“Possible.”
“Possible?” Saul shot back, but he was interrupted by the buzz of one of his telephones. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “Jesus Christ. All right, thanks.”
When he put down the receiver, he gave Stone an ominous look. “A bomb went off in Moscow a few minutes ago.”
“A bomb? Where?”
“In the Kremlin, Charlie. Right inside the fucking Kremlin.”
The Nite & Day Restaurant was a small place below street level on East 89th Street, with dark wooden booths and Formica tables, steel napkin-holders, bottles of Heinz ketchup. It had been “discovered” when New York magazine called it the best “retro diner” in the city, an “unpretentious little spot.” Stone, who had been having lunch there for years, considered it a little more akin to a dive, which was why he liked it.
He was having lunch with Lenny Wexler, one of his Parnassus colleagues who worked on Japan, especially the Japanese intelligence services. Wexler was small and bearded, with wire-rim glasses, a hold-over from the sixties who often took time off from the Foundation to drive to Grateful Dead concerts in his van. He was quiet and reflective, undoubtedly brilliant, and had a weakness for endless obscene shaggy-dog jokes, one of which he was just now finishing.
“ ‘I’m keeping an eye out for you, too,’ ” Wexler concluded, and laughed uproariously. Stone, who normally enjoyed Wexler’s jokes but now found himself distracted, laughed politely.
Wexler tucked into his bacon cheeseburger with a side order of macaroni and cheese. He was watching his cholesterol, he had announced as he blithely ordered; three oat-bran muffins every morning, he explained, allowed him to eat whatever he wanted during the day.
“Did I tell you Helen and I have been trying to get pregnant for the last six months?” Wexler asked.
“Tough job,” Stone said, and took a bite of his burger.
“Yeah, well, it takes the fun out of it.”
“I imagine. Go out there and win one for the Gipper,” Stone said as he put down his half-eaten hamburger. He was thinking of Charlotte again, and Wexler sensed that.
“Oh, sorry. Well, you’re better off without her. Anyway, I’ve got a girl for you. She works with my sister.”
Stone smiled tightly. He had always liked Lenny. During the difficult period after Charlotte had moved out, he’d been a steadfast friend, a rock.
“What the hell,” Wexler asked with alarm, “you still thinking you two’re going to get back together, is that it?”
“Possibly. I’d like that.”
“Yeah, well” – Wexler swallowed a large forkful of Day-Glo-yellow macaroni and cheese – “lot of fish in the sea. Guy like you with money and looks,” he managed to say through the macaroni, his words muffled, “don’t sell yourself short.”
“I don’t.”
“So what do you make of this thing about the bomb in the Kremlin?”
“I’m not sure yet.” They usually didn’t talk about work, almost never in public places.
Wexler nodded slowly and went back to the macaroni and cheese. “Did I tell you one of our assets in Tokyo was caught?” he said sotto voce.
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, yeah. They arrested him, interrogated him. Solitary confinement for three days. They probably got him to spill everything.”
Stone suddenly stopped eating, holding his burger in midair.
HEDGEHOG. The KGB hadn’t arrested HEDGEHOG, or interrogated him, or anything of the sort. They’d killed him.
Why?
Why was HEDGEHOG simply killed?
“Something wrong?” Wexler asked.
“Nothing,” Stone said, his mind spinning. “Hey, how’s the old cholesterol count doing there?”
Wexler looked up, his eyes wide, his mouth full. “Good.”
“That’s nice. Ever try their Boston cream pie here?” Stone asked silkily, a wide grin on his face. “I hear it’s excellent.”
“Really?” Wexler said, glancing over toward the dessert case.
Saul Ansbach leaned back in his chair, waiting for the secure connection to Langley to be completed. Absently, he cleaned his fingernails with an orange stick, thinking. After a minute, his secretary’s voice crackled on the intercom.
“Okay, Mr. Ansbach.”
“Thanks, Lynn.”
He leaned forward, picked up the phone, and listened for the voice of Ted Templeton, the Director of Central Intelligence. The secure connections were free of the usual noise or static, and as a result Templeton sounded eerily close. The DCI’s voice was always confident, a resonant baritone; over the phone it was even more so, almost operatic.
“Saul, good morning.” His What’s up? voice.
“Morning, Ted. Say, what do we have on this bomb in the Kremlin?”
“Not much, unfortunately. The Russians cleaned it up before anyone could get anything. A terrorist, evidently a Soviet citizen, tossed a pipe bomb in the Kremlin Armory. Really did a lot of damage. American girl killed. Some Faberge eggs got scrambled.”
Ansbach gave the half-smile he wore whenever life began to approximate a Kremlinologist’s wildest madcap imaginings. The Kremlin Armory was where the Soviets stored, in proud disdain, all the czarist treasures, crown jewels and whatnot. “The Russians get the guy?”
“The shmucks shot the alleged perp dead,” Templeton said, his ungainly imitation of cop-speak. “Good old Kremlin guards. What’s up, Saul?”
“Listen, we’re a little closer to understanding what that HEDGEHOG thing is all about–”
“Saul, I want this thing to go no further.”
Ansbach furrowed his brow. “In what–”
“We’re dropping it, Saul.”
“What do you mean, ‘dropping it’?”
“NFA, Saul. No further action.”
A few minutes later, after they discussed other matters, Saul hung up the phone, puzzled and alarmed. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. He had begun to develop a throbbing headache.
Outside, it was starting to rain.
One of the small privileges of being the godson of Winthrop Lehman was that, when you went to his townhouse, you never had to suffer a New York taxi ride. Lehman’s Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow picked Stone up in the early evening, in front of Stone’s apartment building on Central Park West, to take him to the party.
The rain that had begun that afternoon had become a dark, howling torrent, the sort of downpour that, in New York, with its skyscrapers and concrete canyons, always seems like the end of the world.
The chauffeur, a ruddy-faced red-haired man in a yellow rain slicker, opened the car door for Stone.
Stone smiled as he got in. “You’d think Mr. Lehman could arrange a nicer day than this for his publication party,” he said as he got in.
The chauffeur was not to be outdone. “He knows a lot of people, sir,” he called out, “but I don’t know if he’s got any strings to pull up there.”
Stone chuckled politely.
Once behind the wheel, the chauffeur said nothing; that was the way Lehman preferred it, and Stone did not try to make small talk. Driving through Central Park, the Rolls’s suspension so good that he could scarcely feel the uneven streets below. Stone felt as if he were in another world. The car’s interior was immaculate, its leather aromatic of some kind of oil, the air cool and dry. Outside, the unfortunate pedestrians struggled with ruined umbrellas and gargantuan puddles and powerful gusts of wind.
He sat, absorbed by his thoughts. He recalled Lehman, the rich and distinguished man in his expensive bespoke suits, the skin of his head like speckled parchment stretched tight over his cranium. As a child, an adolescent, even a young man, Charlie had felt somewhat elect because of his family’s connection to Winthrop Lehman. If his family had been besmirched by his father’s jail term, the unfair but unmistakable aura of disrepute that surrounded his father – the whispered allegations that Alfred Stone really was, after all, a spy, once – things were almost put right by their association with Lehman. Almost.