Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“I told you I’d be robbed!” protested the man, at once.

“We’re not here to talk about your bracelets, are we, Anatoli Sergeevich?” said Danilov. “We’re here to talk about things much more important than that.”

“A lot of people have died. Here, now. More, in America,” said Cowley. “And your own brigade got hit-Mikhail Vasilevich Osipov himself.”

“What have you got to tell us about that?” picked up Danilov.

“Nothing.”

“You’re being stupid, Anatoli Sergeevich. And irritating,” said Danilov. “You know why we’re here?”

“Of course I know why you’re here!”

“No,” contradicted Danilov. “Here, in your apartment. We’re here so that no one in Petrovka-and no one outside Petrovka-is ever going to know we’ve had this meeting.”

“Keeping you safe,” added the rehearsed Cowley. “That was the undertaking, wasn’t it? Keeping you safe?”

Lasin’s eyes flickered snakelike-blankly, as snakes’ eyes are blankly unresponsive-before he said, “Osipov’s dead. The brigade’s smashed. That’s all I know.”

“Who killed him?” demanded Pavin.

“How do I know?”

“We’re sure you do,” insisted Danilov.

“I do the cars, that’s all. There was a war a few years back. I wasn’t with him then. Ask the brigade he fought then.”

“Can we tell them you sent us?” asked Pavin.

The bravado began to crumble. “I don’t know!”

“Our deal,” reminded Danilov. “You were going to get me a name I needed?”

“I couldn’t,” the man refused, bluntly.

Silence grew up in the opulent, flower-overwhelmed apartment, like building blocks for a wall. Danilov said, “You seen all those people outside the American embassy?”

“Hasn’t everybody!”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get through,” said Cowley, to Danilov. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Not unseen,” said Danilov, back to the American.

“We’ll try,” said Cowley.

Danilov spread his hands toward the Russian gangster. “You can’t say I didn’t try to keep my side of the bargain.”

“What the fuck you talking about now?”

“The same thing, keeping you safe. Not letting anyone know you’re helping us,” said Danilov.

“You’re not making sense,” jeered the man, although uncertainly.

“Can’t be many foreign cars-European, American-you can’t recognize, being in the business like you are?” suggested Cowley.

Lasin’s eyes flickered once more, but he didn’t speak.

“Got a lot of pictures of American cars at the embassy,” said Cowley. “What we want you to do is look through them, see if you can match any to a description we’ll give you of the car used in the attack on the embassy.”

“Pity you couldn’t give me a name from Petrovka,” said Danilov. “And tell us about the Osipov killing. Wish I had enough people to guarantee your safety after you’ve been to the embassy, but we’re as stretched as hell. Sorry.”

“Bastard!” said Lasin.

“It’s the business we’re in-makes us like that,” said Pavin. “We all ready?”

Cowley and Danilov moved toward the door together.

“Mizin!” blurted the man. “Ashot Yefimovich Mizin!”

Who’d volunteered to deliver Plant 43’s double-headed missile-the missile that had been switched in transit-to the Foreign Ministry and the self-appointed investigator of brigade godfather Mikhail Vasilevich Osipov, thought Danilov. “You see, you can help, when you really try.”

“Now let’s talk about American cars in Moscow,” picked up Cowley.

“And after that we’re going to go back to who killed Mikhail Vasilevich and destroyed the Osipov Brigade.”

“You’ll get me killed! You know you’ll get me killed!”

“You help us, we’ll help you,” promised Danilov.

“Motherfuckers!”

“We don’t enjoy it, either,” said Cowley. “Just part of the job.”

Pamela Darnley was pissed off: irrationally, which she knew and which didn’t help, angry but with no one and no target at which to vent it. It had begun so well, so seemingly complete. All it needed was one simple, fucking 25 cent telephone call-why was everything in nickels and dimes! — and she’d have been there, wherever there was. There with a SWAT team and helicopters-a fucking army, maybe-and they’d have all been in the bag, tied at the neck, the national emergency over and done with.

But there hadn’t been a call between 69 Bay View Avenue, Brooklyn, and a public street booth on the corner of Lake Shore Drive and 14th Boulevard, Chicago.

In the thirty-six hours since she’d established the monitor, the Chicago surveillance team had racked up $480 in overtime and taken 250 unnecessary photographs, including three sets of street hookers who used the telephone for business. And the Manhattan listeners knew what take-out pizza toppings Arseni and Mary Jo Orlenko preferred, that when she was out jogging on the bay road he called telephone sex lines, and because the house was live to every sound that he enjoyed oral sex when she came back, before she showered.

There was an equally frustrating paradox about the bank investigation, too. Within the thirty-six hours that the bureau auditors had moved in to the regional offices, there’d been the breakthrough that the siphoning from three banks in New York City and four in Philadelphia had gone beyond pennies: at two, in Philadelphia, three separate amounts of ten dollars had disappeared. The frustration came with the caution from the fraud team supervisor that while she-and Anne Stovey-had probably locked in on a substantial crime, it was still going to be difficult to isolate the embezzlers.

Pamela was actually in the Manhattan office, listening to the conversation between the couple on Bay View Avenue, when the fight began that alerted them.

Pamela said: “This could be something!”

It was but not at all-or anything-what any of them wanted, Pamela Darnley least of all.

Patrick Hollis had been panicked, open-boweled, for the rest of the day after Gillian Carling’s cafeteria announcement and sleepless that night in his locked den. But he was better now. Totally calm. It would not be just difficult, it would be impossible to catch him. And he’d always intended Robert Standing to be hurt, as badly as possible, for what he’d done, although more by an internal bank audit than by an FBI investigation.

Because it was an FBI investigation he still had to be careful, Hollis acknowledged. Better to get rid of the Jaguar than need to explain it, despite the inheritance cover he’d created. It was, really, a small sacrifice to make.

Senior Colonel Investigator Ashot Yefimovich Mizin was a thin, round-shouldered man who didn’t make the mistake of flaunting his additional income with impeccable tailoring, like Reztsov and Averin in Gorki, but there was the faintest attitude of superciliousness as he came into Danilov’s office.

Danilov said, “I thought I should have an update on the brigade murder.”

Mizin shrugged. “Another turf war, like the ones a few years back.”

“Who’s the opposition brigade?”

“I’m not sure, not yet. I doubt we’ll be able to bring a case even if I do find out.”

“I don’t want it written off,” said Danilov. “I want it properly investigated.”

“Trust me,” said Mizin.

“Of course I will,” said Danilov.

The argument was again about walking instead of driving to the Coney Island strip.

“I’m wearing heels!”

“Change your shoes.”

“You’re fucking paranoid!”

“I’m fucking careful.”

“It’ll be the Bare Necessities,” predicted Pamela, to no one in particular. “Fuck it! And fuck the D.A. most of all: He’s going to sleep well when half Manhattan gets wiped out in the next germ attack!” The dispute between Leonard Ross, the New York District Attorney, and the attorney general remained unresolved three days after Pamela had renewed Cowley’s already once refused request to tap the public telephone in the topless bar.