He took another step. The pain was there but it was muted. The hell with it. He was free, and it scared him and pumped him up at the same time. He hurried across the street. He was free, by God! The dull months of prison fell away. He felt alive for the first time in nearly two years, alive in a way you can’t be inside. It was dangerous to be free, to have this feeling of power.
He saw the blue and white police car turn into the street ahead of him. He ducked into a dark doorway and waited for the car to pass. He had civilian clothes on and had left the jumpsuit in his cell, but a prisoner gets the feeling that anyone with a badge and gun can see right through the civvies and see the soul of the con.
The rain matted his black hair and streamed down the angles of his face. He raised his arm and hailed a cab.
He climbed inside. “Airport,” he said.
“O’Hare?”
“That one,” he said. He wanted to settle back but he couldn’t. He sat on the edge of the rear seat, and the cabbie looked back at him once or twice.
“You got a plane to catch?”
“Yeah,” Henry said.
“What time’s your plane?”
“Three.”
“Shit, you got two hours. Don’t get anxious.”
The cabbie looked at Henry in the rearview mirror. The man hadn’t moved. He seemed really nervous, and that made the cabbie nervous. John Mozart regretted picking up his fare. You never knew. Someone on the street when the bars were closed and you never knew. The guy was a white man, but even a white man could be dangerous.
The cabbie took the Eisenhower Expressway west under the post office to Spaghetti Junction, where the strands of three expressways connected in a bowl of ramps and crossovers. The cab climbed and then dropped and shot onto the Kennedy Expressway and headed northwest. The roadway was nearly deserted. The city was slick and empty beneath the orange lights of the side streets and the gloom of the rain. The skyline from the Sears Tower north two miles to the Hancock building tilted up and away, winking in the eternal nondarkness.
Shit, John Mozart thought, just give him the money. He played it out in his mind, because the guy didn’t say anything and sat hard on the rear seat and was staring straight ahead. Give him the money. Only don’t get hurt.
Henry was still on the edge of his seat, thinking about it. Two hours, would probably be that long before the first morning flights went out. Nobody caught a plane at three A.M. And where the hell was he going anyway?
He thought about a flight back to Alaska. He knew Alaska. He could use Alaska to get back into the Soviet Union, it wasn’t that hard.
But they knew that, too, didn’t they? They knew about Henry McGee right down to the nth degree. Bastard like Devereaux would have that covered. They’d sew up Alaska from Anchorage to Barrow, close it down at the airports because all the harbors were frozen now.
Henry stared at the back of John Mozart’s neck while he figured it out. Skarda. Where the hell had Devereaux come up with Skarda? Someone had put Skarda on Henry McGee’s back, and Devereaux wanted to pound it out of him. Skarda was buried sixty feet down an abandoned mineshaft of memory, and now they were digging for it again.
The thought crossed his mind almost casually. He looked at the face on the hack license attached to the dashboard. John Mozart. Should ask him if he played the piano, Henry thought.
He knew what he had to do a moment before John Mozart knew it.
“Is this a stickup?” Mozart said, his eyes on the rearview mirror.
“Yep,” Henry said. His hands were below the back of the front seat.
“Jesus. I thought it was.”
“You guessed right, son.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pull off this road and find a quiet street and pull over. Then give me your money and I go away.”
“I swear to God I will, but don’t hurt me. I got a wife and two kids.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Henry said.
John Mozart believed that almost to his last moment.
5
It began with a series of mistakes on the day after the officials ended their conference.
The conference had taken an unusual turn on the second day, and the public agenda was replaced by a secret agenda.
The public believed the U.S. secretary of state and the Soviet foreign secretary were discussing freedom of the seas as it related to the shallow, frigid waters of the Baltic Sea.
Sweden had alleged abuse of that freedom by the Soviet Union when a T-class Soviet submarine grounded itself on a rocky shoal six hundred meters off the city of Stockholm. It had taken two Soviet trawlers three days to pull it off while the Swedish navy watched from Stockholm harbor.
The incident had led to an American show of strength on the eastern Baltic, off the Latvian coast, that consisted of two older frigates and a destroyer. The gray ships had sailed up and down for four days in the gray sea, shadowed all the time by Soviet submarines. The dangerous game had been called off when the conference on the Baltic was agreed to by the American president and the Soviet president.
That is what the demonstrators who gathered in Malmö on the Swedish southern coast believed. There were no more than sixty demonstrators, but they were very colorful and the city tolerated them.
They urged the Soviets to free Lithuania.
They urged the Americans to sever relations with South Africa. They sang folk songs, and their eyes were sad.
The negotiators ignored them. Nearly everyone ignored them. They were mostly Swedes and still wore long hair and jeans. They were very sincere and passed out buttons and petitions, even in the rain.
It rained all that Saturday morning after the conference ended and the principals had gone home. The rain came straight down for a time, and the demonstrators gathered in the pedestrian street behind the Savoy Hotel and tried to attract the Saturday shoppers. But the rain was very cold, and the tolerance of the Malmö residents did not extend to catching cold. The shoppers hurried on.
It was just after eleven in the morning. At noon, Michael Hampton would collect his things — his tapes, his equipment, his translation books, which helped him look up the precise word in a precise context — and carry them down to the train station. The train for Stockholm left Malmö’s old red station on the waterfront at 1340 hours. There was plenty of time.
Because of the rain, the immense room in the rear of the Savoy Hotel was colored in gray light. The room made them feel sleepy. They lounged on the wide, soft bed and held each other. They were naked. The rain made them feel dreamy and romantic and very tired of the rest of the world.
Outside the hotel, the demonstrators chanted for Lithuanian freedom and South African censure.
Rena Taurus, whose parents had fled Lithuania after the war and after the Soviet Union had swallowed up that Baltic country, pushed her hands above her head so that he might better see her nakedness. Her hair was so intensely black that it was almost blue. Her body was pale, and her eyes were deep, blue ponds. Her mouth was formed by generous, pouting lips. Sometimes, in a moment of pleasure, her lips formed a circle that made her look vulnerable, and yet the vulnerability was belied by the voluptuous touch of those glistening lips.
She drove him crazy at times, those times when she stretched her arms above her head, times when she looked at him in a certain way when they were both in a crowded room and could do nothing about her look. It pleased her to excite him, and it pleased Michael Hampton. He was blond and large and, she thought, clumsy. He spoke in a soft voice, even when they drank too much together in one of the noisy bars and it would have been better to shout.
Now her lips, wetted by her tongue, pouted to be kissed. He bent and kissed her, lost his lips in the hunger of hers. Her lips sucked his lips as her body relaxed to yield to him, to draw him on her lap.