The Sisters Read online

  On the fifteenth of the month he made an application for work in his second choice, a rust-colored brick warehouse on the corner of Houston and Elm that dominated a roughly diamond-shaped plaza through which the target would have to pass on his way to the luncheon. The building had been constructed at the turn of the century as railroad offices, had been turned into a branch office of a plow company, and only recently been converted into a warehouse. Khanda, again wearing a tie and jacket, sensed that he was making a good impression on the woman who interviewed him this time. He explained away his lack of references by saying that he had attempted free-lance journalism since his discharge from the Marines. The interviewer asked when he could start, assuming his application for employment was accepted. Khanda flashed a boyish smile and replied eagerly, "First thing tomorrow morning." The interviewer smiled back. And Khanda knew he had the job.

  Thursday spotted the item in the New York Daily News, to which he subscribed at office expense so he could follow the comic strips. A minor-league left-fielder who had made it up to the majors for three months and four days almost two decades before had been found murdered near the New Jersey docks. "It's the way he was killed," Thursday told the Sisters when he showed them the item.

  Francis, who was wearing a new orange polka-dot bow tie that seemed almost fluorescent, screwed up his nose in disgust. "I abhor physical violence," he observed. He handed the newspaper, with the item circled in red, across to Carroll, who was spitting a piece of caramel laced with pistachio into his palm. Carroll read the article casually. Then his brow furrowed, and he read the article a second time. "You don't think it's him?" he asked Thursday, staring at a point on the wall over his right shoulder.

  "During the war," Thursday recounted in that smug way he had of offering up footnotes to history, "he left a trail of strangled German corpses.

  The British claimed there were eight, The Germans-our Germans-listed eleven in his dossier. Then there was the little matter"- here Thursday capped a giggle before it could leak to the surface-"of the man who was strangled in the airport just about the time our friend the Potter enplaned for the Free World."

  Francis waved a hand vaguely, as if he were trying to discourage a fly from touching down near him. His wrist was limp, a sure sign that he was not convinced.

  Thursday seemed offended. "I took the initiative of phoning a lieutenant in homicide whom I had some dealings with, the one who was assisting us in our inquiries, as the British like to say, when we tried to make the suicide of the Bulgarian diplomat's wife look like murder in order to hook the diplomat. Anyway, my source says that the late left-fielder worked as a bartender in a watering hole frequented by members of the Mafia; that the man who killed him had been dealing with the very same mafiosi; that one of them, known to the imaginative New York City Police Department as Luigi the Lean, recognized him as a Russian who had been around years before trying to purchase a rifle with a U.S. Army night sight on it. Luigi also told my source that the Russian's car was parked in a nearby alleyway, exactly where the body of the late left-fielder was eventually discovered; that the car had two passengers, a young woman and a pussycat."

  Carroll astonished everyone in the room by whinnying. "It's the Potter, all right," he concluded.

  "How on earth did he get from that hotel room in Vienna to the docks of New Jersey?" Francis wanted to know.

  "The Potter has always been a resourceful man," Carroll pointed out. He turned on Thursday with such ferocity that the poor man had the urge to duck. "Did you body-search him when he arrived in Vienna?" Carroll demanded. "Did you at least go through his belongings?"

  Thursday grimaced. "I assumed our German friends would tend to routine matters like that," he replied lamely.

  "You assumed," Carroll sneered.

  Francis said stoically, "A man like the Potter would have squirreled away a supply of Western currency, spare passports, a kilo or two of cocaine even, for that proverbial rainy day."

  "That's probably what he was doing down at the docks," Carroll concluded. "Trading in his cocaine for greenbacks."

  "And the late left-fielder made the mistake of trying to increase his employers' profits," Francis guessed.

  Thursday eyed Carroll's box of candies; considering that he had been the one to spot the crucial item in the newspaper, he thought that Carroll might break with tradition and offer him one. But Carroll had other things on his mind. "You can slink back to your cubbyhole," he instructed Thursday. "We'll whistle when we need you."

  As soon as the door closed behind their man Friday, Francis said to Carroll, "What do you think?"

  "What I think . . ."he began, and then, motioning with his head toward a wall, he reached for pencil and paper. "What I think," he scribbled on a legal pad, "is that he came to warn the Sleeper and found him gone."

  "What if," Francis wrote, "he tracks the Sleeper down?"

  "The only people in the world," Carroll wrote, "who know where the Sleeper is going, and what route he is taking, are in this room. How could he track him down?"

  "How could he get from Vienna to New York?" Francis wrote in turn-and Carroll could almost hear his exasperation. "He is a resourceful man, you said it yourself," Francis wrote. "What if the Sleeper told someone where he was going? What if he left footprints?"

  Carroll shook his head. "The Sleeper's not one of those who leaves traces everywhere he crawls-like a snail does when it crosses a leaf.

  You are jumping at shadows," Carroll concluded.

  Francis took the pencil, hesitated, then bent his head and wrote, "You are sure?"

  Carroll, staring at the wall over Francis' shoulder, nodded. "I'm sure,"

  he said out loud.

  Francis waved a hand vaguely. Once again his wrist was limp; once again he was not convinced. He began collecting the leaves of yellow paper with the intention of" shredding them before he left the office.

  Carroll turned his attention back to the box of candy. "Damned pistachios will be the death of me," he muttered under his breath as he fumbled with the tinfoil of another candy.

  It was not Francis' usual night to take in a film, but a nagging doubt lurking like a migraine behind his forehead persuaded him he ought to.

  Francis liked neat packages. The Potter turning up in America represented a complication. People had to be notified. Contingency plans had to be drawn. Precautions had to be taken.

  Later, Francis wouldn't even remember what film he had seen that night, so deep was his absorption with the problem at hand. He stared at the screen in the filtered darkness without registering the images. He listened to the dialogue without making any sense of the words. When the final freeze frame faded and the houselights came up, he had more or less put everything into perspective. He reached into his pocket for the cigarette he ritually smoked at the end of a film. He used the single match left in the book to light it and discarded the empty matchbook under his seat. The sweepers could clean up after him, he reassured himself. Taking a deep, distasteful drag (how he longed to give up smoking entirely), he casually sauntered (Francis prided himself on his ability to saunter; he thought of it as a dying art) up the center aisle toward the exit.

  Killers, the Potter liked to tell his student sleepers when he was initiating them into the theory and practice of espionage, almost always came in twos. Which was another way of saying that if someone was worth killing, he (or-why not?-she) was worth killing well. If one assassin failed, so the conventional wisdom went, the second might be able to profit from the confusion caused by the first attempt and carry out the assignment. The classical example of this, of course, was the assassination of Czar Alexander II in I88I. The first bomb thrower managed to wound some guards and horses. When Alexander made the mistake of stepping out of the carriage to survey the damage, the second bomber nailed him.

  Both the Soviet and the American espionage services tended to have their killers work in tandem. Two of the best in the business, known in professional circles as the Canadians becau
se of their nationality, were vacationing in Ottawa after successfully carrying out an assignment from the Romanian counterespionage service to "neutralize" a Romanian exile.

  The man in question had published details of the sexual dalliances of members of Bucharest's ruling circle. Marriages had broken up. Careers had been ruined. The Canadians had been contacted. They had gone to London, tracked their victim until they had become familiar with his routines, then dispatched him at high noon in Piccadilly Circus by jabbing him in the groin with the poisoned tip of an umbrella as he waited impatiently for a bus.

  The Canadians had completed three assignments since the first of the year and complained openly of "metal fatigue," but their Merchant, thinking they were referring to the aluminum castings of their gyrojet pistols, promised to supply new ones. Left with no choice, the Canadians, posing as homosexuals, made their way to Niagara Falls, wandered arm in arm across the border as if they had nothing more on their minds than sightseeing, picked up the new gyrojet pistols, false identifications, a supply of cash and two valises full of clothing at a safe house in Buffalo, then rented a black Dodge and headed southeast toward Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  The Canadian who wore a tiny woman's watch on his wrist and travelled under the name of Ourcq did most of the driving. He was in his middle forties, balding, bloated, effeminate, with the beginnings of a paunch that no amount of Canadian Air Force exercises could get rid of. The other Canadian, a rail-thin man with wavy hair who was using the name Appleyard, passed the time working on a crossword-puzzle paperback. He had spent several years as a soundman on radio soap operas, and could imitate almost anything. Whenever he was stumped over a word, he would purse his lips, fill his cheeks with air, produce a scrap of tinfoil or sandwich wrap, bring a palm up to his lips, stare off at some middle distance-and come out with noises: horses' hooves, a door opening, a kettle boiling, the whine of a jet engine starting up, static on a radio, fire in a chimney. He claimed he could do snow falling, smoke rising, the sun setting, the sound of someone dying; the last two, he said, were indistinguishable from each other. He was imitating a train pulling into a station when Ourcq glanced at him and said, "What the fuck's the name of the fucking place in Lancaster again?"

  Appleyard reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for the itinerary they had picked up at the Buffalo safe house. "It's called 'Seventh Heaven,' " he replied presently, and puckering his lips, he produced a perfect imitation of surf lapping against a shore.

  After a while Ourcq shook his head in despair. "It's a shit assignment,"

  he decided. His brow wrinkled up in disgust. "Asking us to be fucking sweepers! There are fucking professional sweepers for fucking sweeping."

  "Maybe the professional sweepers were off killing, so they sent the professional killers to sweep."

  Ourcq was not amused. "What if the fucker who is following the other fucker isn't following the other fucker after all?" he moaned. "Then we come all this fucking way for nothing."

  "Maybe he's not as much of a dwarf as they say he is and we wont recognize him," Appleyard added. "Maybe he is not accompanied by a woman with a pussycat."

  "Me, I don't see why they couldn't let the fucker who is the fucker who's being followed take care of the fucker who is doing the following," Ourcq insisted,

  Appleyard, who sometimes had trouble following Ourcq's sentence structure, clucked his tongue to imitate the sound of tumblers falling in a combination lock. "Maybe," he offered, "they didn't want the follower and the followee to meet."

  "It is no fucking way," Ourcq muttered, "to run a fucking cold war."

  Appleyard nodded in vague agreement and went back to his crossword puzzle.

  The walls, it seems, did have ears.

  "I'm just thinking out loud," Francis' voice came from the tape. "What if . . ."

  "You bastard," Carroll spat at the interrogator without ever looking him in the eye. He brought several fingers to his cheek to deal with his twitching muscle, and arched his neck to take the pressure off the welt under his starched collar.

  "What if what?" Carroll's voice on the tape prompted impatiently.

  "What if we were to put our man Friday onto someone with Mafia connections?" Francis said on the tape recording.

  The interrogator, whose name tag identified him as G. Sprowls, depressed the Stop button on the tape recorder. He had a conspiratorial half-smile installed on his otherwise impassive face-a half-smile which looked as if it had been recently taken from a deep freeze and not yet defrosted.

  "Now, why," G. Sprowls inquired gently, trying as usual to imply that there was some sort of complicity between the questioner and the person he was questioning, "was Francis suggesting that your man Friday contact the Mafia?"

  "In the course of any given day," Carroll replied loftily, "we throw around dozens of ideas. That's what we are paid to do, in case you don't know it. We think up angles, avenues of approach-"

  "I am fully aware of what you are paid to do," G. Sprowls said. The half-smile glistened on his lips like dew on a petal. "But you haven't answered my question, have you? Why the Mafia?"

  "I don't remember," Carroll maintained, a muscle twitching quietly in his cheek. He longed to plunge his hand into a box of candy, but decided the interrogator would interpret it as a sign of weakness if he asked for one. "We'd have to go over any jottings Francis or I made to see what we were onto at that moment."

  "Francis shreds the notes at the end of each workday," the interrogator reminded Carroll. He smiled pleasantly. "You've already told me that."

  He depressed the Fast Forward button until the tape reached number one-forty-eight, then put it on Play again. "What we will need"-it was Francis' voice again-"is someone who can carry out an assignment without knowing it came from us."

  G. Sprowls pushed the Stop button. "Exactly what assignment were you talking about?"

  The interrogation of the Sisters was in its fourth day. It began at the end of the first week of November on the express order of a very nervous Director of the Central Intelligence Agency when Thursday's indiscretions on the Man Friday network filtered up to the Athenaeum. G.

  Sprowls, the Company's utility infielder who specialized in tying up loose ends, was summoned back from Mexico where he was finishing the interrogation of a junior code clerk who seemed to have an endless string of mistresses. (G. Sprowls's tentative conclusion was that the code clerk was nothing more sinister than an accomplished lover.) The first thing G. Sprowls did on arriving in Washington was to isolate the Sisters; they were installed in separate but equal apartments in a safe house in Wilmington, Delaware, and brought out, one at a time, into the Grill Room, as G. Sprowls liked to call it, for their daily four-hour sessions.

  Another, less experienced interrogator might have started the ball rolling by hooking each of the Sisters up to a lie-detector machine and then confronting them with the discrepancies between their version of events, contained in the Sisters' formal Op Proposal updater, and Thursday's version, passed on to the Deputy Director's man Friday over a pool table. But G. Sprowls knew the discrepancies were too vague, too undefined, to get a handle on. Did Thursday really skim off some cream when the Potter came across in Vienna, for instance, or did Thursday, in his eagerness to appear important, merely convince himself that he had?

  Did the Sisters set out to lure the Potter to the West in order to get access to someone who could carry out an assignment without knowing it came from them? If so, what assignment had they invented for him to carry out? Did they think they had authorization? Did they actually have the authorization they thought they had? If they had received orders, had they interpreted them correctly?

  All of this, to G. Sprowls's jaundiced eye, represented the proverbial can of worms. What he needed to do was question the Sisters at great length in order to be able to compose the right questions. That was the process he had used to break the Soviet sleeper in the CIA ranks whom the Sisters themselves had unmasked not long before. The disadvantage o
f working this way was that it was slow. The advantage was that it was sure.

  "What we need-" Carroll was saying on the tape.

  "What we need," Francis' voice repeated eagerly on the tape.

  "What we need-" Carroll, from the tape recorder, whined.

  The tape continued to run through the playing head, but there was no sound for roughly three minutes. Then Carroll's voice, distant, hollow, could be heard saying, "He might just do it."

  G. Sprowls stopped the tape recorder. "Who might do what?" he inquired.

  Carroll shook his head. He didn't remember.

  "What were you doing during the long silence?" G. Sprowls asked.

  "Thinking."

  "Not writing?"

  "We may have been jotting notes to ourselves," Carroll conceded.

  "If there were notes," G. Sprowls remarked, flashing his half-smile as if it were a storm warning, "Francis would have shredded them at the end of the workday?"

  Carroll's cheek muscle twitched once. "That's correct," he said.

  "What was it," G. Sprowls wondered out loud, "that was so important you couldn't say it-you had to write it?"

  When his turn came, Francis took a slightly different tack. "Of course I understand you are going through the motions," he confided to G. Sprowls at one point. An angelic smile took up a defensive position on his face to deal with the conspiratorial half-smile confronting him. "The last thing in the world you really want is for me to tell you what we are up to."

  To G. Sprowls, it seemed almost as if Francis were daring him, inviting him even, to discover it. "So you are up to something?" he inquired.

  Francis spread his hands innocently. "Josef Stalin started out his professional life as a seminarian," he retorted, "which explains why he was obsessed with confessions. What is your excuse?"