“He says that he’ll keep them until we come down,” she said.
I shook my head. “Not all of us are coming down,” I said. “Think of something to get them back.”
She shook her head in bewilderment “What?”
“You’re the CIA agent, honey,” Knight said, bowing slightly to the plainclothesman, “come up with something brilliant.”
Arrie turned back to the plainclothesman and, holding out her hand, said something. The plainclothesman’s eyebrows went up, he laughed and winked, and then brought out the passports and handed them to Arrie. She thanked him and then handed them to us.
“What did you tell him?” I said as we started up the stairs.
“That you and I might be spending the night and possibly wouldn’t see him again before he went off duty.”
“Well, if it wasn’t brilliant, it was quick,” I said.
Apparently, the two policemen downstairs were the only ones on duty at night. None was guarding the door to the Pernik flat. I knocked and the door was opened immediately by Gordana Panić.
“Has anyone tried to see him?” I said.
She shook her head. “No one.”
“What about Stepinac?” I said.
She ducked her head like a child caught in its first lie. “He came to see me, not my grandfather.”
“But you told him that the old man was dead.”
“I had to,” she said. “It was the only way.”
“Well, Stepinac’s dead,” I said, not trying to ease her shock, if there was to be any.
She repeated the word. “Dead?”
“Like your grandfather.”
She gestured vaguely around the room. “But he was here and we talked and he had some brandy and—” She ended it there and looked at Arrie and then at Knight. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’ll need some of his clothes,” Knight said. “His overcoat and hat and gloves and a scarf, if he had one.”
“Whose?” she said.
“Your grandfather’s,” I said. “Knight’s going to impersonate him while we go past the guards downstairs.”
“Pernik is dead?” Arrie said to me.
“That’s right,” I said.
“When did he—”
I interrupted her. “I haven’t got time to give you a running explanation and you don’t deserve one. Just pick up what you can as we go along.”
“The clothes. I need his clothes,” Knight was saying to Gordana.
“They’re back here,” she said, moving toward the bedroom where the dead man lay. Knight followed her and I followed Knight. All three of us filed into the bedroom where the old man still lay clutching his rosary. “Good Christ,” Knight said.
“In this cupboard,” Gordana said, opening a closet.
Knight rummaged through it and took out a hat, a coat, and a scarf. “Did he have any gloves?” he said.
Gordana produced a pair from the drawer of a bureau and handed them to Knight. He put the hat on first, wearing it low over his eyes. He slipped into the topcoat which was too short for him until he stooped to compensate for its lack of length. He wrapped the scarf around his neck and most of his chin.
“Glasses,” he said. “He wore glasses.”
Gordana looked around the room. “I put them someplace,” she said. “Someplace safe.” She opened and closed drawers until she found them in what seemed to be her sewing box. “Here,” she said, handing them to Knight.
“Is this your best mirror?” he said, pointing to the one above the bureau. She nodded and Knight took articles from the pocket of his own topcoat which he had folded on a chair. “That coat cost me two hundred and twenty-five bucks, skipper,” he said to me. “It goes on the expense account if I have to leave it here.”
“One double-breasted, foreign intrigue trench coat,” I said. “Duly entered.”
Knight removed Pernik’s clothing and started opening his packages as Gordana and I watched. “All I could get hold of was powder and pancake makeup and an eyebrow pencil,” he said. “But if it’s only a quick glance, it may do.”
“What about your hair?” I said.
“I’ll have to shave off my sideburns,” he said. “There’s no time for dye and I couldn’t find any in that hotel shop anyway. The hat and the scarf’ll cover most of my hair. I can use powder in the eyebrows.” He turned to Gordana. “Your grandfather have a razor?”
She nodded. “It is the old-fashioned kind with a straight blade.”
“Don’t you have one?” he said.
She shook her head. “I do not find use for one.”
I could attest to that but I didn’t. “Use the straightedge,” I said.
“Where is it?” Knight asked.
“In the bath,” she said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
While they were gone I stared at the old man who looked no deader than he had looked at half past five that afternoon when his nude granddaughter and her new lover had come calling.
Knight came back into the bedroom looking almost naked without his sideburns. Gordana followed him. “She watched,” he said. “She likes to watch men shave.”
“Cut yourself?” I said.
“Only a nick.”
He turned to the mirror over the bureau and started applying the pancake makeup and the powder. “It’s more a question of mimicry than it is of makeup,” he said. “I just want to create an old man’s face — any old man. But my movements — my walk and my gestures — will provide the real misdirection. If they recognize them as familiar, they won’t look at the face too much. The familiar clothing will help too.”
He worked on his face for fifteen minutes, rubbing here, patting there, and drawing lines with the eyebrow pencil. Then he put on the hat, an old, almost shapeless felt, and pulled it down low over his forehead. He wrapped the long, blue woolen scarf around his neck and chin, making it ride high up on the back of his collar. He shrugged into the coat and adjusted the glasses so that they rode halfway down his nose. He looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to remember something, and then with a dip and shrug he started to walk across the room in a slow, shuffling, sliding gait that drew a gasp from Gordana.
“It is exactly how he walked!” she said.
Knight walked back toward us. “He walked on the outside of his feet,” he said. “A lot of old men do.” He peered at Gordana over his glasses, using a stooped, slouching posture. “How do you like it, my dear?” he asked in a deep voice that was an almost perfect replica of Pernik’s — accent, inflection and all.
She glanced at her dead grandfather quickly. “You do not look as he looked, but you sound and walk as he did. It is fantastic.”
“It’ll be fantastic,” Knight said, “if they ask me to say something in Serbo-Croatian.” He slumped back into his old man’s posture and shuffled out of the room. Gordana turned to me.
“I am... I am sorry about Stepinac,” she said. “I did not mean to seem so stupid earlier, but it was a shock and I do not need any more shocks. I have had enough. How did he die?”
“It was an accident,” I said.
She shook her head. “I did not love him, but he was nice to me. I am sorry that he is dead. That is not much, is it, to be only sorry?”
“You can’t do anything else,” I said. “Do you want anything here?” I gestured at the room and the bed where the old man lay.
She shook her head. “I want nothing from here. Nothing.” She walked over and put her hand on her grandfather’s forehead. “He is cold,” she said and turned back to me. “Were we terrible this afternoon? If we were terrible, I will forget it.”
“I don’t know what we were,” I said.
“I will forget only part of it then,” she said. “I will forget only the terrible part. The rest I will remember. Will you?”