Джозеф Файндер - The Moscow Club

“Exactly.”

The investment banker took another sip of his wine and began telling a story about the Saint-Emilion he was drinking and how it was the favorite wine of Julius Caesar. Stone, who knew that Lehman never served anything but burgundy, smiled and nodded. No reason to puncture the poor man’s affectations. Stone thought.

Lehman was seated as if on a throne, nodding deliberately in response to something one of the surrounding throng had said. He wore a beautifully tailored dark-gray English suit, but it looked as if it had fit him beautifully decades ago. Now he had shrunk within it.

Lehman’s eyes were a cool, even chilling, gray. They seemed watery, and they were grotesquely magnified by the lenses of his glasses, whose frames were a pale flesh-tone. His nose had once been what was often called aquiline, but now it seemed merely sharp and protruding.

As he spoke. Stone could see the off-white of his too-perfect false teeth.

Suddenly he saw Stone, and he extended a liver-spotted hand. “Charles. How good to see you.”

“Congratulations, Winthrop.”

“My godson, Charles Stone,” he explained to a dowager at his left. “Come closer, Charlie. It’s good to see you.”

“You’re looking well.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Lehman responded lightheartedly, in a reedy voice. He added, with a raised eyebrow: “Your clients are treating you well?”

“Quite well.”

“Your clients are lucky to have you.”

“Thank you.”

Stone came close to asking about the “Lenin Testament,” but he restrained himself.

“Is Alfred here?”

Stone’s attention was momentarily distracted by something he glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, a familiar silhouette.

“Excuse me?” he said, and turned to see a lovely blond woman in a white low-necked dress with high taffeta shoulders, huddled in intense conversation with Saul Ansbach, in the adjoining foyer.

“No, he’s not, Winthrop. Excuse me for a moment, please,” he said, feeling his stomach constrict.

It was Charlotte.

At about that time, roughly 150 miles to the north, a young seminarian at the Russian Orthodox monastery in Maplewood, New York, packed a small valise and got into a car that belonged to the seminary.

After an hour’s drive, he arrived in Saratoga and pulled into the parking lot of the De Witt Clinton Rest Home, a graceful nineteenth-century stone structure, rough-hewn and yet symmetrical, in the architectural style of H. H. Richardson. He found the set of keys secreted exactly as he had been told they would be – magnetically affixed under an iron staircase at the back of the building – and he made his way in.

When he found the correct room, he checked his bag once again. The 5 ml vial of atracurium besylate was there.

The moonlight illuminated a shriveled figure in a wheelchair, an old man who sat dozing. He had no legs.

The seminarian recognized the man immediately. He was named Alden Cushing, once one of the most important industrialists in the country. At one time, he had been the business partner of the industrialist and statesman Winthrop Lehman, going back to Lehman’s years in Moscow. The seminarian had studied the file on Cushing and knew that Cushing’s name was usually paired with Lehman’s in old issues of Fortune magazine from the twenties and thirties. He was often seen in photographs with William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller the original, playing golf at San Simeon, hunting in West Virginia. The seminarian wondered what could possibly have reduced such an extraordinarily powerful man to such a state, from San Simeon to a small, grimy nursing home in upstate New York, a room that stank of medicines and salves and bad institutional food.

“Mr. Cushing,” he said quietly in English, opening the door and switching on the light.

Cushing awoke gradually and seemed disoriented. He shielded his eyes from the light. “Who …?” he demanded weakly.

“I’m a priest,” the seminarian said. “We have some mutual friends.”

“A priest? What– it’s the middle of the night!”

“Everything is all right. You will be all right.” The seminarian’s gently accented voice had a hypnotic quality to it.

“Leave me–!” Cushing croaked.

“Everything will be all right.”

“I kept my promise to Lehman!” Cushing’s head shook involuntarily. His voice was high and cracked. “I never said a word.” His eyes filled with tears, which gathered at the corners of his eyes and then spilled onto the mottled cheeks in odd rivulets.

Within a few minutes, the seminarian had found out everything he wanted to know. Then he placed a soothing hand on Cushing’s mottled arm, smoothing back the pale-blue cotton pajama sleeve.

“You’re obviously very upset, Mr. Cushing,” he said. “I’ve got something to calm you down a bit.” His voice was soothing.

Cushing’s eyes were large and round with terror.

The seminarian held up a small syringe, which he fastidiously knocked against his hand. “This is to keep any air from getting in your bloodstream,” he explained. He tightened the tourniquet on Cushing’s upper arm, deftly located the vein, swabbed the spot with an alcohol pad, and inserted the hypodermic needle.

Cushing was now looking at him furiously. His mouth worked, opening and closing, but no sound emerged. He could see a slight backwash of his own blood enter the syringe just before the priest injected.

Cushing’s limbs had gotten heavy. He felt his eyes close.

“You’ll be feeling fine very soon,” he could hear the priest saying. What kind of accent was that? Nothing made sense. He wanted to shout, to push him away.

But Cushing could not have replied, or moved, much as he wanted to.

He was completely alert – he could hear every word the intruder spoke, every sound in the room – but he realized with a steadily dawning terror that he could not breathe. Or speak. Or move. Or scream.

A minute later, he began to lose consciousness. Everything darkened, until slowly the room was completely black. Cushing’s body had gone flaccid. Anyone passing by would have thought he had fallen fast asleep.

The atracurium that had been injected into his bloodstream – a muscle relaxant that is metabolized by body temperature and body pH – acted quickly. Within a very short time, it would be entirely metabolized. There would be no trace, and the presumptive cause of death would be cardiorespiratory arrest. Even if Cushing’s body were subjected to a routine pathological examination – which it would not be, because of his age – the metabolite of atracurium would not be detected. If they found the needle mark in his arm, well, he had asked for a sedative the day before. Cushing, everyone knew, was a very high-strung man.

New York

Stone approached Charlotte and Saul noiselessly, careful not to be noticed. He wanted to see her, hear her for a moment, without his wife’s knowing he was there.

They were speaking in hushed voices in the dark alcove, Saul shaking his head, Charlotte beaming at him.

She had changed. Her hair was different, shorter, but it was becoming. She had aged a bit, too; you could see it around her eyes, but they were laugh lines, and they suited her. She had lost a little weight. She looked spectacular. If she wanted, she could look un-nervingly like Grace Kelly, and tonight she must have wanted.

Stone realized with a flash of anger that she wasn’t wearing either her diamond engagement ring or her wedding ring. He was embarrassed by the rush of his feelings for her. He considered turning around, not greeting her.

Instead, he watched, and listened, for the moment unobserved.

“But how do you know it’s Russian?” she was saying with a toss of her head.