The Sisters Read online

  "Assuming you are up to something," G. Sprowls persisted, ignoring the historical diversion, "do you have authorization?"

  "As a general rule," Francis noted, "Carroll and I are pointed in the right direction by our betters."

  "Then perhaps you can explain why the Director himself authorized this interrogation?"

  "That is clearly a matter you will have to pursue with the Director."

  G. Sprowls selected another tape from his collection and played it for Francis. His voice could be heard saying, "Shows he had bad taste.

  Personally I never liked Whitman. All those unbuttoned shirts! All that hair on his chest! He was a poser. It follows that his poetry is a pose." There was a moment of silence, after which Francis asked on the tape, "Do we know exactly how the Potter knew that?" Then there was a very long stretch of tape without anything. Finally Francis' voice was heard again. "Having a great time. Wish you were here," he snickered.

  Carroll's voice, faint, said, "We have gotten our hands on a perfect criminal." To which Francis, a bit awed judging from his tone, replied,

  "I suppose we have."

  G. Sprowls glanced at his wristwatch. They had been at it for more than three hours. Francis showed not the faintest sign of fraying at the edges. "Why," G. Sprowls tried, "were you discussing Whitman?"

  In all his life Francis had never smiled more innocently. "Don't tell me, let me guess. You are one of those Whitman hysterics who can't put up with the slightest criticism of the master."

  If G. Sprowls came equipped with one thing for the business of interrogation, it was a thick skin. "What could Carroll have meant," he went on as if Francis' response had not registered, "when he said that you had gotten your hands on a perfect criminal?"

  "I would have to refresh my memory from my notes to answer you," Francis said.

  "And the notes-"

  "-were shredded," Francis finished the thought for him, "at the close of every workday."

  "By you."

  "By me."

  "I see."

  "Do you?"

  The Sleeper was tired: of spending his evenings alone in his room; of taking his breakfast while it was still dark outside; of trudging off into the fields every morning with the rifle slung over his shoulder and two sandwiches (the Hunter's Special, prepared by the inn's chef) in the pocket of his brand-new Sears, Roebuck bush jacket; of working the bolt until his fingers blistered; of waiting; most of all, of waiting. But he had a fixed schedule, and a fixed itinerary, and there was no question of deviating from it. An order, the Potter had drummed into his head at the sleeper school, is to an agent as commandments one through ten are to an Orthodox priest. It was a matter of the Sleeper's being patient one more day. Tomorrow he would be off and running again, and anything, including a cramped, smoke-filled Greyhound bus, would be better than being cooped up in the phoney luxury of Seventh Heaven, an inn just outside Lancaster with its birds wheeling freely through the lobby and the corridors, the birdshit stains on the furniture, the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch meal with its seven sweet and seven sour courses at every dinner.

  Again and again, the Sleeper's thoughts drifted, almost against his will, to the mission. If his father's well-being, and in a sense the Potter's too, didn't depend on his performing well, he doubted if he would go through with it. One prince more or less in the world wouldn't change anything as far as he could see. But he had been backed into a corner; the one luxury he no longer had was choice. He imagined the moment when he would reach his ultimate destination, and wondered what his chances were of succeeding; he guessed they were quite good, or he wouldn't have been sent out in the first place. He wondered too what would happen to him after the mission. He wouldn't be returning to his comfortable life in Brooklyn Heights, of that he was certain. If he managed to survive, his masters would surely repatriate him to some corner of the Soviet Union remarkable for its remoteness.

  If he was suddenly lonely, if he ached above all for just one more night in the same bed as Kaat, he could take comfort from the fact that he had accomplished what he came for. On the first day, he had zeroed in the rifle, bracing it on the elbow of a dead maple tree, aiming through the four-power telescopic sight and firing at a homemade bull's-eye. The rifle had been firing low and to the left. Using a small screwdriver, the Sleeper gradually adjusted the sight. After that he went to work recapturing the talent he had had when he served as a sniper during the Great Patriotic War.

  It came back fairly quickly, In the beginning, he had trouble concentrating and felt unsure of himself. He missed more things than he hit. By the third day, however, he was beginning to get his concentration- and his confidence-back. He started once again to think of the rifle as an extension of his arm, and aiming became just a matter of pointing. He had been told in his instructions that he would be firing at a slowly moving target, but the possibility existed that it might be moving rapidly. So the Sleeper fired mainly at moving targets-rabbits, birds, ducks skimming the surface of ponds. He had always had a sixth sense for leading a target; an almost Zen feeling that all he had to do was point at the place where the target would be when the bullet got there. By the afternoon of the fifth day, and all during the sixth, he was snapping off shots and hitting practically everything he aimed at.

  "So how'd it go today?" the wife of the inn owner asked when the Sleeper showed up at the bar for the Seventh Heaven Happy Hour. She was a handsome woman in her late twenties, married to a grouchy man a good deal older than she was. Her name was Marjorie, but the waiters and several of the inn's regular customers called her Sergeant Major, as if it were a rank; one of the younger, more insolent waiters even saluted her when he delivered a check to the cash register. "What did you bag?"

  she wanted to know.

  "Everything I aimed at," the Sleeper replied testily. A bird flew in from the lobby and plunked down on the bar nearby.

  "You're that good?" Sergeant Major asked, smiling suggestively.

  The Sleeper stared at her curiously. "Why don't you put me to the test?"

  "Maybe I'll do just that," she shot back, and she dispatched a damp palm down her thigh to smooth out an imagined wrinkle in her tight skirt.

  It was after eleven when she scratched her long fingernails on his door.

  He let her in and locked it after her. She had brought a bottle of cognac and two glasses, but the Sleeper made it clear he didn't go in for preliminaries. He asked her what she was wearing under her dress.

  Instead of answering, she bent and caught the hem and peeled it over her head. Underneath, she was naked, round, in places as soft as a sponge.

  She had hair under her arms and legs, which reminded the Sleeper of the women he had made love to in Russia; he liked hair on the female body.

  Somehow it seemed to make them less abstract, more real. Sergeant Major stretched out on the bed and parted her legs and raised one knee and moistened her thumb and forefinger and pinched her nipples to make them erect. "Now," she announced with a nervous laugh, "we'll see how good a shot you really are."

  Some time passed. Neither of them had any idea of how much. Eventually Sergeant Major rolled off the Sleeper's body and laced her fingers through her hair. The Sleeper had the impression she was surfacing, like a deep sea diver. "I've read about that," she whispered hoarsely, "but I've never actually tried it-I wasn't sure I'd enjoy it."

  "Did you? Enjoy it?"

  Sergeant Major smiled a faraway smile; she was coming up, but she had not yet reached the surface. "Do you know any other tricks?" she asked.

  The Sleeper nodded lazily. He reached for the phone. Sergeant Major was intrigued. "Who are you calling at this ungodly hour?"

  The night clerk who doubled as a switchboard operator came on. "I want a number in Brooklyn," the Sleeper told him. "After you get it for me, I want to hear the click you make when you get off the line."

  The number rang a long time before anyone picked up the phone on the other end. "Yeah?" Millie finally said, suppressing a yawn
. "Who the hell is it?"

  "It's me," the Sleeper said.

  Millie came awake instantly. "You know what time it is, for Christ's sake?"

  "What are you wearing?" the Sleeper demanded.

  Millie's tone changed. "A T-shirt."

  "Take it off."

  After a moment she said, "Okay, it's off."

  "Take the phone over to the couch and curl up," the Sleeper instructed her. "You're going to hear a bedtime story."

  Millie purred like a cat. "It's one of those phone calls," she said. "I can't wait!"

  At the foot of a bed, the cat angled a paw over its head to keep the light out. Kaat kicked off her shoes and stretched out on one of the twin beds. They had just come back, the three of them, from a diner across the street from the motel. The desk clerk had given them a mimeographed street map of Scranton. Kaat removed the antique gold ring, which she wore around her neck attached to a length of silk string, and dangled it over the map.

  "If you please," the Potter asked, "what are you doing?"

  "I'm trying to find out where he is in Scranton," she told him, her eyes concentrating on the ring.

  "And the ring is going to tell you?"

  "If it does tell me," she retorted, "you'll be an autologophagist."

  "Which is?"

  Kaat glanced up from her pendulum. "An autologophagist is someone who eats his words," she said.

  The Potter settled onto the edge oi the other bed. "What made you become interested in words beginning with A?" he wanted to know.

  Kaat shrugged defensively. "Everybody who collects things specializes,"

  she explained. "Stamp collectors collect art stamps or French stamps or whatever. Antique dealers collect porcelain. Kids collect match-books. I collect A words. I suppose you could say I'm basically an A person. It's no accident that Kaat has two lovely A's smack in the middle of it." She nibbled thoughtfully on a fingernail.

  "Try phoning again," the Potter advised her. He busied himself loading the Beretta with the bullets she had bought for him that afternoon.

  Normally the clip held eight bullets, but the Potter squeezed ten in.

  Giving yourself an extra margin was what separated the professionals from the amateurs. He wondered how professional he really was in the end. The whole idea of going out on a limb with this odd girl who nourished herself mostly on her own fingernails and passed pendulums over maps seemed more ridiculous than ever. To begin with, the chances were that the Sleeper would never call Millie in Brooklyn Heights. Even if he did, there was only a remote possibility that he would tell her where he was. The Americans, he remembered from his days as rezident, had an expression that perfectly described what he was on: they called it a wild-goose chase.

  The girl, moreover, was beginning to get on his nerves. She had carried on a running monologue during the ride down to Scranton, almost as if she dreaded silence, as if only a string of words could keep her phantoms at bay. (Silence, the Sleeper once laughingly told the Potter, was a gift two people could offer each other only after they were intimate.) The Potter had discovered a great deal about Kaat during those hours in the car. She shivered before it got cold, she admitted; according to her, the chills originated in her imagination. She liked making love and being made love to, she said; she relished the sensation of not knowing where her body ended and a lover's began. When the street (as she called real life) got too rough for her, she sought refuge in her mind's eye, which she sharpened, she said, as if it were a pencil.

  "Call her up again, if you please," the Potter repeated now.

  Kaat put aside the map and pendulum, picked up the phone and gave the number to the receptionist. A moment later she could hear the telephone in Brooklyn Heights ringing. Instead of Millie's recorded voice coming on as before, Millie herself snatched up the receiver. "Kaat, is that you?" she cried.

  "Where have you been?" Kaat demanded.

  "She is in?" the Potter asked. He came around to sit next to Kaat on the bed.

  "Thank God it's you," Millie cried. "Peter phoned."

  "He's called," Kaat whispered triumphantly to the Potter.

  "Who are you talking to?" Millie asked.

  "Nobody. What did he say?"

  "Wait a sec. I'll play the tape for you."

  "She's playing the tape for me," Kaat whispered. She and the Potter bent their heads so they could both listen to the voice coming from the earpiece.

  The Sleeper's voice came over the line. "You're going to hear a bedtime story," he said.

  "It's one of those phone calls," Millie's voice replied. "I can't wait!"

  A woman's voice could be heard. She was breathing hard. Kaat and the Potter exchanged looks. "I don't have the vaguest idea what to say," the woman pleaded.

  Fainter, the Sleeper's voice: "Tell her what we're doing. Describe it."

  The woman laughed uneasily. "You want me to tell her everything?"

  "Absolutely everything," Millie insisted on the tape.

  "Well," the woman began, talking between gasps, "I'm lying on my stomach

  ... on my stomach, see, with my ass more or less, eh, elevated"-the woman giggled hysterically here-"holy shit. 'Elevated' is the right word, and he's, eh, he's-" She stopped abruptly, almost as if she were too preoccupied to talk.

  "He's what?" Millie prompted on the tape.

  The real Millie came back on the line. "Are you catching all this, Kaat?

  Are you turned on?"

  "I'm catching it," Kaat said. "I'm suffering from apodysophilla-that's a feverish desire to undress," she explained.

  "He's"-it was the woman's voice on the tape again-"oh, Jesus." She expelled a lungful of air, and what began as a husky sigh wound up as a throaty scream.

  The Potter turned his head away so that Kaat couldn't see his expression.

  "He's inside me now," the woman continued, her voice weaker than before.

  "He's reaching under my stomach with a hand and rubbing my clit." She gasped as if she were in pain.

  "Keep talking," the Sleeper's voice ordered in the background.

  "He's . . . behind me ... not moving . . .perfectly still," the woman said more calmly now. "It's me that's . . . doing ... the moving. When I

  ... when I back up I get ... his dick going . . . deep. When I move forward ... I get his finger." She giggled again. "I can pick my poison!"

  On the tape, Millie could be heard moaning. The real Millie came back on the line. "That's me moaning," she laughed.

  "As if I couldn't tell," Kaat retorted. She sounded annoyed. "Did you ask him where he was, for Christ's sake, or did you just beat off?

  "I asked him, I asked him," Millie assured Kaat.

  "Say, where are you two?" Millie said on the tape.

  "She wants to know where we are," the woman told the Sleeper.

  "Don't tell her," the Sleeper could be heard saying.

  "We're in a bed," the woman told Millie between gasps.

  "Give me a little hint," Millie begged on the tape.

  The woman giggled again. "We're in a ... hotel in Holland," she told Millie. "We're in seventh heaven, with birds flying through the corridors-"

  There was a click on the tape. Millie came back on the line. "He hung up before she could say any more," she said.

  After Millie had hung up, Kaat and the Potter sat on the edge of the bed staring at the floor. Kaat chewed on a fingernail. Eventually the Potter said, "The phone call didn't tell us very much."

  At the foot of the bed the cat stretched, then coiled again. Kaat said,

  "We know he's somewhere in Pennsylvania. What did the woman say? A hotel in Holland. Seventh heaven, with birds-"

  "-flying through the corridors," the Potter remembered.

  Kaat snapped her fingers. "My ex might be able to help us," she announced brightly.

  "What is an ex?"

  "My ex. My first husband."

  "Did you marry again after you left him?" the Potter asked.

  Kaat shook her head no.


  "Then why do you call him your first husband?"

  Kaat shrugged. "Even when I married him I thought of him as my first husband," she said, suddenly melancholy, suddenly distant. "He had the look, the smell, of a first husband. He was much older than me," she said as if it explained everything, which made the Potter wonder if Svetochka had referred to him, behind his back, as her first husband.

  "He was a country singer," Kaat plunged on. "Still is, I imagine, though his voice was beginning to go the last time I heard him. He spent twenty-three years wandering around the back roads of America, with his beat-up guitar in the trunk of a beat-up station wagon. That's how I met him. It was in Oklahoma. I was sixteen going on twenty-five, if you know what I mean. I heard him sing in a bar in Wetumka, Oklahoma. My ex, whose name is W. A. Henry Oaks, though everyone called him W.A., my ex claimed that every town was famous for a different position."

  "Different position?"

  "Different sexual position. Wetumka, according to W.A., was famous for the Wetumka. The next day we drove north to Weleetka, where W.A. was playing a bowling alley, and I discovered the Weleetka. After that there was the Okmulgee, which only thin people can do. Thank God we were thin!

  Later, when we wanted to use a certain position again, we referred to it as the Wetumka, or the Weleetka, or the Okmulgee." Kaat began chewing wistfully on a fingernail.

  "What was the Okmulgee?" the Potter asked, not sure whether he believed the story-or whether he wanted to know.

  "You're sure you want to know?"

  "I take back the question."

  She laughed and told him. "You're blushing," she said when she had finished.

  The Potter went back to his own bed. "If you think your first husband can help us, phone him up," he said moodily. He didn't know how he got into these conversations with her. He seemed to follow her wherever she led. He would have to concentrate on the problem at hand; use her if there were ways she could help him; discard her when it became clear that she could serve no purpose. All this talk of sexual positions just blurred the picture. He would have to make a greater effort to keep things in focus.

  Kaat eventually got her ex husband on the phone. "What time is it on the Coast?" she asked him. "Then I didn't wake you?" she asked him. "No, I'm not sorry I didn't wake you," she snapped, "Listen, W.A., don't start on me, all right?" She listened to the voice on the phone for a moment, shook her head and planted her eyeballs in the tops of their sockets.