Stuart Kaminsky - Black Knight in Red Square

She walked through the open door of 808 at about nine-thirty and asked, “Anybody here?” No one answered.

Clothes hung on hangers; a suitcase sat on the chair. There was nothing to empty from the wastebasket. Irina bent to pick up the room keys from the floor near the door. She put them on the nearby table and got a cloth from her cart. The routine was automatic. Clean the room, replace the towels, check the toilet paper. The light was out in the bathroom, and she flipped it on.

There was blood on the toilet seat, bright red against the white plastic. Under the sink a drunken foreigner was sleeping. She wanted to simply walk out after changing the towels, but he might be someone important, and he might be hurt.

“ Gospodin ,” she said, “you all right?” He didn’t move. She reached down to touch his shoulder, but what she felt made her pull her arm back with a jerk. He is not a man, she thought. He is a body. She touched him again, and he rolled away from the wall to stare at her with unseeing eyes.

Irina jumped back quickly, banging her shoulder against the open door. Although the face of death was a shock, it was not death but the look of pain on the man’s face and the blood on his lips that terrified her. He was pale and cold, and the light from the sputtering bulb danced on his bald head.

Irina backed out of the bathroom, fighting her panic and the desire to run. She left the room as calmly as she could and hurried to Vera Olganova, whose eyes opened wide at this breach of routine. She reached for the phone, dialed a number, couldn’t get through, and dialed again.

“Comrade Verskov,” she said, proud of the control in her voice.

“What room?” he answered. Vera’s eyes rose and met those of Irina, who was looking back down the corridor.

“I-we just found a dead man in eight-oh-eight.”

“I know,” said Comrade Verskov, his voice cracking.

“There’s blood on his mouth.”

“How did-?” she began, but Verskov’s quavering voice cut her off.

“We now have four of them in the hotel.” There was a silence, and she could hear Verskov trying to pull himself together. “Don’t touch anything. Close the door. The police will be there in a few minutes.”

On the sidewalk in front of number 16 Kalinin Street, three boys about fifteen years old were jostling a younger boy between them. The younger boy wanted to get away without looking too frightened, but the tears were forming. From the window of the first-floor apartment, a pair of dark eyes watched the struggle with detached interest. The viewer saw the event as an experiment carried out many times before from São Paulo to Helsinki. The outcome was statistically inevitable. The tormented boy saw a slight opening and tried to step through the small circle of his tormentors’ legs, but one of the older boys tripped him, and he fell on the sidewalk, taking part of the impact with his face. He stood up bewildered, examining the blood on his shirt. Instead of arousing sympathy in his tormentors, the sight of blood seemed to anger them, and the shortest of the three attackers stepped forward and slapped the bleeding boy hard with the back of his hand.

The dark eyes turned back to the near-darkness of the room.

“The time must be exact,” said a male voice in too precise German.

The dark eyes turned slowly to the speaker, a thin, dark Arab in his late twenties.

“Four days from today on Sunday at six, seven, and eight P.M. Moscow time,” said the one with dark eyes. “That is exact.” The eyes coolly examined the four others in the room. Besides the young Arab, Ali, there was a short, muscular Arab in his late forties named Fouad, a nervous type who had to have something in his hands to keep them quiet. There was a blond man in his thirties with a French accent. The others called him Robert. He appeared to be the leader, but he seldom spoke. The final member of the quartet had made most of the arrangements. She was a woman in her late twenties with thick blond hair who identified herself as Seven. She had once been beautiful, but now she was consumed by a neurotic hatred that the man with the dark eyes had seen often before. She had a slight British accent, but the dark-eyed one knew it was a fake. The conversation was conducted in German.

“You are sure,” said Seven, “that nothing has changed because of the Metropole business?”

“I am sure,” said the one with dark eyes. “Business is going on as usual. Now I’ll have the rest of my payment.”

“We think,” said Seven, rising, “it would be better to pay you when we are finished.”

Fouad leaned against the door, and Ali backed into a corner, his hand in his pocket. The dark eyes moved to Robert, who sat impassively, arms folded, a slight smile on his lips.

“I get it all, and now,” said the one with dark eyes, “or you can forget about the agreement.”

“If the KGB knew about our meeting,” said Seven, “you would not be seeing anyone for a long time. You might not live very long.”

“You are not very good at this,” said the dark-eyed one, “not good at all. If you get away with the plan, it will be because of what I do, what I plan. You’re wasting time with these games. I’ve got to get back or someone might grow suspicious about where I’ve been. The cash now, and all of it.”

Robert nodded to Seven, who went to a briefcase on the table and extracted a package.

“If you-” Seven began, but a gesture from Robert stopped her words. She handed the package to the visitor.

The dark-eyed visitor took it and left, thinking that the money was good and the challenge interesting, but that as a group, the terrorists were far below even the clumsy Japanese airport group and the inept Italian quartet, both of which had bungled their tasks miserably. Robert was more interested in self-image than ideology. Seven was all fire and no brains. Ali was an idealist with no experience. Only Fouad had the makings of a good terrorist; he was unconcerned about self-image and able to control his fire and strength. If the four of them had plans to dispose of their visitor eventually, Fouad would be the one to keep an eye on.

Outside the sunlight was bright. Across the street, the three youths had given up their game with the younger boy and were looking for something else to fill their empty day. They spotted the one with the dark eyes and started to move forward. When their quarry did not run or even walk away, they paused in the middle of the street.

The smile on the face of the one with dark eyes told the three boys they were like insects to this lone, well-dressed foreigner. The stranger walked directly toward and then past them without hurrying or looking back. One of the boys muttered the only words he knew in English: “Fuck you.”

The dark-eyed one felt the packet of $150,000 in American dollars and didn’t bother to reply.

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov realized the importance of what he was about to do this Thursday morning. There had been several such crucial moments in his fifty-two years. The first had occurred in 1941 when he was a boy soldier who had stepped out from behind a doorway in Rostov to face a German tank. He had destroyed the tank with a lucky grenade and a hail of bullets from the machine pistol he had taken from a dead German. The cost had been a nearly destroyed left leg, which he had to drag slowly and often painfully behind him throughout the rest of his life. The second such moment happened when, as a young policeman in Moscow, he had caught a drunken thief named Gremko assaulting a young woman outside the Kursk railway terminal. The drunk had nearly killed Rostnikov with his bare hands, but fortune and a well-placed knee to the groin had turned the tables.