The Sisters Read online

  For once, Francis enjoyed the Tuesday-night movie enormously. It was a musical comedy starring Judy Garland, for whom he had a lingering soft spot. She had a way of belting out songs that took his breath away; she conveyed the impression that she was ready to explode if she couldn't sing. When "The End" finally appeared on the screen, Francis was in love again, with the result that he almost forgot why he had come. Only when the people around him started to head for the exits did he remember to light up the cigarette. As usual, he used the last match in the book to do it, then casually dropped the empty match book under his seat and, still preoccupied with Judy Garland, headed up the aisle.

  From his seat in the third row of the balcony, G. Sprowls observed the people on the main floor. A short man with wavy hair moved toward the aisle past the seat Francis had been in. Then a young couple. Then an older man with a young woman, probably his daughter, judging from the care they took to avoid touching. Then two middle-aged women, one with bleached blond hair piled in a knot on the back of her head, the second with short straight hair and an open handbag hanging from a strap over her shoulder. As the second woman came abreast of the seat Francis had used, the handbag slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor, and several things in it spilled out. Laughing in embarrassment, the woman bent and stuffed the spilled items back into her handbag, and then hurried after her bleached-blond friend up the aisle.

  As she passed underneath the balcony, G. Sprowls stood up and took a good look at the woman with the open handbag over her shoulder. All that remained for him to do now was attack the photo albums that the Company kept in the Identities Section, piled up on shelves as if some doting great-grandfather were keeping track of his progeny. Somewhere in one of those books G. Sprowls would come across the photo of the woman he had seen at the Judy Garland film. And then he would know what else Francis, his features frozen in an expression of pained innocence, had been lying about as the styluses scratched away in the black box behind his back.

  To the Potter, it seemed as if America consisted of an endless string of small towns with curious names (Wish-bone, Adam's Apple, Point Blank) and main streets inevitably named Main Street. Between towns there were billboards in the middle of nowhere advertising things he had no interest in: radio stations, beers, tractors, mobile homes, even advertising space on the billboard in question. Sometimes he and Kaat would pass a single home, hundreds of miles from open water, with a boat up on chocks in the yard. Once they spotted a run-down bar that advertised "bad whiskey,” once a run-down church with a sign planted on the lawn that read, "Everybody ought to know Jesus." America, the Potter decided, was seeded with drive-in movies and trailer camps and baseball diamonds, and, most of all, discount stores; if you drove long enough and far enough, he commented to Kaat, you would get the impression that everything in the country was sold at a discount.

  Kaat spent a great deal of time explaining things to the Potter: a sign that said "Soft Shoulders," for instance; or a Negro teenager overheard in the diner calling another Negro boy "Mother"; or an advertisement in front of a bank that said, "Throckmorton Savings and Loan Talks Turkey."

  The Potter remembered that Thursday had used the same expression in Vienna. How do you talk when you talk turkey? the Potter asked Kaat, and when she told him he broke into a smile for the first time since he had shot one of the sweepers in the foot. You should smile more, Kaat commented. The Potter asked her why, and she said the first thing that came into her head: that it made him look less arachnoid-another one of her A words, which meant "cobwebby." Which made him smile again.

  They drove past sheep ranches and cattle ranches, and the Potter wondered out loud what it was that made one man raise sheep and another cattle; he guessed it was surely a preference that revealed a lot about someone's character.

  At one point the highway climbed along a ridge and they could see a valley stretching out below them with dozens of neat farmhouses and sparkling white silos and manmade ponds and fences that always seemed to be in good repair. Perhaps there was something to be said for letting the peasants own the land they worked, or at least (here the Potter quoted what Piotr Borisovich had once told him back in Russia) the crops they harvested. At the mention of Piotr Borisovich, Kaat grew melancholy and began chewing on a cuticle.

  The Potter realized he had said the wrong thing, and tried to distract her by asking her questions about herself. Where was she born? What had become of her parents? Did she have brothers? Sisters? What had she wanted to be when she grew up? And when she grew up, what had she wanted to avoid being? She answered, reluctantly at first, in abrupt phrases meant to discourage further questions. But the Potter would not be put off. What started out as therapy turned into thirst, as if knowing more about her would eventually give him access to her genitals.

  Kaat was not misled. She understood enough about men to realize that he was trying to seduce her the only way he knew. Still, she found the questions irresistible. Neither W.A. nor the Sleeper, nor the dozen or so men who had played walk-in roles in her life, had ever asked her very much about the life that they had wandered into; the Sleeper-unlike the Potter now-had never even asked her what her first name was: Veronica.

  They pulled into a motel on Route 35 outside Wichita, rented a room from a fat woman doing needlepoint in atrocious color combinations, and waited for the Sleeper to phone Millie again. There was no news that night, or the next day. The Potter and Kaat whiled away the time between phone calls to Millie walking in the woods behind the motel, or driving to a diner two miles down the road to get a bite to eat, or roaming around the streets of Wichita. During one meal, Kaat dangled her grandmother's ring over a road map and came to the conclusion that they should head south, but the Potter was not convinced; they would stay where they were, he decided, until they had something definite to go on.

  Kaat fell asleep, fully dressed, on her bed in late afternoon, and woke to find the shades drawn and the Potter sitting on the edge of her bed, the palm of one hand resting tentatively on her breast. His desire, his need to touch her, was etched into the lines of his face. For a moment neither of them uttered a word. Then Kaat brought her hand to rest on the back of his, and ran her fingertips over his knuckles.

  Taking the gesture as a sign of encouragement, the Potter buried his face in her crotch. Kaat stiffened and muttered, "Don't."

  The Potter took the hint. "I am sorry, if you please," he said, sitting upright abruptly.

  She regarded him with her deep-set eyes. "Here's the thing," she whispered. "I would if I could, but for it to work for me I need to feel like a co-conspirator." She tossed her shoulder in exasperation. "With you I don't have the sensation of sharing conspiracies. You have yours.

  I have mine. '

  The Potter closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "In the end everyone has his own conspiracies."

  "Maybe another time," Kaat suggested gently. "Maybe when all this is over...”

  The Potter elevated his chin and stared off" into space. "All this"-he had in mind much more than she thought-"will never be over."

  When Kaat phoned Millie after dinner, she came on the line in tears.

  "What's the matter?" Kaat demanded.

  Millie was too choked up to answer. Instead she fumbled with her tape recorder and held the telephone to the speaker so that Kaat could hear for herself.

  "Let me talk to Kaat," the Sleeper ordered on the tape. He seemed to be pressed for time.

  "Kaat's not here," Millie replied. "I'm here."

  "When is she coming back?" the Sleeper demanded.

  "Where are you?" Millie asked. "When are you coming back?"

  "That's just it," the Sleeper told Millie. "I'm not coming back. I called to say good-bye to Kaat."

  "And me?" Millie burst out angrily.

  "And you too, naturally. '

  "You bastard," Millie flared. "Where are you?"

  "Tell Kaat," the Sleeper said. There was a long silence on the tape.

  "Tell Kaat what?" M
illie asked.

  "I thought," the real Millie managed to say now between her tears, "that he was going to say he loved you."

  "It would be totally out of character for him," Kaat told Millie.

  "Tell Kaat that I met someone who wants to buy all the mobiles I can make," the Sleeper said on the tape. "I'm going to get rich," he added.

  "You're not a capitalist," Millie told him. "You’re an artist."

  "I'm going to make a killing," the Sleeper said in a voice that had a bitter edge to it. "I'm going-" Then: "Shit." Then the line went dead.

  "What does it mean in English?" the Potter asked Kaat when she had hung up on Millie. " 'I'm going to make a killing'?"

  "It means he's going to make a lot of money," Kaat explained.

  The Potter got up and began pacing the tiny room. "There is something I never told you about Piotr Borisovich," he said. "He is not an espionage agent in the ordinary sense of the expression. During the war he was a sniper, a crack rifle shot. Now he is a specialist in what we call wetwork-he is a professional assassin."

  Kaat's eyes glistened, and she looked quickly away before the Potter could spot the tears. If someone had asked her, she would have sworn that she could never love someone who was capable of killing. Yet she had loved the man whom the Potter called Piotr Borisovich. She had sensed the mystery in him all along; it occurred to her now that she might also have sensed that violence was at the heart of the mystery.

  "It doesn't surprise me," she remarked. "Deep down I always saw him as an acutiator-in medieval times that meant a sharpener of weapons." A terrible possibility struck her. "You don't think...”

  "He said he was going to make a killing," the Potter reminded her.

  "Oh," Kaat breathed. "Whom is he going to kill?"

  "If we knew the whom," the Potter said, "we might know the where."

  They checked out of the motel and drove into Wichita for lunch.

  Afterward they ordered coffee. Almost as if they were putting oft the inevitable, each ordered a second cup. "We've come a long way from that coffee shop in Brooklyn Heights," Kaat noted.

  The Potter took a wad of twenty-dollar bills from a pocket and pushed it across the table toward her. "For your fare home." When she started to protest, he said, "If you please."

  Kaat pocketed the money. "Where will you go?' she asked.

  The Potter shrugged. "There are not many countries left for me to defect to," he answered. He thought a moment and said, "I will go to Canada.

  They say the climate is very close to Russia's. I like it when it is very cold because it gives me an excuse to drink a great deal of vodka."

  They asked directions to the bus station, and the Potter drove her there. Kaat discovered she had an hour and a quarter until her bus left, so they settled down on a wooden bench to wait. A clock on the wall over their heads marked off the minutes with a loud clicking sound that resembled a door closing or a lock opening. After a while the Potter went over to a newsstand. The newspapers were arranged in two tiers, in-state and out-of-state. The Potter bought half a dozen out-of-state newspapers, carried them back to the bench and started going-through them. "What are you looking for?" Kaat asked.

  "The whom, the where," the Potter said without looking up.

  He was reading an inside page of his fourth newspaper when his eye fell on a boxed item in the lower-left-hand corner. Once again the skin on the back of the Potter's neck crawled; once again his body knew before he did. (He could hear the squirrellike taxi driver with the worker's cap pulled low over his eyes calling, "And what about you, comrade fur cap?" almost as if the start of the journey had taken place that morning.) He ripped out the boxed item and reread it.

  "What is it?" Kaat asked in alarm.

  "Look at this," he instructed her. He handed her the clipping. It reminded readers o! the impending visit to the city in which the newspaper was published of the Prince of the Realm, and announced the route he would take on his way from the airport to a luncheon at which he would speak.

  "I don't-" she started to say.

  "This is the whom," the Potter whispered fiercely, "and the where"

  It dawned on Kaat what he was talking about. "How could you know such a thing?"

  "I know," the Potter insisted.

  "You're guessing," Kaat said.

  "I am guessing, yes," the Potter conceded. "But it all fits. Someone went to an enormous amount of trouble to organize my defection; to get the identity of a sleeper; to activate him and send him on a mission.

  They are not going to order him to hold up a candy store. The target has to be worthy of all this trouble. And then there is the matter of why they wanted Piotr Borisovich to commit the crime for them. There are local people, criminals, who do this kind of thing. But they wanted a Russian so that the crime would be traced back to Moscow, which would make it, from their point of view, a perfect crime." When Kaat stared at him, still not convinced, he added lamely, "You told me we should go south."

  That made an impression on her. She brought a nail to her mouth and started biting on it nervously. "What if you're wrong?" she demanded.

  "What if this has nothing to do with him?"

  "If I am wrong," the Potter said, "you will have lost three days and visited another American city." He added, "Have faith, if you please."

  "All I come equipped with," Kaat said, "is a longing for faith." She got up and stalked off a few steps, stopped to think, then turned and came back to the Potter. "Let's say, for argument's sake, that you're right.

  How are you going to find Peter before he commits the crime?"

  The Potter had an answer for that one too. "You forget that I trained Piotr Borisovich. What he knows, he learned from me. To find him, all I have to do is study the route through the city and calculate the best place from which to commit the crime. If Piotr Borisovich is half as good as I think he is, he will select the same place."

  Kaat laughed under her breath. "All this is what we refer to in English as a long shot."

  "It may be a long shot," the Potter said grimly, "but it is also our only shot.

  If the Sleeper never saw the inside of another bus in his life, it would be too soon. The wrinkles in the countryside he had passed through the day before had been flattened out, like a shirt that had been ironed.

  The only thing to break the monotony was an occasional road sign indicating how far it was to the city. "This here ain't the real West,"

  a man wearing blue jeans and tooled cowboy boots shouted across the aisle to the Sleeper. He leaned into the aisle, but he didn't lower his voice. "Hell, the real West don't start for another hundred or so miles.

  There the damn cities are so far apart you forget they exist by the time you get to one of them. Say, this your first time down to God s country?"

  "First time," the Sleeper told him.

  "Business or pleasure?"

  "Both, I hope," the Sleeper said with a knowing smile.

  In the back of the bus, a Negro woman scolded her eight-year-old boy for running in the aisle. "Thomas James, you get yourself right back here, hear?" she called. "Thomas James, you set yourself back down. What you got, ants in your pants? I don't want to hear another meow out of you, Thomas James."

  "That there is the airo-port," the man across the aisle told the Sleeper in a booming voice, gesturing with his chin out the window. "Me, I'll take a bus over a plane any day of the week. Plain truth is that planes scare the pants off me. Afraid the damn things will come to a sudden stop-like against a mountain!' He howled at his own joke.

  The bus driver (Safe-Reliable-Courteous, according to the plaque over his head) steered the Greyhound into Lemmon Avenue. Up ahead, through the front window, the Sleeper could make out the downtown area. "How long you say you were planning to stay?" the cowboy asked.

  "Two days at the outside," the Sleeper told him.

  The cowboy snorted. "First time I came down here," he recounted, "I was going to stay two days also. Came on down from Minnes
ota to visit an old lady who said she was my aunt. Wound up staying seventeen years. Ain't that something? I just plain liked the climate, is what kept me. They got themselves six weeks of what they call winter down here, but I sure as hell don't call it winter."

  The Sleeper smiled pleasantly. Small wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes, "In two days," he reassured the cowboy, and himself, "I will have accomplished what I came to do, and I'll be on my way."

  "That's what they all say," the cowboy remarked with a wink.

  The Sleeper turned to stare out of the window, The Greyhound was passing a small park with a statue of Robert E. Lee in it. A Mustang with its top sawed off wheeled past the bus. A girl was driving, another sat next to her. Looking down at them from the bus, the Sleeper noticed that their skirts had edged up along their thighs. He remembered the way Kaat had of planting herself in a chair with her legs spread and her skirt hiked up above her knees and dipping between them in a way that outlined her thighs. The Sleeper had always appreciated the innocence, the openness of her posture. Why, he asked himself, do my thoughts keep drifting back to Kaat? Is it because, as the Potter had noted back in Moscow, sex turns me on to violence, and I am getting close to the time and the place where I need to turn on to violence? I was a fool to phone her last night, he berated himself. What would I have said to her if she had been there? That I longed for her in ways that I can't explain, even to myself? That if things go badly in the next two days, reporters will be breaking down her door to get from her insights into the man she had lived with; had shared, along with Millie, a bed with? That if I manage to make my killing, I can retire to the relative luxury of a dacha on the Black Sea, and that I might ask her, once the dust has settled, to come live with me? Knowing Kaat, she would laugh in my face. She would produce an appropriate A word to sum up what she thought of the idea.