Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Squatting in the bushes nearby, behind a rusty set of metal barrels that held food refuse, I watched. A noise inside signaled that someone had heard his desperate knocking. Slowly, with a squeak of the hinges, the door swung open to reveal a rotund old woman wearing a green canvas smock over a shapeless floral-print housedress. Her brown eyes, small circles in a large mass of wrinkles beneath a wild flyaway mane of gray hair, widened suddenly when she saw Ruggiero’s wound.

“Shto eto takoye?” she said in a high, scared voice. “ Bozhe moi! Pridi, malodoi chelovek! Bystro! ” What’s this? she was saying in Russian. My God, come in, young man!

Ruggiero replied in Italian: “ Il marmo... Il marmo é affilato ...” The marble is sharp.

She was, I presumed, the Russian housekeeper, perhaps a servant who had worked for Orlov in his days of power. And as I anticipated, she behaved with all the motherly concern of a Russian woman of her generation. She naturally wouldn’t have guessed that Ruggiero’s wound had not been caused by an accident with the sharp-edged marble tiles but had instead been created by me, using stage makeup from a shop in Siena.

Neither did the poor woman suspect that the instant she turned her back to direct this young Italian man into the kitchen for first aid, someone else would jump from the bushes to subdue her. Swiftly, I clamped a chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth and nose, smothering her scream, and supporting her large, awkward body when it went limp.

Ruggiero quietly closed the kitchen door. He glanced at me, alarmed, no doubt thinking: what kind of “Canadian investor” is this? But his assistance had been bought and paid for, and he would not let me down.

From his childhood days playing at Castelbianco, Ruggiero had known where the entrance to the kitchen was. Already, as far as I was concerned, he had earned his money. When I pulled the coil of slender nylon rope from my overalls, he helped me tie the housekeeper up, taking care that the rope not chafe her, and placing a gag in her mouth, secured by rope, for when she came to. Then, silently, he helped me move the unconscious body from the onion-fragrant kitchen into the large pantry.

He shook my hand. I gave him the final payment, in American dollars, and with a quick nervous smile, he said, “Ciao,” and was gone.

A small, dark set of stone steps led from the kitchen up to a dark corridor, off of which appeared to be unoccupied bedrooms. I crept noiselessly, making my way by feel as much as anything else. Somewhere in the house I heard a faint buzzing, but it seemed quite far off, as if from miles away. There were none of the normal noises a house makes, though, even an ancient castle such as this.

I came to an intersection of two corridors, a bare landing that held only two small, shabby wooden chairs. The insistent buzzing noise was closer, louder now. It came from somewhere below. I followed it downstairs, turning left, going straight for a few feet, then left again.

Slipping my hand into the front pocket of my overalls, I touched the Sig-Sauer. I felt the reassuring cold of the pistol’s steel.

Now I stood before high oak double doors. The buzzing came, in irregular intervals, from within.

I grabbed the pistol and, crouching as low to the ground as possible, slowly pulled one of the doors open, not knowing what or whom I’d see inside.

It was a large, empty dining room with bare walls and bare floors and an immensely long oak table set for lunch for one person.

Lunch, evidently, had been eaten.

The single diner, who sat at one end of the table, buzzing furiously for a housekeeper who was not able to answer his calls, was a small, bald old man, an innocuous-looking man wearing thick, black-framed glasses. I had seen pictures of the man hundreds of times before, but I had no idea how small Vladimir Orlov actually was.

He was wearing a suit and tie, strangely: who would come to see him, hiding as he was in Tuscany? The suit wasn’t smartly British, as so many modern Russians in positions of power seemed to favor; it was old-style, boxy, of Soviet or Eastern European manufacture, probably several decades old.

Vladimir Orlov: the last head of the KGB, whose likeness, stiff and unsmiling, I had seen countless times in Agency files, in newspaper photographs. Mikhail Gorbachev had brought him in to replace the traitorous KGB chief who had plotted to overthrow Gorbachev’s government, during the last convulsions of Soviet power. We knew little about the man, except that he was deemed “reliable” and “friendly to Gorbachev” and other traits vaporous and unprovable.

Now he sat before me, furled and small. All the power seemed to have been drained out of him.

He looked up at me, scowled, and said in clipped Siberian-accented Russian, “Who are you?”

Not for a few seconds was I able to reply, but when I did, it was with a smoothness that I hadn’t expected. “I’m Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law,” I said in Russian. “I’m married to his daughter, Martha.”

The old man looked as if he’d seen a ghost. His heavy brow lowered, then shot up; his eyes grew narrow, then widened. He seemed to pale at once. “Bozhe moi,” he whispered. Oh, my God. “Bozhe moi.”

I simply stared, my heart hammering, not understanding what he meant, who he thought I was.

He got slowly to his feet, scowling and half pointing at me accusingly.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

I didn’t reply.

“You are foolish to come here.” His words were a whisper, barely audible. “Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.”

I walked slowly into the cavernous dining room. My footsteps echoed against the bare walls, the high vaulted ceilings.

Beneath his glacial calm, his imperious demeanor, Vladimir Orlov’s eyes flicked back and forth with great anxiety.

Several seconds of silence passed.

My thoughts raced. Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.

Betrayed him? What did this mean?

Orlov spoke now, his voice clear and resonant and reverberating: “How dare you appear before me.”

The old man reached a hand to the underside of the dining table and depressed a different button. From somewhere in the hallway I heard a long, continuous buzzing noise. Footsteps came from somewhere in the house’s interior. The housekeeper, probably returned to consciousness by now but unable to move or be heard, was not answering his summons. But perhaps one of the guards had heard the noise, suspected that something might be wrong.

I withdrew the Sig from the overalls pocket, leveled it at the KGB chairman. I wondered whether Orlov had ever had a gun pointed at him in earnest before. In the circles of intelligence in which he had always worked, at least according to the career assessments I’d read, one’s weapons were not guns or Uzis or poison darts, but fitness reports and memoranda.

“I want you to know,” I said, now holding the gun under the table, “that I have no intention of harming you. We must have a brief chat, you and I, and then I will be gone. When the guard appears, I want you to assure him everything’s all right now. Otherwise, you’ll most certainly die.”

Before I could elaborate, the door to the dining room flew open, and a guard whom I hadn’t seen before leveled an automatic at me, calling out: “Freeze!”

I smiled casually, gave the old man the briefest glance, and, after the barest moment’s hesitation, he told the guard, “Go on. Thank you, Volodya, but I’m fine. It was a mistake.”

The guard lowered the gun, sized me up — dressed as a workingman as I was, he remained suspicious — untensed slowly, and said, “Sorry.” He withdrew and closed the door quietly behind him.