The Enemy (27 page)

His next available free time was the evening of January 4th. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centred around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.

"Still got the letter?" I asked.

He nodded. "But you won't be able to read it, because it's written in Bulgarian."

"What were you wearing that night?"

"Plain clothes. I'm not stupid."

"What kind of plain clothes?"

"Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. AJerican. They're all the plain clothes I've got."

"What did you do to the guy?"

He shook his head. Wouldn't answer.

"OK," I said. "Let's all go to Cape Fear." We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn't remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.

And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as an historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left towards a place called Southport.

"Cape Fear is off of Southport," Summer said. "It's an island in the ocean. I think there's a bridge."

But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn't even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle.

Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.

"Here," Trifonov said. "Make a right."

There was a wide centre track with narrower tracks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.

"Her name is Elena," Trifonov said.

We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena's door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin house dress and men's shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.

"Yes?" she said. "Can I help you?" Her accent was like Trifonov's, but much higher pitched. It was quite appealing.

"We need to talk to you," Summer said, gently.

"What about?"

"About what Slavi Trifonov did for you," I said.

"He didn't do anything," she said.

"But you know the name." She paused.

"Please come in," she said.

I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion. But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody else in it.

"Your husband not here?" I said. She shook her head.

"Where is he?" She didn't answer.

"My guess is he's in the hospital," Summer said. "Am I right?" Elena just looked at her.

"Mr Trifonov helped you," I said. "Now you need to help him."

She said nothing.

"If he wasn't here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That's the situation. So I need to know which it was."

She said nothing.

"This is very, very important," I said.

"What if both things were bad?" she asked.

"The two things don't compare," I said. "Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?"

She didn't answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.

"I don't know exactly what happened," she said. "Mr Trifonov just came here and took my husband away."

"When?"

"The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia."

I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy.

"How long was he here?"

"Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why."

"And that was it?" She nodded.

"What was he wearing?"

"A leather jacket. Jeans."

"What kind of car was he in?"

"I don't know what it's called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes."

"OK," I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved towards the door.

"Will my husband come back?" Elena said.

I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.

"I seriously doubt it," I said.

We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.

"Where did you leave the guy?" I asked him.

"On the road to Wilmington," he said.

"When?"

"Three o'clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called nine one one. I didn't give my name."

"You spent three hours on him?"

He nodded, slowly. "I wanted to be sure he understood the message."

Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north towards Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-storey and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.

"What was the guy's name?" I asked him.

"Pickles," he said.

The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.

"Early morning of January fifth," I said. "Sometime after three o'clock, there was an admission here."

The guy rifled through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out. "Male or female?" he said. "Male."

He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.

"John Doe," he said. "Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road."

"That's our guy," I said.

"Your guy?" he said, looking at my uniform.

"We might be able to take care of his bill," I said.

He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking one down, two hundred to go.

"He's in post-op," he said. He pointed towards the elevator. "Second floor."

He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.

"Pickles," I said.

She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.

"Five minutes only," she said. "He's very sick."

Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room's door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn't see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital's radiography budget all by himself.

I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror. "You two wait outside," I said.

Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.

"How are you, asshole?" I said.

The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.

"That was the man," he said. "Right there. He did this to me."

"Did what to you?"

"He shot me in the legs."

I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been knee capped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired. "Front or side?" I said. "Side," he said.

"Front is worse," I said. "You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky."

"I didn't do anything."

"Didn't you? I just met your wife."

"Foreign bitch."

"Don't say that."

"It's her own fault. She won't do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible."

"Shut up," I said.

"Aren't you going to do something?"

"Yes," I said. "I am. Watch."

I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.

"He's very sick," I said.

We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.

"I apologize," I said.

"Am I in trouble?" he said.

"Not with me," I said. "You're my kind of guy. But you're very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different."