The Sisters Page 20

  The Sleeper immediately dismissed the possibility that they were two local hoodlums who had spotted a stranger in town and were planning to roll him. If they had followed him for any length of time, they would be aware that he had arrived by Greyhound bus and was staying in a not very luxurious hotel near the station- hardly the mark of someone who might be carrying a good deal of cash on him. (Ironically, the Sleeper did have more than six thousand dollars in small bills, most of which he had stuffed into the top half of the viola-da-gamba case in which the rifle, broken down into component parts, fitted.) Which narrowed it down to people who were in the same business he was in.

  But on which side was the irritating question. Forcing himself to act as if nothing unusual had happened, the Sleeper caught his bus early the next morning and, following his itinerary to the letter, headed farther west. The two men-he had nicknamed the one with the pursed lips Whistler, and the effeminate one Whistler's Mother-weren't in the bus with him, nor did he spot them trailing after him in automobiles, nor were they around when he touched down that night in a motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Walking through the city the next morning, the Sleeper used every reflecting surface he could find, but the two men were nowhere to be seen. He was beginning to think he might have imagined the whole thing when, thirty-six hours after he had left the small town in Ohio, he saw them again. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he spotted Whistler gazing up at a street sign at an intersection. Halt an hour later he saw Whistler's Mother squeezed into a phone booth in a drugstore, dialling away as if he were reporting a tire.

  The Sleeper thought he could perceive a time pattern in the movements of Whistler and Whistlers Mother. Like him, they would have taken roughly twelve hours to get from the small town in Ohio to Indianapolis. Yet he hadn't spotted them for thirty-six hours. Which meant that they had not bothered to tail him for twenty-four hours. And that little detail told the Sleeper two things: they were most likely professional sweepers who lingered for a day after he moved on to ensure that nobody else was following him; and they obviously had a duplicate of his itinerary.

  The theory was easy enough to verify. The next day the Sleeper boarded a bus that would take him across Illinois to St. Louis. Two blocks from the Greyhound terminal he let out a cry of panic and went racing up the aisle to the driver with a story about having forgotten the valise that had all his music in it. The driver shrugged a pair of fat shoulders, swung the bus over to the curb, opened the doors with a rush of air and let the Sleeper off. "You can catch another bus around noon," the driver shouted down, "but you'll have to buy another ticket cause this one's been punched, and there ain't no way in the world I can unpunch it.

  Doubling back on his tracks, the Sleeper returned to the motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis. He made his way down a long, narrow alley past several overflowing garbage cans to the kitchen door. The only person in the kitchen was a black dishwasher wearing pink rubber gloves that reached to his elbows. He was finishing up the breakfast dishes.

  Depositing his viola-da-gamba case and his worn leather valise under a table, the Sleeper walked over to the swinging doors and looked through the small porthole into the dining room. An elderly waiter was setting the tables for lunch. Beyond the dining room was the bar. Two men sat on stools in front of it, sipping drinks, glancing occasionally at the check-in desk, which they could see in the mirror behind the bar. . The two men were Whistler and Whistler s Mother.

  Which meant that they were sweepers: literally ours, sent by the people who had drawn up his itinerary, his masters in Moscow.

  But why did his masters in Moscow feel he needed sweepers trailing after him? What did they know that he didn't know? Had there been a leak that could compromise his mission, not to mention his life? Were they afraid that he would lose his nerve? Had they sent the sweepers after him to make sure he went through with it? He was tempted to stop them on the street, invite them-in Russian; would they be embarrassed!- to a bar for a glass of vodka, the way he did in Moscow when he spotted the man whom the Potter had put on his tail.

  But this wasn't Moscow, and he wasn't a neophyte sleeper learning the fundamentals of tradecraft. This was America. And he was on a mission that would end, if he was successful, in someone else's death; in his own death if he was not.

  Mulling over the various possibilities, the Sleeper retraced his steps and caught the noon bus to St. Louis. There was a half-hour holdover at Terre Haute. When be got back to the bus, he found a woman sitting in his seat. She was wearing blue jeans and white ankle-length socks and high heels. She was chewing gum and reading an old issue of Vogue and shaking her head in despair, activating long pendulum earrings that the Sleeper expected to chime the hour. "Hey, you don't mind none if I take the window?" she asked, looking up with a faint smile. "Buses give me claustro-whatever."

  Depositing his viola-da-gamba case in the rack overhead, the Sleeper slid wordlessly into the aisle seat next to her. "That's very gentlemanly of you," the woman said. "There are not many gentlemen around these days. Say, what did you say your name was?'

  "I didn't say what my name was," the Sleeper answered. "But I will be glad to tell you." He gave her the name he was travelling under.

  "My name is Orr," she said, "with two R's. Geraldine Orr. My friends call me Jerry."

  "I am extremely happy to make your acquaintance," the Sleeper told her, his appetite whetted by the curve of her breasts inside her black turtleneck sweater.

  "Likewise, I'm sure," said Jerry Orr.

  It came out in conversation that she had been offered a job checking hats and selling cigarettes in a nightclub in St. Louis. She had worked there several years before, but had left to live with a garage mechanic in Terre Haute. That had ended badly when he went off with his childhood sweetheart, a Wave stationed in Norfolk. "Couples are basically collisions," Jerry Orr said with a sigh, and the Sleeper agreed heartily. Couples, in his experience, were unnatural combinations, something people created for economic or logistical reasons. But when you came right down to it, after the newness wore off, living as a couple was like condemning yourself to permanent house arrest; you limited your possibilities, and hence your potential. Even Millie's

  "triple," which at least had the saving grace of offering variety, had begun to feel like a prison of sorts. The Sleeper thought of Kaat. There had been something unusual about her, he had to admit it. If you had to be trapped in a couple, it was better to be trapped with someone like Kaat in the end.

  "I don't ever want to get involved again," Jerry Orr was saying,

  "because it takes too much out of me. Emotionally, I mean. I like people who are just passing through, if you see what I mean.

  The Greyhound picked up speed as it crossed the high plateau on which Terre Haute was planted. Long fields stretched off like religious wafers to the horizon. It occurred to the Sleeper that if the world were really flat, the horizon he could see from the window of the bus might be the bitter end of it. Soon after, the Wabash was behind them and the bus was heading down Route 70 into Illinois. The Sleeper thought about the man he was travelling across the country to kill. He had seen a photograph of him in a copy of Newsweek discarded on a bench at the bus terminal.

  He seemed like a decent enough man, fiddling with the button of his suit jacket, eyeing the camera with sardonic detachment. The Sleeper shrugged away the image of the man he would see, if all went according to plan, through the telescopic sight on his rifle. He felt devoid of energy; of hope. He remembered another snatch of Walter Whitman. "The past and present wilt ... I have drained them." Which left the future. To get his mind of it, he reached across and brushed the back of Jerry Orr's wrist with his fingertips. "I'll be in St. Louis for two clays and two nights," he told her. And he added pointedly, "I'm just passing through, if you see what I mean," The faint smile on Jerry Orr's face brightened.

  She saw what he meant.

  Kaat had gone into mourning for her dead cat. "Why would they want to kill her?' she cr
ied, biting furiously on a fingernail. The Potter's answer-that they hadn't wanted to kill her cat; they had wanted to kill them -didn't diminish her sense of loss. The fact that the cat was dead and buried (in a trench by the side of a back road, covered with gravel and dead leaves) and they were alive seemed to impress her more than anything the Potter could offer her in the way of comfort. Then, almost six hours to the minute after the bullet pierced the back of the car and lodged by pure chance in the cat's body, she shook herself the way a dog does when it comes in out of the rain. "Here's the thing," she said in a serious voice, and it was evident to the Potter that she had stopped thinking about the cat and started thinking about herself. "I want out.

  I'm not made for this kind of adventure. I have butterflies in my stomach just thinking about what happened."

  She saw the confusion on the Potter's face as he tried to figure out how someone could have butterflies in the stomach. "It means I'm nervous,"

  she explained in exasperation. "It means I have gas. It means I fart all the time."

  The Potter had seen people crack before, and with less cause; had been surprised that she had not cracked sooner. "A night's rest, perhaps." he muttered, as if sleep could solve her problem, could dissipate the gas, could restore her sense of her own dignity, could give her the courage to go on.

  "Park me somewhere," she pleaded, and her voice had the unmistakable vibrations of tear in it. "Park me anywhere.

  "And Piotr Borisovich?"

  She avoided his eye and concentrated on a fingernail.

  "Look," he said finally-the Chevrolet's headlights had just picked up a sign indicating they were crossing the border into Indiana-"if I can catch up with Piotr and talk to him, maybe I can save his life."

  "Why is someone trying to kill him?" Kaat asked in a voice so devoid of inquisitiveness it was obvious she would have been just as happy if he didn't answer.

  "Piotr Borisovich is an espionage agent," the Potter said in a whisper, as if he were afraid of being overheard. "He has been sent on a mission, that much is obvious. This is what I think: whoever sent him on this mission wants Piotr to be caught, so that the blame for the mission will fall on the Russians."

  "What am I doing here?' Kaat mumbled, staring out of her side of the car.

  "It was your idea to come," the Potter blurted out. "I need you. Believe me, if you please. If you please?"

  The Potter was squinting into the headlights of an oncoming car. When it passed, he glanced quickly at her. "It is important for me," he said suddenly. "I must save him." And he repeated, "It you please? He is the son I never had."

  Kaat looked straight into his eyes as it she could see through them to some dark center, some remote corner where he would not give any more of himself away.

  The moment passed. He turned back to the highway. "Stay, please, at least until he makes one more phone call to your friend in Brooklyn, New York," he said in a flat voice.

  "Why not?" she replied, moved by his physical ugliness; by his need for her; above all by the difficulty he had expressing it.

  After she agreed, the Potter broached the subject of the car. "You want me to steal an automobile that belongs to someone else?" Kaat exploded when lie first raised the possibility.

  "We cannot keep driving around in this one," the Potter insisted, and he explained some of the facts of life to Kaat. There were two men behind them who would presumably mount a spare tire in place of the flat tire with the bullet hole in it, and start out after them. If they managed to catch up with them they would kill the Potter, and then feel obliged to deal with any witnesses in a similar way.

  Kaat asked how the two men in the Dodge could possibly find them, given the twists and turns the Potter had taken in the hour after the incident at the crossroad. "We don't have any idea where we are going," she pointed out with irreproachable logic, "so how can they know where we're going?"

  It was a reasonable question, to which the Potter offered a reasonable explanation. They had run into the two men in the Dodge right after they had almost caught up with the Sleeper; they had most likely been spotted making inquiries at the inn with the curious name of Seventh Heaven.

  Which meant that whoever had awakened the Sleeper and dispatched him on his mission had been covering his tracks with what the professionals called sweepers. And that, in turn, meant that every time they managed to get close to the Sleeper, they risked a new run-in with the men in the Dodge. Driving around in the Chevrolet would only make matters easier for the sweepers.

  Kaat still wasn't convinced about the need for a new car until the Potter told her how; she would steal it-at which point she made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and waxed enthusiastic about the idea and began peering eagerly through the front window looking for a suitable location. On the outskirts of a small town in southern Indiana they found what they were looking for. a low, modern circular structure with pulsating neon arrows pointing the way from the main road, and raucous rock music filling the night around it.

  The parking lot in back of the nightclub already held more than three dozen cars. The Potter drew up on the far edge of the lot, near a line of trees, and cut the motor. He rummaged around in the trunk for the tool kit that came with the tire iron, found a screwdriver in it and began to remove the Chevrolet's license plates. Once he had them off he told Kaat he was ready if she was. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, unbuttoned, at the Potter's suggestion-he had a mania for details like this-another button of her shirt, and went around to plant herself on the curb near the front door of the nightclub.

  Within minutes a red two-door Ford pulled up and two girls spilled from its doors. The Potter, watching from the corner of the nightclub, waved Kaat off; he wanted a newer, heavier car, also one that was more subdued and less likely to attract attention. The boy who was driving the Ford honked his horn at the girls as they disappeared through the door of the nightclub, and gunning his engine, raced off to park in the lot.

  The Potter let lour more cars go by before he found one that appealed to him. Eventually a blue four-door Chrysler eased to a stop in front of the entrance. A girl and a boy emerged from the back seat, a second girl from the front seat. They were well dressed, slightly older than the other clients of the nightclub; they gave the impression of college kids who had borrowed a car from one of their parents for a night of slumming.

  The Potter pointed at the car and nodded vigorously. Kaat mustered a toothy smile and trotted around to the driver's side. "There's a new service starting tonight," she informed the driver. "We park your car for you, and bring it around when you're ready to leave." And she added,

  "There's no charge, but if you'd like to give me something for my trouble, I won't say-no."

  The boy behind the wheel hesitated, then caught sight of his girl observing him. Not wanting to appear unsophisticated, he climbed out of the car, fished a dollar bill from his shirt pocket, handed it to Kaat with a nod and went off to join his friends. Kaat slid in behind the wheel and drove the Chrysler over to where the Chevrolet was parked. The Potter appeared a moment later and began attaching the license plates from the Chevrolet.

  "I don't believe it!" Kaat exclaimed as they sped away from the nightclub in the Chrysler. "I actually did it. Me! I stole a car!" She pressed her hands to her ears in exhilaration. "In my next incarnation,"

  she abruptly announced, her eyes pressed shut as if she were visualizing it, "I want to do that kind of thing more often. I want to not suppress farts and not set the hair of dead people and not obey the law all the goddamned time." She slid down in the seat so that her head rested on the back of it, kicked off her shoes and propped her feet up on the dashboard. "Do people steal cars in Russia?" she asked after a while.

  "There aren't that many cars in Russia to steal," the Potter replied with a laugh. "There is very little crime in the ordinary sense of the word-muggings, bank robberies, burglaries. On the other hand, everyone steals from the state whenever they can. People work less and accept thei
r full salary. They take bribes for doing what they are supposed to do anyway. You might say that we have no crime, but more than our share of corruption."

  The way he said it made her turn her head toward him. "Why do you serve the state if there is so much corruption?" she asked softly.

  The Potter waved a hand in irritation; she didn't understand at all. He was a Chekist from the old school; he had made his commitment to Leninism early in life, and stuck to it even when the excesses of the cult of the personality became apparent. If there had been a viable alternative, he had never been aware of it. Western democracies were decadent; they weighed competing philosophies rather than deciding where the rights of the matter lay. Stalinism, moreover, was not the inevitable result of Leninism, but an aberration. Mankind's best-for the Potter, its only-hope rested in the idealistic seeds buried within Leninism. But how could he explain all this to her? He decided to try; it suddenly seemed important to tell her who he was.

  "The roots of the Russian state are idealistic," he said. "Because things have taken a bad turn is no reason for someone to abandon the original dream. All dreams turn sour at some point. Only the faint of heart, or those whose original commitment was self-serving, lose faith.

  That is something you, being American, should understand better than most people. Your country started out with idealistic roots too, but your 'All men are created equal' didn't include Negroes. It took a civil war to bring them into the mainstream of the country's idealism. You still haven't solved the problem completely. But the important thing is that you are evolving. My country will evolve too. It will move closer to a situation in which its actions match the idealism of its founders."

  "You believe that? You believe Russia will rediscover its idealistic roots?"

  The Potter said quietly, "I am obliged to believe it."

  "What about Peter?" she asked after a moment's reflection. She appeared to wince at the memory of a pain when she pronounced his name. "Does he believe in Russia? Does he think what he is doing will help it evolve?