Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Marley’s Ghost by John C. Boland

“I saw Vlad in New York. He looks better.”

“Did you speak?” Charles Marley asked.

“Of course not. No point in opening old wounds.” Oleg sipped tea, glanced at the wintry bustle on Connecticut Avenue, and steered the conversation back to his book. “The work on my memoir is three-quarters finished, more than three-quarters. But the publisher has lost enthusiasm. There are too many memoirs from the period, they say.”

“There have been others,” Marley agreed.

“If pages full of lies are a memoir, then you are both right.” Oleg squeezed the cup onto its saucer with a rattle. He settled back. It was warm in the hotel dining room, but he wore his expensive overcoat on his shoulders to prevent its being stolen. He had held his cup the same way, Charles Marley thought, and to the publisher’s dismay, Oleg had probably held tightly to his better secrets as well.

After both men had been silent for a minute, Oleg said, “We were onto him early. I’m speaking of Vlad. You only received from him what we intended for you to have.”

“He was never productive,” Marley agreed. The words triggered an unwanted thought that if Vlad had been productive the intelligence service might have taken better care of him. He said, “Is Vlad in your book?”

“No, I would not embarrass you, my old friend.” Sighing, Oleg added, “Besides, this publisher wants tales of adventure, when I am not giving away the dirty little secrets. Vladimir Davidovich was nothing, there was no excitement in capturing him. He was a coward who finally told us everything he knew. Where is the value in such a story? In our time, Charles, we seldom encountered adversaries worthy of us. Don’t you agree?”

“When you saw Vlad, where was he?”

Oleg raised his hands. “Near my publisher’s building. Let me tell you, I was surprised. A taxi had brought me from the train station and when I got out almost the first thing I saw was this bony rat’s face from the old days. He did not notice me. He was operating a vendor’s cart, and a policeman was arguing with him.” Between his fingers, Oleg laughed. “Still getting into trouble, after all these years.”

For a moment, Marley dropped his gaze to his cup. The coffee had gone cold. He thought he could leave.

Oleg shook a finger at him. “Your people were always so sanctimonious about our handling of social parasites. Well, what did you expect? We produced so many of them! Vladimir Davidovich is proof that some people will end at the bottom of whatever society adopts them. Don’t you agree?”

The thought of being locked in a warm taxicab repelled Marley, so he walked to his hospital board meeting. For the first block he managed to focus his mind on the frozen Washington sidewalks. Ribbons of ice curled across the pavement. The streets in Moscow had always been cleared, even after an unexpected October snowfall. Politics might thaw, but not the streets. And the politics hadn’t changed much. Even in a thaw, Marley reflected, we needed something to occupy us, so we went on recruiting. He had met the young graduate student from the Moscow Conservatory four months after the Berlin Wall fell, in the apartment of a journalist. Innocent and fun, the evening had had no agenda except a well-lubricated celebration. Vladimir said it was as if all Europe’s windows had opened at once. “Fresh air makes us giddy,” he said.

I was giddy too, Marley thought. But my job was to muck around. It wasn’t just habit that kept me doing it. We still had to know what was going on in the ruling cliques, how far Gorbachev would go, which way the Army would march. Had the arrests steered off a KGB coup? Important questions. What we thought we could do with the answers wasn’t clear, but I never saw our section as a headless body going on without a purpose. The purpose was as important as it had ever been. It was only after the fact that you knew how things turned out.

Recruiting Vlad had not been on his mind that night. Young music students didn’t make Marley’s target list. Men and women with family ties in the party hierarchy weren’t on the list either; as contacts they could be useful, but the ones who could be recruited as agents were idealists or malcontents. Either type blipped on the security apparat’s radar. Idealists and malcontents who had worked their way into the system over half a lifetime had learned to hide their social illness. They interested Marley and his colleagues.

Vlad recruited himself. “My father is General Zavenyagin,” he said idly. “Careless. Brings satchels full of work home.”

His father had never asked himself a single fundamental question, on any subject, according to Vlad. His mother believed the only questions that mattered were the size of the family’s apartment and whether the General’s next assignment included a chauffeured Zil. The state had not shot generals in many years. The family had a good life.

They were on the sidewalk outside the journalist’s apartment when Vlad dangled the bait. They were alone.

Marley’s first concern was not getting himself ejected from the country by succumbing to a novice provocateur.

When he thought about it, the young man had been selling himself hard all evening. “We’re all edgy now, everyone hoping for true reform. Do you know what it’s like? It’s like seeing everyone having wonderful sex all around, while you wait for word that it’s okay to take part. But in your soul, you know Mikhail Sergeiovich will raise a hand at the last moment and say no, stop, you must wait another fifty years. That is a long time to go without.” And later, when he seemingly was no more drunk: “We can’t hang them all, and whoever’s left will carry on.”

Oleg was right about the boy’s face. Bony, rodent-like in its hunger. Though he listened and watched attentively, Marley found nothing in Vladimir that he had grown to expect from people baiting a trap. There was no instant intimacy. There was little flirtation. When Vlad spoke about politics, it wasn’t to denounce the terror of Stalin, the bromide of the undercover operatives. Instead, he expressed a young man’s half-shaped belief that if Western-style democracy came, his country would flourish.

“I would like to travel then,” he said, “perhaps concertize. The piano.” He held up his broad, long-fingered hands. “A natural, you would say.”

George Proffer, the newspaper writer, was present for the first part of that mutual seduction. Picking at the zakuski, Proffer said, “Vlad can travel. He’s not part of the oppressed masses. Tell Charlie about Paris.”

Rolling his eyes, the young man shaped a silent whistle. “I will go back. But it would be nice not to go by permission. My visa was for only three weeks.”

“Did you perform?” Marley asked. It was an innocent question.

“It was two years ago. I wasn’t ready.”

“He could get bookings in Paris tomorrow,” Proffer said. “Vlad’s from a good family.”

Marley raised a questioning glance.

“Believe it or not,” Proffer said, staring at the bottle in his hand as if it could refute him, “this boy is too principled to take advantage of his connections. Rare anywhere, hmm, Charles? He doesn’t want a career handed to him by Gos Concert.”

“Crap,” said Vladimir with a grin. “The creeps know if I ever got out, I would keep going. Have you ever been to Paris?”

As soon as Marley admitted he had been stationed on Rue de Rivoli in the early eighties, Vladimir peppered him with questions — had he ever been to this or that dive, did he know where Henry Miller had lived, did he know there were still emigre Russians running restaurants near the Odeon? “Seventy-five years after the Revolution,” he said, “they’ve got pictures of Kerensky above the bar. Can you believe it?”

“What’s this about Henry Miller?” Marley said.

“He was the first person to truly understand the twentieth century,” Vlad said with a perfectly straight face. “That it was all going to be about sex.”

Marley, who thought it had been about politics, nodded. He wasn’t the least bit tight, but he thought it would be interesting if he had missed the point that Henry Miller and a young Russian student understood.

“Where did you hang out?” Vlad asked. He named a restaurant where students gathered. “I went there eight nights in a row. Gaulois smoke thick as butter. Pots of nondescript wine. Girls who didn’t live with their parents. I could have stayed, but my education wasn’t finished.”

Proffer pulled a glass away from his nose and chuckled. “Haven’t seen anyone so wide eyed, have you, Charlie, since your first trip to a whorehouse? Poor kid thinks the world outside is a party.”

“Compared to life here, it is,” said Vlad.

“You haven’t met my editor,” Proffer said in a tone that didn’t invite argument.

Charles Marley kept his mind on the hospital board meeting. The other directors knew what he had done before his retirement, but they were all people of the world who refused to be impressed or shocked. Several had worked for government. Only one board member joked in whispers that maybe Charlie still had a hand in. In which case, he added, the videotape of a certain sheik’s colonoscopy had probably made it to Langley.

“Questionable taste, Pruitt,” said the chairman.

Charles Marley stared past both men. Langley would have the sheik’s medical results without his intervention.

“Well then, we’re agreed?”

Of course they were agreed. People of the world didn’t join boards to be disagreeable. On whatever the question was, they were agreed.

“He could be useful,” the Moscow station chief had said. She had studied the profile of Vlad that Charles prepared, asked him questions that she believed were penetrating.

“General Zavenyagin, the boy’s father, is five levels from the top,” he said. “Doesn’t see major stuff.”

“Neither do we,” the station chief said. “He might get promoted.”

“A good man deserves to be,” Charles said. When she didn’t respond to his flippancy, he let his grin slide away. “Zavenyagin won’t know if a coup is coming. He would be a follower, not a leader.”

“We won’t expect much from his son.” The station chief’s attention was moving on to something else, but Charles Marley had received his nod to see if Vladimir Davidovich could be recruited. The station chief looked up suddenly when Charles was at the door. “Maybe he will surprise us,” she said.

“It’s a nom de guerre, a cover name, isn’t it,” Vlad asked him the next time they met. “It’s too literary to be your real name. You know, Dickens. Marley’s ghost?”

“Someone should have told my grandfather — or his grandfather.”

“Everyone knows what a cultural attaché does.”

“When the political climate permits, I arrange exchange visits. Your ballet dancers for our bluegrass pickers.”

“Banjos.”

“Right.”

“Duh-duh-duh DUH duh. The movie’s been here. Must be pretty dull — the world’s in ferment, and you’re escorting hillbillies around Moscow.” They were at Proffer’s apartment again, alone, and Vlad was playing with him, enjoying his moment, knowing he had gotten someone interested — if not in himself, then in his father’s satchels of work.

“What I was thinking,” Marley said, “is I might try to get you some engagements in New York.”

The narrow face mocked the offer. “If I help you, you’ll see I play Carnegie Hall?”

“More like Queens College, if you’re as good as Proffer says. Or places in Iowa. It would be part of an exchange of students. Up to you what you made of it. And whether you stayed. How good are you?”

“Ask Melissa.” She was a young woman who came to some of the gatherings at Proffer’s apartment.

“At the piano.”

“I’m very good.” He grinned confidently, but the look in his eyes wasn’t so sure. “This is the nation of great pianists — and great alcoholics. I’m good enough for your Queens College, not quite ready for Carnegie Hall. In another year, maybe.”

“Proffer says you’re as good as Gilels was at your age.”

Vlad shrugged. “Proffer’s no music critic.”

“But he’s right?”

“Bound to be once in a while.”

“And you want out.”

“Oh, brother. You’ve seen through me.” The young man dragged his hand down his face theatrically. “I thought I kept that hidden.”

“You’ve been shouting it on the street corners,” Marley said.

“It gets lost in the din there. Everybody wants out, more or less. The KGB can’t arrest us all. Anyway, they’re busy plotting against each other.” He got up from the table where they’d been sitting. His elbows had rested on a magazine, Literaturnaya Gazeta. He turned several pages casually, then walked away. A foolscap sheet lay between the pages. With the heel of his hand, Marley swiveled the magazine and read the sheet. Before he finished, Vlad returned with a bottle of pepper vodka. He didn’t bring glasses. “What do you think?” he asked. He tilted the bottle to his lips, then passed it to Marley.

What Marley thought was: Are you sure you want to do this? But he was too professional to ask. He had other words ready. “You’re doing a service to your country, Vladimir Davidovich,” he said.

Vlad laughed and demanded the bottle back.

The station chief was pleased. “James Jesus,” she murmured, an expression she used often, which had nothing to do with divinity but invoked the memory of her favorite counterespionage officer, whose surname was Angleton. “This needs to be verified, of course.”

“Sure.” He had read the foolscap memorandum through twice, taking no notes. It appeared to be what Washington would call a talking paper, outlining the pros and cons of the military recommending a hard line against restive republics that wished to weaken their ties to the Soviet Union.

“It’s not much by itself,” she said.

“No.” Marley was having trouble suppressing a smirk.

“But if General Zavenyagin is privy to those discussions...” She snapped a glance that only caught Marley looking serious. “What does the kid want from us?”

“Vodka and promises,” Marley said. “He wants to tour the West playing Schumann.”

For just a moment, the station chief gave Charles Marley a blank stare, long enough for his mouth to drop open a crack at the discovery she didn’t know Schumann, and then her stare turned scornful because he was so gullible. Not a good quality in an agent, being easily led — her head shake made that plain.

He heard Vlad perform nine days later at the apartment of an apparatchik who liked to pretend she ran a salon. There were a couple of poets in residence, but everywhere Marley went there were poets, or men who planned to become poets and drank seeking inspiration. One of the apparatchik’s poets was a widely acclaimed dissident who had never been arrested. He was middle aged, wore faded jeans and a leather jacket, and had soulful eyes that lingered on young women. The hostess prevailed on him to recite, and when he compared the stars in the American flag to bullet holes, several of the Americans who were present applauded dutifully. One of the young women, with broad Slavic cheeks and a bitter mouth, grabbed her coat and left.

The apparatchik had a baby grand piano in her parlor. The cultural high point of the evening was Vladimir Davidovich’s recital of some of the Études symphoniques, and Marley wondered what was it about Russians and Robert Schumann. The man sitting beside him insisted on humming along, an octave lower than the piano, as if every one of the miniatures was a dirge. Vlad’s playing had maturity beyond his years. The boy kept his technique in check, though there were hints that it could run away if he let it. Much of the time he wore an apologetic smile, as if he knew the listeners had heard better. The young man stopped in the middle of a passage, threw up his wide hands in a shrug. “ ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ would come out better tonight,” he said.

“No, no, Volodya,” his hostess said insincerely, “you will be a great pianist.”

Marley, who had spent half his life in recital halls, thought his young agent already was.

The young man shrugged. “I will play composers who are too dead to object,” he said. He left with the girl named Melissa. Marley tried to remember what he knew about her. Her parents were schoolteachers. She was an art student. She was said to be an informer.

“How well do you know Melissa?” Charles Marley asked. They were sitting in a greasy smelling restaurant on the fringes of the Arbat. Vlad had delivered a parcel of recent memos his father had written, stuffed into a brown envelope, buried in a bag of turnips. If the KGB caught either of them with the bag, Marley thought... and let the thought trail away. He might be beaten, but it wouldn’t be bad.

“She’s a good girl,” Vladimir said. “Very friendly.”

Marley smiled. “That’s important.”

Vlad nodded, looked at Marley with curiosity he wasn’t impudent enough to translate into words. Marley hadn’t encouraged personal questions from Vlad. He could speculate to his heart’s content on whether there was a mistress at the embassy or a wife at the American compound, or some other arrangement best not considered.

“What do you think of the General’s scribbles?” Vlad asked. He had taken to calling his father the General, making the betrayal less intimate.

“That’s for our analysts to say,” Marley answered. “He’s prolific.”

“He doesn’t want to be assigned to Afghanistan. So he keeps busy, nuancing his arguments in favor of whoever he thinks will win. That’s how your analysts should view the material, Charles. A shrewd man’s estimate of how it will all turn out.” His smile could have been worn by a much older person. “A man has only one skin, so he must have a lot of principles. How did you like my playing?”

“Apparently I liked it better than you did.” He almost said he thought it was as crisp and pure as Sofronitsky’s, which he had heard only on old recordings. But one praised agents carefully if one wanted to keep them under control.

Vladimir made the small shrugging motion Marley had seen so often, and it occurred to the American that the young man had enough doubt. He sipped tea that tasted oily. The dump’s proprietor was in the back, arguing with a woman.

“About Melissa,” he said. “One of our people thinks she has ties to the KGB.”

Vlad chuckled. “Who hasn’t?”

Charles Marley slipped on the ice leaving his hospital board meeting and fractured his left ankle. It wasn’t a severe break, but it was painful. For two weeks he was laid up at his townhouse in Foxhall Village, alone except for a thrice-weekly cleaning woman and two well wishers, each of whom visited only once. He rationed his pain medication, read novels that had found their way onto his shelves, and seldom thought about Vladimir.

The station chief’s fervor had cooled as the analysts at Langley concluded that General Zavenyagin was far outside the decision-making loop and his memos contained little real intelligence. Nobody decided to cut Vladimir loose because he was viewed as low cost and low maintenance. But the station chief didn’t invite Marley into her office to review each new packet of memos the young man provided. Marley wasn’t sure she read them. The packets might have gone straight into the bag to Virginia.

He was getting around on a cane, an improvement on the walker, which made him feel like an old man, when Oleg called and said the publisher had postponed his book.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Marley said.

“Yes, well. Fortunately, I’ve met some people in New York. They import glass. Some of the glass is filled with vodka.” He laughed heartily. “So I will get by. It’s difficult, old friend. You were on the winning side, so you have a pension that is worth something.”

“It doesn’t stretch far,” Marley said, wary that Oleg might ask for a loan.

“By the way, I saw your master spy again. He was on the subway that goes to Brooklyn, shaking a metal cup.”

“Did you speak?”

“I looked around for a policeman, but what is it you say — there’s never one when you want?”

After he hung up the phone, Marley wondered if he could get his old colleagues to ask about Vlad in New York. Immigration might have an address. On the way to his desk to look up a phone number at Langley, he decided instead that even though it was only four in the afternoon, he needed another pain pill.

Oleg Ossovsky had called him in to KGB headquarters personally a few days after Vlad was arrested. “Suborning Soviet citizens, Charles! I’m shocked, simply shocked. All these months I believed you were going to poetry readings because you loved Pushkin. Then we have this embarrassment. It’s no good for either of us, you know. I get a black mark for letting you run the little twerp under my nose. You get a black mark when we expel you.” Big head shaking side to side, wide lips curled down in dismay, hazel eyes spilling regret, Oleg sat behind a polished desk, fingers laced across a striped vest, glancing down now and then to admire his own flowered necktie and wonder if the American recognized that it was from New York.

He had sat Marley in a straight-backed chair, suitable for embassy spies who got a dressing down before being ejected. Two years ago, it would have been much rougher. But now people like Oleg were looking ahead, wondering which way the tree was going to fall. If liberalization continued, it would mean the end of the old regime. One couldn’t rule out trials in a post-Soviet Russia. If one needed to relocate, it would be good to be remembered by the Americans as humane and perhaps cooperative.

So Oleg Ossovsky was thinking, as he ordered brandy brought in and joked that he and Charles were both professionals and so he had no hard feelings.

Marley took a slightly harder line. “What ‘little twerp’ are you talking about?”

“General Zavenyagin’s son. Come now, Charles. Vladimir Davidovich, your young friend.”

“The piano player?” Marley asked innocently.

“No, I would say he is no longer a piano player.” Observing Charles Marley’s expression, Oleg waved a hand. “Vladimir will recover. Some of his interrogators were of the old school. Of course, I stopped them as soon as I found out.”

“What did you do?”

Oleg scratched his forehead, decided to ignore the man’s harsh tone. “There was no point in his holding out. We showed him the photographs of your meetings. We played tape recordings.” He held up his palms. “He told everything to this girl he slept with. A total amateur.”

They didn’t expel Marley. The diplomatic thaw had become a small warm stream of goodwill that nobody wanted to disturb. It was six months before Vlad was released from a psychiatric hospital, and three months after that before Marley saw him at the apparatchik’s salon. He understood then why Oleg’s people hadn’t shot the young man. Nobody played the piano that evening.

Marley caught up with Vlad on the stairs. “I’m sorry we couldn’t help.”

Vlad shrugged. He wore a black leather jacket, with his mangled hands hidden in the pockets. He turned away.

“What are you going to do?” Marley asked.

“Journalism.” Looking over his shoulder, Vlad grinned. “There’s an opening on the literary gazette. Another six months, we’ll be exposing what the KGB did for the last seventy years. I think I’m going to be good at it. Nothing like personal experience, is there?”

When his leg was better, Charles Marley took the train to New York, stayed at a friend’s apartment, and arranged dinner with Oleg Ossovsky and two Russians from Brooklyn. In an informal way, Charles was casting himself in Oleg’s old role. He had offered to see what business the Russians were really in, and the person to whom he had made the offer had accepted. Oleg’s friends had been with him in internal security. Both had thick shoulders and heavy faces, close-cut hair, scars on the cheeks or eyebrows. Wrestlers was the term for official thugs that Charles had picked up in Romania. He couldn’t remember the word used in the old Soviet Union. So he thought of the men as wrestlers. Oleg had been a wrestler who no longer smelled of sweat. He teased Charles about Vlad, playing to his companions.

“We’ll have a reunion one of these evenings,” Oleg said. “Your little artist, you, me, plenty of zakuski, vodka.” He spoke expansively, but his eyes were hard. “If I run into Volodya again, we may have a reunion without you, Charles.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the little shit too often for it to be accidental. Last week, he came into a saloon on Brighton Avenue where I was meeting friends. I know he saw me, because he left quickly. It occurs to me that he may be working for your people.”

“I no longer have people,” Charles said. “I have a pension.”

“Then what happens to him won’t matter to you.”

“I think you’re overreacting. Brighton Beach is full of Russians. Where else would Vladimir hang out?” He reminded Oleg: “You and I met again by accident.”

“At that party, yes. But afterward, I had to pursue you. You didn’t keep turning up.”

“Then I should be suspicious of you,” Marley said.

Oleg laughed. “Unless you’re much better than I remember.”

“I was never good. That’s why I retired.”

“About Vladimir,” said Oleg, who had been thinking. “Perhaps he blames me for his injury. Tells himself I cost him a glorious career.”

“He was never sure about the career. You saved him from having to find out.”

“So he should be grateful.” Nodding, Oleg laid a hand on the shoulder of the large man beside him. “My friend Vassily broke tougher men in much less time. Vladimir held out for hours. There was no reason for it. We needed nothing from him, but it was the principle of the thing that he answer.”

Marley nodded. He understood. “Vassily did the interrogation?”

The wrestler across from him grinned. “If you call snapping fingers an interrogation.”

The wrestlers left around midnight, and Oleg looked after them shaking his head. “What these idiots are doing is far too risky for me,” he said.

“What are they doing?”

“If you still have people, Charles, they may be willing to pay for that information. Do you think?”

Marley was still using a cane but almost as a prop. A middle-aged man in a good topcoat somehow looked better for having a shiny black cane, if he didn’t lean on it too heavily. Leaving the restaurant, Marley took longer than he would have needed a year ago getting into a taxicab, and bent almost double he saw the thin sallow figure waiting in a cold doorway across the street. Oleg Ossovsky tottered onto the sidewalk, closing his coat over a half-zipped fly, and called good-bye to Marley. Oleg headed down the street. The man who had been in the doorway waited until Oleg was half a block ahead before following.

Marley’s people were very much interested in what Vassily and the other wrestler were doing. They were interested in what Oleg was doing.

“Mafiya,” a woman in the New York office speculated. “Gangsters.”

“Might be nothing, might be something,” said a soft-faced young man. “Does he want much money?”

“Not too much,” said Marley.

“Tell him he’s not worth much,” the woman said.

It took Marley two afternoons to find the cramped hotel at the edges of Brighton Beach where Vladimir had a single room. The room’s walls were decorated with concert notices. Ashkenazy at Lincoln Center. Yablonskaya at Brooklyn College. Kissin at Carnegie Hall. All Russians, Charles noted, all pianists.

Talking little, they drank the vodka Marley had brought; then, eyes feral, the young man brought a bottle of Georgian brandy to the table with a flourish. “Stalin drank this while he decided whom to murder,” Vlad said. “I read that fact in the KGB files. He drank a lot of brandy.”

“What happened to your job in journalism?”

Elbows on the table, head bent, Vlad struggled with the bottle’s screw cap. Even indoors, he wore gloves. “People decided the KGB files smelled better closed. After that, I was useless. Couldn’t even carry coffee to the boss. You see?” He got the cap off and it skittered across the table like a cockroach. Bottle held in both hands, he poured brandy into coffee mugs. “To your health, Charles.”

“To yours. Are you following Oleg Ossovsky?”

“Who?” The thick brows rose as he pretended not to know.

“I want to warn you about Oleg. He spotted you, and he still has rough friends.”

“An ideal man not to meet, then,” Vladimir said.

“He has mafiya connections. But he’s helping us.” Marley said the last in an offhanded way. Their eyes met briefly.

“So Oleg is protected,” Vlad said.

“Yes. I’m sorry about your hands.”

Vladimir shrugged. He talked about people they had both known in Moscow, had Marley heard what had become of so and so, and Marley tried to remember faces. The more they drank, the less he remembered. Vlad told him that Melissa, the art student, had been stabbed by a mugger in London.

Marley staggered out of the tiny apartment after dawn.

Oleg Ossovsky sat in an unmarked panel truck outside a rooming house near Coney Island. He sat for a long time, but the truck was comfortable. Two burly men, made thicker by black leather and scarves, came out of the rooming house and stood beside the mouth of an alley, indifferent to the cold.

“Are those your friends?” said a CIA watcher.

“Yes, that is Vassily Kuper. The man beside him is his brother, Misha.”

“Where do you go from here?” said Charles Marley, who sat beside Oleg.

“The docks. They import glass, I told you.” Oleg folded his arms. “And people.”

“People from where?”

“Anywhere. Mostly around the Red Sea, I think. This is worth more money than you’re paying, Charles.”

Depending on what the people from the Red Sea had in mind, Oleg might be right, Charles thought. But the information might also be worth much less. He had spent nights thinking about it and decided he didn’t care.

“You shouldn’t keep them waiting,” Marley said.

“Let them freeze.” Oleg huddled in his expensive topcoat. He cast a resentful look at Marley, then decided to be solicitous. “You look ill, old friend.”

“No, I’m fine,” Marley said.

“You should be paying me more for this,” Oleg insisted. He got out on the blind side of the truck, began walking briskly as if he had just come around the corner.

The two Russians didn’t notice him until he was crossing the street. Then they greeted him with hugs, and the guttural voices said they needed to confer, so the three men slipped into the alley. Neither the CIA watcher nor Marley could interpret the grunts they heard from the microphone. When the two wrestlers emerged alone from the alley, the men in the van looked at each other uncertainly. Marley said, “We’d better see.” He was the first into the alley, the first to see the crumpled figure on the ice. He had seen enough dead men to know that Vlad had had time to pass the word, and the word had reached Oleg’s friends.