Not for the first time in the past two months, Devereaux felt trapped in a state that was neither certain nor real. The quality of a dream infected his waking moments in the frozen city; perhaps it was a nightmare. Sometimes, after a night of dreams that tormented him with memories of dead men and nightmares survived in his past, Devereaux would awake and think he was still sleeping.
He had noted contact with an agent in his last message to Hanley, posted the day before. He guessed the agent was British but he didn’t know. He told Hanley in the note that his cover had been blown but still there was silence.
Four P.M. The city was growing dark. The lights were flicked on in the streets but they seemed pale. People began to leave the stores and offices along the main shopping thoroughfares. In a little while, the center of Helsinki would be wrapped in silence.
Contact with Hanley was complicated by official Washington’s distrust of both the Swedes and Finns. It was assumed all telephone lines were routinely tapped. The usual routing of messages was by mail, anonymous drop, to the safe house in Copenhagen. The mail normally took a day. From Copenhagen it could be sent to the States by pouch or by scrambled radio signal.
He had done one other thing. He had addressed Hanley in a separate open telegram sent to the address in Fairfax, Virginia, that was the last desperate expedient of desperate agents needing to contact the Section through extraordinary means. The addressee was “Mr. Dougherty” who lived in a seedy rooming house in that Washington suburb.
MR. DOUGHERTY. NEED IMMEDIATE DECISION ON ARABIA PURCHASE FOR CALIFORNIA STORE. DIXON.
The California store was the place in Santa Barbara where defectors were “stored” after the first debriefings in Maryland, before they were given new identities and scattered to safe sites throughout the United States. “Arabia” was the trade name for the Finnish glass-and-dinnerware company and the message sounded sufficiently like a business inquiry that Devereaux thought it would escape the special study of the Finnish censors.
Darkness at four fifteen.
Devereaux gave it up for the day. He bent his head into the face of the perpetual wind that howled off the plaza between the Presidentti Hotel and the office complex across the way. If there had been contact by the Russians, the signal was to purchase a bottle of Finlandia vodka in the Alko store between three and four in the afternoon and then leave the bottle on the walk in front of the store. It had not happened.
He pushed through the front doors into the vast square lobby of the dark modern hotel. He felt cold. He always felt cold now, as though a perpetual chill had taken root in his bones.
He walked to the left of the elevator bank and took the stairs down to the sauna rooms.
Behind the wooden desk, a pregnant woman nodded to him in greeting. She was dark and her eyes were a very dark blue; she wore thick glasses as did many of the women in Helsinki.
She handed him blue bathing trunks and a locker key and towel.
“Cold today, Mr. Dixon?”
“No. Warm. People were wearing bathing trunks outside,” he said. She smiled because the exchange was ritual and he had developed an odd fondness for the pregnant women whose name was Ulla. It was the only warm contact in Helsinki for him and he maintained it with the care of a man who blows on a small flame to keep it from dying in a frozen camp.
The sauna was usually empty at this time.
He found comfort in the ritual as much as in the physical warmth of the basement rooms. He would sit in the sauna and become lost in the luxury of the heat as it soaked into his cold bones; when he was sweating, he would go into the next room and plunge into the small swimming pool and swim himself into exhaustion. And then he would return to the sauna and fall asleep and invariably he would be refreshed at the end of the ritual.
He undressed and pulled on the blue trunks in the changing room and then padded across the floor in bare feet to the shower room that led to the sauna. There were bloody prints of feet on the floor.
He stood still for a long moment.
The prints were prints of shoes and what appeared to be a bare foot. The shoe prints led to an outside door that in turn led to a hall. He opened the door to the hall. The bloody shoe prints continued for six feet and then stopped. The blood had dried on the shoes. The shoes belonged to the killer.
Devereaux knew it was a killing.
He turned on a shower in the shower room and the water beat down harshly against the tile in the open stall.
Devereaux then opened the door of the sauna.
It smelled of warm blood.
A single light lit the wooden room. Warm blood — it reminded Devereaux of a battlefield in Vietnam a long time ago — warm, sickly sweet smell of blood.
The wooden walls were splattered with blood that still ran on the wood.
Propped on a bench above the heater, facing the door like a macabre butler, was the naked body of the Englishman called Sims who had made contact with Devereaux the night before.
From nipple to bladder, the chest had been opened. All the blood was draining from the body. Gray guts were splattered on the bench.
Devereaux stared at the dead features. The eyes were open, the mouth lolled open. A pail of water was next to the body; it was tinted red by the blood that had spilled into it.
Devereaux looked for the weapon but it was not there. He leaned across the body and pulled a locker key from a pair of swimming trunks cast aside on the bloody bench. Locker 112.
Devereaux stepped out of the sauna. He was sweating but he felt cold. He stepped into the running shower and bathed the blood from his legs. He stepped out of the shower and let the water keep running. He went into the changing room and pulled his towel from the locker and dried himself while he considered the possibilities.
The pregnant woman named Ulla at the front desk had seen him enter. Was it the only way in or out of the sauna? Had she seen the killer? But he knew that sometimes Ulla worked sorting clothes in a back room behind the desk where she dispensed towels and bathing garments and, oddly, beer from a tap. The killer could have slipped in and out without being seen if he was willing to take the chance.
Ulla had seen him. She would have to tell that to the police. Was Devereaux intended to be trapped by this? Was the dead man a British agent? Had he been set up to be killed here, in this time and place, because of Devereaux’s habit of using the sauna in the afternoon?
Which would mean that someone had an interest in Devereaux enough to follow him every day, until his routine was established.
Devereaux put down the towel and used the key found in the sauna to open locker 112.
Trousers, shirt, sweater. No outer jacket. He had stayed in the hotel. Devereaux fished through the pockets for identification. None. Three hundred-markka notes, some Finnish change, a single British ten-shilling piece. And a key to Room 612.
He dressed quickly. After seven weeks of inaction, the discovery of the body of the dead Englishman had curiously energized him. He felt no horror. He had seen such dead men before. It was a peculiar sort of professional killing, used by some hired hands in the Mediterranean area.
He put the key to Room 612 in his pocket. He threw his outer coat over his arm and carried along his dripping trunks and the towel he had taken from the locker of the dead man. He left his own towel at the entrance to the sauna, on the sopping floor where the shower still played against the tiles.
He went down the hall.
Ulla was looking at a glossy Swedish magazine. It had a lurid cover and the headlines were bright red.
“Mr. Dixon. You are finished already?”
“No, Ulla,” Devereaux said gently. “There is a dead man in the sauna.”