Howard Fast - The Case of the Russian Diplomat

“I apologize. I’m sorry. We’re in this together.”

“And you’re making that same stupid mistake that the parents of every kidnapped child make. Ana’s seven years old. If she saw them, she can identify them. Do you think there’s a chance in the world that they’d let her go alive?”

“Not much chance, no.”

“Then what?”

“We have to find her.”

“How? Where? If you think this Binnie Vance was involved with the drowned man, then she had help. Is that it? Does she know where the kid is?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We can’t even place her at the Beverly Glen Hotel. She only fits with a lot of guesswork-and there’s no reason, no motive, no sense in the whole thing.”

“We could pick her up and sweat it out of her.”

“Pick her up for what?”

“We could try to sweat it out of her.”

“She’s not the kind of a woman you could sweat anything out of. You know,” said Masuto, “there was something damned strange about that voice on the phone.”

“What?”

“Adverbs.”

“You just lost me.”

“Adverbs. They’re part of what makes English an impossible language. An uneducated man faults his adverbs. So do foreigners. The man on the phone said, ‘you will listen to me very carefully.’ Why didn’t he say, listen careful? Then he used the word unavailable . That’s a fancy word. He could have said, get lost. Stay away. Forget it. Drop it. But he said unavailable. Then the adverb again. Leave it completely alone or something like that. But he said completely.”

“What does it add up to?”

“It was a young voice, high pitched. I’ll tell you what it adds up to. It adds up to a student.”

“And there’s got to be maybe ten thousand foreign students just in L.A. alone.”

“It’s a game!” Masuto blurted out. “It’s a crazy, sick, monstrous game. The games children play-the bloody, stupid games! Sy, there’s only one way to go. We have to find the drowned man’s clothes.”

“Why? For Christ’s sake, why?”

“For the same reason that they were hidden. Because they make a connection, and right now we have no connection. None. I could make guesses. I could put the whole thing together-or at least I think I could-but now they’ve pulled Ana into their insane game, and I want my child. I want her alive.”

“All right, Masao. It’s a quarter to eleven. We have eight hours.”

“No. We have five hours.”

“Why only five?”

“Four, five, six-somewhere in there, believe me.”

“All right, five hours. We got the second largest metropolitan district in the United States. Where do we look?”

“In the hotel. Those clothes never left the Beverly Glen Hotel.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything, but that’s where we look.”

“And right now Mr. Arvin Clinton, the pride of the F.B.I., is sitting in his office downtown waiting for you to show up and kiss his ass.”

“We’ll just let him wait.”

Masuto went into the bedroom, where Kati lay huddled on the bed. He sat down beside her and touched her cheek gently.

“Kati.”

“Masao, if anything should happen to her-”

“Nothing will happen to her.”

“Or to you. Then I would surely die.”

“Nothing will happen to me. I will find Ana and bring her home. I promised that. I want you to stay here. I still have a son, and he will look for his mother when he comes back from school. He is not to know anything about this. No one is. Even if Captain Wainwright calls, you must tell him nothing, except that you do not know where I am. And you must say that to whoever calls.”

“Then you will do what they ask?”

“I will do what has to be done.” He bent over and kissed her. “Lock the doors. Remain in the house. If the man who took Ana calls again, you must tell him that I am carrying out his wishes.”

“And Uraga?” she asked. “What can I tell my son? He will see my face.”

“Then you must compose your face. Ura is nine years old. He is old enough to behave like a man and accept the fact that his mother is not always smiling and laughing.”

“He will ask about Ana.”

“I took her to the doctor. Tell him that, and also tell him that he must remain in the house.”

“How do I know he’s all right?”

“He’s all right. If you wish, call the school, but don’t let them know that anything is wrong. I’m sure he’s all right. I’ll call you later. From here on, Kati dear, every minute is precious to me. Let me depend on you.”

She sat up and nodded, her face tear-stained. “Yes, I will do as you say.”

Masuto was himself again as they got into his car. He said to Beckman, “You drive, Sy. I want to put it together.”

“The hotel?”

“Yes, the hotel.”

“You know, Masao, when I spoke to Freddie Comstock, he said that he cased every empty room in the hotel, and those that were vacated too.”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean anything?”

“I don’t want to think about it that way,” Masuto said. “I want to start from the beginning and put it together. I have all the pieces, or at least I think I have. So just let me put it together, and then we’ll see where we are-” thinking to himself that now he must put everything else out of his mind, all his terror about his daughter, Kati’s misery, what might be happening to Ana right at this moment, all of it out of his mind and only the puzzle, only the game that sick men played all over the world in this time of his life.

“Go ahead, Masao.”

“We begin with a man who calls himself cultural attache but who works for Soviet Intelligence. He uses the Zlatov Dancers as an excuse to go to San Francisco, I don’t think the Soviets give two damns about the Zlatov Dancers, but the only other Russian event on the West Coast that we know about is the fact of the agronomists. That the Soviets care about. They used to buy oranges from Israel. Now they have to learn how to grow their own. So we make our first guess: Peter Litovsky is sent to California to keep an eye on the agronomists.”

“Maybe,” Beckman said.

“Why maybe?”

“Because the fat man is no bodyguard. He’s in his fifties, fat and soft. One punch in his gut would put him out of the running.”

“That makes sense. All right, the fat man’s an intelligence agent. He comes out here because someone wants a meeting to discuss something concerning the agronomists. That’s better, of course. The meeting is set up at the Beverly Glen Hotel.”

“Who with?”

“The next guess. Binnie Vance.”

“Why?”

“It makes some sense. At least we know that whoever killed Stillman was someone he knew and trusted. You don’t walk up behind a man who’s shaving and put a bullet into the base of his skull while he’s looking into a mirror unless he knows you and trusts you. So from there we make the presumption that she was in his room the night before and that she was the woman who phoned in the news about the fat man.”

“And the hooker?”

“She never existed. I never believed she did.”

“Okay. We got Binnie Vance as a Russian agent of some sort.” Beckman shook his head. “It don’t figure. It’s that Mata Hari crap. She’s just a belly dancer.”

“She’s German. She doesn’t have to be an agent. She could have some connection in East Germany that would bring Litovsky out here to see her.”

“All right. I go along, Masao. Now we come to the stopper. How did they get into the hotel? How did the fat man get in? No one saw him. No one remembers him. He never registered.”

Masuto smiled slightly, the first time since his wife had phoned him that morning. “Kati was talking about common sense last night. Do you remember, yesterday morning, I told you to go down to the basement and check the bolt on the door?”