Hidden prey

Chapter 10

Svoboda's Bakery in downtown Hibbing had a U-shaped glassed-in counter with the cash register at the bottom of the U. If a customer wanted bread, which was kept in the case to the left of the cash register, he had to walk between fifteen running feet of glazed, frosted, powdered, and jelly doughnuts, cherry, apple, and blueberry popovers, poppy-seed kolaches, six kinds of Danish including prune, apple, and apricot, and a variety of strudels, cakes, jelly rolls, and cookies.

Two small bathroom-style exhaust fans, mounted in the corners of the wall behind the cash register, blew odors from the ovens into the sales space, a mixture of yeast, dough, spice, and just a touch of sea salt. Few customers made it back to the street without a load of extra calories.

Leon Witold and his wife, Wanda, arrived two minutes after the bakery opened at six in the morning. Karen Svoboda, the stay-at-home daughter, was standing at the cash register and tipped her head toward the back. The Witolds nodded at her and went on past the cash register, through the preparation and oven rooms, down a short corridor past the single rest room to a small employees' lounge. The lounge was a cube with yellowed walls and a flaking ceiling, furnished with three tippy plastic-topped tables, a dozen folding chairs from Wal-Mart, and an E-Z clean vinyl floor. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, disinfectant, and warm cookies.

Rick Svoboda, a round-faced man with steel gray hair, was pushing chairs around. When the Witolds walked in, he said, his eyes downcast, worried, "Hi, guys."

"You know what it's about?" Leon Witold asked. Leon was an accountant, a tall, thin-lipped, thin-faced man with overgrown eyebrows.

"Something serious," Svoboda said. "Marsha Spivak called last night and said Anton was in the hospital. Somebody tried to hang him-and she thinks it's the Russians."

"Oh my God," Wanda said. The blood had drained from her narrow face, and she pushed a knuckle against her teeth. "Hanged him?" she breathed.

"He's not dead, but the cops are all over the place," said Svoboda. There were footsteps in the hallway outside, and Grandpa Walther was in the doorway, ancient, shaking a little, his eyes blue as the sky. Then Grandma appeared, in a wheelchair pushed by their grandson, Carl.

Svoboda looked at Carl and then Grandpa, who said, "He's been in for five years. I've been teaching him for more than twelve."

"Aw, boy. Does Jan know?" Svoboda kept his eyes on Carl, who looked back with the flat stare of a garter snake.

"No. She turns her back on us, so we tell her nothing," Grandpa said.

"Carl's her kid," Svoboda said.

"I'm in," Carl said. "I don't care what Mom thinks."

"I'm not sure what the others will say," Leon Witold said.

"It doesn't matter what they say," Grandpa said. His voice had an edge of the Stalin steel. "He is in. He knows our story. He knows enough to send every one of us to prison. Some of us were younger than he is, when we got in. He's our future, and he's in."

Svoboda rubbed his face. "Oh, brother. I thought it would stop with us."

"Never stop," Grandpa said. "We have a duty."

More people: Marsha Spivak, Anton's wife, a heavyset woman with a hound-dog face, a babushka over her hair, the woman who raised the alarm.

"Good to see you, good to see you," she said. "My Anton is terrible hurt, terrible hurt…" She'd been born in the United States, but somehow managed a middle-European accent. She'd been to church already, not to Mass, just inside the door to dab her forehead with holy water and to say a prayer for Anton. She was a Communist, all right, but of the practical sort, the just-in-case kind, who had no personal problem with Jesus.

Janet Svoboda, as round faced as her husband, blond, with a long nose that looked a little like one of her bagel sticks, came in with a pot of coffee and a tray of doughnuts. "Karen will stay at the counter," she said. "What else can I get for everybody?"

Marsha Spivak sat heavily in a folding chair, dabbed at her face, took a jelly doughnut and said, "Maybe a little milk to wash down the doughnuts?"

"Oh, sure," and Janet darted away to get a carton of milk.

Bob and Carol Spivak came in, two walking fireplugs, twin brother and sister. They both looked at Carl Walther, and then Bob stooped to kiss his mother, who burst into tears again, finished her first doughnut, and took a second.

Nancy Witold Spencer came in: "Hi, Mama." She didn't speak to her father or look at him, but he said, weakly, "Hi, Nance." She nodded, a bare acknowledgment: they'd had a financial falling-out over a loan to her dance studio.

"Everybody got a seat?" Rick asked.

Everybody had a seat; the men, in plaid cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women in jeans and pastel blouses and cardigans with the sleeves pushed up. Leon Witold, working his way through a doughnut, said, "Boy, them are good, gimme a little more of that coffee, will ya, Janet?" They were using small paper cups and she gave him a refill and he said, again, "Boy, them are good doughnuts. I gotta get down here more often."

"We could use the business," Rick Svoboda said.

"Ah, bullshit, Rick, you're richer 'n Bob Dylan." Bob Dylan had been born and raised in Hibbing, and was the local standard for obscene wealth.

"I sure wish." After arranging the chairs, Svoboda took an electronic box out of a paper sack, pulled out an antenna, and walked around checking for bugs. He didn't find any. He never had; the only thing he'd ever detected was transistor radios. "Okay, guys-Marsha called for this and she is going to tell us what happened last night."

"First things first," Leon Witold said. "I want to know about Carl, before we talk."

Grandpa Walther cleared his throat and said, "When it was time to decide, Grandma and I told him about the early days, and he was a good student. He wanted to hear. So we told him. You know Jan and Ron were breaking up, and Carl was living with us, so he began to… understand that something else was going on. That things were not exactly as they seemed. So, when he was far enough along, we told him: five years ago. And he is a believer. A believer on his own. A good boy. We haven't forced it on him."

Carl was nodding during this, and he said, "I made up my own mind."

They all looked at him for a moment and then Leon said, "I hope to God that's the truth, because you could hang all of us. And your mom, for that matter."

"She's not one of us," Carl said.

"But she knows, and anyone who knows would be in as deep as the rest of us."

"If the kid is in, he's in," said Rick Svoboda. "Can't go back now." He looked at Carl for a moment, then nodded, and turned to Marsha Spivak. "So tell us what happened with Anton."

Marsha Spivak started leaking tears again and muttered around, trying to find a start, and then she sighed and lifted her heavy head and said, "Yesterday, the police came. They knew about the meeting in the back. Anton tells me that they had a receipt from this Russian, who has so many names now that I can't keep track. Remember the Russian puts all the drinks on the American Express. So stupid. Why? Why? Why did we let him do that?"

"He wanted to put it on the card so he'd have the extra unaccountable cash to go to Wal-Mart." Svoboda said.

"But he said he had all that money…"

"Not his money. He had to account for it," Svoboda said. "He was chipping off a couple hundred bucks, and probably a few more here and there. The stupid thing wasn't putting it on the card-the stupid thing was keeping the receipt."

"He didn't know he was going to die," Leon Witold said. "But to get back to Anton…"

Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: "He told them nothing. They went away, they knew nothing. They knew only what they had on the receipt, that the Russian paid for drinks. Anton tells them that he'd never seen anybody before, he thought they were fishermen stopping on the way to the border."

Grandpa Walther nodded. "That's reasonable, anyway."

"Of course it is." Spivak sniffed. "They went away, but then this other man came. He sat in the bar late, the last one, and when Anton says it's closing time, he says that he wants to talk, that he is from Russia. So Anton locks the door and turns out the lights and they go in the back and when Anton turns around, this man has a gun. He makes Anton throw a rope over a beam and put it around his neck, and then he makes him stand up on a six-pack of beer bottles-beer bottles! Anton says, 'No!' and the man shoots him in the ear, and Anton must stand on the beer bottles. The man wants everybody's name, but Anton, he tells him nothing. He says he knows no names. The man says he will leave him on the beer bottles. Anton says he knows no names. And then, the man has a radio and he hears the police are coming and he kicks the beer bottles out and Anton is hanging by the neck and the man goes running out, and another man comes in and lifts up Anton and then the police come and cut the rope and they take him to the hospital…"

She started weeping again and finally Svoboda said, "He never saw the guy with the gun before?"

"No. Never."

"It all comes back to the fuckin' Russians," Leon Witold said. "We never should have met with that guy. I hope to hell nobody here had anything to do with that murder down in Duluth." His eyes scanned across the room and stuck for a moment on Grandpa Walther.

"Don't be stupid," Nancy Witold Spencer said. "We're not operators. It must be from Russia, somehow."

"She's right," Rick Svoboda said. "There's something going on in Russia that we don't know about. The first guy didn't even know for sure who we were, how many there were, who the families were."

"He knew about me," Grandpa Walther said.

"You're the only one," Svoboda said. "The question is, how did this second man get to Anton? Why didn't they go back to Grandpa?"

"Maybe they will." Leon Witold said.

Marsha Spivak opened her mouth to say something, but Grandpa jumped in: "We've been thinking about this," Grandpa said, "And we do have an answer, Carl and I. There was a story in the newspaper about the Russian killed in Duluth, this accident, this…"

"Wasn't no accident," Leon Witold snorted.

"Whatever it was," Grandpa said impatiently. "Moshalov, Oleshev, whatever his name is, is killed. We know he did not come from an official office: he was working outside the apparat. So the apparat sends its own investigator, this Rusian policewoman. I believe she must have a shadow. The story said the state police, and the Duluth police, were cooperating with the Russian. If they went to Anton, and he told them nothing, then maybe the Russian shadow went to Anton to see if Russian interrogation might work."

"Anton tells them nothing," said Marsha Spivak.

Grandpa turned to her. "Did the police say who this other guy is, who helped Anton?"

Carol Spivak shook her head, answering for her mother. "No. They won't release his name because the crazy man is still on the loose. They say he was walking past the back of the business when the crazy man came running out the back, and he saw Anton hanging there, and he ran in and lifted him and then the police came."

Carl frowned: "That's sounds weird."

Grandpa Walther nodded: "We should all ask. We should all listen. People will be talking."

"The main problem, as I see it, is that we have cops all over the place, asking questions. Probably the FBI and the CIA, too," Rick Svoboda said. "They have Anton's name, and they must suspect something. First there's the meeting, then the Russian gets killed, then Anton gets hanged. We have to believe that they will come after him."

"He will say nothing," Marsha Spivak said vehemently. Her son and daughter nodded, but Janet Svoboda said, "What if this shadow, whoever he is, catches one of you and… you know. What if they catch Carol, and then they call Anton and say, 'We'll cut her throat if you don't answer.' You think Anton wouldn't answer to save his daughter's life?"

They had nothing to say about that, and Carol Spivak lightly pinched her Adam's apple with two fingers, as if closing a cut.

Wanda Wit old said, "The big question now is, what do we do? We have no contact with Russia, everybody was swept away. We thought it was done."

"It's not done," Grandpa insisted. "How many times do I have to tell you, the party is…"

"Not time to argue about that," Janet Svoboda said, cutting him off. "What do we do? Do we just sit?"

"We have no choice," Leon Witold said. "We don't know who this Russian is, and even if we did, what would we do about him? We're not operators."

"I was an operator," Grandpa said.

Leon said, with exasperation, "Grandpa, that was seventy years ago, for Christ's sake. Things have changed."

Carol Spivak said, "Why should they hurt us? Seventy years of good service for the motherland, and now things change, so we retire. So what? They can always set up another ring."

"But we're in place, and we're good at this, and they never lost a single person who they sent here," Wanda Witold said, a note of despair in her voice. "We have the shelters, we can move people in and out, we can get them down the St. Lawrence and out through the Maritimes… That's what they want. They'll never let go."

More silence, finally broken by the old man.

"So we talk, talk, talk, delay, delay," Grandpa said. "That's all we can do, if they come back."

They argued some more, and came to only one conclusion: they would resume the old emergency routines. They decided they would not meet again except in the most extreme circumstances.

"I don't think they could have surveillance in place this quickly," Grandpa said, and they all looked up at the ceiling, as if for bugs. "But from now on, especially with the Spivaks, and with me, no face-to-face contact. Somebody knows us, but we don't know if they know the Witolds or the Svobodas. If the Witolds or the Svobodas need to get in touch, or we need to get in touch with them, we use cold phones and code."

Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: "What's going to happen to us?" she asked Grandpa Walther.

Grandpa shook his head: "If we're careful, we should be okay. Back in the forties, and the fifties, there were some close calls, but we came through. Compared to those times, this is nothing. We stay calm, we deal with one fact at a time."

They left in ones and twos, carrying white paper bags full of doughnuts. Carl drove the Taurus station wagon. After the meeting, he felt more and more like a spy, and he watched the street with narrowed, careful eyes. Grandma rode in the passenger seat, while Grandpa sat in the back with her wheelchair. Grandma watched the street go by, and suddenly asked Grandpa, "Do you remember when we came down here to dance?"

Carl looked at her: her head was up. This was the first intelligible thing she'd said in a week.

"Every day," Grandpa said, looking out the window at storefronts. "Every day I remember: I liked the snowy nights, when we'd come down, and see the lights all along the street with the big flakes coming down. Remember that wet-wool-on-the-heating-register smell? When you'd cook your mittens to dry them out. You don't smell that anymore, everything is synthetic."

Grandma nodded, smiled, and dozed, gone again.

"What's going to happen?" Carl asked after a minute.

"That's what we need to talk about," Grandpa said. "You learned something valuable today-you saw it, anyway. Groups of people have trouble deciding anything. They also have a tendency to panic. Sometimes, for the safety of the group, you must act in secrecy, on your own, to protect the group. You have to do it even if the group is against it, because they are too frightened or too divided. You must act! That is the thing. To act!"

"I can act," Carl said. "But I don't know what to do."

"Think," Grandpa commanded. His eyes were sparkling.

Carl thought, then said, "The only thing I can think of, is we have to… cauterize the wound."

Grandpa recognized the phrase-he'd used it himself, before the killings of Oleshev and Wheaton. Carl had picked it up. He was pleased.

"How do we do that?"

Carl thought again for a moment: "We could get rid of the Spivaks, all of them. Couple of problems-it'd be hard to kill four people. You'd have to do it all at once. Then, the others might figure it out. Or maybe just freak out and go to the cops. Some of them are not so… emotionally tough as we are."

"Good. Do you think you could do it? I mean, anyway? Handle it, technically?"

He was asking whether Carl could go through with it. "Sure. Not a problem. But I'm not sure we could control what happened afterwards."

"I'm not sure, either. Because that's so cloudy, we put it aside. The other problem is, we still don't know what's going on. I can make a phone call tonight-I might be able to find something out."

"Call who?"

"A man in Moscow. If he's still alive. He should be, he'd only be, let's see…" He did some quick calculation, moving his lips. "… about seventy. He might be able to tell us something."

"What if he can't?"

"The other possibility is that we simply sow confusion. We deliberately confuse everything, so that nobody knows what is coming from where. Except us. My Russian is still good; if we make the right phone calls, make the right threats, we could perhaps create a charade, an illusion, that this is all gang warfare."

"Boy." Carl was impressed, both by the analysis, and the fact that Grandpa could call a man in Moscow. "When would you make the call?"

Grandpa looked at his watch. "Right now. It's four o'clock in the afternoon in Moscow."

"I've got to be at school in an hour."

"That's enough time. If my friend's number doesn't work, I don't know how I'd find him."

They went out to a Wal-Mart, left Grandma in the car. Grandpa used a phone card from a public phone, looked at a piece of paper as he punched in a long phone number, then the card number. There was a wait, and then he blurted something in Russian, smiled at Carl, gave him a thumbs up, and then turned his back, hunched over the phone for privacy, and started talking. Carl knew no Russian; he stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.

Grandpa was on the phone for fifteen minutes, doing a little talking, but mostly listening. When he was done, he hung up, looked at the phone for a few seconds, then turned to Carl and said, "Let's go."

On the way out, when they were clear of other customers, he said, "I love to hear the old language. You should learn to speak Russian. It's much more musical than English. A beautiful language."

"Maybe when I go to college," Carl said. "What'd the man say?"

"Bad news, I'm afraid. He says the department would do anything to find Oleshev's killer. Nobody cares about Oleshev except Maksim Oleshev, but many people care about Maksim. There is a struggle going on in Moscow, a fight over the oil, and Maksim is a big man in the fight. Putin wants him; and Maksim wants the killer."

"That puts me in a tough spot," Carl said, grinning and wrinkling his nose.

"It's not funny," Grandpa said. "It puts all of us in a tough spot. My friend says that they would throw all of us overboard if it would make Maksim happy. Except… he says that they don't know exactly who we are. That is why Nadya Kalin is here."

"And we can trust him? Your friend."

Grandpa smiled and tipped his head. "Not exactly… trust. But. He is with the party. He is like me, he is a believer. I think he was as happy to hear from me as I was to talk to him-for him to know that there are still people out here, working."

Carl looked at his watch. "I've got to get going, get you home and get to school."

"And I've got to think," Grandpa said. "It's like a chess problem, with so many pieces. But you should be ready, because one way or another, we have to act. Don't doubt it."

"I'm ready," Carl said. "Should I come over this afternoon?"

"Yes… Maybe I'll have figured out something. This Kalin, and her shadow… they are a problem."

On the way back to Grandpa's, Grandpa said, "We need some way to communicate. Everything can be tapped, now. Cell phones, everything. We could work out a routine where you come over four or five times a day. Before school, at lunch, after school… but in an emergency…"

"Walkie-talkies," Carl said.

"What?" Grandpa focused on him.

"When I went hunting with the Wolfes last year, old man Wolfe gave us walkie-talkies," Carl said. "Everybody had one-he uses them with his construction company. You couldn't call me if I was down in Duluth… but around town here, you could. He said they've got a range of six or seven miles, lots of privacy channels, everything, so they'd cover the town. But they're expensive."

"How much?"

"Maybe six hundred dollars for two-I think that's what Jimmy Wolfe said. You can get them at Radio Shack."

"Get two," Grandpa said.

"Where'm I gonna…"

"I've got funds," Grandpa said.

"You got six hundred…"

"More than that. Official funds. I'll get the money, you get the radios. You'll have to show me how to work them…"

"Easy. Easier than a cell phone," Carl said.

"I can work a cell phone," Grandpa said. "I don't have all of it figured out, the damn thing has that terrible ring now, I pushed something wrong."

"I'll show you," Carl said.

And just before Carl got out of the car, Grandpa said, "We will have to get some ammunition for the pistol."

"I know how to get it," Carl said. "I was over at Jerkin's, looking. All the pistol ammo is right behind the counter. I've got the nine millimeter spotted. If we wait 'til Jerkin's wife goes to dinner, and then we go in, and you ask him for some tire inflator, and he comes around to get it for you-I spotted that, too, it's way down at the end of automotive-I can lift it right off the shelf."

"Cameras?"

"I looked real dose, didn't see any. There's a big round mirror, but it's set to show somebody at the counter what's going on in the appliance aisle. If you're over there in automotive, he won't be able to see back."

"Got it all figured out," Grandpa said.

"Figured we were gonna need some ammo, sooner or later," Carl said.