The last good german, p.9
The Last Good German, page 9
“Who’s making the machine?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“How will Denisov steal it?”
“I don’t know. But whoever he steals it from will be after him. On the trail of it. And no one caught on the trail is going to be alive for very long.”
“You’re saying that to scare me.”
“Be scared, Rita. You can always be scared.”
“And what if you get out of this alive, Dev? Do you wait until the next time and the next time? Do we always have to go through this? I can’t live apart from you. I thought you knew that. I thought we had worked that out.”
They made love. They were so lost and so abandoned that the softness of making love filled in the hollow places in them. They made love in the intense and selfish way of people who have been held apart a long time. When he satisfied her and put his hands under her, pushed up her body to meet him more deeply, he satisfied himself. He wanted to lick her face in the comforting way that some animals lick their beloved. When he was exhausted, they slept a little and there were no dreams in his sleep. When he awoke, it was sudden. It was night. He didn’t know where he was. And then he felt her next to him and he felt an indescribable sadness. Because it was time now to leave her again.
14
24 Sep 90—NEW YORK CITY
Mickey Connors picked up the phone in the back room. The telephone had no number on it and was not connected in any way to the telephone at the bar in front. His telephone had not even been installed by the telephone company, though it used company lines. It was untappable because it didn’t exist. He dialed a number; he preferred dials on telephones and whiskey drunk straight and boxer shorts and a number of other set and precise things that you might not have expected in a seemingly unfussy man.
“So what’d he do?” he began without greeting.
“He was booked on United and then on Delta. He took Delta to Atlanta and turned around and took Delta to Washington. Our fella saw him get on the D.C. plane and he called the man down there.”
“Good fella,” Mickey said.
“The fella caught the cab number and we made a cabbie twenty bucks richer an hour later. He went to the apartment.”
“And she was there.”
“Well, we figure so. He left an hour ago and the lights were on. And then they went out so she’s up there. She was there, ninety percent certain.”
“That’s love for ya, ain’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the voice said. “After that, he goes to Dulles and catches a red-eye out to San Francisco. So he’s not going through LAX at all.”
“He’s a devious fella, Devereaux. Well, you can’t blame him and the girl for missin’ each other, I suppose.”
“What do you want to do with him?”
“Ah, there’s time, there’s time, Tommy. Never tap the tree till the sap’s ready to burst. Plenty of time to figure out things.”
“You wanta watch him at the other end. I can call up to San Fran—”
“Naw, naw. He’s not gonna go anywhere but right where I told him to go. The thing is about the girlie, Rita Macklin. What d’ya think he might of told her, her being a newspaperwoman and all.”
“You wanna do somethin’ there?”
“We don’t harm women, Tommy. There’s nothin’ to do.”
“You can make an exception.”
“If I was to do that, Tommy, you’d lose respect. For me and yerself. Shut your gob, now, Tommy.”
Silence on the line. Mickey was thinking and he didn’t realize he was smiling as well.
“Well, the thing about her is we gotta watch her. I want a couple of men, good fellas now and not some boys from the force out to make a little extra money on the side. Good fellas. Just watch her and you call up the bar when you got somethin’ to say.”
He broke the connection.
15
28 Sep 90—SANTA BARBARA
Devereaux got a room on the fifth floor of the sand-colored hotel on Cabrillo Boulevard. The hotel was across the street from the beach and the grounds were California-immaculate with grass that never seemed to grow or to become brown, spotted with little palm trees and shrubs cut into alarming shapes.
Denisov lived on Alisos up the hill and across Highway 101 from the hotel.
Devereaux knew the building and he knew the habits of the Russian. There would be a morning walk, there was probably a chess club somewhere, and there would be those soulful strolls along the beachfront when Denisov communed with the oil derricks poking up through the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel.
Except that everything was out of the ordinary.
Denisov did not leave the apartment building until ten in the morning most days and he left with a woman each time. The woman was tan and fit and disturbingly familiar. Her hair was cut short and her eyes were large, with brown pupils that seemed to swim at the edge of tears.
What Rita had said was not true; Devereaux had forgotten.
The first night in California, Devereaux called Dougherty’s and tried to leave his telephone number. The barman said, “I’ll tell him you was looking for him.”
“You take a number?”
“I look like an answering service?” And hung up.
Devereaux had smiled at the rudeness and the aura of secrecy Connors was surrounded with. Some of it seemed absurd caution.
But what had been more absurd than his own devious route back to Rita in Bethesda… only to tell her the broad outlines of a secret assignment? Because she had gone to Pendleton and because that put her in danger of becoming part of this. Or of Pendleton telling her the blackmail. That was the thing Devereaux feared most. It would have had an effect, the opposite of what Pendleton intended, and it would have started to ruin their lives, both of their lives, for the rest of their lives.
He thought about the woman with Denisov. It had stirred a memory and yet he could not find the face in the file. He spent the first three days only watching, trying to fill in what person Denisov had become. He had been very set in simple ways before and now he was at the center of a dangerous new game that involved at least two government agencies and a foreign company and two ruthless middleman organizations that made their livings by doing the dirty acts that even government agencies couldn’t admit to doing.
What had changed in Denisov.
The woman, the woman. He felt a vague stirring of memory but it was so indistinct. It might have been in Asia, it might have been one of the nurses from the hospital in Saigon.…
It might have been anyone in any of a thousand places all crammed into his mind like photographs stashed in a shoebox.
He could not remember.
And then, one afternoon, the woman left the apartment alone. He had been watching from a café on the corner and his small, anonymous Honda was parked outside the window.
The woman got into a red Toyota and started away. He hadn’t come to watch the woman but some instinct drove him now to rise and leave a couple of dollars on the table and start for the door.
She took Highway 101 west through the pretty, jeweled city of whitewashed buildings and red tile roofs. The highway curved into the hills and climbed and then fell toward the Santa Barbara airport on the ocean.
She had no bag with her.
She was meeting someone.
She drove to the terminal and parked in a no-parking zone.
He followed her to the baggage claim area beneath the main level. And then he understood.
It was Ruth. The little waif on the train platform in Paris so long ago. The girl who had insisted on making love to him and had left him to die in a brothel in Zurich’s old town.
Because now she was holding the man and kissing him and it was Kurt Heinemann. He would never forget the face or the scar or the black, wild eyes. Ruth had changed over the years but Kurt Heinemann was exactly the same as the photograph in Devereaux’s memory. He had shot Devereaux in that room and the next thing he had known, he was in a hospital in Zurich and Pendleton was there and…
And Pendleton was there. Now Devereaux was in Santa Barbara working for a crook, trying to steal a secret code machine of some kind from someone.
He stood by a bank of pay telephones and watched their meeting in the middle of the baggage claims area. She handed him an envelope and he handed her a much larger envelope. They talked but Devereaux wasn’t close enough to hear them. And then she kissed him again, on the cheek, and he turned and he waved at her and was striding away, probably back to another plane. Or perhaps a private plane.
He followed Ruth back to the apartment building on Alisos but it was done automatically because she had no idea he was following her and because he knew exactly where she would go back.
What more did Pendleton want from him?
Devereaux took a long shower. The water felt good and he could close his eyes and just feel the water and let the thoughts come, jumbled, out of order and rank, thoughts that mixed up the past and present. All his past life in Section tumbled down into this California city, fell in the shower of water in this hotel room.
He turned off the water and stepped out of the tub and stood in the steam of the small bathroom. He stared at the man in the foggy mirror and then wiped a circle of the glass and looked at his face. What was he looking for? But he wasn’t sure at all.
He dried himself with the thick, white towels and padded into the bedroom. He dialed the number in New York again and he said Mickey’s name.
“Who are you?” the barman said.
He said his name.
“Where you at? You didn’t leave a number.”
He smiled at that. He gave the number.
“Tell Mickey,” he said.
“I look like his answering service?” Hung up. The same old lines, same old tired saloon with the iron resistance to anything and anyone outside that world. Hell’s Kitchen, very much that.
The telephone rang an hour later.
Devereaux picked it up and waited.
“See anything interesting?”
“Not yet,” Devereaux said.
“You wouldn’t hold out on me.”
“You can fire me when you want.”
“Is that a fact? I wonder what would happen if I did. What about Denisov, what’s he doing?”
“He walks a lot, plays chess. He’s got a girlfriend who sleeps with him.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been here that long.”
“So he’s got a girlfriend. Everyone should have a girlfriend. How you holdin’ up, you think you might get back with your girl?”
“Things happen sometimes.”
“Did she throw out your clothes?”
Devereaux blinked. Mickey didn’t care if Devereaux now knew the phone in Rita’s apartment was tapped. And that Mickey had heard their conversation that night he called her from the Croydon Hotel. The night Mickey had decided that Devereaux might be bona fide. Mickey was getting careless or Mickey didn’t have to care. Something had changed between them and Devereaux felt it over 2,500 miles of telephone line.
“Probably gave them to a charity. She isn’t much on wasting things,” he said.
“You dress kind of crummy anyway. There probably wasn’t much there.”
“I’ll use your tailor next time I’m in New York,” Devereaux said. “I told you this was the wrong way to work it. I’m just standing around looking at a fat Russian go through his daily life without a clue. You should be looking at Consortium in Denver. The spy tell you anything more?”
“Not much,” Mickey said, cautious as a cardplayer. “Nothing you can use.”
Devereaux was silent: Mickey was edging around again, he could hear it in the voice. Something didn’t fit right now and it had all changed since he left New York that morning.
“Maybe the girl is the clue. La femme. Lemme know.”
“I got any way to reach you at all?”
“As long as I can reach you,” Mickey Connors said, and broke the connection.
16
1 Oct 90—HONOLULU
Rita Macklin had spent the morning at Pearl Harbor where the dead ship Arizona rested in the shallow water. It was supposed to be one of the reasons for her trip. She had sold Mac on this story and another story and not told him the truth at all. It was not the first time she had lied to her editor at the magazine but it was the first time she had done it for this reason.
He had shared part of a secret.
She had tried to see it in the warm, still water of Pearl Harbor where the ship Arizona was in a shallow, wet grave, marked with a memorial to the bones of the sailors entombed inside. She was a reporter and watcher and she tried to see the past in the stillness of the present. It sometimes worked, to stand perfectly still and see the faces and hear the sounds of other times long dead. It is not true that you have to experience a thing to feel it because all the dead of all the battles never leave the battleground. They remain there as ghosts above the graves, waiting to touch the kindred spirits of the living.
In the afternoon, she met the man in the café of the Holiday Inn where she stayed off Waikiki Beach. His name was Ernie Funo, a Japanese-American whose parents had been interred in California in the first years of the war. He was as tall as she and powerfully built with thick, dark hair framing an open face with just the trace of a mocking smile on his lips. He worked as a stringer for the same magazine that employed Rita Macklin and he aspired to more. He knew his way around the islands and he knew some secrets that never show up in print. He knew about a man named Captain Peterson.
She slipped into a chair opposite him and waited for coffee. He had his in front of him, along with a copy of the New York Times turned to the crossword puzzle. He gave her a rueful smile because his head hurt. They had seen the nightlife of Honolulu the night before and it was much like the nightlife in other cities, where excess is turned into a cause for celebration.
“You look like a walking hangover,” she said. She liked him from the first. He was quick and he knew the things she wanted to know for herself.
“Cheerfulness at the beginning of the day signifies a bad end,” he said. The coffee came along with menus.
They ordered food. The waitress walked away and Funo looked at her and the mocking smile was back again, brushing against the hangover in his eyes.
“Peterson went out this morning.”
“Is that unusual?”
“He went out alone. His ship, Pequod, is a thirty-six-footer and he can handle it, but it’s odd. If he’s making a big drug pickup, he would take along some of the gang. But he went alone and that’s odd and it’s odd where he went.”
“Where was that?”
“I talked to a fellow named Jimmy Wong. A nice fellow except for his cocaine habit. I spent a hundred dollars to help supply him. From company funds.”
“Keep a receipt,” she said.
“Yes. But I don’t think the IRS will approve. Anyway. Jimmy was out this morning himself, he wouldn’t say why but I can guess. He was out ten miles and saw the Pequod going flat-out due west. Maybe Peterson is going to Japan.”
Japan. She kept the excitement out of her face by staring at the coffee as she carefully stirred it.
“What’s this really about, Rita?”
Exactly as Devereaux would say it. She had lied to Funo from the beginning because he wasn’t part of this, Mac wasn’t part of this, Devereaux would have said she wasn’t part of this.
“We’re going to do a major on the Asian drug trade. And Hawaii is part of it.”
“Peterson is a lowlife beginning to a big story.”
“Where was he going?”
“I don’t know.”
She glanced at him. He was waiting for something and so was she.
“You’ve got some idea.”
“Peterson is a smuggler and that means dope because that’s what people usually smuggle. But there have been other things smuggled.”
“What things?”
“I read five newspapers every day. It’s part of my job. At least, the way I see my job. I like the patterns in stories. You can tell things beyond the stories themselves if you read the patterns the right way. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. But I don’t read five newspapers.”
“Perhaps you have a more active life than I do. Look here. There was a story on the inside pages of the Times four days ago. A freighter blew up in the Sea of Japan called the Fujitsu. I was a little intrigued and I got a copy of the Asahi Shimbum for the next day and they made quite a story out of it, bigger than the Times’s first story. The ship had twenty in the crew and they recovered thirteen bodies. The ship went down in two hours and it belonged to Masatata Heavy Industries.”
“What’s that?”
“The usual conglomerate. They make bicycles and auto parts and everything between. The last five years, they’ve built an enormous R & D facility in Hokkaido in the north. Very secure. They even use some Tokyo gangsters for security, which shows they’re serious. The spokesman for Masatata says the ship contained computers.”
Computers. She held her breath and he noticed it and a small, knowing smile replaced the mocking smile. “This is about computers, isn’t it, Rita? You just didn’t want to tell me.”
“What was really on the ship that blew up?”
“Computers.” Funo shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know that the first ship on the scene arrived less than an hour after she went down. It was a Soviet trawler, the Novostok. But everyone was dead. The sea was rough.”
“There’s lifesaving equipment—”
“Exactly. But there wasn’t anything in the water. Not a raft, not a preserver. Everything went down. That makes it a mystery.”
“What’s the connection to Pequod and Peterson?”
Funo smiled then. “I have a friend named Toshibata at Shimbum in Tokyo and I called him. Very expensive call, I kept a receipt. I asked him some more because I like to watch things and anything about Japanese business makes news in America. He told me a second ship could have reached the Fujitsu before it went down. It was a freighter called the Northern Lights, it’s an American ship registered in the Bahamas but it works down the Aleutians this time of year to warm water. Does coasting and some transshipping to the warm-water Alaskan ports in winter like Haines. But I checked with the shipping desk at the Advertiser and they said the Northern Lights is headed due west for Hawaii. And the Lights has never put in at Hawaii. Do you see the connection?”
