The Third Bullet (21 page)

Finally, enough time passed so that Stronksi felt safe enough to set a night; he met Swagger again, this time in the back of a van, to arrange the debrief and pass over the money.

“You swear,” said Stronski, “that after I have this thing for you, we will proceed directly to embassy, I will watch you enter, and can then finally relax, knowing I served you as you required and lived up to all promises.”

“Absolutely.”

“Now tell me where to meet.”

“No.”

“Swagger, you are such a bastard. Such a stubborn son of bitch. You don’t trust me?”

“What choice have I got? But let’s take elementary precautions. Though troublesome in the long run, they will cut down on the yips, and we can concentrate on our work.”

“You talk like general. All the time soothing, reasonable, and probably right. Goddamn you, man, you are a hard friend to have.”

“I’m just a country boy scared of city slickers, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what ‘slicker’ is, but I get the meaning. So when we settle on place?”

“I will call you on a cell that morning after you are out of the Lubyanka. I will give you a street. You will drive down it. At a set time, I will call you with a turn to make. I will guide you by me in this way and make sure nobody follows. I may do that two or three times. When I am certain you are alone, I will give you the destination, my choice, and you will be dropped. We will chat, then head by another cab to the embassy. Is that acceptable?”

“You have a cunning Russian mind. No rush to do anything.”

“It’s how I earned a glorious retirement in the basement of a bicycle shop where I watch the plaster slowly fall from the ceiling.”

“It is not very interesting, I am sure, but still, I am sure it is more interesting than death.”

“It is.”

Swagger gave him the envelope: ten thousand dollars in rubles.

“I hope what I get for you is worth that. There are no refunds,” said Stronski.

“I understand. I take the risk cheerfully.”

“I wonder: why do you do this, Swagger? The money it costs, the danger you run, after all you’ve been through. It’s so insane. I can make no sense of such a thing. Vengeance. You took the death of this president fifty years ago so seriously, the pain is so deep?”

Swagger laughed. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about JFK.”

Three days later, Stronski called at precisely 7 a.m.

“I have it,” said Stronski. “It was fine. Walked in, found the Second Directorate volumes, found the right year, found the report, broke the rules by writing it down, he never asked or wondered, got out easily, now I am with driver.”

“Anyone following?”

“Hard to tell. It’s crowded. All Porsches look the same. But no, I think not.”

“Take a few more turns around the town. I’ll call back shortly and give you a boulevard.”

Shortly, Swagger called. “Go to Bruskaya, then go north on Bruskaya.”

“That’s seven miles.”

“I will call in half an hour.”

Then it was “Bruskaya to Simonovich, left on Simonovich.”

Swagger waited forty minutes. “Simonovich to Chekhov. Right on Chekhov.”

He himself stood in an alley on Chekhov and watched as Stronski’s black Cherokee roared by. He watched the busy Moscow traffic flow that followed, looking for cars with intent pairs of middle-aged men, their eyes hammered to the vehicle they were following. He saw nothing like that, mainly commuters as glum as those on any freeway in America, truckies cursing the schedule, buses driven by women, a few cars of youngsters too full of booze and vitality to notice how early it was.

He moved a block, rerouted Stronski around another street, brought him by, and again noted no professional followers; this time he looked for repeats from the first batch of vehicles he’d monitored. He found none.

“Okay,” he said, “you’ve heard of the Park of Fallen Heroes, near the Tretyakov Gallery?”

“I know it well.”

“I will meet you there in an hour. I will take the Underground to the Okty—er, Okty—”

“—abrskaya station. Yes, it’s a few blocks.”

“See you at”—looked at watch—“nine-thirty or so.”

“Sit in front of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. He will appreciate the company,” said Stronski.

Possibly Comrade Dzerzhinsky did enjoy the company. He had no one else there. He stood on his pillar twenty feet above the ground, wrapped in a swirling greatcoat, his strong face ascowl with contempt for the world he looked upon. The man had ruled from the same altitude in the center of the square named after him, where he had commanded the ceremonial space before the Lubyanka, whose apparatuses he had invented as founder of Cheka in the early days after the revolution. He was the first of the Communist intelligence geniuses, if Polish by birth, and had helped Lenin cement his hold and built the machine that helped Stalin sustain his. He ruled from
that spot in stone certitude for years, radiating the red terror from each eye.

Now, covered in graffiti and bird shit, he commanded nothing. Look ye mighty and despair, was that the message? Something like that. After the fall, he had been removed to this far place, a glade behind the Tretyakov art gallery. He had become a perch for the avian citizens of the state, and he looked out on a small patch of grass and bush in which other dead gods had been dumped, including about twenty-five Stalins, some big, some small, all broad with the muscular mustache and the wide Georgian cheekbones but all turned somehow comic by their extreme proximity to the earth. It was as if the Russians were afraid to throw out the icon that was the Boss, but at the same time they couldn’t honor him with a dictator’s height from which to command fear and obedience. So, low to the ground, sometimes swaddled in weeds, sometimes noseless or otherwise defaced from street action at various colorful times, he looked, in his rows on rows, like a mysterious ancient statue, unknowable, mysterious, vaguely menacing but easy to ignore, and he was ignored, for of the many beautiful Moscow parks, this was the least beautiful and maybe the least visited. It was unkempt and overgrown, unlike the formal perfection that was within the Kremlin walls. It was strictly an afterthought.

Swagger sat in almost perfect aloneness with the stone men. Sparsely visited in normal time, the park was even more desolate this early. He felt secure from his hunters: he had not been followed on the Underground, he had not been followed on his walk over. He checked constantly and knew himself to be unmonitored. It was a matter of minutes before Stronski arrived, and then he could go home and get on with it. He yearned for a shower, American food, a good, deep sleep, and a fresh start. Maybe all this shit would begin to swing into focus after he got away from it for a while. He knew he had to persist in his nighttime journeys with the creep Oswald. Who? What? How? Why? Nah, fuck why. Why wouldn’t make any sense. Only how mattered.

Oswald went away, and Swagger returned to man-on-the-run
guy. He looked up and down the sidewalk; from the direction of the Tretyakov, a museum whose modern fortresslike walls could be seen through the trees, he saw Stronski approaching. He had read Stronski’s file, which Nick had obtained through CIA sources; he knew that Stronski had his finger in a hundred dirty pies, but everyone in Russia did. Some didn’t have so many pies. He also knew Stronski was known as a reputable assassin. He always delivered, he never betrayed. His stock in trade was efficiency combined with trustworthiness; he worked with equanimity for whichever
bratva
needed a job done, never tarnishing himself with their affairs, never playing their games.

So Swagger trusted him as well as he trusted anyone in this game.

“This is Petrel Five at Tretyakov, do you read?”

Static crackled over the handheld radio set, but the young man on the roof of the Tretyakov waited patiently until it cleared.

“—have you loud and clear, Petrel Five, go ahead.”

“Ah, I think I see Stronski.”

“What’s your distance?”

“About four hundred meters. I’m on the roof. He’s got Stronski’s hair, his build, muscular, he looks to be about the age.”

“Where is he going?”

“He’s in the park, just like you said. No rush. No worry. No indication he realizes he’s under observation.”

“Okay, drop out of sight, let the situation settle. Come back up in three minutes and tell us what you have.”

“Got it.”

The young observer did as he was told, sliding into repose below the edge of the wall at the roof’s precipice. He was by profession a construction worker in one of the companies that the Izmaylovskaya mob owned, but he and many others had been pulled out for observation duties on sites known to be favored by Stronski. This was quite exciting for him, for like many young men, he dreamed
of gangster glory, of running with the feared Izzies on their violent adventures in Moscow. The chicks, the blow, the bling! It was the same for gangsters everywhere.

He rose, looked through his heavy binoculars, had a moment of panic, and then made contact.

“Petrel Five.”

“Go ahead.”

“He is sitting on a park bench with someone. Yes, now I see, a taller man, at least his legs are longer. Thin, not so big as Stronski. Workingman, probably, not a Westerner. Doesn’t look like an American.”

“Can you see his face? His eyes?”

“Let me move a bit.” The young man slid down the wall of the flat roof, coming to the corner. This would give him the best angle.

“I can now see they are sitting before the statue of Dzerzhinsky.”

“The eyes.”

He dialed the focus carefully, hoping to squeeze a bit more resolution out of it.

“The eyes,” he said. “Very wary. Hunter’s eyes.”

“Good work, Petrel Five. Now stay undercover.”

“First the good news,” said Stronski. “The good news is that there is no bad news.”

Swagger nodded. He waited for it.

“In those days, KGB started a program where a Second Directorate technical team was in constant rotation, station to station, the world over. That’s all they did. They stayed a few days, a week, they did a complete sweep, using every electronic countermeasure and tracking device at their disposal, and they issued a report to center with copies to the KGB resident in place. A Comrade Bukhov seemed to be in charge. Very thorough man, very patient, very wise in the ways of concealed microphones, wires, long-distance amplified eavesdropping, the power of batteries.”