kiss, and then the Chrysler took over.

The lawyer's name was Johnny Tey. His office was in the Farrell Building down the hall from mine, but this being Sunday I saw him at home. He had a small ranch-style house ten miles south of Washington, in Alexandria. After we had chatted a few minutes and after his wife had made us a pair of tall cool gin and tonics, he asked:

“Business or social call, Chet?”

“I want to put some money in a trust fund.”

“Who for? Relatives?”

“Two six-month-old boys. I'm their godfather. Is there any way I could do it so I couldn't touch the money myself even in a weak moment?”

He gave me a strange look. “Sure. That's called an irrevocable trust. But a man in your line of work shouldn't set it up that way. You don't draw a steady paycheck, you know, Chet. You're liable to need the money one of these years.”

“That's just it. I want to make sure it's theirs, for keeps, while I have it. To be drawn when they're eighteen, with their mother as trustee?”

Tey shrugged. “It's your money.”

“How soon can you fix the papers?”

“Monday morning, if you have the money.”

“I'll have it,” I said. “Would ten thousand bucks, put in trust now, send a couple of kids through college eighteen years from now?”

“Sure, unless inflation runs wild. We could invest the fund in blue-chip stocks. But where the hell did you get ten thousand bucks?”

“I'm about to start earning it,” I said.

We shook hands, and a while later I drove home, having told Tey I would drop in to his office on Monday morning. When I got home I felt a little less implacable and a little more human. I stood in the hall near the phone table and stared into the hall mirror. I suddenly liked my face, up to and including the little knife scar on the right cheek. “She loves you, you dope,” I said out loud.

Then long distance got me Mike Rodin's Maryland number. Miss Champion was surprised to hear from me.

Chapter Fifteen

W
e got a Capital Airlines Viscount to New York on Tuesday, the 18th of June. Miss Champion went with us that far. I sat across the aisle from them on the one-hour flight. If Miss Champion ever took her eyes off Mike Rodin's face, I never noticed it.

Rodin was traveling under the cover name of Williams. He had a passport to prove it, and he wore a brown toupee to hide America's most famous shaved head besides Yul Brynner's.

The rest of the American team had left Washington the night before and would catch an earlier transocean flight out of New York. I had spent Monday with a certified check for ten thousand bucks and Johnny Tey's trust papers. I hadn't said good-bye to Marianne. If things went according to schedule, we'd land in Moscow Wednesday morning local time, and I'd be on my way out with Vasili Rodzianko forty-eight hours later. I'd get back to Washington by Saturday. That is, if things went according to schedule. They weren't going to, but I didn't know that yet.

Monday night Jack and Pappy had given me the final rundown. I committed to memory what biographical information on Vasili Rodzianko they thought necessary. He lived, probably under house arrest, in a dacha forty-five miles north of Moscow, in the monastery town of Zagorsk. His wife was dead. He had a daughter named Galina who was with the Bolshoi ballet and a son named Mikhail, after his brother, who was an engineering student at Moscow University.

I would have a Russian contact in Moscow, arranged by MacReedy and the CIA. I didn't know his identity yet; he would approach me. The contact words were “juvenile delinquent.”

Pappy assured me that Laschenko was still going around the horn. For her attempted murder, the State Department had declared Eugenie
persona non grata.
Lucienne Duhamel had taken her into hiding.

Miss Champion came close to making a scene at New York International Airport. “It isn't right, Mike,” she said as we waited in the new Pan-Am building for our flight. “It isn't right. Why does it have to happen to you?”

Giving her a cold smile and then a warm one, Mike Rodin assured her that for the next couple of days at least he would have the time of his life. “I haven't been overseas in almost thirty years,” he said. “I haven't seen my brother or his family. I've been so damn busy making money I've forgotten how to live. These next few days.…”

He said nothing about what would happen after the next few days, but he succeeded in cheering her up. I drifted away from them, letting them talk. For a guy who was saying good-bye to his adopted country for the last time and who was flying to his own funeral, Mike Rodin seemed unexpectedly cheerful. But even cheered up, Miss Champion behaved as you would have expected: as if she were sitting at her lover's wake.

After a while the P.A. announcer blared: “Attention, please. Pan-American World Airways announces the departure of Flight 630 to Copenhagen. All aboard for Flight 630, Pan-Am's Jet Clipper service nonstop to Copenhagen. All aboard, please.”

“So soon?” Miss Champion cried. Her usually cold face was pathetically vulnerable. Mike Rodin kissed her and she clung for a moment, and then Mike and I joined the line of tourists filing to the gate with their tickets.

Our plane was one of the new Boeing 707 Intercontinentals that could make it nonstop across the drink to any European city. It would touch down at Copenhagen, where an SAS twin-jet Caravelle would take us the rest of the way to Moscow. We boarded, received a toothpaste smile from the pert stewardess, found our seats and strapped in. Pretty soon a tow truck hauled the big Boeing out to the runway. Mike Rodin had the window seat and looked out. “That poor kid,” he said. It was the first and last time he'd have anything to say about the dedicated Miss Champion.

Five minutes later, with the Intercontinental's sweptback wings thrusting at the sky in a steep climb, we were airborne. Destination—Moscow.

Mike Rodin was dozing as we made our landing approach a dozen hours later in the SAS Caravelle. I fastened his seat belt for him and peered out the window. I saw Moscow, sprawling almost from horizon to horizon—the fifth biggest city on earth, a city of yellow industrial smoke and rank on rank of low, huddled, dun-colored buildings with here and there the unexpected cobalt blue of an onion dome or the soaring gingerbread tower of a Stalin-Gothic skyscraper. This, I thought, was as far behind the Iron Curtain as you could get. This was the hub. This was the spider, crouching many-legged at the center of its web.