Instinctively, we both stepped inside, shutting the door behind us, plunging us into a blackness so deep, I couldn’t see my hands.
“Lew,” Rarig asked, “is that you?”
“Whom do you have with you?” was the answer, coming from somewhere high and against the wall to our backs. It was a light, delicate voice, heavily accented, with the careful phrasing of someone who’s learned the language too well.
“He’s a friend. He figured out you might be here. Are you all right?”
“Yes, but I am not sure for how much longer. No doubt they are doing as you are, searching me out.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Rarig explained, as if coaxing a child. “To get you someplace safe.”
“There may be no such place.”
Rarig lost his patience. “Well, it sure as hell isn’t here. Where are you, goddamn it?”
A soft chuckle. “That is John Rarig. Look to your left.”
We did as instructed and saw a tiny, bright red dot hovering in the darkness. Following it, our shoulders rubbing the wall for reference, we groped forward, found a narrow set of steps, and climbed to the door of a small sound and light control booth wedged up against the theater’s ceiling. The red light turned out to be from a pen-sized laser pointer, which our guide returned to his breast pocket as we joined him. A faint glow emanated from the equipment panel located at the base of a broad window overlooking a huge blank universe.
Lew Corbin-Teich was a soft outline of tousled hair and bushy beard, with an aquiline nose that came and went in the dim light as he turned his head. He greeted John Rarig with a bear hug and a kiss on each cheek, exchanging a few comments in Russian, which Rarig seemed to speak like a native.
Then Corbin-Teich turned to me and fumbled in the dark for my hand, which he shook energetically. “It is nice to meet you. I am Lewis Corbin-Teich.”
“My pleasure,” I said automatically. “Joe Gunther. Do you have any idea who’s after you?”
His shadow shook its head, his voice sounding bewildered. “No. I was walking with Andrei to the Geonomics Center, where he had a meeting. I was merely keeping him company. He has been in low spirits since the passing of his wife. I heard an automobile approaching from behind us. I turned my head to look. I was nervous because I thought I had seen a man watching my house the night before. I saw the barrel of a gun in one of the windows and instinctively I fell to the ground. Andrei never saw a thing, and I never extended a hand to warn him. I was utterly silent throughout the attack. Speechless. Andrei died as if all life suddenly was pulled from him and only his clothes remained. He fell in a heap and never moved.”
Corbin-Teich was weeping. Rarig placed one hand on his shoulder. “Lew, there was nothing you could do. He probably never felt a thing.”
“Tell me about the man you saw watching your house,” I asked.
Corbin-Teich’s voice was strained. “It may have been nothing. I have been on edge ever since the death of Sergei Antonov. I no longer know.”
I switched tacks. “Could your friend have been the target?”
“No, no. Andrei had no enemies. He was the gentlest of men.”
“I heard he was a defector, too.”
Corbin-Teich’s rejection was absolute. “Ah, such nonsense. He was a poet. He left decades ago as a matter of conscience. No one missed him. No one cared, just as no one will care that he was shot down in cold blood.”
Rarig administered more solace as I tried to keep Lew focused, although, truth be told, now that we’d found him, I had no idea what to do with him. Pure instinct was making me act like a cop.
“Did you get a look at the man who shot him?”
Corbin-Teich wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “I am sorry. Having all this return after so many years, it is a shock. I thought I had seen enough. I have become weak with old age. No, it is soft-that is what I have become. Forgive me. I understand what you are trying to do and I thank you. Yes-I did see the man, but I did not recognize him. His features were familiar. He was as they all were in the old days. But I did not know him personally.”
“Why didn’t you go to the other place?” Rarig asked.
“I tried. I ran after Andrei was shot, to the first phone I could find. I called you, and then I ran to go there. But I saw the automobile again, and I felt I could no longer stay in the open. I came here because I know it so well.”
He stopped suddenly and looked from one of us to the other. “How did you find me?”
“That was Joe’s doing.”
“Lucky guess,” I finished. “How long have you been here?”
“Hours. I have not paid attention.”
“Rarig, you have any ideas what to do now?”
There was a pause before he answered. “No. I thought we’d just get out of town and go from there. Maybe hole up someplace for a while.”
Great, I thought, but I didn’t have anything better. I did, however, have one more question to ask. “Mr. Corbin-Teich-”
“Please call me Lew. It is a wonderful custom. I like it very much.”
“Okay. You can call me Joe. I understand your friend had no enemies and you don’t think he was the target, so don’t misunderstand what I’m about to ask, but thinking back, do you remember the shooter ever taking aim at you, especially after he hit Andrei?”
There was a stunned silence. “You are thinking I was spared on purpose.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m thinking it’s possible.”
“To lure me out?” Rarig asked. “I’m in the phone book, for Christ’s sake.”
I shook my head in the darkness, reviewing the conversation I’d had with Sammie the night we’d all met with Olivia Kidder and Rarig at the inn. “Not you-somebody else.”
“It is possible,” Corbin-Teich admitted, his voice harder now, its inflection suddenly reminding me that this man had once been a protégé of Padzhev and a rising star within the KGB.
“The automobile,” he continued, “had no reason to speed by. There was no other traffic, no other people on the street that I could see, and it was an automatic weapon, yet all the bullets struck Andrei.”
“Who’re you thinking of?” Rarig asked me. “Padzhev? It still doesn’t fit.”
“No, not Padzhev. Someone else. Someone we haven’t thought of yet. Someone who would benefit from getting things all stirred up. Killing Antonov on your front lawn, tapping your phone line to find Lew, staking out his apartment and then knocking off his friend in a fake drive-by. It all feels like somebody’s trying to get something, or someone, to rise to the surface.”
“Snowden must be behind it,” Rarig said.
I shook my head. “If it’s Snowden, then who’s his target? Antonov’s already dead, you and Lew could’ve been knocked off anytime. There’s somebody missing in the equation.”
“It is Georgi,” Lew said softly.
“What is?” I pushed him.
“The target. It is Georgi Padzhev. Sergei Antonov would never do anything without Georgi’s blessing, so we can assume Sergei was in this country under Georgi’s orders.”
“Probably because they saw your picture in that article about the inn,” I added, excited that some of this might at last become untangled.
Rarig didn’t answer, but I saw him run his hand through his hair as if considering the idea.
“Would Georgi Padzhev be after you?” I asked Lew.
“Not to kill me. We are old men now. The KGB is gone. All that is history. Georgi might want to talk, to reminisce, as old men do. I might like that, too. It is what John and I did, after all, for hours and hours. This image you have of the KGB, much of it is propaganda. Georgi Padzhev is no monster. He was a chess player, like John here, like many others. The pieces were human beings, it is true, and many died but not as Hollywood would have it. We didn’t go around shooting people.”
I didn’t bother quibbling semantics. What did I really know, after all? “So Padzhev wants to reminisce. But he’s old, he’s now into the Mafia, and he has lots of enemies, which cuts down on his mobility. Antonov goes instead to check things out. But he’s known as Georgi’s henchman. Which means he’s followed to Rarig’s place, knocked off to lure out Padzhev, and Rarig’s line is tapped for insurance. Is that what you’re thinking?”