He checked the hour again but there was ample time; he allowed himself an extra cup of coffee, pouring cream from a glass syrup pitcher with a steel spring-loaded thumb lid—a peculiarly American device that fascinated him.
Down the block from the house one of Hathaway’s people was sitting in a parked car. Belsky parked some distance away and let the man have a good look at him under the street light when he got out of his car and walked by. The man nodded almost imperceptibly.
The bungalow was obscured from neighbors’ view by tall oleander hedges. Belsky went up the cracked flagstone walk and Hathaway emerged from the shadows on the porch and spoke a low greeting. Hathaway was forty, crew-cut and dark, paunch beginning to swell. He wore a T-shirt that showed off his thick arms and husky muscled shoulders; wire-hard hairs on his chest and back burst through its fabric. He held the door for Belsky.
Douglass had picked the place years ago as his cell’s meeting place because the woman who owned it lived alone and her habits of odd hours and odd company made it unlikely that gatherings here would attract attention. The living room was crowded with flowers and ferns planted in old pharmaceutical jars. The repulsive plants writhed everywhere and for a moment Belsky felt as if he couldn’t breathe.
Hathaway’s Air Force Tech Sergeant tunic was hanging on the back of a chair. A uniformed Airman Second Class named Torrio was fooling with the controls of a portable metal detector. Torrio was a short man with a thin pocked face and a stiff curry brush of brown hair that added two inches to his height. He nodded with reserve. Belsky had assembled them six hours ago with no advance warning and told them precisely what they were to do and no more; now Torrio and Hathaway stood awkwardly, trying to look like typical Government-Issue bureaucrats, but with fear and curiosity on their faces.
Belsky said, “You want to ask questions, don’t you? Forget them. Torrio, go back and get the woman.”
After Torrio left the room Belsky said to Hathaway, “How is it arranged?”
“I’ve got a man outside in a car. He’ll screen them as they arrive. They’ll come into this room and I’ll hold them here. I’ll send them one at a time into the bedroom, back that way, and Torrio will go over them for metal. Then they’ll go out the back door from the bedroom and you’ll talk to them out there. It’s a screened-in porch—patio, if you want to call it that.”
“I don’t like that. Voices carry outdoors.”
“There’s a high hedge around the back of the place and both neighbors have got cinder-block walls around their backyards. There’s nothing behind this house but an empty lot.”
Belsky still didn’t like it but this little living room wasn’t big enough and it was too late to change the location now; he wished he’d had time to inspect the place beforehand. Douglass was a fool for recommending it.
Belsky said, “We’ll be done with the first group in forty-five minutes, no more. You and Torrio will make sure they get on their way. You and your men will leave before six o’clock and you’ll take the woman with you.”
“Isn’t there another meeting at six-fifteen?”
Belsky, removing a thick envelope from his inside breast pocket, only glanced at him. Hathaway said, “I get it. You’re changing the security shift for each bunch so none of us will be able to identify anybody outside of the people we already know from our own cells.”
“Just do your job. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.” But Belsky was impressed; the man was brighter than he looked and might prove useful.
It was a requisite never to break security by allowing subordinates to communicate directly with their superior: any one of them might be tailed to the superior. But Rykov’s message had made it necessary to break many such rules. By midnight he would have met with almost one hundred Illegals, representing sixteen cells, and tomorrow there would be more meetings. He was exposing himself to great personal risk, but only because nobody was going to be able to trace back beyond Belsky himself: he would not lead anyone to his own superior and if he should be trapped there was always the death pill inside the hollowed tooth. Belsky was quite prepared to make use of it if cornered. Nevertheless on those infrequent occasions when his nerves acted up he found his tongue experimenting tentatively with the loose tooth; years ago he had reached the sensible compromise of removing the pill from his mouth whenever he went to sleep. He always kept it near at hand but there remained the chance he might be caught asleep and prevented from reaching it; but that risk was preferable to the risk of swallowing it by accident.
Torrio came in with the woman. She wet her lips with the sharp pink tip of her tongue and said, “So you’re the prince who’s come to wake Sleeping Beauty.”
He made no immediate answer. His silence was calculated to unsettle her. He wanted to use this opportunity to appraise her as he appraised them all, to judge their excellences and weaknesses and to determine the extent to which they had been affected by the cultural shock that penetrated all Communist agents exposed to Western societies.
“You’re a pretty drab-looking prince,” she said, trying to needle him into response. He didn’t rise to it and she began to show she was unnerved.
Her name was Nikola Lavrentyeva; in America she was Nicole Lawrence. A little crepe dress clung to the curved surfaces of her small spider-waisted body. When she moved, her breasts stirred with braless insouciance. Her toes, in open sandals, were a bit dirty. Cynical dark onyx eyes in a pinched simian face; a vague sullen smile, nervous, discontented, suggestive of stormy passions. The ugly wizened face was at odds with the lean thrusting body and he got the feeling her looks had faded faster than her appetites. Her hair was pulled back from her scalp so tightly that it looked as if it must ache: a sign of things repressed, emotions held precariously in check. She looked susceptible to the kind of incendiary emotions that could make a shambles of surface loyalties and rationalizations. Dangerous, then; to be watched.
He said, “Leave us,” and waited until Hathaway and Torrio had gone away into the back of the house. Then, finally, he spoke to the woman. “Nikola Lavrentyeva, daughter of Nikolai Lavrentyev and Ella Galharova Lavrentyeva.”
Her dour smile showed tiny teeth. Her eyes were overhung by thick droopy lashes—cunning eyes. “What if I don’t play the game with you, Comrade?”
“Do you want me to answer that question?”
Her face changed; she saw he had no patience with coquetry. She said in a harder voice, “My grandparents—Anastas Lavrentyev, Valentia Lavrentyeva, Josef Galharov, Nikola Blokhova Galharova.” She tilted her face away from him. “I’m surprised I still remember them.”
“Your parents are quite well. Your sister Marya is a successful physician, you know.”
“Little Marya. That’s hard to picture, Comrade—ah?”
“You’ll know me as Dangerfield.”
“That’s not quite fair. You know my name.”
He said, “Come with me,” and went toward the hallway. “Is that the bedroom?”
“Yes.”
Torrio and Hathaway were inside the cluttered room and Belsky sent Hathaway back to the front of the house. “They’ll start arriving soon.” When Hathaway had left he said to Torrio, “This one first.”
Torrio showed his surprise. “Her too?”
“Get on with it.” Belsky backed up against the door to push it shut and stood with his shoulderblades against it.