Requiem For a Glass Heart (24 page)

S
TANDING IN THE FOYER OF THE RESTAURANT
, I
RINA LOOKED
out at this city that was foreign to her and thought of all the other times she first had set eyes on an unfamiliar city. So many years, so many miles, so many worlds. So many deaths.

But there was something different now, here. She was no longer intimidated by encountering cultural and geographic unknowns. Kruptatin had thrown her into this business with only a single, powerful motivation to sustain her: threat. The consequences if she did not accomplish what she had been assigned to do far outweighed any natural intimidation resulting from being plunged into a foreign environment. She had had to be self-sufficient in so many foreign countries, to get up to speed in so many foreign languages among unfamiliar traditions and conventions, that she had come to realize that people were essentially everywhere the same and that for the most part, only the details of their dress and manners and customs differed. Human nature was consistent. This she could depend on, and once she fully had grasped this concept, crossing borders had become less daunting.

The difference she was now sensing had nothing to do with common timidity. It had everything to do with something Krupatin had given her inadvertently as a result of his brutal despotism: a highly developed sense of survival. From
the very beginning, Krupatin had thrown her into the water to sink or swim. And she understood, as surely as she understood her own fear, that he didn’t care about the outcome. If she survived it, she would be useful to him. If she didn’t, it saved him the trouble of looking after her.

So she received a briefing: here is the target; here is a file. Study the file. Kill the target. He didn’t give a damn how. And her own survival was a matter of developing her cunning. She had to learn to kill—as she would later understand it—in a vacuum. She and the target’s life left the scene, the city, and the country almost simultaneously. This was no more than common sense, a woman’s and a mother’s instinct for survival, and had nothing to do with sophisticated KGB training. Krupatin had never offered her that, though he could have. The fact that he had not bothered to do so said as much about how worthless he considered her as anything he had done.

But in retrospect, it may have been her unconventional training, or lack of training, rather, the gut-driven evolution of her native instincts, that had made Irina such a success at her grim profession. There was a science, a psychology of assassination that had developed over millennia in the name of governments and religious fanaticism and prejudices and greed, a manner of individual killing that had, by the end of the twentieth century, developed to a prescribed art form. Irina partook of none of this. She didn’t know the rules of the game she played; she didn’t know the history of traditional deceits. Which worked to her advantage, for she left no patterns, no signatures, her adversaries could recognize. She did not use the tricks of the trade. Every hit was different, and she went about it in isolation. She was simply a woman without recourse, which made her unpredictable, resourceful, and dangerous.

Therefore, it was with a finely tuned sixth sense that she waited for the taxi she had called. If there was one thing she knew she could not do, it was to trust Krupatin. And yet that was exactly what he was asking her to do. Rather, that was exactly what he was requiring her to do. She had no choice.

The taxi came, driven by a young woman in well-worn blue jeans and cowboy boots and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut out at the shoulder seam. Her chestnut hair had a masculine cut and her freckled face was a little pinched by the sun and weather, but her gray eyes handled Irina with a tenderness
not hinted at by her appearance. In a flash she summed up Irina’s London fashion, and as she held open the back door of the taxi she relished what she could see of Irina’s breasts and long legs as Irina bent to get inside. A country boy could not have yearned more ardently for what he saw.

Irina played tag with the taxi driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror as they drove through the Houston streets, which were just now slipping into evening. The lights were coming on all around them, and the city was beginning to sparkle, the heat of the day giving a clean coolness to the evening, deepening the blue that belonged, in this particular hue, to dusk.

She was surprised at how heavily wooded the city was-— pines, it looked like, and oaks, everywhere a thick canopy, dense woods, houses and offices set back in darkened greenish shadows. Landscape lighting created pale pools of jade.

The taxi swooned smoothly into a wooded lane and wound its way toward a stout stone chateau, the softly lighted facade of which Irina glimpsed through the surrounding pines. They passed through tall iron gates thrown open from massive pillars and slowed when they approached a paved compound formed by high stone walls, which reached out from the gates to embrace the two wings of the chateau that extended from either side of the main structure. Loggias fronted each wing of the hotel, and shiny, dark cars were parked in a line along the hedges, facing outward like soldiers in a dress parade: Mercedes, BMWs, Rolls Royces, Jaguars, Bentleys, black and midnight blue, sparkling chrome and dark windows.

When the taxi pulled up under the porte cochere, the doorman was instantly at Irina’s side, holding open the door and extending his hand to her. She ignored him and paid the driver, who looked at her over the back of the seat and handed her a card as she accepted the overpayment. She smiled at Irina, who hesitated, nodded at her, and looked at the handwritten number on the back of the card. Irina looked into the gray eyes again, then turned and got out of the taxi, leaving the attendants to take care of her luggage.

Inside, at the marble registration desk, Irina gave her name as Olya Serova and said that a suite was being held for her under the name of Anton Nakhimov.

Yes, of course, the concierge said, her rooms were already waiting for her.

“Excuse me,” Irina said. “Will you show me where they are?”

Of course. The concierge produced a floor plan and pointed at the location of Irina’s suite with the gold nib of her fountain pen. She said that for Irina’s convenience, the suite was right next door to that of her colleagues and had a private courtyard and garden of its own. Irina studied the plan.

“And Mr. Stepanov?” she asked. “Is he nearby also?”

The concierge presented a satisfied expression, and the gold nib of her pen moved directly across the corridor. “They are here,” she said.

“They?”

The concierge hesitated, but it was subtle, and she quickly recovered. “He and his woman friend,” she said.

“Oh, of course.” Irina shifted her eyebrows indulgently and smiled wanly at the concierge, who returned the smile, a woman-to-woman exchange. “Okay. Well, good, then, you’ve thought of everything. And they have all arrived?”

Yes, indeed.

“Excellent,” Irina said. “But you know, this is my first visit to the city, and though I appreciate the convenience of the ground floor, and the proximity to my friends, I would much rather be on an upper floor—with a view.”

The concierge again hesitated only slightly. “But this was a special request of Mr. Nakhimov’s.”

“And that was kind of him, but I really would prefer a higher floor,” Irina graciously insisted. “The third floor, the topmost. You have suites available there?”

The concierge, unflappable, consulted her computer, tapping a few keys. In three beats she had located another wonderful suite, with an exquisite city view. But it was slightly more expensive.

“That’s fine. Where is it?”

The concierge again employed the gold nib of her pen to point to the map, describing the suite as Irina again studied the plan.

“Perfect.”

The concierge was pleased, delighted that she could have been of service.

“A woman?” Hain reared back in his chair in front of the computers, holding the telephone in one hand, a cup of coffee
in the other. “A good-looking woman?” He looked at Ometov on the sofa, with his shoes off, his legs stretched out as he studied a folder of documents in his lap. “Olya Serova?”

Ometov, looking back at him, shrugged. Hain glanced at Erika, who sat in an armchair with her feet folded up under her, reading a magazine. She shook her head at the name and then got up and went to one of the computer screens. She bent over, tapped in the name, and waited.

“Where is she staying?” Hain listened. “That’s interesting. I’ll be damned. Okay, thanks. Listen, when can you get us a picture?” He looked at his watch. “Okay, great, we’ll be waiting.”

As soon as he slammed down the telephone, he turned to Ometov.

“Okay, what the hell’s this, Leo?”

Ometov had sat up and placed his socked feet on the floor. Looking down, he was pondering. He didn’t answer.

“Krupatin’s woman?” Hain suggested.

“The name is not in the files,” Erika said, looking at the computer screen. “S-e-r-o-v-a. Right?”

“Right,” Hain confirmed. He was looking at the Russian intelligence officer.

Ometov tilted his feet back on his heels a couple of times, a thoughtful, rhythmless gesture, his forearms on his knees as he stared at the floor.

“Not a mistress,” he said finally. “Not a mistress.”

“Why not?”

“Not this time. He wouldn’t do that, ferry in his favorite woman. It’s too cumbersome. Not for this, I think.”

Hain looked at Erika.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think maybe Leo is right.”

“Okay, then.” Hain shrugged his huge frame at them, looking back and forth between them.

Ometov rose slowly from the sofa and padded to the windows that looked out into the courtyard. Earlier he had found the switch that turned on the landscape lights, and he delighted in looking out at the palms and the sagos and the bougainvillea.

“You asked where she was staying?” he asked.

“Yeah. When she checked in, she asked where the others were staying. When they told her, she said she preferred to move higher up, because of the view. She was new to the city
and wanted a view. She looked at a layout of the place and chose a suite on the top floor.”

“A suite,” Ometov said thoughtfully, gazing out at the courtyard. “Very expensive, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

Ometov said nothing for a while, his hands clasped behind him, looking out at the night palms.

“To be honest,” he said at last, “I don’t have any idea, Curtis.” He pronounced Hain’s first name as “cur-TESS.” “It could be that this woman belongs to someone else.” He turned around. “I don’t know why I refuse to believe it is Krupatin, but it simply is not right for some reason. I’ll think about it. It will come to me. I am sure I am right, but it may take me a little while to understand why.”

The fax machine beeped, and Hain went over and waited, impatiently grabbing the paper as it came out of the machine and holding on to it until the machine let go. He looked at the photograph.

“Jesus. Well, she’s good-looking. They were right about that.”

Ometov came toward him, holding out his hand, and Hain gave him the photograph. Ometov quickly turned it around and frowned at it, pushing his mind to grasp the image as quickly as possible. Then, abruptly, all the anticipation and tension fell away from his face, and he backed up two steps and sat down on the sofa.

“My God,” he said. “My … God.”

T
HE KNOCK ON THE DOOR WAS UNEXPECTED.
C
ATE AND
V
ALENTIN
already had unpacked. They had three rooms. The door to the suite opened into the main sitting room, furnished with sofas and armchairs; it was large and spacious, with French doors opening out onto a garden. A bedroom adjoining one side of the main room also opened onto the garden. And on the opposite side the main room opened into a kind of office-sitting room, with a desk, computer, fax, and answering machine, a number of armchairs, and a television. The garden, which was enclosed by high brick walls for complete privacy, was beautifully landscaped with an abundance of flowering plants, a bistro table, and chairs. A stone statue of a nude woman bending to dry her feet was partially hidden among the vines behind a small fountain.

They ordered room service and ate. Afterward, as Cate sat looking out at the garden, sipping the last of a glass of wine, Valentin decided to take a shower. He hadn’t been gone ten minutes when there was a knock at the door. Her heart lurched, but she took another sip of wine and a deep breath. In this kind of hotel the maid did not knock at the door to see if you wanted her to turn down the sheets. They had not rung room service to take away their dinner things. They had been
there three hours and had not heard a word from the two Russians.

She took another sip of wine—actually a mouthful—and swallowed it as she crossed the main room to the door. She did not put on her shoes.

“Hello,” the first man said. His companion was just behind him, looking away, down the corridor.

“Yes?”

“We are friends of Valentin’s. Is he in?” He was smiling, agreeable. The first thing she noticed about him was that he was rather tall and had a simpering mouth, a rather prissy way of holding his lips closed as he smiled. He was blond, with fashionably cropped hair, longish on top. His face was smooth and flawless, with flushed cheeks that looked as though they had just been smartly slapped. He wore a beige tailor-made suit that draped his body elegantly, fluidly, and a black, long-sleeved cotton knit shirt buttoned at the collar.

“Well, actually he’s in the shower.”

“The shower.” He beamed. “Valentin is always so
clean.”
He beamed even more brightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forgive me. My name is Anton Nakhimov, and this”—he turned slightly without looking around—“is Rudolf Bykov.”

Bykov looked around at the sound of his name and smiled. He was paler than Nakhimov, shorter, with a receding hairline of dark hair. He had none of his partner’s charm or flair; his dark suit and white businessman’s shirt would have made him anonymous in any city in the world. Whereas Nakhimov’s complexion was almost Technicolor, Bykov’s skin was pasty, grayish, a genetic misfortune rather than the result of a lack of sun. His lips, niggardly in their thinness, were a darker gray than his skin, with perhaps a hint of a slightly bruised darkness to them.

“Well,” Nakhimov said, still beaming, “might I ask to whom I am speaking?”

“Uh … Catherine Miles,” Cate said.

“A friend of Valentin’s.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You’re living here with him for his stay, I suppose.” Cate nodded. “That’s right.”

“Well,” Nakhimov said, looking down at his feet with a smirk, “would you mind if we waited for him … in there?”
He looked up at her again. “We are the reason he has come here. Business—with us.”

“Sure,” Cate said, smiling a little foolishly. “I’m sorry. I just wasn’t expecting you.”

“Of course.” Nakhimov beamed on, coming into the room almost more quickly than Cate could back away from the door. “We should have called, but we, you understand, thought it would just be Valentin.”

He was inside, looking around, checking out the second room, looking out into the courtyard, sizing up the situation, while Bykov sauntered in more slowly, looking only at Cate, She closed the door. Nakhimov wheeled around, thrust his hands into the generous pockets of his trousers, and beamed.

“So, Catherine, how long have you known Valentin?”

“Oh,” she said, “a year, maybe.” She picked up her glass of wine. “Not longer than that.”

“Not longer.” Nakhimov nodded, looking her over. “And where are you from? New York?”

“No, no. I live here in Houston.”

“Oh?” He raised his blond eyebrows. “A Texan, then. A cowgirl,” he added brightly. He was mocking, but it was clear that he had every confidence Cate would not have the bad manners to object to it. He was too charming; she would not protest. But she would know she was dealing with a superior.

“Not hardly,” she said, not offended.

“What do you do here in Houston, Catherine?”

“I work for an architectural firm. In personnel.”

“Really? What firm?”

“Guillen and Boardman.”

“And what do your architects build?”

“Whatever their clients are willing to pay for,” she said. “They’re international.”

“Oh, international,” he cooed, smirking primly, amused at her effort to put her employer’s best foot forward and perhaps to impress him.

He walked to the cart that had carried their dinner in, where the leftovers had grown tepid amid soiled linen napkins. He examined what was left.

“And how often do you see Valentin?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She was letting Stepanov’s words seep into her brain, reminding her of her place. She was so tempted to take this guy down to size.

“Whenever he comes to Houston,” she said, sipping her wine. “Whenever he wants. Not often.”

“So it’s kind of a party when our Valentin comes to town,” Nakhimov said, using the tips of his fingers to lift the wine bottle by the neck and pull it partway out of the ice bucket so he could read the label.

“You might say that. He likes to have a good time.”

Nakhimov let go of the bottle, and it slushed down in the bucket.

“What do you do?” Cate asked. She sat down in a plush chair, drew her legs up after her, and sipped the wine, managing a pleasant face for Nakhimov. “You’re Russian too, right?”

“Emphatically,” he said. “And I do what Valentin does. Has he told you what he does?”

“He doesn’t talk about it much. International business or something.”

“That’s right, Catherine. Businessmen. We are world-traveling businessmen.” He looked at his watch. “International, just the way your architectural firm is international. Perhaps we could do business.”

She sipped her wine and didn’t say anything. During all of this Bykov was obviously bored. For a few moments he wandered into the office part of the suite, but he wasn’t there long enough to do anything more than count the chairs. He came back in, stepped out into the courtyard, looked at the wall that separated this garden from the one next door, and came back to the living room. He sat down in one of the armchairs and crossed his legs, ankle on knee. His socks were too short, and a band of white hairless ankle brightened the space between his trousers’ cuff and the top of his sock. Cate guessed that Nakhimov’s socks reached all the way to the tops of his calves.

“I might’ve known it would be you,” Stepanov said, suddenly standing in the bedroom door. He was wearing one of the hotel’s white monogrammed robes. His hair was still wet but slicked back with a comb. His face was also damp, and he was lighting a cigarette. He puffed on it and put the lighter in the pocket of the robe.

Nakhimov was beaming at him, his hands in his trousers again. “Valentin,” he said, “we have just been visiting with Catherine.”

Stepanov grunted and pulled on the cigarette.

“How long have you been here?” Nakhimov asked.

“Where’s your boss?” Stepanov ignored his question.

“All in good time,” Nakhimov said. “We didn’t know you would be having a guest.”

Stepanov looked past Nakhimov at Bykov and nodded.

The putty-faced Bykov nodded back. “Valentin.” His voice was a surprisingly handsome baritone.

“Nice that we have these opposite suites,” Nakhimov said. Cate could see no reason for his pointing this out.

“I noticed when I checked in, Anton, that there’s another one waiting,” Stepanov said.

“So did I,” Nakhimov said.

Then Stepanov switched to Russian.
“The boss?”

“I only do what I’m told to do, and I wasn’t told to say anything about the other suite,”
Nakhimov said.

“Which means you don’t know anything either.”

“I know that you are in the dark, Valentin. I know that.”

The telephone rang, interrupting the conversation. Cate picked it up as they all turned to look at her.

“The telephone line’s clean,” Ann Loder said, “but just for this one call. Don’t use it again. Apologize. Act embarrassed, tell them it’s personal. Turn away from them and stay right where you are—they’ll probably go on talking in Russian.”

Cate did as she was told. Stepanov turned back to Nakhimov and continued.

“The other guy’s going to have half an ear on your conversation,” Ann said, “so throw in something every so often. You need to know that a woman named Olya Serova has just checked in to Nakhimov’s reservation, but she’s moved upstairs to Suite 316. Her real name is Irina Ismaylova, and she is the woman Leo told us about who used to be Sergei’s lover. We don’t know what she’s doing in the picture here. Tell Stepanov after the others have left. They don’t know she’s here yet.”

Cate mumbled a few phrases about what one friend said about another friend.

“Leo wants you to get close to the woman if you can. His guess is that she’s definitely going to be seeing Krupatin. Ask Stepanov if he knows anything about Bykov. Leo knows nothing. We’ll get back to you.”

Suddenly the line was dead. Gate acted out a few more exchanges and hung up just in time to hear Stepanov saying to Nakhimov in English, “I wouldn’t work too hard at being a prick. It rarely pays off in the end.”

“You can testify to that,” Nakhimov said.

“You two sound like a couple of pussies,” Bykov said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s not the first time any of us has gone into something like this not knowing whether to piss or puke. Why don’t you try to relax until you can find out what’s to get excited about?”

“If you only came to pay your respects,” Stepanov said, “consider them paid. Do you have any messages for me?”

Cate noticed that his face was still wet, and she wondered if perspiration had replaced the shower water.

“No messages,” Nakhimov said with authority.

“Good,” Stepanov said with unmistakable finality. He stood in the middle of the room like a glowering Cossack.

Irina had replicated this moment many times. Wrapped in a hotel robe, she sat in the dark, near the window of a hotel she had never slept in before, and looked at the lights of a city she had never visited before. Or perhaps she had been there before, but always as a stranger. When she was not in St. Petersburg, she was a stranger in all cities. Perhaps Zurich was not so lonely for her, or Paris. But those were exceptions. She never could relax in any of the others, and this one was no different.

She drank vodka and thought of the people below her. Stepanov. She had seen too much of Stepanov. Over the years she had watched him simmer under Krupatin’s lordship. But there could be only one top man, and Krupatin had brutally claimed that position for himself. Not that it made any distinguishable difference. A sea of people had died at a spoken word from Stepanov as well. And before his word carried that kind of weight, he had done the work himself. She had heard talk. Ever since he had taken over the operation in the United States, he had had to restrain himself. The level of violence he wreaked elsewhere had to be reined in here. Though the profits could be enormous, the law enforcement agencies were better than their counterparts around the world. The risk was greater.

Grigori Izvarin was just another version in the shape of a
new generation. Young and handsome and well trained by the KGB before it folded, he represented Krupatin’s vanguard. He had the good sense to use his head once in a while, but he was impatient, and brutality was close at hand. He was bisexual and vain and ambitious. He was mercurial and absolutely untrustworthy.

Valery Volkov. Yet another variation on a theme, and by now she was beginning to understand the music very well indeed.

And of course Stepanov would have a woman. He dragged them along everywhere he went or picked them up wherever he happened to find himself. He and Krupatin had that in common too. They were like adolescent boys, always wanting to see under yet another woman’s skirts, always peeping down women’s blouses, wanting to touch them. The fact was, if that was as far as it went, it might be considered prurient or wanton but not necessarily destructive. But neither man ever found enough satisfaction in these pubescent curiosities. Long ago, when they were in fact pubescent, these men/boys had been awakened to the psychology of necrophagia. In one way or another death served them; it became nourishment for them and sustained them. A steady diet of death kept them alive.

The telephone rang. She didn’t even flinch. She took another drink of the clear vodka. The telephone rang in the darkness, and she listened to its bleating, bleating, bleating. Lifting her wrist, she looked at her watch. By now, the overeager Izvarin would have discovered her arrival. And Stepanov would know. They would have talked by now, these two creatures. They would be discombobulated by a woman’s name in the register. They would be suspicious because she had moved to the top floor.