28 Sep 90—SANTA BARBARA
Devereaux got a room on the fifth floor of the sand-colored hotel on Cabrillo Boulevard. The hotel was across the street from the beach and the grounds were California-immaculate with grass that never seemed to grow or to become brown, spotted with little palm trees and shrubs cut into alarming shapes.
Denisov lived on Alisos up the hill and across Highway 101 from the hotel.
Devereaux knew the building and he knew the habits of the Russian. There would be a morning walk, there was probably a chess club somewhere, and there would be those soulful strolls along the beachfront when Denisov communed with the oil derricks poking up through the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel.
Except that everything was out of the ordinary.
Denisov did not leave the apartment building until ten in the morning most days and he left with a woman each time. The woman was tan and fit and disturbingly familiar. Her hair was cut short and her eyes were large, with brown pupils that seemed to swim at the edge of tears.
What Rita had said was not true; Devereaux had forgotten.
The first night in California, Devereaux called Dougherty’s and tried to leave his telephone number. The barman said, “I’ll tell him you was looking for him.”
“You take a number?”
“I look like an answering service?” And hung up.
Devereaux had smiled at the rudeness and the aura of secrecy Connors was surrounded with. Some of it seemed absurd caution.
But what had been more absurd than his own devious route back to Rita in Bethesda… only to tell her the broad outlines of a secret assignment? Because she had gone to Pendleton and because that put her in danger of becoming part of this. Or of Pendleton telling her the blackmail. That was the thing Devereaux feared most. It would have had an effect, the opposite of what Pendleton intended, and it would have started to ruin their lives, both of their lives, for the rest of their lives.
He thought about the woman with Denisov. It had stirred a memory and yet he could not find the face in the file. He spent the first three days only watching, trying to fill in what person Denisov had become. He had been very set in simple ways before and now he was at the center of a dangerous new game that involved at least two government agencies and a foreign company and two ruthless middleman organizations that made their livings by doing the dirty acts that even government agencies couldn’t admit to doing.
What had changed in Denisov.
The woman, the woman. He felt a vague stirring of memory but it was so indistinct. It might have been in Asia, it might have been one of the nurses from the hospital in Saigon.…
It might have been anyone in any of a thousand places all crammed into his mind like photographs stashed in a shoebox.
He could not remember.
And then, one afternoon, the woman left the apartment alone. He had been watching from a café on the corner and his small, anonymous Honda was parked outside the window.
The woman got into a red Toyota and started away. He hadn’t come to watch the woman but some instinct drove him now to rise and leave a couple of dollars on the table and start for the door.
She took Highway 101 west through the pretty, jeweled city of whitewashed buildings and red tile roofs. The highway curved into the hills and climbed and then fell toward the Santa Barbara airport on the ocean.
She had no bag with her.
She was meeting someone.
She drove to the terminal and parked in a no-parking zone.
He followed her to the baggage claim area beneath the main level. And then he understood.
It was Ruth. The little waif on the train platform in Paris so long ago. The girl who had insisted on making love to him and had left him to die in a brothel in Zurich’s old town.
Because now she was holding the man and kissing him and it was Kurt Heinemann. He would never forget the face or the scar or the black, wild eyes. Ruth had changed over the years but Kurt Heinemann was exactly the same as the photograph in Devereaux’s memory. He had shot Devereaux in that room and the next thing he had known, he was in a hospital in Zurich and Pendleton was there and…
And Pendleton was there. Now Devereaux was in Santa Barbara working for a crook, trying to steal a secret code machine of some kind from someone.
He stood by a bank of pay telephones and watched their meeting in the middle of the baggage claims area. She handed him an envelope and he handed her a much larger envelope. They talked but Devereaux wasn’t close enough to hear them. And then she kissed him again, on the cheek, and he turned and he waved at her and was striding away, probably back to another plane. Or perhaps a private plane.
He followed Ruth back to the apartment building on Alisos but it was done automatically because she had no idea he was following her and because he knew exactly where she would go back.
What more did Pendleton want from him?
Devereaux took a long shower. The water felt good and he could close his eyes and just feel the water and let the thoughts come, jumbled, out of order and rank, thoughts that mixed up the past and present. All his past life in Section tumbled down into this California city, fell in the shower of water in this hotel room.
He turned off the water and stepped out of the tub and stood in the steam of the small bathroom. He stared at the man in the foggy mirror and then wiped a circle of the glass and looked at his face. What was he looking for? But he wasn’t sure at all.
He dried himself with the thick, white towels and padded into the bedroom. He dialed the number in New York again and he said Mickey’s name.
“Who are you?” the barman said.
He said his name.
“Where you at? You didn’t leave a number.”
He smiled at that. He gave the number.
“Tell Mickey,” he said.
“I look like his answering service?” Hung up. The same old lines, same old tired saloon with the iron resistance to anything and anyone outside that world. Hell’s Kitchen, very much that.
The telephone rang an hour later.
Devereaux picked it up and waited.
“See anything interesting?”
“Not yet,” Devereaux said.
“You wouldn’t hold out on me.”
“You can fire me when you want.”
“Is that a fact? I wonder what would happen if I did. What about Denisov, what’s he doing?”
“He walks a lot, plays chess. He’s got a girlfriend who sleeps with him.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been here that long.”
“So he’s got a girlfriend. Everyone should have a girlfriend. How you holdin’ up, you think you might get back with your girl?”
“Things happen sometimes.”
“Did she throw out your clothes?”
Devereaux blinked. Mickey didn’t care if Devereaux now knew the phone in Rita’s apartment was tapped. And that Mickey had heard their conversation that night he called her from the Croydon Hotel. The night Mickey had decided that Devereaux might be bona fide. Mickey was getting careless or Mickey didn’t have to care. Something had changed between them and Devereaux felt it over 2,500 miles of telephone line.
“Probably gave them to a charity. She isn’t much on wasting things,” he said.
“You dress kind of crummy anyway. There probably wasn’t much there.”
“I’ll use your tailor next time I’m in New York,” Devereaux said. “I told you this was the wrong way to work it. I’m just standing around looking at a fat Russian go through his daily life without a clue. You should be looking at Consortium in Denver. The spy tell you anything more?”
“Not much,” Mickey said, cautious as a cardplayer. “Nothing you can use.”
Devereaux was silent: Mickey was edging around again, he could hear it in the voice. Something didn’t fit right now and it had all changed since he left New York that morning.
“Maybe the girl is the clue. La femme. Lemme know.”
“I got any way to reach you at all?”
“As long as I can reach you,” Mickey Connors said, and broke the connection.