TROTTER WALKED AROUND SMOLINSKI’S neighborhood a few times. There was a newspaper on clips under the mailbox, and white showed through the window in the box itself.
Good, Trotter thought. Everybody who was likely to be coming to Smolinski’s had already been there. Unless UPS showed up with a delivery or something, Trotter could feel reasonably confident he’d be able to do what he wanted to do without interruption.
Not that it was going to take all that long. Screw the silencer on the end of the .38 he’d borrowed from Albright before driving to Sparta this morning, through the yard of the vacant house-for-sale on the other side of the block, over the corner of the fence, in through the back door or kitchen window (whichever was easier), find him, pull the trigger. Once would do it. Twice to make sure. Two minutes, tops, and that was allowing a full minute to find one man in a three-room house.
So why was he still casing the neighborhood? It wasn’t caution. The plan was made; the more time he spent on the street, the greater chance someone would remember him. And while he’d been careful to efface himself as far as the citizens were concerned, he’d been obvious enough to attract some attention from any of the Pole’s professional colleagues, assuming any had been around.
There had been no response. It came as a minor surprise; even with Trotter (as far as Smolinski could tell) dead, there should have been someone around protecting him. Trotter wasn’t the only spy America had. Besides, with someone as new as Smolinski, with such a visible cover, it only made sense to have someone nearby to wet-nurse him, if necessary.
No wet nurse. Trotter didn’t care. It gave him one less thing to worry about.
He kept walking around the neighborhood. He wasn’t holding up out of reluctance. He didn’t enjoy killing, but he’d always done it when it was the best thing to do. And he didn’t have any qualms about killing Smolinksi in particular. Trotter hated that bastard on every conceivable level. He hated him as a man, both because he worked for the Russians and because in doing so, he had betrayed his own people. The Poles, if you asked Trotter, were the most remarkable people on Earth. Victims of geography and history, they had spent hundreds of years enslaved by one bunch of vicious scumbags or another but still maintained their faith and their identity as a people. It didn’t seem likely, but they deserved to be free someday. Bastards like Smolinski kept backing that day deeper into the future.
He hated him as a professional. Trotter hated sloppy work, even if the work was designed to kill him. A second-rate gunman, followed by a trap that by its very nature was less than foolproof, was very sloppy. And Smolinski had broken one of the unwritten laws, one of the hypocritical-but-necessary accommodations that had been reached to make it possible to keep delaying the start of World War III. The rule Smolinski had broken was simply this: You do not kill an enemy agent unless you have something to gain by it. “Something to gain by it” did not include arranging for there to be a smaller number of enemy agents. Down that road lay war. It was too easy for the enemy to retaliate.
Just as, Trotter thought, I’m about to retaliate now. If I get around to it.
Trotter hated Smolinski on a personal level, too. He heard the cowardice when he’d phoned the man; he’d seen his complete disregard for Regina’s life. Dropping the hammer would bring Trotter no joy, but it would be a cleaner world as soon as Smolinski left it.
It was his father. He was hesitating because of his father.
Or, more correctly, because of the absence of his father as anything but a lump in a hospital bed.
Because every rotten thing Trotter had ever done before, all the lies, deceptions and violence, he had been able to blame on the Congressman. He’d used people, and abused them, and maimed and killed them, but deep down where the real he lived, the little boy with the name the man never used, he could say his heart was clean. All the rotten things he’d done had been done because the old man had forced him to, or in an effort to keep the old man from forcing him to do things even worse. It was his mouth telling the lies, his body making the love, his fist smashing the face, his finger pulling the trigger, but it had never been his responsibility.
Trotter estimated that over the last thirteen years, since he’d first tried to get out from under, he had spent less than two full days, total time, in the old man’s company. But he’d always been there, a monkey on his back, a voice in his ear, saying, “You’ll be back, son. Can’t help it. Might as well try to make an octopus sing as for you to try to walk away from what you were born to. It’s in your blood, boy. It’s your destiny; you couldn’t stop if you wanted to.
Except—and this was the thing—except now, he could. If he wanted to.
If he wanted to, he could keep walking until he saw a cab or a bus or a train, and take off. Rines wouldn’t look for him—he’d be too busy trying to handle the Congressman’s job. Even the thought of foisting the Agency off on Trotter wouldn’t be an incentive for Rines to find him. Nobody was going to trust a man with the kind of power the Congressman had once wielded after he walked out in the middle of an operation.
For the first time in his life, since before his life, Trotter’s fate was entirely in his own hands. If only, he thought, mine were the only fate.
Trotter went through the yard of the vacant house. He got barked at by a dog in one of the nearby yards but aroused no human’s interest. He went to the corner that touched the corner of Smolinski’s yard, jumped, caught hold, and pulled himself over. There was a small stoop under Smolinski’s back door. The storm door was open; the wooden door behind it locked.
It was not a good lock. This was a safe neighborhood, and it was more important to fit in than to be barricaded in the house. One of the standard ways to find amateurs (terrorists, bank robbers, counterfeiters, drug dealers, etc.) in a suspect neighborhood is to see who’s got the best locks on the house. The smart ones, and the trained professionals, used what everybody else had. If there was really anything inside that had to be locked up, you built a safe in the back of a closet or a vault in the cellar floor.
That wouldn’t work, though, if they were after something you couldn’t keep in a vault. Such as your life.
Trotter unzipped his jacket and took the gun and the silencer from an inside pocket. He put them together close to his body, using the loose flaps of the jacket to screen him, in the unlikely event someone was looking. He tucked the gun in his belt, took out an L-shaped piece of stiff, thin plastic, slipped the lock and went inside.
He looked around and listened. There was nothing to hear. The kitchen looked like a kitchen. In the dish rack to the side of the stainless-steel sink was a cup, saucer, spoon, and something that looked like a vase.
It was all very tidy. Trotter could hear Smolinski coming home the other night—“I tidied up Trotter, now I’ll tidy up the house.” Trotter got the gun ready and began walking quietly through the house.
The whole place was tidy. A mother would be proud.
Oops, Trotter thought. Spoke too soon. Through a doorway, he could see sheets of paper almost incandescently white against the dark wood floor. He hugged the wall alongside the doorway, then popped in, crouched low, gun ready.
Smolinski was sprawled across the desk. His left arm was straight out, as if pointing at something. His right arm was clutched to his chest.
Softly, Trotter said, “Get up.” No response.
He tried again, a little louder. Still nothing. He walked across to the desk and poked Smolinski with the silencer. He did not move.
It could be a ploy. Trotter doubted Smolinski had brains enough to come up with it, but it could be. Play dead—get your would-be attacker to want to know if you’re alive. If he wants to take your pulse or feel your temperature, he’s going to have to take off one of the gloves the October weather and the desire to leave no fingerprints have undoubtedly caused him to wear. If he uses the other hand to remove the glove, the gun has to waver from you, at least for a split second. If he pulls the glove off with his teeth, chances are his eyes will roll up with the effort for that split second. It may not be much, but it’s more than you had, and sometimes, a split second is enough.
Trotter was not giving out free chances today. The gloves would stay on. He took a handful of Smolinski’s intellectual-long blond hair and pulled his head up sharply. One look at the face was enough. For instance, no one in the world was a good enough actor to stay unblinking with his hair being pulled and pencil shavings clinging to his eyeballs. Trotter lowered him gently to the desk.
Smolinski was dead. How convenient. Looked like natural causes, too, a heart attack while he was cleaning his pencil sharpener—the cup had fallen to the floor when Trotter raised the head. The posture, the face, everything looked like sudden heart failure.
Trotter didn’t buy it for a second. He bent close to Smolinski’s mouth, but facedown in a pile of pencil shavings, there wasn’t much to smell but pine and graphite.
Another remarkable coincidence. The Russians developed a little toy back in the fifties that was a big hit with their East German and Bulgarian attack dogs. It was a little glass tube that shot a mist of cyanide in somebody’s face. Once the bitter almond smell dissipated, there was damned near no way to tell the victim hadn’t succumbed to a heart attack. Safe for the operator, too, provided you swallowed a good dose of milk or olive oil beforehand and took the antidote right after you used it.
No smell, no proof.
Trotter was thinking what to do about it when he noticed Smolinski’s hair. For some reason, it had stayed in the shape of the inside of a fist. It was as if Trotter had grabbed a handful of bread dough. Not a good idea to leave that behind.
He was brushing the hair down roughly with a gloved hand when he heard the jingle of keys from outside. He ran quickly to the window alongside the door, hooked the curtain aside, and took a look.
What he saw was a dumpy old woman wearing a shapeless coat between her babushka and opaque stockings and sensible shoes. She tried a key. It didn’t work, and she cursed. In Polish.
The cleaning lady. Trotter had checked her out. It wasn’t her day to be here. Damn.
Or maybe no damn. A plan blew to fullness in Trotter’s mind like an inflatable raft. He hoped the old woman’s heart would take it. He took another look, and decided she seemed healthy enough. He saw the reason she was having so much trouble with the keys was that she was encumbered by a huge bunch of yellow flowers.
Trotter went on tiptoe back to the desk and propped Smolinski upright. He ran back and stood alongside the door.
She was taking forever with those keys. Trotter was tempted to open the door for her, but he got over it.
At last he heard the tumblers click. The door unlatched, and he heard her wiping her feet assiduously on the welcome mat. She had her head down, making sure she got every speck of mud. And she was speaking. Polish, a language in which Trotter was not fluent. Still, it was related to Russian, which he did speak, and he’d picked up a bit of Polish during his travels, so he got the gist of what she was saying. She was sorry she couldn’t make it before, somebody was sick, the flowers probably died, new ones, would only be a minute, busy man.
Then she stepped in the door. He watched her eyes. At the instant she saw Smolinski, after she saw his face, but before she could think, He’s dead, Trotter put a bullet in Smolinski’s forehead. He’d been dead for a while, so there wasn’t much blood, but there was enough. The body pitched back against the chair, then forward to the desk again. When it hit, Trotter fired again, putting a hole in the top of Smolinski’s head. That one didn’t bleed at all.
Even if he had spilled oceans of blood, the old woman’s reaction couldn’t have been any more drastic. She screamed, sank to her knees, beat the floor with hands made leathery from a million acres of dirty floors.
Trotter screamed at her in Russian. “Silence!”
He raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. “Smert Spionam,” he said, which meant “Death to spies” and provided the words for which SMERSH was an acronym. SMERSH, as a separate organization, no longer existed, but the policy did, and every Polish refugee would know the phrase, or be able to figure it out.
The old woman had. She stayed on her knees, made the Sign of the Cross, and spat. Trotter assumed only the spittle was for him.
He wanted to hug and kiss this old woman, and tell her she was worth a hundred Smolinskis. Instead, he smiled coldly at her and spoke more Russian. “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them no one escapes the KGB.”
She understood KGB, all right. Trotter went out the front door. He dropped the gun in Smolinski’s hedge so the cops would find it, and not some little kid, and walked calmly back to his car.
On the way, he assessed his day’s work. They’d do an autopsy. They’d know soon enough the bullets hadn’t killed Smolinski, but they might not be able to decide what had. They’d know damn well something had gone on. It would make the media. The Russians had killed the heroic defector. Smolinski would wind up serving the cause of freedom, anyway. That was worth a smile.
Trotter got to the car (a Dodge Aries K, this time) and went to take off his gloves to get the keys from his pocket.
There was something yellow on one of the fingers of his left glove. He looked closely at it. A flower petal, like the ones on the flowers the old woman had dropped on the floor in panic. But how had it gotten on his glove? He’d been nowhere near her. Or the flowers.
He pulled off the gloves and noticed that the left glove was slightly tacky, as though something had been sprayed on it. He sniffed, and got a faint, sweet smell. There was the vase in the sink. She said she’d brought new flowers today. The vase in the dish rack was empty. And all Trotter had touched was Smolinski’s head.
That really called for a smile. It was his style to stir things up, but he hadn’t realized just how well he’d been doing it. He had them killing each other now. Because the stickiness came from Smolinski’s hair, and it got on Smolinski’s hair because someone poured water from a flower vase on him. And who did things like that?
The killer the Russians called Azrael. The Angel of Death had, so to speak, come home to roost.