House Haunted (21 page)

“The bed,” she said simply.

Instead, Jan put his hands around her neck.

She stiffened. She looked into Jan's eyes with contempt and reached to activate the call button on her belt.

Jan pushed her against the wall, holding her neck tight with one hand while ripping the call beeper from her grasping hands. He dropped it, returned both hands to her neck and redoubled the pressure.

“Die,” he spat.

She hissed a loud silent scream, and her face turned bright red and then purple. Her eyes opened wide. The mottling of her face only made her look as ugly as she was—not the hidden deformity of the nun, but true ugliness. Jan's throttling hands lifted her off the ground. Her hanging was complete, free of gravity. A stain spread on her smock at her crotch as her face froze in place.

When Jan let go of her, the body collapsed to the floor and a hissing, her last breath, vented into the atmosphere.

Jan opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. He closed the door behind him.

“Quickly,” Bridget's voice said close-by his ear. “As I told you.”

He turned right and walked purposefully to the end of the hallway. It was the beginning of a trip he had taken many times before. There followed a long, tense walk through the maze. Jan's heart seized as he recognized the turnoff for the hall with the two doors (“Pain!”). He heard the husky, deep, begging cries of the old woman, very close. He hurried on.

Soon he was in unfamiliar territory. There came to him the faint smell of cabbage, of other vegetables—carrots, potatoes, meat. These were smells he had not sampled in more than a month, and he stopped dead as if hypnotized, tasting them with his nostrils. “My God. . .” he said, beginning to tremble, a precursor to weeping.

“Jan! Go on!” Bridget urged.

He stumbled ahead, as if his roots had been pulled from the spot. The smells strengthened, and now there were voices—not cries of madness but laughter, true conversation. He passed a low wall, heard the clanking of silverware, the hiss of cooking steam. Two women's voices, arguing politics; one of them saying, “Walesa is a
great
man, a saint!” and the other grunting, giving in to the point, begrudgingly, “Well . . . maybe not a
saint
, though. . .”

Jan continued. There were office doors cut into the concrete walls now, painted a cheery blue, with smoked-glass windows set into them. He heard typing, the ring of a telephone.

“Turn left, Jan.”

He thought of the woman with hair on her chin making him turn right, turn left. He nearly laughed in his nervousness. “This one, Jan.”

He had walked by an entrance. He felt Bridget close-by. He backtracked to stand before a large wooden door with no window, no sign on it, a smooth polished aluminum doorknob.

“Turn the doorknob and go in.”

He rubbed his hands together, hesitating. Then down the hall he heard two voices, two men walking side by side, talking.

“
Go
,” Bridget said.

He turned the knob.

He entered a spacious office. There was an empty secretary's desk; behind her small partition, the room opened to luxurious dimensions. There was green, thick-piled carpeting on the floor. Plants in large pots bookended the filing cabinets. A deep red leather chair with a coat draped over it squatted in one corner. A long, polished wooden table abutted the far wall. Lit from above, it showed off models of several large sailing vessels. Against another wall, behind the partition, was a huge desk with chairs in front of it, and a tall leather swivel chair of the same wine-red color as the other.

“Walk,” Bridget whispered.

Jan stepped around the partition and all the way into the room. A stout man with his uniform tie loosened sat behind the desk. In front of him on the desk was a bottle of vodka and two glasses, which he was filling. The bottle was half empty. He handed the second glass to a man who now sat down in the wine-colored swivel chair. The man in uniform behind the desk stopped pouring his own vodka and looked up at Jan; when the man on the other side of the desk turned to look at him also, Jan was startled to see how much he resembled himself.

“Who are you?” the stout man behind the desk said, in a curt, hoarse voice.

“Go to the coat and reach inside the right pocket,” Bridget said. Jan strode across the room, lifted the coat from the leather chair and drew a pistol from its pocket. A fat silencer was screwed onto the barrel.

“Use it,” Bridget's voice said, urgently.

“What—” the stout official was saying, rising from his chair as Jan turned and shot him in the chest and throat. He sat down heavily, blood pouring copiously from his mouth and down over his uniform. He tried to gag the flow, to speak or scream. Jan shot him again, and his face erupted in blood. He fell forward to the desk.

Jan turned the gun to the other man, who stood and stepped back, away from the desk. He looked at Jan calmly and moved lithely into the center of the room. He was dressed impeccably, Italian tailoring, his thin red tie knotted to perfection.

“I'm sure this shooting is none of my business,” he said to Jan, beginning in Russian and then repeating and changing to Polish. “You're Polish Intelligence, I take it? I'm sure our friend Stefan here had his enemies.” He smiled, and now Jan saw how nervous he really was. “What I'm saying is,” he said, his cool demeanor beginning to crumble, his eyes darting left and right, back to Jan, searching for any kind of opening, “I hope we can work something out.”

“Shoot him, Jan,” Bridget said.

Jan aimed. The man looked at Jan imploringly, and Jan hesitated. “Damn it, man, call Roskolov in Moscow! He's KGB like me! He knew about the smuggling—it was all so
innocent
! A few cases a month! One of them went to Roskolov for his Kremlin buddies. Hell, two can go to you if you want!”

“Shoot him,” Bridget repeated.

Jan fired a single shot into the man's forehead. “You . . . can . . .” the man choked out, before he collapsed and was silent.

“Quickly, Jan—take his clothes.”

Jan went to the man, trying not to look at his contorted face as he removed his clothing. Everything was nearly a perfect fit, even his shoes, which were of fine leather and looked English.

“Under the desk, take the briefcase,” Bridget said. “Button the jacket and put on the topcoat.”

Jan did as he was told, putting the gun into the coat's right-hand pocket. There was even a scarf, bright red, which he wrapped around his neck.

“Go.”

Jan put his hand to the doorknob, and after drawing a breath, he turned it and opened the door.

He stepped confidently out into the hall.

Bridget guided him back the way they had come, until he turned abruptly into an offshoot of the main passage. He passed more offices. There were more sounds of typing and paper shuffling. He kept his head down, looking thoughtful, his briefcase swinging easily at his side. Two more turns. Suddenly he was in a large hallway.

He was hit with a sense of deja vu. He had seen this place once before—and then he knew it. His eyes registered the huge steel doors in front of the elevator.

“Step up to the elevator,” Bridget said, “and wait for it to open.”

Jan did as he was told, holding his briefcase in both hands before him until the doors slid back. “In,” Bridget said. “Tell the operator to take you all the way up.”

Jan did so, noting the gray uniformed man in the comer who eyed him with boredom. He waved his finger at the man, indicating that they should go up.

“Ground level?”

Jan glared at him, and suddenly the operator went rigid and pale.

“I'm sorry,” the man stuttered. “I didn't recognize you for a moment, sir. It's ... it's been a long day.”

Jan broke off his glare to regard the doors in front of him. The elevator man fumbled to bring the elevator into service.

There was a bump and then a jerk upward. The elevator rose.

It seemed a half hour went by. Jan had the feeling the elevator was moving slowly, but there was also the impression of rising through a great amount of earth. Jan could feel the' pressure lessen in his ears. He nearly became light-headed.

The elevator jerked to a stop. The operator fumbled with the door mechanism, giving short glances at Jan, who remained impassive.

The doors opened.

Jan squinted and put a hand up before his eyes at the brightness that hit him. He hadn't realized just how dark the underground world had been, how few light bulbs there had been, strung far apart and of dim wattage.

The smells of the earth assaulted him. He must have swooned, for the elevator operator was at his side, blubbering, giving aid. Jan stood straight and pulled away from the man, who immediately scrambled back into his doorway and closed the doors.

Jan could faintly hear the slow machine returning to the bowels of the earth.

It was late afternoon. Jan smelled wet leaves, cut grass, maple trees. He smelled pine sap. His nose was assaulted with the odors of mown hay, far off, and apples and pears. It was as if his nose had never been used before. He smelled motor oil, and rain, though the ground was dry. There were thickly stacked white-gray clouds overhead, moving toward twilight, and the sun was orange and tinged the edges of the clouds orange. He smelled winter coming, far off, beginning to gain strength and stretch its limbs and think about its season.

He stood on a spot of tarmac; behind him, the, elevator doors were set back in a barnlike building that looked for all the world like a farmer's storage area. He had a feeling he was in the extreme north of the country. Empty, harvested fields stretched off to a strong-looking chain-link fence about a quarter mile away. To Jan's left was parked a Soviet limousine, angled away from neatly painted parking spots that held three Polish automobiles.

The car door opened on the limo, and a man got out. He stood up next to his open door and regarded Jan.

“Lower your head and get in the car,” Bridget told him. Jan stiffened.

“He won't know the difference. And he's Polish, so you can tell him whatever you want.”

Jan straightened his coat and walked over to the car. The driver bowed and opened the back door. Jan got in. The door slammed shut behind him.

He nearly gasped at the accommodations. A long leather backseat was flanked on one end by a bar, on the other with a writing desk complete with telephone (red! Jan noticed). There was a television and radio set into the partition between driver and passenger.

Bridget told Jan to tap on the partition window. The driver slid back a small window.

“Yes?” the driver inquired.

Following Bridget's instructions, Jan said, “Take me to the airport immediately. Does your phone work up front?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Estimate our time of arrival and tell them to have my plane ready to go by the time we get there. Tell them we are going to New York. Call my office in Moscow and tell them the same. There is very important business at the embassy in New York that I have to attend to. Tell them I'll be back in two days. I'm going to take a nap now. Don't disturb me until we get to the plane.”

“Yes, sir.”

The partition slid closed.

As the limousine pulled away, Jan saw another car pull up before the elevator doors. Two men got out of the back. Then the driver emerged from the front. Jan recognized them immediately. They were the three who had tracked him down like a dog and taken him to this place. The leader still wore his same trench coat. The other two argued as they pulled a limp body from the backseat and propped it upright. Jan saw faint movement as the prisoner tried to stand on his own. The two thugs holding him let him go, and he collapsed, falling forward and striking his head on the tarmac. The two thugs laughed.

“Enough!” the trench-coated man said. They picked their prisoner up under either arm and dragged him toward the elevator.

A bolt of hate and remembrance shot through Jan; angrily, he reached to pull open the partition between himself and his driver to tell the man to stop.

“No,” Bridget said, close-by. It sounded as if she were curled like a kitten next to him. Jan felt the weight of her hand on his lap, working its way inside the coat to his belt. “Think about me, Jan. Think about what it will be like when we're together.”

Jan's eyes were glued to the retreating image of the three men stumbling their prisoner toward the elevator doors.

“Think about me, only me,” Bridget cooed in his ear.

Jan felt the beginnings of arousal. He glanced at his lap to see that she had placed his hand where hers had been.

“Think of me, Jan. All of me,” she purred.

“Yes,” Jan said, suddenly very aware of her presence, aware that she was everything to him.

“Yes . . .”

I'm going to kill her.

And after they had been getting along so well. The last two weeks, in particular, had been heaven. Bridget had warned him that there might be a little work coming up at the end of October, but in the meantime, he could enjoy the calm before the storm. A couple of trips upstate was all she had asked, stocking supplies, things like that, and the rest of the time he had had to himself. He had almost begun to believe that the “storm,” the busy times she had talked about, wouldn't come at all.