A colleague from State drifted past with a small wave. A lobbyist and his client had the man from State between them like prisoner and escort. Lock grinned back, acknowledging the wave with a waggle of his fork. This was Indian country for civil servants and politicians.
Billy and Turgenev, on the other side of the room, were in close counsel with a Democratic senator who had ambitions to head the Senate Committee that overlooked the administration’s assistance to Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. Turgenev was affable, as always, while Billy’s face was still clouded with some new and worrying knowledge. Lock realised that he might require a bolthole — preferably in the shape and glamour of a young woman with brains — before he was summoned into the dialogue as the State Department’s resident expert on Russia.
But he could not turn away from the image of the taller Turgenev and the somehow reduced and shrunken Billy. The unflurried, relaxed Russian looked as if he’d been moving in Washington circles for most of his life.
But then he had, in a way. He’d been a young but already senior KGB officer in Afghanistan during the ‘80s. He and Billy had met Turgenev during the last days, when the Russians were about to get out. They’d helped supervise the withdrawal, the prisoner exchanges, obtained guarantees of safe passage from the mujahideen commanders. They’d found themselves comrades-in-experience, the two men from the CIA and the KGB colonel. They’d all liked each other, under the strangest circumstances and in the most unlikely place. He had a snapshot somewhere of the three of them, posed against snowcapped mountains like good ol’ boys on a hunting trip.
It had been the beginning of Billy’s association with Turgenev, and when the Russian had appeared in Siberia, reincarnated as an entrepreneur, he and Billy had set up what had become the behemoth of GraingerTurgenev, the largest exploiter of the vast Urengoy gasfield.
They drifted purposefully out of the dining room, leaving the senator in their wake — just Billy and the Russians; as if fleeing the party. Business? Beth would not be pleased; her liberal credentials did not extend to excusing a lack of etiquette in herself, Billy or anyone else.
His claret was refreshed by a murmuring waiter, moving smoothly as a machine about the room. There was a desultory exchange of greetings with a journalist, but no real conversation.
The man was after bigger game. Russia was unfashionable this month in the Washington Post. Bosnia had the inside track on international news. A department junior introduced his girlfriend, a small-faced young woman hiding behind huge spectacles who gushed her awe of Beth. She’d been one of the students his sister had taken to the UN.
Then he was alone again for a moment, surveying the guests, before a hand touched his arm. His delight that it was Beth was at once tempered by her clouded expression.
‘What’s the matter with Billy?’ she demanded, as if Lock were responsible.
‘What’s up. Sis? Great party ‘
‘Billy’s locked in the study with Pete Turgenev and some other Russians. I want him out here, not ignoring his guests.’
‘Sis, it must be important ‘
‘John, go and drag him back in here, please!’
She smiled at a passing compliment on the buffet and her hair from a blue-rinsed matron who was a congressman’s wife and a member of the same country club, then the affability was gone in a moment.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Sis,’ he soothed. It was as if her new confidence was the merest facade. She would not interrupt Billy herself, just in case a chasm yawned in an angry or impatient refusal. He nodded. ‘OK, I’ll go roust him out.’
“Thanks, thanks-‘ And at once she plunged into a conversation regarding the current production of La Forza del Destino at the Washington Opera, the young woman from her class nging on her every pronouncement. He was relieved to miss hanp that discussion, because Beth would inevitably want to show him off as her musicologist brother — which he wasn’t, not unless he eventually did finish that damn’ book on Monteverdi …
Beth was severe when he excused it as a good reason to spend time in Mantua and Venice, Sis, nothing more … all of which reminded him he had to return the call on his answerphone from the lady at Washington Musica Antiqua tomorrow.
Tomorrow, definitely — just as soon as he thought up a good enough story for the delay with the performing version of the opera.
There wasn’t too much wrong. He wandered to the broad, dark doors of the dining room and across the hall. At the foot of the staircase, seated on the bottom step of the sweeping flight, an aspiring painter Beth was patronising was insinuating himself with two senior executives of a bank. Like the bank’s profits, the price of his paintings was set to rise. Maybe the bank should invest … hustle, hustle. He smiled, then knocked at the study door.
He could hear raised voices on the other side of the door which was locked, he realised. He knocked again, sipping at his claret. He could distinguish nothing of the conversation — quarrel, was it? Then Billy eased the door open like someone afraid of the cops or the landlord.
‘Oh — John.’ He was sweating and he had been drinking bourbon by the scent of his breath. He was in shirtsleeves, his black tie loosened and dangling on his chest, which heaved as if he had been running. ‘Beth sent you, uh?’ Lock could see Turgenev seated in a leather armchair, long legs stretched confidently out.
The Russian turned his face towards the door. He was smiling, untroubled. ‘Well, did she?’
‘Yes. You know what a stickler’
‘I’m busy, John. Just get lost, uh?’ He manufactured a disarming, reassuring smile. His eyes were drunk, tired and unnerved.
‘OK, OK, I’m just the messenger.’ Lock raised his hands in mock surrender, and Billy nodded, closing the door and relocking it at once.
Even before he had moved away from the door, he could hear Billy’s raised voice again; protest, anger, defiance. He shook his head. A disagreement over profits, what else? He’d have to soothe Beth.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He had an early meeting with the Secretary of State, who wanted his face-to-face impressions of the Russian situation. He’d leave soon.
He looked back at the study door, as if drawn to the disturbing eddies and waves of emotion he had sensed as vividly as static electricity during the. moments that the door was ajar.
He yawned. Not your business, he advised himself. Just soothe Beth, nod in the direction of the faces that were important, talk to the people he liked, then make tracks. Pete Turgenev was a hard-nosed bastard, but then so was Billy. It would be an interesting contest It was like the most undeserved and repressive surveillance, glancing through the small square of window in the door to the ward. He could make out only the shape of the wife beneath the bedclothes, her features hidden by a mound of pillow.
Dmitri Gorov sat motionless on a chair beside the bed, staring at the hand that lay unresponsively in his own. It was a scene, Vorontsyev guessed, identical to every other visit Dmitri made. A tableau depicting the aftermath of a tragedy. His wife was evidently sedated on this occasion. There were more awful visits, he gathered, when she wept uncontrollably, when she was conscious but did not know him, when she was a girl again.
He could not understand why Dmitri came so regularly. Was it self-flagellation for the dead daughter? Was it memory, love?
Vorontsyev turned away, ashamed, his boots echoing in the hospital corridor. He had come to collect Dmitri, but the man was evidently not yet ready to abandon the silent, unconscious madwoman.
The pharmacist had confirmed that he had.prescribed sleeping pills for Rawls — four days ago. The executive from GraingerTurgenev had identified the body in the mortuary. Vorontsyev had the autopsy report in his pocket. It told him nothing he did not already know. Rawls had been dragged into the copse, but had not walked any distance. The taxi must have dropped him and headed back to town. He must have been meeting someone he knew — at least, someone he had no cause to fear would do him harm. There had been no sign of a struggle, no physical damage to Rawls other than the single wound to the back of the head. The Russian who’d identified him had no explanation.