Scorpion
A Novel
For Annie with love
The center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union lies south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf.
—SOVIET FOREIGN MINISTER V.M. MOLOTOV in conversation with the German ambassador, 1940.
PROLOGUE
The old man was dying at last. This time the doctors were certain. He wouldn’t survive the night. With a grim nod, Fyedorenko had settled down to wait outside the bedroom door, while the doctors gathered around the living corpse like ancient priests, rattling their tubes and oscilloscopes and oxygen tanks like gourds to celebrate the rite of death. Fyedorenko lit an English cigarette and inhaled deeply, trying to control his impatience. If his lifelong friend wasn’t dead by morning, he was tempted to strangle the old bastard himself.
For months they had desperately propped the old man up like a scarecrow, allowing him out for rare public appearances under carefully orchestrated conditions, while the western press speculated over the rise and fall of his blood pressure as though it were the Dow Jones average. Periodically, someone would report that he had died, sending the currency markets into wild gyrations and diplomats scurrying like midnight mice into hurried conferences. Then they would have to trot the scarecrow out in one of those carefully-staged, public pantomimes to squelch the rumors. They had to keep him alive then, because they desperately needed the time. But now everything was ready and the sooner he died, the better. If the old man lingered much longer, Fyedorenko feared that his enemies in the Politburo might learn about his preparations and act first. Every minute that the old man lingered on increased his jeopardy. The Central Committee was thick with the old man’s appointees and there were plenty of those who still believed in the old man’s policies of coexistence with the West. Well, they would change their line when the time came and, once things settled down, they would be purged, one by one. If only the old man would die now!
Yet, his hand did not tremble as he held the cigarette, and his face might have been carved from marble as he calmly waited for the doctors’ verdict. After all, Fyedorenko was not given to any outward display of emotion. If he had been, he would have disappeared long ago, like so many others. His coarse peasant’s face had long since acquired the bland and amiable expression of the polished diplomat. He was known for it. Once Bulgarov, who loved to drink and tell dirty jokes, had jeered at his impassivity.
“You’re a damned bookkeeper. Do you have blood in your veins or what? You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with those young hotheads who stormed the Winter Palace with us that cold morning,” Bulgarov had said, sloshing the vodka from his glass as he gestured with it towards Fyedorenko.
“Fyedorenko has no emotions, didn’t you know?” the old man had remarked archly. “He is like a statue. Da, and like a statue he will survive us all,” the old man muttered and his gaze suddenly pierced Fyedorenko, turning his heart to ice.
But that had been long ago, before Bulgarov had been sent to that labor camp in the Urals where they didn’t bother to put up a fence, because no one could make it across the snow without freezing to death anyway. The old man had been right about him. He had survived them all, even the old man.
But the old man had grown soft in his dotage. “Since nuclear war is unthinkable, our only alternative is coexistence with the West,” he used to say. When the Old Guard purists objected, the old man had responded, “We will nibble away at the West, bit by bit. The fat capitalist capon is more easily devoured by an army of mice than a single gulp of the bear.”
Fyedorenko had something else entirely in mind.
If only the old man would die now, Fyedorenko thought, and found himself clenching his fists. He guiltily looked around the salon. The room was located in the old Arsenal building in the Kremlin and was a part of the apartment the old man had taken when he had suffered his first heart attack. It was decorated in the massive marble style filled with the overstuffed furniture favored by senior Party officials. Now it seemed still and empty, so early in the morning. The only sound was the quiet ticking of the old Regency clock, covered with the gilt of the period. Once it had belonged to Alexandra, the last Tsarina. Fyedorenko carefully wiped his damp palms on his trousers. Imagine if any of the others waiting in the antechamber outside had seen it, he mused wryly. Comrade Fyedorenko clenching his fists! Unheard of! They would be gossiping about it for days. It was the waiting, making him nervous.
He stood up and walked over to the window, his reflection blurred by the double-glazed glass. The reflection in the window showed a paunchy middle-aged man in the gray suit that is the uniform of the eastern European bureaucrat. With his small dark eyes and jowly cheeks he looked like an intelligent bulldog. But those dark eyes showed nothing. They could have been made of glass.
He leaned closer to the window, his breath frosting its surface. Outside the inky blackness of night was broken only by a single lamp in the Alexandrovsky Gardens down below. Thick wet snowflakes fell through the feeble yellow lamplight, the wind swarming them like moths around the light. A black winter’s night, the wind howling around the cupolas of the Kremlin like … what was Mayakovsky’s line? “… as though the gargoyles of Notre Dame were howling.” Snowflakes wove a shroud of icy lace across the window. “Ice flowers,” his mother had called it, when he was still a boy and snow was something to play in.
He stared at his reflection. It looked like a ghost against the darkness of the winter night. Perhaps the earth itself would be a ghost when this was all over. He remembered how the frozen bodies were stacked like cordwood in the snow during the Great Patriotic War and an unaccustomed shudder trickled down his spine like a bead of sweat. Perhaps they were making a mistake. There was still time to call it off, he thought, knowing he wouldn’t.
He remembered when Svetlov first outlined the operation to him. They sat in front of the fireplace in Fyedorenko’s country dacha near Zhukovka, southwest of Moscow. Outside, birds chirped in the birch trees, as the dappled sunlight glittered off the icicles hanging from the branches. For a long moment, Fyedorenko didn’t say anything. They listened to the music of a pine log burning in the fireplace. The operation was characteristic of Svetlov, brilliant and ruthless. Svetlov played chess the same way. Although Fyedorenko was the best player at the Moscow Metropolitan Chess Club, Svetlov was the one man who could beat him consistently.
“Suppose something goes wrong,” Fyedorenko said at last.
“It makes no difference. All options lead to checkmate,” Svetlov said.
Fyedorenko peered curiously at Svetlov.
“It could mean nuclear war,” he said.
“Better sooner than later,” Svetlov smiled complacently.
Svetlov had an almost pathological hatred of the West, Fyedorenko remembered. Svetlov’s father, mother and twin brother had been wiped out by a shell from a British warship, covering the evacuation of Denikin’s army from Novorossisk during the last days of the Cossack revolt. An infant still in diapers, Svetlov had been staying with his grandmother at the time and she had raised him on the story.
But they had to act soon, Fyedorenko thought with sudden urgency. Anything so drastic was bound to terrify the fat sheep of the Old Guard who waited in the antechamber, like pigs at the trough. He turned away from the window and began to walk towards the bedroom, when the door opened and the two doctors came out, fatigue and a sort of lugubrious solemnity painted on their faces. They faced each other across the room, all of them swollen with a sense of their parts in this tableau. It was a historical moment and they all knew it.
“Well then—” Fyedorenko said, just to get it started.
“I regret to inform you of the death of the party secretary, Comrade—” the taller of the doctors began.
“All over is it?” Fyedorenko prompted.
“It is a great loss to all of us,” the other doctor pronounced solemnly.
“Of course, of course,” Fyedorenko said and thanked them as he guided them to the door. “Ask the others to give me a moment alone with him. We were so close you see.” His voice broke.
The doctors looked at each other in astonishment. Imagine how everyone would react when they heard of how broken up the famous stone-faced Fyedorenko was over the death of his mentor. They nodded understandingly as they stepped from the salon into the crowded antechamber to make the announcement. As they did so, the quiet murmur of conversation abruptly stopped.
Fyedorenko went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He could see the body still connected by tubes and wires to the ineffectual tools of this world. The electrocardiograph was still on, a single blip racing across the screen, endlessly repeating itself.
He glanced at the old man’s face, but it had already begun to acquire the waxy expression common to all corpses which proclaimed so clearly that whatever was human no longer inhabited that shriveled old body with its shrewd homely features. Fyedorenko wasted no time looking at the face of the man he had followed for over forty years. He had more important things to do.
He crossed over to the phone on the night stand and dialed Svetlov’s private number. He knew Svetlov would be awake and was not surprised when the receiver was picked up before the first ring was completed. Out of habit, Fyedorenko glanced at his watch. It was 3:15 a.m. He took a slight breath, because once he spoke, there was no stopping, no going back, no matter what.
“It has begun,” he said.
PART ONE
You should never beat a woman, not even with a flower.
—The Prophet Mohammed
Paris
IT WAS AN OLD nightmare, as terrifyingly familiar as the darkness of sleep itself. She was running for her life down the dark empty streets of the Latin Quarter, the sound of her footsteps echoing in the silent night. The streetlights reflected wetly on the pavement, still damp from the afternoon rain. The cafés and shops were closed and shuttered as firmly as the eyelids on a corpse. There was no help anywhere. As in a dream, there was that nameless terror of the shadowy man relentlessly pursuing her. Dreamlike too was that horrible feeling that flight was useless. Sooner or later he would catch her and kill her. Except that it wasn’t a dream.
At the corner of the rue de Seine, Kelly paused to catch her breath in the shadow of a kiosk plastered with posters advertising the Théâtre Odéon. Her breath came in great, heaving sobs and she wondered whether if she screamed it would bring lighted windows and help, or whether it would just make it easier for him to find her. Her chest heaved and she tried to scream, but nothing came out. Her throat was blocked by a burning lump, as though she had swallowed hot wax. She sucked in desperate gasps of night air and tried to think of what to do, but nothing came. The air tasted of the night and fear. It smelled like wet clothes.
A wave of nausea rippled through her and she was sick again. When she stopped heaving, she found herself on all fours, moaning softly like an animal. She gagged at the smell and from somewhere came the irrelevant thought that her dress and stockings were ruined. Imagine worrying about that now, she thought wildly. A hysterical laugh began to bubble out of her and then she froze at the soft purr of the Mercedes, its lights out, as it slowly prowled next to the curb. Her beautiful eyes went flat with terror, like a rabbit caught by a car’s headlights, and there was nothing but the fear.
Then the Mercedes stopped and she heard the sound of the car door opening and then being carefully closed. The sounds of his footsteps came closer and she pressed her face against the hard embrace of the kiosk, curling her body into a tight ball, wishing she could shrivel away and disappear in the shadows. The footsteps stopped nearby and she could hear his breathing as he stood there, listening. Without realizing it, she was making soft whimpering sounds, like a whipped puppy. He came closer and his teeth glowed in his dark face as though they were phosphorescent. A ray of streetlight glowed with a pearly sheen from the metal as he motioned with the gun for her to get up. She shook her head, her long blond hair rippling with the movement.
“Please,” she whimpered.
He grabbed her hair and harshly pulled her to her feet. His smile had more in common with an animal baring its teeth than a human expression. He twisted her face to his and put the muzzle to her temple, gripping her hair as if he wanted to pull it out by the roots. They stood there like lovers, close enough to kiss.
“Let’s not have any more of this nonsense, chérie,” he whispered.
She nodded dumbly and walked stiffly beside him to the Mercedes. He shoved her in from the driver’s side and told her to cross her wrists behind her. Then he tied her hands and started the car. The cords were too tight and it was very painful. She could feel the knots digging into her skin and told him so.
“Ça m’est égal,” he shrugged with icy indifference, but there was a harsh note in his voice and a gleam in his eye that might have been hatred, or perhaps just the greenish reflection of the dash lights. He was enjoying her pain, she thought, and began to feel queasy again. It reminded her of the ferocious resentment she had once heard in her father’s voice after a quarrel with her mother. The ice cubes in his highball tinkled like wind chimes as he stared at her, damning her for the irrevocable crime of being female. That was when he first got into politics. Her parents had quarreled a lot in those days.
“A woman’s main purpose in life is showing men how noble women are compared to the male beast,” her father had said, that bitter edge in his voice.
She thought he meant that he didn’t love her.
They sped down the Porte Maillot and headed out towards the périphérique, the autoroute almost empty in the three o’clock darkness. Every once in a while, he glanced over at her, a thin curious kind of smile on his handsome face. But there was nothing sexual in the smile and she shuddered. She kept thinking that he was certainly going to a lot of trouble if all he wanted to do was to rape her and then the bitter taste of bile was at the back of her throat, because she didn’t think that he would be satisfied with just raping her. Tears stung her eyes and she tried to think over the pounding in her temples. Perhaps if she seduced him, let him think that he could have her now and any time he wanted, he would let her live. If she could just survive tonight, she’d make it somehow, she told herself.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said, surprised at how calm, even seductive her voice sounded. Inside, she was quivering like a leaf in a high wind. “I’m terribly attracted to you. I’ll do things for you no woman ever has,” she whispered.
He looked at her with contempt, as if she were the sleaziest whore in Pigalle. She recoiled, her face flushed with embarrassment. Again, for some bizarre reason it reminded her of her father and the time she had worn make-up for the first time on a date. When she had walked into the living room, he had called her “a cheap slut” in front of Brad and sent her back upstairs to wash it all off. She ran up the stairs, humiliated, knowing it would be all over the school the next day. That night, when Brad parked the car, she let him take her panties off for the first time. And when he put his hand between her thighs, all she could think of was not sex, but how much she hated her father.
“You don’t have to force me. I want to,” she whispered, her eyes dry and calculating. His lip curled with disgust.
“Shut up,” Gerard snapped, his eyes gleaming in the dashboard light.
The taste of bile burned the back of her throat and she thought she was going to throw up again. Her stomach heaved and she begged him to please pull over for a minute.
“So you can run away again, pas encore,” he growled.
“I’m sick, can’t you see?”
“Tant pis,” he shrugged and it came with a rush that he was really going to kill her. She was going to be one of those articles in the paper, the details of her body described in humiliating detail, something people glance at for a moment over their morning coffee and mutter some pious platitude about the crime rate before going on to the crossword.
She glanced down at the door and thought about jumping, but the car was going too fast and it was locked anyway. There was absolutely nothing she could do and she felt like crying, except that it seemed silly because she couldn’t believe it was happening. That sense of unreality, as if it was all a bad dream, had returned. It couldn’t be happening to her. None of it was real, except for the cool vibrating surface of the car window as she rested her head against it. Soon she would wake up and tell Lori about this horrible dream she’d had. It would be all right, this was happening to her dream self, not her. Except that she had fallen down a macabre rabbit hole, flying through the tunnel of light carved by the car’s headlights, and she wasn’t even sure who she was any more.
She glanced at the car window. The vague dark shapes of fields and houses slid silently through the reflection of her face in the glass. He had turned off the périphérique to the A-6 Autoroute Sud towards Lyons. Wake up Kelly, she urgently told herself, but there was only the pain in her hands and the pain told her with a horrible certainty that it wasn’t a dream.
She had spent her life living in a fool’s paradise, she told herself bitterly. One moment everything was just as it had always been and suddenly, it was as if she had taken a single step off a curb and the gutter had turned out to be a dark and bottomless pit. It was all the more shocking because the day had begun so well …
It had been one of those rare sunny days in Paris when the city seems to shimmer with light, when the flowers in the Tuileries sparkle with color and when even the taxi drivers manage a smile now and then. She and Lori wanted to take advantage of the light and spent the morning snapping photos of the barges and flower stalls along the pea-green Seine from the Ile St. Louis. In the afternoon it had rained on and off. Strands of drops hung like pearls from the café awnings, each of them a tiny miniature of the street. In Paris, the summer rain is warm and teasing, like a brief flirtation.
They went shopping for an umbrella at the Galeries Lafayette near the Opéra. It was still raining when they came out and they stopped off for a kir at the nearby Café de la Paix to wait it out. She remembered how they laughed when an American woman at a nearby table had slipped the Dubonnet ashtray into her purse, self-righteously assuring her husband that “they expect you to take it.”
When the contact came, it wasn’t at all what she’d expected. They met Randy, a long-haired American in jeans searching for the ghosts of ’68 at the café. He was with Jean-Paul, a good-looking would-be actor. They went to the Bois and passed around some joints and wound up at Ondine’s. The crowded chrome-plated club on the rue de Ponthieu was one of the places that everyone went to, if only to say they’d been there. Later, they all climbed into Jean-Paul’s battered Renault and went to a party on a private barge moored near the Pont d’Iena.
The party was packed with people shouting in a dozen languages and soon the barge began to glide down the river. There was a stereo blasting in the salon and couples danced, while women wearing originals from the rue Sainte Honoré shrieked as they greeted each other, as though they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. The air reeked of perfume and the unique smell of Paris, that unmistakable melange of garlic, Gauloise smoke and café au lait. Lori and Randy disappeared and Jean-Paul was taken in tow by Angela, an attractive blonde, in her forties at least, Kelly thought cattily, who had once appeared in a Truffaut film.
Kelly wished someone would ask her to dance, but the men seemed afraid to approach her, somehow intimidated by her classic blond beauty. She wondered if she would always feel that way. Once, when she was a teenager, her father had said, “Beauty can be as much of a burden as ugliness, kiddo.” In school, the boys who had always been so brash, would fall silent and nudge each other when she went by. As she passed, she could feel their hot eyes on her body. She remembered how Brad would always stammer, “You’re so beautiful” in the car, before they began their nightly tussle.
“Beauty is only skin deep,” she had snapped, when she finally realized that all he was after was to brag that he had screwed the prettiest girl in the school.
“Who wants more … a cannibal?” he had retorted with a silly grin, and he couldn’t understand why she had began to cry.
She stepped outside the salon and found a spot not occupied by the embracing couples. Beauty didn’t merely snare those attracted to it, it trapped its owners forever, she thought.
She stood at the rail, holding a glass of wine and watching reflections of the city lights shattered like glass on the surface of the Seine. The light breeze of the boat’s passage ruffled her hair and she could hear the sounds of the stereo in the salon, thumping its way through an old Beatles tune. She was still annoyed because of the way Jean-Paul was acting. He was dancing with Angela, his slim tan body tightly pressed against hers, and he was murmuring something that made Angela’s eyes burn as though with fever. Just an hour before, at the club, he had told Kelly that she was brilliant, truly “éclatante” and now he was probably telling Angela the same thing. He couldn’t be the one, she thought. The boat was approaching the Pont de la Tournelle and ahead she could see the spotlighted towers of Notre Dame, bathed in white light. She remembered thinking that it was so beautiful and somehow sad too and her eyes began to water.
“Vous êtes triste, mademoiselle?” a modulated masculine voice said and she turned and saw him standing there. He was tall and dark, with soft brown eyes in a handsome triangular face. He was wearing an expensive blue suit, obviously cut by a London tailor who knew what he was doing. His dark curly hair was cut short and neat and she felt her heart flutter like a bird ruffling its feathers.
“What was that?” she stammered in English and her glance involuntarily shot over at Jean-Paul and Angela.
“He is handsome, yes, but he is also a fool,” he said with a wry smile, following her glance.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Mon chèr papa used to say that the true fool smiles even as he exchanges gold for brass,” he replied in a musically accented English. He told her his name was Gerard. They stood at the rail, chatting about nothing and watching the city lights as the barge slid silently down the river.
It wasn’t until later, after he had brought her the champagne, that she had begun to feel sick. She had thrown up twice in the toilette by the time the barge tied up near the Pont Neuf. Suddenly she straightened, as the realization hit her. He had drugged her! It was the champagne! He had planned it all along, she realized miserably. At the time she thought he was being generous, offering to drive her back to the hotel in his gleaming white Mercedes. Lori had offered to come back with her, but she hadn’t wanted to spoil it for Lori, who was clearly taken with Randy and it seemed silly not to go with Gerard. Besides, she was too miserable to argue. She had felt so awful that she hadn’t really paid attention to where they were going until, instead of turning up the rue de Chateaubriand to the hotel, he entered the whirl of lights around the Etoile. When they recrossed the Seine to the Left Bank, she knew something was terribly wrong.
The first time she told Gerard he was going the wrong way, he simply ignored her. His profile stared fixedly at the windshield. She repeated herself, raising her voice and he viciously slapped her face with the back of his hand. Something exploded inside her and she clawed at him, yelling for him to let her out. He hit her again and showed her the gun and her world blew apart like a house of feathers in a strong breeze, just like that.
Her mind raced. She knew she had to get away before he took her out of the center of town. There must be some people still awake she thought desperately. She told him she was going to be sick again and he carefully pulled over. Given the way she felt, it was hardly a lie. Fortunately, the door wasn’t locked then and she opened it and bent over as if to throw up. But instead, she rolled head over heels the way she used to in high-school gym and was momentarily blocked from his view by the wing. She desperately scrambled on all fours around a parked car and began to run, her spine tensed for the impact of a bullet. She ran wildly, terrified that she might slip because of her high heels. When she rounded the corner into the shadows of the rue de Seine, she briefly thought she might make it. But she never really had a chance, she realized dully.
They turned off the autoroute near Fontainebleau and drove down a country road overhung with dark and ancient trees. It felt as if they were entering a primordial forest. Every so often Gerard glanced over at her, his eyes dark and calculating. Mercifully, her hands had gone numb, but she felt a terrible urge to urinate. She squeezed her legs together to hold it in, like a child. Then he pulled into a dark driveway and left the car to open an old metal gate. She briefly thought of running again, but how and where? She was helpless.
He drove the car past the gate, then went and locked it. She felt a warm flush between her thighs and wondered if she had wet herself. Then he drove up to a dark house, with a single light in one of the windows. He hauled her out of the Mercedes and unlocked the front door. There was a murmur of voices coming from what appeared to be the living room. Then a small dark-skinned man peered from the doorway. Kelly was about to beg him to help her, when she realized that he didn’t seem in the least surprised to see her.
“Tout va bien?” the man said to Gerard, in a harsh voice that grated like fingernails on metal.
“Pas des problems,” Gerard replied. No, no problems. She had been easy as pie, she thought miserably. Gerard led her down a dimly lit stairway to a tiny room lit by the harsh glare of a naked bulb and walled with whitewashed stone. Except for a narrow bed and a dirty sink, the room was bare as a nun’s cell. Gerard clicked open a long stiletto blade. It glittered like ice.
“Please … don’t kill me … oh, please,” she gasped.
“Kill you,” Gerard frowned. “Pas de tout. You’re worth more to me than that, ma petite.”
He cut the knots tying her wrists and stepped away, as she rubbed them gratefully, the pain flooding into her fingers.
“Here, clean up,” he said, tossing a towel at her.
“Thank you,” she said, her eyes blurred with tears. She took her time washing, trying to find some sense of normality in the everyday actions. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his. He looked so handsome, even approving.
“Bien,” he murmured and she felt a strange gratitude. Perhaps he wouldn’t kill her after all, she thought.
“Take off your clothes,” he ordered.
“Yes, anything,” she whispered, and began to unbutton her dress with clumsy fingers. When she had stripped down to her bra and panties, she looked expectantly at him, but he just stood there. Confused, she hesitantly unhooked her bra and then, after a moment, stepped out of her panties.
“Do you want me to lay down?” she asked, motioning at the bed. If there was a bulge in his pants, she couldn’t see it.
“Just stand there,” he snapped irritably.
Then she heard the heavy steps of men coming down the wooden stairs. Four men in suits entered the room and studied her as if she were in a cage at the zoo. One looked like a fat, graying French businessman with dark, beady eyes and a moustache which he twitched like a rodent. The other three were dark-skinned. Algerians or Arabs, she guessed. One of the Arabs, a scrawny man with a scar on his cheek and long hairs growing out of his nose, came up to her and fondled her breasts. He breathed heavily in her face and she thought she was going to pass out. His breath was foul, as if he fed on carrion. A tear edged its way out of the corner of her eye. Then another Arab gestured for her to bend over. She closed her eyes and felt his harsh fingers probing. She felt their hands all over her, moving her this way and that, as though she was a giant plastic doll. She let them do what they wanted, thinking Kelly’s not here. Kelly’s far away with her Daddy and her Mommy who are still married and they still love their little girl.
Then the hands were gone and when she opened her eyes, they had gathered in a circle and were babbling furiously in French. She felt her legs were about to collapse under her and somehow made it to the edge of the bed and sat down. Every once in a while, one of the men would glance over at her. She looked pleadingly at Gerard, but his eyes were cold and calculating; they followed the conversation back and forth as though it were a tennis ball.
They were arguing and although her French wasn’t good enough to understand all the words, she had the strange impression that they were bidding for her. It was almost as if it was an auction and she was the prize, she thought and then shook her head, because that seemed more bizarre than anything else that had happened tonight. It just couldn’t be, she thought.
When she looked up, they had stopped talking and were all looking expectantly at her. One of the Arabs gave Gerard a thick roll of money and Gerard smiled crookedly at her. Then he was gone. A tall, thin Arab said something and the others laughed harshly. It sounded like dogs barking.
“Why not?” the ugly Arab with the bad breath said suddenly in English and she knew that he wanted her to understand. “Nobody expects a western woman to be virgin,” and the men laughed again. Kelly looked down at her naked breasts, watching drops of water trickle down, not even aware that she was crying. Kelly’s not here. Kelly’s gone away, the voice inside her kept saying.
She felt their hot breath as they gathered around her like a wolf pack closing in for the kill. The fat gray-haired Frenchman came closer and grunted something. Teardrops spattered on her breasts, weaving tiny streams on her skin. Then Kelly looked up defiantly, her eyes large and luminous. Once, a handsome young district attorney she had dated briefly had told her that her eyes should be registered as a lethal weapon. But they didn’t seem to have any effect on these men. The fat Frenchman harshly pushed her back on the bed.
One by one, the men in the room began to undress.
Pakistan
THE SAFE HOUSE was a small copper and brass shop in the Misgaran Bazaar. Over the doorway hung a corrugated metal awning which made it indistinguishable from the other shops and stalls crowded along the Street of the Storytellers. Near the front of the shop, a brass coffee pot with its lid open sat on the upside-down copper kettle. It was the signal that it was clear to approach, but still he held back. The Russians had put a price on his head and Peshawar was thick with men who would stick a knife in someone’s back for a dollar and give you back change.
The street shimmered in the afternoon heat, as throngs of Pakistanis and turbanned Pathan tribesmen and women veiled in white from head to foot haggled in the bazaar. The air was ripe with the smells of animals and herbs, meat roasting over charcoal braziers and sweetish scents of khat and hashish smoke, that unmistakable scent of the Orient which whispers of ancient sins. Motor scooters weaved through the crowd, buzzing like giant insects in the gas haze.
Near the corner, a blind storyteller sat under a canvas awning, calling to passers-by in Urdu and Pushtu. From an unseen loudspeaker near the mosque came the tinny wail of a Pakistani love song. In the distance, sunlight turned the parapets of Bala Hisar to gold, like a fairy-tale castle. The huge brick fortress towered over the city as it had since the time of the Moguls, the sun casting its shadow far across the sea of rooftops. Soon it would be time for dusk prayers.
“In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” the blind storyteller said and began to tell the story of how the great Afridi leader, the Fakir of Ipi, had annihilated a British regiment in the shadow of the holy mountain, Shahur Tangi. A small crowd of old men and wide-eyed boys clustered around the storyteller. Near the edge of the crowd, a Pathan in a dark brown robe casually gazed over at the copper shop, rapidly quartering the street in a single glance. The Pathan was taller than most tribesmen, his body wiry and desert-hardened. He sat listening to the storyteller, with the deadly stillness of a beast of prey. With his dark stubbly beard and skin burned mahogany by the sun, only the most careful observer would have spotted him as a westerner by his features and cold gray eyes. Yet he was noticed.
A dark-skinned Mahsud, still in his teens, couldn’t resist stealing a shy glance at the foreigner, although he knew that no one was to speak of him. The moujahadeen of the Khyber said that he was a great warrior. Others said that he was an escaped murderer. Wherever he went, he was followed by whispers. No one even knew his name. Among the tribes he was known only by his code name. They called him “the Scorpion.”
The storyteller spoke of how the tribesmen had shot down the British biplanes with their breech-loading rifles and there was a murmur from the crowd. Did not the moujahadeen do the same to the godless Russians? Were they not men like their fathers? Then he told of how the great Fakir, who could not be defeated in battle, was finally slain by treachery. The crowd grumbled threateningly. The soul of the infidel was black with sin.
“It is said that the British cut out his heart. It was placed in a gold box lined with silk and sent to a museum in London city. The heart weighed ten pounds. Who can doubt it?” declared the storyteller.
A tonga piled high with oranges and pulled by a water buffalo rumbled slowly down the dusty street. They always reminded the Scorpion of the carts in Vietnam. The memory reeked with the smells of nuoc mam and cordite and as always, he immediately pushed it away. He stood up and moved towards the shop, using the cart for cover. For a moment, the storyteller’s glance caught his, the sightless eyes covered with a milk-white glaze, like the eyes of a statue. They made him uneasy, as though the old man could see him. It’s nothing, he’s blind, the Scorpion told himself as he moved with a fluid ground-eating stride alongside the tonga.
When the young Mahsud glanced over again, the Scorpion had simply disappeared.
The shop was cool after the blazing heat of the street. It was empty, except for a fat, sweating Pakistani in a white robe, who rose like a jinn from behind a large copper urn. The merchant bowed his head and touched his hand to his heart.
“Sahib Khattak?” the Scorpion asked.
“You honor my shop, Sahib,” the man said and bowed again.
“Have you the copper lamp I ordered? The one with a tiger’s face?”
“There are no tigers in Peshawar, Sahib,” Khattak said, glancing anxiously at the bright street outside, looking for eyes that looked back.
“There are tigers that smile in Islamabad,” the Scorpion replied, completing the sequence.
Khattak went to the front of the shop and noisily pulled the metal shutter across the doorway, sealing them in the suddenly dim light, as in a tomb. When he turned back to the Scorpion, he held a .45 automatic in his hand.
“Did anyone see you come here?” Khattak asked nervously, his sweat-slick face shining like the man in the moon.
“Only the storyteller without eyes.”
“I am to search your person,” Khattak said, coming closer. The .45 was cocked.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Does anyone know who anyone is in Peshawar?” Khattak said, his eyes darting about like fish in a tank. The Scorpion smiled.
“I am called ‘the Scorpion,’” he said.
Khattak paled. The gun began to shake in his hand. He nervously stuffed it back inside his robe and bowed, his hand over his heart.
“A thousand pardons, Sahib. The one you seek is waiting,” he said and with a series of anxious bows, he led the Scorpion through a beaded curtain to a small airless room in the back, where Bob Harris was sitting like a sultan on a leather hassock. Harris was grinning as though it was all a glorious adventure. Iced lime drinks for both of them were already set up on a large copper tray.
“Oh Christ,” the Scorpion muttered and shook his head. With another bow, Khattak eased his huge bulk past the curtain, leaving them alone. Harris winked and gestured for him to sit down, but the Scorpion just stood there.
“What was all that James Bond bullshit with Khattak?”
“Oh that,” Harris shrugged. “He’s not a contact. This is just a one-time deal. Besides, don’t worry about it. We’ve bigger fish to fry.”
“Worry is what keeps people like me alive,” the Scorpion said quietly.
“Of course. Sorry,” Harris said, with an understanding grin. He had a smile for every occasion, like Hallmark cards, the Scorpion thought. He sat down on a hassock, positioning himself so he could watch the doorway and Harris at the same time.
Harris was tall and fair, his boyish face alive with the mischievous charm of an urchin who has gone to all the better prep schools. In his spanking-new safari jacket and pith helmet, Harris looked as if he had just stepped out of the window of Abercrombie & Fitch. The Scorpion scratched his five-day growth of beard and tried to remember the last time he’d had a hot bath. Harris always managed to make him feel that way, like the character in the commercial who uses the wrong kind of deodorant soap.
But seeing Harris, he knew that whatever it was had to be top drawer. Harris was the DCI’s protégé, so he wouldn’t have been sent out unless someone very high up was interested. Harris handed him a glass of iced lime juice and he sipped at it, hoping it would help to dissolve the knot he felt at the pit of his stomach. The last time he had seen Harris was in Abu Dhabi, when Harris had roped him into Operation Eagle Claw, the Blue Light Brigade’s abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran. “A Pentagon Blue Plate special,” Harris had called the operation. He had tried to squirm out of it, but Harris had hooked him and he had been lucky to get out of Teheran in one piece, just two steps ahead of the Revolutionary Guards. The brass had handled the fiasco in the usual way, by handing out posthumous medals, and Harris had wound up with a promotion. That was Harris all right, the Scorpion mused. Throw him into a manure pile and he’d come out sniffing a rose.
“There’s a little job we’d like you to do for us,” Harris said in his best briefing-room manner. The only things missing were the wall maps and pointer.
“Another Blue Plate Special?” the Scorpion couldn’t resist asking. Harris gave him his patented “Come on, don’t be that way” smile, a lop-sided grin that had toppled more women into bed than champagne.
“No, you’ll like this one. Money-back guarantee,” Harris said.
“If it’s as good as the last one, I can hardly wait.”
Harris pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face. The heat was starting to get to him. He looked around at the cramped storeroom with distaste, then sighed to show he was ever the good soldier and stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.
“Why don’t you get Khattak to set up a fan?” the Scorpion grinned. He was beginning to enjoy watching Harris squirm.
“No electricity, besides there isn’t time. As soon as you get cleaned up and out of your Gunga Din outfit”—looking at the Scorpion as if he had just stepped out of a cesspool—“you have to be on a plane out of here.”
“I still have business here,” the Scorpion said. He’d spent months trying to set up the gun deal with the Afghani rebels and now he had the queasy feeling that the Company was about to pick up its marbles and tell him that they didn’t want to play any more.
“We’d be appreciative if you’d handle this little matter for us first. Very,” Harris said, making a steeple with his fingers. It reminded the Scorpion of the Thai wai greeting and the night a thousand years ago when Alex and he had met Harris for the first time. It was at the Derby King on Patpong Road, the CIA’s favorite watering hole in Bangkok. That was the night Harris had told them about a quick little op in Phitsanulok province. Alex had never come back from that one, and later they learned that the Pathet Lao had impaled him on a bamboo stake.
“How much is appreciation going for these days?” the Scorpion asked.
“I had a feeling you were going to use dirty words.” Harris reached into his pocket and pulled out a color photo and tossed it over to him. It showed a beautiful young woman posing on a park bench which might have been in the Luxembourg Gardens. If people came out of files, hers would have been labeled “All-American Girl—Pretty.” She wore a green silk blouse, designer jeans and a smile that said she could have a love affair with the camera any time she wanted. Her shoulder-length blond hair was tousled in the way that took a top-notch hairdresser half a day to achieve. Her eyes were a disturbing violet with silver specks, sparkling with intelligence. They’d have made the ugliest girl special, and if it weren’t for a touch of wistfulness in them, she could have been posing for a magazine cover. She was the grown-up version of the head cheerleader whom everyone had a crush on in high school. She was a dream girl, the kind who attracts tragedy the way honey attracts flies.
“I hope you’ll be very happy together,” the Scorpion said.
“She turned up missing in Paris five weeks ago. We want you to find her.”
“Have you tried the French lost and found?” the Scorpion said and put the photo on the tray. He was annoyed. This wasn’t his kind of job and Harris knew it.
“The rue des Saussaies put us on to it. I don’t know if they’d appreciate that description,” Harris said drily.
“How did the Sûreté and the Company suddenly get involved? I mean, she’s cute, but nobody’s that pretty.”
“Her daddy is Congressman Max Ormont, the oil millionaire. He’s a member of the Republican National Committee.” Harris winked.
“How do you know she didn’t run off for a dirty weekend on the Cote d’Azur?”
“She was snatched,” Harris said with finality.
“Political?”
Harris shook his head. “It looks like white slavery.”
The Scorpion whistled silently to himself. Now he knew why Harris needed him. Arabia was his personal briarpatch and that’s where the biggest market was for white females. But it was also a dead end, because the one sure way to get Arabs to kill you was to go around trying to sniff out their womenfolk.
“How good is the data, Bob?” the Scorpion asked.
Harris looked insulted and turned his profile to the Scorpion to show how bravely he could suffer. In a way, a pique was justifiable, the Scorpion mused. In theory, any data passed from a senior case officer to a field agent was supposed to be sacrosanct. They might—and usually did—withold a lot, but what they gave you was supposed to be good. Except that he had known men to die in the gap between theory and practice. When Harris looked back at him, a hard glint had come into his eyes.
“Don’t worry about the data. This is straight from the Sûreté and we independently confirmed. It’s got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
“Oh sure, Grade A. Just like Warsaw,” the Scorpion shrugged.
Harris winced at that one. He had been in Warsaw when the Company had paid thirty thousand dollars for the latest Soviet military plan on Poland; except that the report turned out to be a rewrite of an article in Le Figaro. Then he leaned forward and the Scorpion saw that the flush in his face was anger, not embarrassment. His naked fury surprised the Scorpion. Harris was a born actor. Normally, he held his real emotions like a miser, carefully doling them out like coins.
“Do you want the guns, or don’t you?” Harris said through gritted teeth.
The Scorpion nodded. As Sergeant Walker used to say in his easy Georgia drawl, “They got you by the short and curlies, boy. Y’all can’t complain about the price when it’s the only store in town.” Harris leaned back and smiled, back in control again. That was the way he liked it.
The two men sipped their drinks. Dimly, they could hear the distant cry from the mosque loudspeaker calling the faithful to prayer. The Scorpion glanced down again at the photo on the table. If she had been sold as a white slave in Arabia, she’d either wind up in a brothel or the desert. Either way, she probably wouldn’t live out the year. There was a tilt of independence in her chin. Slavery would be a kind of death in life for her, he thought. Harris noticed him looking at the photo and pushed it a little closer to him. There was something dirty about the way he did it, as though Harris were bribing him with the girl’s beauty.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” Harris said.
Pretty wasn’t the word, the Scorpion thought. With that exquisite face and that sexy young body, she must have started a thousand daydreams every time she walked down the street.
“What happened to her?” he said at last. Harris almost sighed with relief and he mopped his brow again with the wet handkerchief. He raised his glass in a silent toast to himself. He’d come a long way to hook this fish.
“Once upon a time there were two American girls in Paris,” Harris began.
“Jesus, Bob. Don’t give me the whole Ring cycle. Just jump to the part where they meet the traveling salesman.”
Harris straightened up, annoyed at the lack of respect for his briefing style. Then he took a long swallow of lime juice and tried the sincere smile that had taken him so far up the ladder.
“Okay,” Harris began again. “The Congressman’s Pride and Joy is Kelly Ormont. Two months ago, she and a girlfriend, Lori, packed their traveler’s checks and Kaopectate and took off for Europe. They were at a ritzy party on a private barge on the Seine when Kelly became ill after a little too much champagne. A handsome Frenchman named Gerard offered to take her back to the hotel. Lori saw her get into a white Mercedes with him. That was the last time she ever saw Kelly.
“The next day she went to Kelly’s room and found that she hadn’t come in. She stewed for a while, trying to figure out what to do and finally took it to the American embassy, who sent her to the Quai des Orfèvres. For two days, the Froggies gave her the usual bureaucratic runaround until she told them about the congressman. Then they figured it might be political and they might actually have to do something about it,” he said, pursing his lips with the bureaucrat’s distaste for someone else’s bureaucracy. “They turned it over to the Sûreté and eventually it got to Interpol, who sent out a Blue. By then the congressman was steaming and he called the Oval Office. That’s when we got involved.”
“That’s a lot of high-priced talent for what sounds like a police matter,” the Scorpion said, scratching his stubbled beard.
Harris sighed and sipped his drink. Dark sweat stains were beginning to grow under his arms.
“The congressman is an important man,” Harris said pointedly.
“What did the Sûreté come up with?”
“Nobody at the party knew this Gerard character.”
“Naturally,” the Scorpion shrugged.
“The Mercedes was stolen, of course. It was found a few days later in St. Germain en Laye. No signs of a struggle. The Sûreté checked with the Duane and sure enough, the girl and two men boarded an Air France flight to Rome the night of the party. By then the trail wasn’t exactly red-hot, but they did come up with something. According to some unconfirmed reports from the SDECE, someone known as Gerard Aupin was rumored to be supplying choice white females out of Paris and Marseilles to the Middle East. He was supposed to be quite a lady-killer.”
“Literally, it seems,” the Scorpion remarked. Harris nodded.
“According to the Air France passenger list, the name of one of the two men with Kelly Ormont was Gerard Dupin.”