Walking Back The Cat Read online

  To a distant observer, the Adobe Palace would have appeared deserted, a Spanish footprint in the dust of history. Only someone approaching quite close would have noticed signs of life. Where Spanish bells had once tolled in the church's steeple, a small motorized dish antenna, pivoting on gimbals, pointed permanently at a communication satellite orbiting three hundred miles overhead. Beneath the outer adobe walls a juniper coyote fence, entangled with a species of wild thorny roses and coils of razor wire, blocked the steep approaches to the fortress. Below the coyote fence, the floor of the canyon—once a sacred burial ground for the ancestors of the Apaches—was littered with the bleached bones of coyotes, jackrabbits, bobcats, snowshoe hares, mule deer and elks that had strayed into a killing field seeded with small plastic antipersonnel mines.

  Walking Back the Cat

  During his almost sixteen years in America Parsifal had been sent off on his pale horse eighteen times, eliminating people who, for one reason or another, had offended his Soviet masters. All of the killings had been made to look like accidents or natural deaths or random murders. Once, in a masterpiece of wetwork tradecraft, he made it appear as if the victim, an Indian, had been electrocuted by lightning while talking on the telephone during a thunderstorm. It occurred to Parsifal that writers, poets and painters might put on a good show, but deep down they were unsure of themselves; unsure of how good they really were. Plumbers, eye surgeons and professional killers, on the other hand, were the real artists. They were able to measure themselves against the results of their handiwork.

  Which was why plumbers, eye surgeons and professional killers suffered from an occupational disorder that Parsifal associated with an innocent arrogance peculiar to knights at a round table: a delicate sniffing of the air in the presence of a challenge, a faint smile of contempt for those who shrank from it. "I am in history's mainstream, albeit a century or two behind," Parsifal once confided to a center psychiatrist during a debriefing at a Soviet R & R dacha. It was the only time in memory that he had even come close to dissecting what he did. "Face reality: wetwork has been with us since Homo erectus staggered onto his hind legs and gripped a club in what became known as his hands. We are still at it, climbing onto our hind legs, killing each other by inches, torturing each other toward death."

  Downtown Santa Fe turned out to be as appropriate a place as any to entertain these thoughts, for Parsifal was stalking his nineteenth victim, a tall Indian with a shaven skull and a deformed ear. Le Juif had provided a description of the target, along with the day and hour the Indian would turn up in Santa Fe. An early evening breeze stirred odors from a freshly tarred stretch of pavement. The Indian, dressed in a flannel shirt, worn jeans and worn sneakers, strode down the street heading for the main entrance of the capitol.

  A yellow school bus swung in toward the curb. A hoard of teenagers spilled from its doors and crowded onto the walkway leading to the building. Parsifal edged into the group behind the tall Indian. In the crush of bodies Parsifal managed to jostle the Indian, who felt a slight pinprick in his thigh, something like the sting of an insect, as Parsifal's briefcase scraped against him.

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  The Indian glanced over his shoulder, annoyed. "Watch where vou re going," he growled, his dark eyes flashing.

  "Hey, sorry."

  The Indian nodded moodily and continued on toward the doors. Parsifal let the students push past him. Just inside the capitol, the teenagers piled up, gaping at something on the ground. Several adults were bending over someone who had slumped to the floor.

  "The only good Injun is a dead Injun," Parsifal muttered to himself. Tucking the briefcase under his arm so as not to scratch anyone else, he set off at a brisk pace down the street.

  He had prepared the briefcase the night before, prying away a brass corner at one of the exterior edges, sharpening it with a file, coating the jagged edge with a film of ricin, a highly toxic poison made from castor-oil seed that works its way through the bloodstream to the heart and brings on a deadly coma. By the time an autopsy could be performed, the ricin would have decomposed, and there would be no trace of it left in the blood. As for the tiny insect bite on the body's thigh, if it was noticed at all it would take a very talented coroner to link it to the collapse and death of the victim.

  Eight minutes later Parsifal was punching a Houston number into a public telephone. When someone finally answered, he said, "Is this ?" and

  gave Le Juif the number of the booth.

  Le Juif snickered under his breath; over the phone line it sounded as if a mole was gnawing on the coaxial cable. "You have dialed the wrong number," he announced, and hung up.

  Robert Littell

  tleman owned an impeccable brace of Maubeuge pistols, circa 1814. The blued barrels bore the inscription in gold, Gardes du Corps du Roi. The locks were inscribed Maubeuge Manuf. The trigger guards were engraved with fleurs-de-lys finials numbered E.22 and E.23. The Englishman would make the pistols available for inspection if O. O. Howard, whom the seller knew by reputation, was willing to come to London. Asking price: $25,500. A date, an hour, a Belgravia address were suggested. If Mr. Howard would send word of what flight he was on he would find a private limousine waiting for him at the airport.

  Parsifal discovered a thin man with a dreary face and a disgusting aftershave lotion holding up a card with "O. O. Howard" hand-lettered on it at the Gatwick arrivals hall. Without a word the chauffeur led the way to a Daimler and took a roundabout route toward the city; in espionage jargon this was called dry cleaning. He stopped once for gas, a second time to check the pressure in his tires, then drove twice into cul-de-sacs before making a high-speed U-turn and heading for Heathrow Airport, where he handed Parsifal a plane ticket to Stockholm and a passport identifying him as a Canadian national. In Stockholm another sweeper provided him with a Soviet passport and identity card, and passage on a tourist cruise ship departing on the evening tide for Leningrad.

  In the Soviet Union, Parsifal was treated as a hero back from the war zone. "You have earned a promotion. From this date you will wear the rank of lieutenant colonel in the KGB. You have also earned a sabbatical," the head of the North American department of the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) said. He could not avoid noticing his agent's haunted eyes. "Buying and selling guns would take a toll on anyone," he added soothingly.

  Parsifal was hustled off to the KGB sanatorium at Semvonovskoye, once Stalin's second dacha, a hundred kilometers south of Moscow, where he spent six weeks in a private suite. The daily routine included regular doses of herbal potions, eucalyptus inhalations, hot paraffin wraps, acupuncture, massages, saunas, workouts in a gymnasium, spartan lunches, sumptuous dinners with attractive women who bathed regularly, wore no perfume and took it for granted they would be spending the night. There were also long rambling discussions with two psychiatrists attached to the directorate's Intelligence Institute, and the inevitable de-briefings by a team made up of representatives of the various technical departments servicing the First Chief Directorate's overseas operations.

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  "What opinion do you have of the new first secretary?" Parsifal asked the chief of the North American department one afternoon. They were strolling along an embankment that ran parallel to the river flowing past the dacha. Parsifal's companion carried a small imitation leather satchel containing an iced bottle of Dom Perignon and two long-stemmed glasses.

  "Gorbachev? Ha! If the West thinks he is a serious reformer," said Parsifal's immediate chief, "they are in for a surprise. He will tinker with the system to eliminate some of its more glaring inconsistencies. The nomenklatura has grown fat. He will put it on a diet. There will be the usual cries of pain from the usual bureaucrats. But our intelligence agency will survive intact. After all, Gorbachev at heart is a Communist. He is committed, as we all are, to preserving the system, not destroying it."

  Reaching the edge of a sprawling vill
age, they made their way single file on planks that had been set out on the wide muddy main street. Smoke curled up from brick chimneys. In a field behind a factory that converted animal carcasses into fertilizer, and smelled from it, children threw stones at a three-legged dog. Parsifal and his companion passed the village dispensary, a dilapidated two-story brick building with broken win-dowpanes through which a framed photograph of Lenin was visible. They passed the local Communist Party headquarters with the inevitable hammer and sickle on the point of the roof and a tiny fenced flower garden in front. Sweaty peasant women wearing long smocks and identical black plastic boots trudged by in the mud, their feet producing sucking sounds with each step. Several of the women carried avoski filled with spring onions slung over their shoulders.

  "What if you are misreading Gorbachev?" Parsifal asked as they hiked through a fallow field on the far side of the village. "What if he is misreading himself?"

  They sat down on a fallen tree above a bend in the river. The head of the North American department clamped the bottle of champagne between his thighs and popped the cork, which arced like a mortar shell into the river, then carefully filled the two glasses and handed one to Parsifal.

  Parsifal seemed mesmerized by the rippling of the river. "What if Gorbachev opens the floodgate a crack and the river, once it starts to flood, tears the gate off its hinges?"

  The head of the North American department tugged at an embarrassingly large earlobe. "In the worst-case scenario we will have to tighten our

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  belts. Ha! We will be reduced to toasting our heroes with Russian champagne. But the services we render to the Party and to the State will not go out of style." He rolled the long stem of his glass between his thumb and forefinger, then leaned toward Parsifal to indicate he was about to share classified information. "Trust me, there are contingency plans," he said cryptically. He raised his glass. "Nasha zdravia"

  "Nasha z'dravia"

  Parsifal slipped back into America as effortlessly as he had slipped out of it. In the months that followed he watched as the floodgate in Russia opened wider and wider. Poland allowed its Communists to be voted out of office, and the Red Army didn't plunge across the frontier. The wall dividing Berlin came down, chipped away in part by tourists eager for souvenirs of the Cold War. In Rumania, Ceau§escu and his wife were put up against another wall and executed. In Moscow, the statue of the KGB's founder, Felix Dzerzhinski, was dragged from its pedestal. Newspapers began acting as if they were no longer constrained by a Party line. Communists began turning in their Party cards. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics splintered.

  And then The New York Times reported that the KGB had been disbanded and replaced by the MBRF, the Ministry for Security of the Russian Federation. That same day Parsifal, buying and selling rare guns out of his mobile home in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, received a cryptic message from Le Juif: Parsifal was to be at a public telephone on the ground floor of a shopping mall in Las Cruces at noon on the following day.

  At the appointed hour the phone rang. Holding a handkerchief over his nose to filter the stale odors, Parsifal closed himself into the booth. He heard Le JuiPs distinctive high-pitched metallic voice in his ear—a Russian Jew speaking Texas English with an electronically enhanced nasal twang. "To dine with the devil," Le Juif exclaimed—the words seemed to ride on undertones of bewilderment—"use a long spoon."

  Parsifal didn't trust his ears. "A long spoon?"

  "Right. A long spoon. To dine with the devil."

  "This is some kind of joke."

  "Read the newspapers," snapped Le Juif.

  Parsifal controlled his voice with an effort. "What are you telling me?" he whispered harshly.

  "I am telling you that it is all ending with a whimper instead of a bang. I am telling you to slip like a spider back into your crack in the wall. I am

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  telling you to use a long spoon if and when you decide to engage in social intercourse with Satan."

  Le Juif started to say something else, then changed his mind. The dial tone pounded in Parsifal's ear.

  "To dine with the devil use a long spoon" had been the last in a long list of cryptograms Parsifal had committed to memory before he squirmed through the rusted barbed wire blocking the river in Goritzia a lifetime ago. It meant "Go to ground and wait." It meant "Hibernate." It meant the situation back home was more chaotic than it appeared to be even in the newspapers. It meant that the KGB was too busy saving the furniture to run agents.

  Parsifal went into a hibernating mode. He collected his one-time cipher pads (matchbooks hidden under the seed in a bird feeder) and burned them. He flushed his stock of ricin down the toilet in a public rest room. He coated his homemade silencer with thick industrial grease and wrapped it in tinfoil and put the tinfoil in a metal cookie box and buried the box in a vacant lot behind the gas station around the corner. He stashed in the crawl space under the linoleum floor the seemingly ancient Motorola AM-FM clock radio that could pick up coded signals from Moscow.

  And he waited.

  Two years went by without a word from Le Juif. Then two more. In Russia the situation continued to deteriorate. The Communist Party's right to exist was challenged in the courts. Gorbachev was almost overthrown in an attempted coup from which Boris Yeltsin, the apparatchik turned democrat, emerged more powerful than the master whose skin he had saved. In short order Yeltsin did what the plotters couldn't: he dethroned Gorbachev in a palace coup.

  In Truth or Consequences, Parsifal's life grew flat, like beer that has been opened and forgotten on a counter. He bought the lot that sloped down to the Rio Grande behind his mobile home and a John Deere mower and cut the grass so often that his neighbor joked he was going to open a miniature golf course. He installed air conditioning in his bedroom and then never used it because it gave off a disagreeable odor. He had a brief affair with a woman half his age who showered before and after every act of sexual intercourse and thought the way he made love was perfectly normal (in the sense that everything under the sun was normal). He roamed the western states searching for rare firearms. In a junk shop in

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  Arizona he came across an 1880 Belgian pinfire pepperbox nine-millimeter revolver with a polished hammer, folding trigger and ebonized grips, which he bought for a song. As the months slipped by he began to think the unthinkable: that King Arthur had abandoned Parsifal; that the KGB, if there still was a KGB, had forgotten he existed; that he would grow old on his bank of the Rio Grande and die in Truth or Consequences without riding his pale horse again.

  The possibility left him feeling distinctly relieved —and vaguely disappointed.

  Just when he had abandoned all hope of hearing again from Le Juif, Parsifal discovered the message, printed in a child's scrawl of large block letters, inside the wrapper of his local newsletter. "Talk shop," Le Juif murmured when Parsifal met him in the reading room of the Albuquerque Public Library. "Admit it— you thought they had forgotten we existed, misplaced the files, stranded us in this godforsaken country, but they haven't. We have got ourselves a new Resident."

  Which is how Parsifal came to dig up the silencer buried in the vacant lot behind the gas station and get back into the business of wetwork.

  Robert Littell

  Parsifal lost his temper. "That kind of answer went out of style with Joseph Stalin," he said in a fierce whisper.

  Le Juif seemed to enjoy Parsifal's frustration. "Beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a headache than a hole in the wall," he said.

  Parsifal, furious, severed the connection.

  Robert Littell

  and the Indians closed in on him. "Hold on, fellas," Finn said pleasantly, raising a hand, palm out.

  "You wouldn't got change for a fifty-dollar bill?" demanded a particularly heavy Indian pushing one of the shopping carts.
<
br />   The Indian riding in his cart belched. "Course we don't got a fifty-dollar bill," he remarked. "But how would you get access to that kind of information?"

  "Yeah, how?" agreed the third Indian with a belly laugh. "Answer the man."

  Finn's hand dropped to his side. His dark eyes hardened. "You don't really want to push it," he said softly.

  "White man thinks we don't want to push it," sneered the Indian in the second shopping cart. He motioned for his friend to wheel him closer. "What makes you think we don't want to push it?" he asked, squinting up into Finn's face.

  "You don't want to push it unless you have paid-up hospital insurance," Finn said. He wasn't boasting; he was just stating facts. " 'Cause two of you are going to come down with real bad headaches, one of you will get stomach cramps the result of busted balls, and it'll come down to the last joker and me, man on man, and chances are good he'll wind up in traction."

  The Indians must have noticed the slight hunching of Finn's shoulders, the infinitesimal tightening of the muscles around his eyes, the faint flexing of his knees as he shifted his weight onto the balls of his sneakers.

  Suddenly sober, smiling nervously, the heavy Indian rocked back his shopping cart. "Hell, we was only testing the water," he said with an unnatural laugh. "Ain't that the situation, Dell?"

  "Let's burn him," the Indian named Dell murmured. He started to climb out of the shopping cart, but his companions had lost the scent. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Dell settled back into the cart.

  "What's this world coming to?" grumbled the heavy Indian as he duck-stepped backward with the shopping cart. "A full-blooded Navajo can't go an' ask the white man to change a fifty no more."