Viktor closed the hatch to the radio room. It was 1600 hours, and the ship was caught in that curious, sleepy time between the workday and the evening mess. No one was on deck. He went carefully and quietly down the ladders.
When he reached the main deck, he looked over the side. The Tolstoy rode low in the oily, dark water. The fog made his skin wet. He wiped at his lips. He would drop off on the seaside and swim around to the end of the pier, where it would be safe to climb up the old ladder to land.
“What are you staring at, Seaman?”
Viktor turned.
The first mate of the watch was on the deck, scarcely six feet from him. It was Doesniov, a particularly loathsome specimen in Viktor’s pantheon of hated superior officers. Doesniov was a big, boastful man with a bullying manner. He strutted down the deck to where Viktor stood at the rail.
“Well? What are you staring at? Do you see something in the water, in all this damned fog?”
Viktor felt intimidated, not by Doesniov’s size but by his rank. Viktor’s intense hatred for those in superior positions did not alter his almost religious respect for rank.
“I thought I heard something—”
“What? Heard a mermaid?”
“Something in the water.” He was not a very good liar. But Doesniov looked over the rail. There. He was looking over the rail.
Viktor couldn’t move.
Doesniov turned to look at him. “You’ve been drinking your own stuff, Viktor Ilyich.”
“I don’t…” So Doesniov knew about the illegal liquor trade. Why not? Everyone knew everything. “Look—”
“Are you ill? You look ill.”
Viktor felt the color drain from his face. He felt fear and cold. He felt the weight of the documents in the waterproof envelope on the chain around his neck. He could give them back, say it was a mistake—
That was stupid! Yazimoff wouldn’t give back his money. What would the two pigs from KGB do? They already suspected him, he was sure of it.
“Look!” Victor pointed down at the water, as though something had caught his eye.
Doesniov turned. Again, he looked over the rail, his head lower than his shoulders.
Viktor had to do it. God offered him no choice.
Both hands locked into a hammer of flesh. The hammer came down hard on the base of the skull. Doesniov grunted, his chin broke on the rail, and he slid to the wet deck. God offered no choice. There was only this one way and no other.
Viktor slipped out of his wool coat and dropped it over the side.
Not a moment to spare.
He scarcely made a splash when he hit the water.
2
Sixteen days later, Devereaux climbed out of the yellow cab in a pouring rain in front of the old Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. He pushed two twenties through the open window on the passenger side and turned to face the entrance. He carried one small brown canvas bag, which contained all his travel equipment — the clean clothes, the spare sweater, the pharmacopoeia, including uppers and downers and penicillin and cyanide capsules. He had also packed a 9-millimeter Beretta automatic of the design now issued to the U.S. military as well as to “authorized agents of the intelligence services.”
He crossed the sidewalk and paused at the entrance. The rain was sheer gloom; the chaos of traffic and noise, an audition for hell. Brutal sirens, horns, the screams of ambulances, the belches of buses — it rolled over him in hopeless waves. The sidewalks were temporarily empty because of the rain and because it was the middle of the afternoon. But the fullness of the city noises suffocated him.
He thought for a moment of refusing to enter the hotel and meet the man who controlled him. He would just turn and run until he could not run anymore, and if they found him, he would kill them.
The doorman decided for him by opening the door. He went inside the old lobby full of overstuffed chairs and old ladies. He walked to the Blue Bar to the right of the entrance. The barman was wiping a glass, and the waiter was reading the New York Post. Devereaux stood, dripping raindrops on the carpet, staring at the bar. And then he saw Hanley at the little table in the corner.
It was just after three P.M.
He crossed the room to Hanley’s corner. Hanley looked up from the folded front page of the Times. Devereaux stood a moment and then shrugged out of his wet raincoat, folded it on a chair, and sat down. A thick carpet covered the floor, and rows of glittering bottles rested on the shelf behind the bar. The barman was Chinese, and he looked as sour as the waiter who approached the table.
Devereaux ordered a vodka. Hanley, clearing his throat, asked for another bowl of nuts. The waiter made it understood with a pull to his mouth that he was extending himself. He nodded without a word and went back to the service bar.
“Tell me,” Hanley said.
But it had been a long flight and the days of interrogation had worn Devereaux out as certainly as if he had been the one being questioned. He didn’t feel in the mood to respond, and something about Hanley’s tone irritated him. Devereaux knew he was a mere cog in the great intelligence machine, but he suddenly wanted to insist he was human, that he was tired, that even a cog can break down. Instead, he looked at Hanley and smiled. “You arrange these meetings in places like this.”
“What’s wrong with places like this?”
“Old New York. Club 21 or the bar at the Algonquin or the lobby of the Plaza. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you’re living in an old movie?”
Devereaux’s sarcasm made him feel better. Hanley was struggling to understand. It would come to him in a moment, and then he would blink like a startled rabbit, and Devereaux knew that would please him, too.
Hanley blinked.
He was small, bald, and he was very rigid after a lifetime in the service. He believed in R Section, which made it that much worse. He had fixed his beliefs and ideas when he was a boy in Nebraska, dreaming through storybooks or at the weekly picture show. New York was such and such; here was China, and here was the way of Chinamen; here was London, full of knights and kings; and here was Washington, seat of power in the world and true to Manifest Destiny, full of dedicated men given to ferocious patriotism. That his view did not reflect reality then or now was the spark that drove the engine.
“I like this old hotel and this old bar,” he explained. “I like old things. I am conservative, and it seems that the old things were better.”
“Silk stockings and segregation,” Devereaux said. His voice was weary, but Hanley always revived a sleeping sarcasm in him. “The best of times.”
“We make the best of times,” Hanley said.
The waiter brought two drinks and a metal bowl full of nuts. He put them down on the little table along with an absurd bill and went out of the room.
“Viktor is a genuine,” Devereaux said after sipping his vodka. Vodka numbed him all the more now because he had refused to drink on the long flight back from Stockholm. He had taken a pill and slept most of the way across the Atlantic, even through a patch of bad headwinds. It did no good. When the stewardess awakened him thirty minutes before the plane touched down at Kennedy, he felt as though he had never slept in his life.
He had kept at Viktor Rusinov for eight days. The CIA station chief had his turn as well, and R Section had been called in to “share” with great reluctance. But part of Viktor’s coded documents demanded R Section involvement. And the participation of Devereaux.
“Are you sure? That Viktor is who he says he is?”
“Nothing is sure.” Devereaux put down his drink and leaned forward. “He’s a hateful man, really. He explained to me his envy as a theory of unfairness directed at him. He has justified everything in his life, every act, every petty revenge. His hatreds are rooted in a ferocious kind of religiosity. In His heart, God knows Viktor is right.”