Marley’s people were very much interested in what Vassily and the other wrestler were doing. They were interested in what Oleg was doing.
“Mafiya,” a woman in the New York office speculated. “Gangsters.”
“Might be nothing, might be something,” said a soft-faced young man. “Does he want much money?”
“Not too much,” said Marley.
“Tell him he’s not worth much,” the woman said.
It took Marley two afternoons to find the cramped hotel at the edges of Brighton Beach where Vladimir had a single room. The room’s walls were decorated with concert notices. Ashkenazy at Lincoln Center. Yablonskaya at Brooklyn College. Kissin at Carnegie Hall. All Russians, Charles noted, all pianists.
Talking little, they drank the vodka Marley had brought; then, eyes feral, the young man brought a bottle of Georgian brandy to the table with a flourish. “Stalin drank this while he decided whom to murder,” Vlad said. “I read that fact in the KGB files. He drank a lot of brandy.”
“What happened to your job in journalism?”
Elbows on the table, head bent, Vlad struggled with the bottle’s screw cap. Even indoors, he wore gloves. “People decided the KGB files smelled better closed. After that, I was useless. Couldn’t even carry coffee to the boss. You see?” He got the cap off and it skittered across the table like a cockroach. Bottle held in both hands, he poured brandy into coffee mugs. “To your health, Charles.”
“To yours. Are you following Oleg Ossovsky?”
“Who?” The thick brows rose as he pretended not to know.
“I want to warn you about Oleg. He spotted you, and he still has rough friends.”
“An ideal man not to meet, then,” Vladimir said.
“He has mafiya connections. But he’s helping us.” Marley said the last in an offhanded way. Their eyes met briefly.
“So Oleg is protected,” Vlad said.
“Yes. I’m sorry about your hands.”
Vladimir shrugged. He talked about people they had both known in Moscow, had Marley heard what had become of so and so, and Marley tried to remember faces. The more they drank, the less he remembered. Vlad told him that Melissa, the art student, had been stabbed by a mugger in London.
Marley staggered out of the tiny apartment after dawn.
Oleg Ossovsky sat in an unmarked panel truck outside a rooming house near Coney Island. He sat for a long time, but the truck was comfortable. Two burly men, made thicker by black leather and scarves, came out of the rooming house and stood beside the mouth of an alley, indifferent to the cold.
“Are those your friends?” said a CIA watcher.
“Yes, that is Vassily Kuper. The man beside him is his brother, Misha.”
“Where do you go from here?” said Charles Marley, who sat beside Oleg.
“The docks. They import glass, I told you.” Oleg folded his arms. “And people.”
“People from where?”
“Anywhere. Mostly around the Red Sea, I think. This is worth more money than you’re paying, Charles.”
Depending on what the people from the Red Sea had in mind, Oleg might be right, Charles thought. But the information might also be worth much less. He had spent nights thinking about it and decided he didn’t care.
“You shouldn’t keep them waiting,” Marley said.
“Let them freeze.” Oleg huddled in his expensive topcoat. He cast a resentful look at Marley, then decided to be solicitous. “You look ill, old friend.”
“No, I’m fine,” Marley said.
“You should be paying me more for this,” Oleg insisted. He got out on the blind side of the truck, began walking briskly as if he had just come around the corner.
The two Russians didn’t notice him until he was crossing the street. Then they greeted him with hugs, and the guttural voices said they needed to confer, so the three men slipped into the alley. Neither the CIA watcher nor Marley could interpret the grunts they heard from the microphone. When the two wrestlers emerged alone from the alley, the men in the van looked at each other uncertainly. Marley said, “We’d better see.” He was the first into the alley, the first to see the crumpled figure on the ice. He had seen enough dead men to know that Vlad had had time to pass the word, and the word had reached Oleg’s friends.
Payback
by Shirley McCann
“Is she dead?”
Jack slipped into the dark booth and flagged down a waitress. “I’m afraid so, Fred.”
Fred Owens lowered his face into his hands. “I don’t know how it happened. One minute, Molly and I were arguing, and the next thing I knew she was lying on the floor.” He glanced up. “I didn’t even touch her. She just tripped over the coffee table.”
Jack ordered a drink, then waited for the waitress to leave. “You didn’t tell anyone else about this, did you?”
Fred shook his head. “I just straightened the table and picked up in the living room, hoping she would wake up. But she didn’t.” He pulled his eyes tight as if the image was too horrifying to relive.
Jack accepted his drink from the waitress and took a sip. “Don’t worry about it, Fred. It’s all been taken care of.”
“What do you mean?”
Jack leaned forward. “I mean why should you spend your life in prison for something that was an accident?”
“It was an accident! I swear it.”
“You and I know that,” Jack said. “But the police may have other ideas. So why take the chance of spending the rest of your life paying for it?” He gulped his drink. “As long as there’s no body, there can’t be a murder.”
Fred’s eyes widened. “You got rid of the body? How? Where?”
“That’s not important,” Jack told him. “The important thing is that you won’t be arrested for murder.”
Fred exhaled and folded his arms across the table. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
“That’s easy,” Jack remarked. “I did you a favor, now you’ll do a favor for me.”
“Anything. Just name it.”
“Kill my wife.”
Fred gasped. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“But why? Marge has already filed for divorce. She’ll be out of your life soon enough.”
“With half of everything I’ve worked hard for during our twenty-year marriage.”
Fred put up his hands. “I can’t do it. I’m no murderer!”
“But you are, Fred,” Jack reminded him. “And if it weren’t for me, you’d be facing a murder charge.”
“Is she dead?”
Fred slid into the booth and lowered his head into his hands. “She’s dead.”
Jack expelled a long breath. “How did you do it?”
Fred rubbed both hands down his long, haggard face. “I almost couldn’t go through with it,” he told Jack. “But when I went home and realized what you’d done for me, I knew I had to repay you.” He glanced up, meeting Jack’s gaze. “The police will think she was shot during a burglary.”
Jack slid back against the booth. “You did the right thing, Fred. Now we can both put this ugly mess behind us.”
“Is she dead?”
Crossing the motel room, Jack scooped Molly into his arms and twirled her in the air. “She’s dead.”
Molly released herself from Jack’s grip and pirouetted across the room. “I can’t believe how easy this was. You were right about everything. When I told Fred I was leaving him for another man, he went crazy. For a minute, I thought he might really kill me. But as soon as he started coming at me, I pretended to fall over the coffee table. I stayed on the floor until he left.”