Goncharov had tiny, cramped handwriting, nearly illegible. The fact that he used the Cyrillic alphabet and wrote in Russian didn’t help. It could have been Sanskrit for all I knew. I pondered that verity for a moment — the bodies I had seen that morning had been real enough, and the man I killed hadn’t faked it, yet I had no verification for Kelly’s statement that these notes were purloined copies of KGB files. Were they? Really?
After a minute or two Dorsey put the pages I had given her back in the suitcase. She placed two more slabs of wood on the fire, poked it up some, then sat down beside me on the sofa and stared moodily at the flames.
The silence grew and grew. “Was the guy the fiancé?” I asked finally.
“Oh, no. We broke up months ago.” She shrugged dismissively. “Geoff is an outside artist. I am thinking about sponsoring him.”
“Outside? He does statues in the park?”
“No, silly. He’s outside the establishment. He has no formal artistic training.”
“Oh.” The fire popped a few times, then settled down. “Guess I’m an outside artist, too.”
She gave me a withering look.
“How come you never suggested sponsoring me?”
“For Christ’s sake, Tommy! You killed several men today, and now you’re sitting here in front of my fire trying to be funny.”
“I’m just happy to be alive.”
“I never met anyone so callous.”
I made a rude noise. Then I kicked off my shoes, stretched, wiggled my toes, and indulged in a huge yawn. Frankly, I felt pretty good… tired and mellow. You gotta admit, being alive has its attractions.
“I want a drink,” she said, and stood. “Do you?”
“Sure. Whiskey, please.”
While she was gone I surveyed the room. It didn’t look as if she had changed anything since I last saw it, back when I thought that she and I…
Dorsey’s great-grandfather was a bootlegger, had been mobbed up, bribed cops and judges and county officials, shot it out with the competition, all of that… got modestly rich and retired when they repealed Prohibition. He bought this estate in the thirties and built the mansion. He had only owned it a few years when his ticker stopped dead one night while he slept.
The bootlegger’s only daughter married a fast-talking salesman who thought cars were the coming thing. He used the bootlegger’s money to build a string of car dealerships around Washington in the late thirties. During and after World War II he got rich when Washington’s population exploded and the mass exodus to the suburbs began.
The car dealer’s daughter, Dorsey’s mother, was a hippie. She flitted off to San Francisco, smoked pot, sang peace songs, and stretched the concept of free love nearly to the breaking point, according to Dorsey. She and Dorsey’s father — another hippie who didn’t need to dirty his hands with work after he married Dorsey’s mom — filled their days with manifestos, politically significant demonstrations, general hanging out, and recreational drugs. They joined communes several times. They were in California protesting the Vietnam War and searching for the meaning of life when they drove their car over a cliff near the ocean one morning during the wee hours. Dorsey thought they were probably strung out at the time.
When her grandparents died Dorsey inherited it all, the mansion, the estate, the money, and the dealerships. She dabbled in starving artists and porno filmmakers and hard cases like me.
She came back from the kitchen with the whiskey and nestled beside me on the couch. Amazingly, after the day I’d had, the heat and pressure of her body against mine felt very good.
“Aren’t you chilly in that outfit?” I asked.
“A little.”
I pulled an afghan from the back of the sofa and put it over her.
“So what are you going to do about this mess?”
“Haven’t decided.” I couldn’t help myself. I draped an arm over her shoulder and pulled her close.
“Could call the police, you know.”
“And have a hit team show up instead of the cops? No thanks.”
She rested her head on my shoulder.
The fire burned down as we sipped our drinks. I was acutely conscious of how she felt snuggled up against me. And smelled.
My eyelids grew heavy. Getting up the stairs was going to take some doing. “Sorry to barge in on you like this,” I said.
“I’m glad you came. The artist was a bit of a snob.”
“A big house like this, moldy old money, a beautiful woman? What the hell does he want?”
“It was pretty obvious that I didn’t know much about art.”
“So it was a rescue! Glad I got here in the nick.”
“Oh, Tommy, what’s wrong with us? You and me? Why didn’t it work for us?”
“If I could answer questions like that, woman, I’d be getting rich with my own call-in radio show.” Actually I had a theory, but that didn’t seem to be the time or place. The fire felt good and she felt better, snugglely, with promising bulges and curves.
As I sat there basking in her aura, my mind wandered. Who were those guys?
That was a problem I couldn’t solve just then.
I dropped it and slid my hand inside the afghan. Yep, she was wearing nothing under that slinky thing. A scene from one of those porno flicks shot through my little mind. Feeling guilty, I retracted my stray appendage and used it to put the whiskey where it belonged.
When I finished my drink, the moment could be avoided no longer. “What bed do you want me in?”
“Mine.”
That response made me smile. “I was hoping you would say that,” I told her warmly. I hoisted the submachine gun and carried it up the stairs while she locked up and turned off the lights.
I awoke about three in the morning. I had been sound asleep and a moment later was fully awake. Dorsey O’Shea was curled up with her back against mine, breathing deeply, totally relaxed.
I checked my watch, then lay in the darkness listening to the sounds, wondering why I had come so fully awake.
I sneaked out of bed, and pulled on trousers and a shirt. The submachine gun was where I had left it, propped on its butt in one corner. I put the pistol in my trouser pocket and picked up the MP-5. Dorsey didn’t awaken as I eased the door open and crept out. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood in the darkness listening.
The old house was deathly quiet. The bootlegger built it solid.
I eased open the door to Kelly Erlanger’s room, stood and listened to her breathe as she slept. Finally I closed the door as softly as I could, making sure it latched.
I worked my way slowly down the stairs, stopping frequently to listen.
Okay, maybe I was being paranoid. I didn’t think yesterday’s killers could possibly find us this quickly, but what the hey, I had a lot to be paranoid about. The truth of it was that I was damned worried. I assumed the Russians wanted Goncharov dead. Yet those guys yesterday weren’t Russians. And they knew precisely where to find Goncharov, ensconced in a top secret government safe house and surrounded by armed guards. They arrived armed with serious weapons — you can’t buy MP-5s at your local sporting goods store. These popguns came from an arsenal somewhere… probably a government arsenal.
And who were the killers? What did they do during the day when they weren’t sneaking around in ghillie suits gunning people down? Where did they live? Were they on some kind of retainer, or were they an ad hoc group hired for one job?
Regardless of how those questions shook out, if the assassins wanted to make the job a clean sweep they were still after Kelly Erlanger and me.
I was going to have to find out who was hiring these dudes if I wanted to get very much older. Somehow, some way, I had to put that someone out of action.