Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER SEVEN

The neighborhood where my lock shop partner, Willie the Wire, lived was quiet that soggy evening. I drove through once, looking for cars parked with people in them. Didn’t see anyone, so I decided to try the dead man’s cell phone.

I turned it on, waited for it to find the network, then dialed Willie’s number.

“Yeah,” Willie growled when he picked up his phone. He answered the telephone at the lock shop the same way — a nasty habit I had tried to argue him out of.

“It’s me.” He had told me a dozen times that relying on other people to recognize your voice was impolite, an ego trip, but I wasn’t going to drop it until he said hello in the conventional manner. Okay, so we were both a bit childish.

“Where are ya?”

“Driving by on your street.”

“Give me two minutes, then drive by again. I’ll jump in.”

“It’s a four-door sedan, white. Not the Benz.”

“Okay.”

He was on his stoop as I braked to a stop. He intended to get in the passenger seat. When he saw Kelly he got in the back. I had the car rolling before he could get the door closed.

“Kelly Erlanger, Willie Varner.”

She wasn’t talking to me at that point — still fuming about me tossing her telephone, I suppose — but she tossed off a “Hi” to Willie.

He grunted at her, then addressed me. “Carmellini, you idiot, what have you got your silly ass into this time?”

Keeping my eye on the rearview mirror, I told it straight, leaving nothing out. The stuff about the archivist was classified, of course, as was the existence of the CIA’s Greenbrier River safe house. Being a convicted felon, Willie Varner couldn’t have gotten a security clearance if his life depended on it. As I saw it that night, one more little felonious security breach wouldn’t blacken my character more than it already was. What the heck, the killers that morning probably didn’t have security clearances either.

When I finished my tale of woe, Willie gave a low whistle. “Jesus, Carmellini. Send you out of town for a day and all hell breaks loose. I never saw you so deep in shit before, man. Gonna need a backhoe to dig yourself out.”

“I should have let them shoot me?”

“Sounds like somebody’s gonna do you sooner or later.”

“You going to help or not?”

“Oh, sure. I’ll pop over to Langley tomorrow and ask to see the director. Get this all cleaned up.”

“Terrific.”

“Like, whaddaya want me to do?”

I held the cell phone up, offered it to him. “I took this off the guy who was driving the crashed car. There must be a bunch of telephone numbers on it. I want to know who they belong to. All of them.”

He didn’t reach for the phone. “I don’t want to go back to the joint,” he said. “I been there and I didn’t like it.”

I took my foot off the accelerator and half turned to look at him.

“Oh, all right!” He grabbed the phone. “Goddamn you, Carmellini.”

As we headed back for his house he muttered — loud enough for me to hear, naturally—“As if I didn’t have enough misery in my goddamn life… goddamn Russian assassins now.”

I could never do anything with Willie when he got pouty, so I didn’t try. Kelly Erlanger knew this mess wasn’t my fault, and she was in high dudgeon, too.

When I was braking to a stop in front of Willie’s house, he said, “They bust down my door and shoot my innocent black ass, Carmellini, I’ll torture you in hell until the end of time.”

He got out and slammed the door. As we drove away, Erlanger said, “What if he calls the police?”

“He won’t,” I assured her. “Willie Varner’s my best friend.”

She made a rude noise, which I ignored.

Erlanger was sulking, doubtlessly angry the killers didn’t wax her, when I remembered Dorsey O’Shea.

Well, why not, I asked myself.

Dorsey lived on that estate overlooking the Potomac, five hundred wooded acres complete with tennis court and swimming pool and a little three-story brick shack with fifteen or twenty rooms, five fireplaces, and a dozen commodes. Ol’ Dorsey owed me big for getting her cute little heinie out of the clutches of her porno boyfriend last spring. Surely she wouldn’t mind if Kelly Erlanger and I dropped in unannounced and hid from the law and the outlaws for a few days.

I pointed the car in Dorsey’s direction. We had been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes when Kelly asked, “Where are we going?”

“To visit a friend of mine.”

“She a plastic surgeon? You and I are going to need one if we hope to live out the year.”

“Naw. She’s a rich socialite. Never worked a day in her life, inherited a huge heaping pile when her parents had the grace to die young.”

“So how do you know her?”

“I was her boy toy for a while,” I said flippantly.

“Good Lord! She must be ancient if you were the best she could do.”

“She’s a real old prune,” I snarled. “And she’s got servants. A maid and a cook. Better keep your lip zipped and let me do the talking or we’re liable to wind up in drawers at the morgue.”

“This is your gig, hero. I’ll cling to you and look deeply into your eyes while you talk us into the house. But I want my own bedroom.”

I wasn’t about to tell Erlanger about robbing a safe deposit box for O’Shea. “You don’t know Dorsey,” I explained. “She’s a friend. She’ll be delighted to help. You’ll see.”

Dorsey O’Shea had a long winding drive, which was cool; you couldn’t see the house from the road.

A Porsche was parked in front of the place. I didn’t think it was Dorsey’s, because she always parked in the garage around back. I parked the heap beside the Porsche and hoisted the suitcase from the trunk. Kelly climbed the stairs and crossed the formal stoop and pushed the doorbell.

I joined her on the stoop with the suitcase.

After a bit the porch light came on.

I heard someone unlocking the door, then it opened.

Dorsey was wearing a slinky black silk thing and a set of high-heeled slippers, and apparently not much else. She had a glass of wine in her hand. It was brutally obvious we had interrupted something.

“What in the name of God are you doing here, Carmellini?” she snarled.

Kelly Erlanger tittered. She leaned against the doorjamb and held her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders began to shake as the laughter went off the scale and she fought for air.

I pulled her hands down. “Hey, get a grip.”

Her whole face contorted and she lost it. Just went to pieces.

I picked her up in my arms and marched through the door, pushing Dorsey aside. “Get the suitcase,” I growled at O’Shea. “This woman’s been through hell and needs a place to sleep.”

As I strode through the living room to the grand staircase, I got a gander at Dorsey’s romantic interest, a balding twit twenty pounds overweight standing by the fireplace with his mouth open.

The guest room that I picked had a nice double bed all made up. “A glass of whiskey on the rocks would be appreciated,” I told Dorsey, who followed me up the stairs and stood twisting her hands in the doorway. She scurried away. I stripped off Erlanger’s shoes and put her between the sheets, then sat down on the edge of the bed as she tried to control her sobbing.

“You keep doing that, you’re going to get the hiccups something terrible.”

Dorsey was back with the whiskey within a minute. I took a sip, just a taste test, then offered it to Kelly. She shook her head no.

“Hey, this is medicine. Settle you down.”

She grasped the glass with both hands and took a long pull as if it were milk.

The sobs stopped. She hiccupped once, then belted back another big slurp.

“How can you be so calm?” she asked.

Dorsey was still in the room. I heard her moving behind me.

“What should I be doing?”

“I don’t know.” She worked some more on the whiskey.

“The best thing we can do for those people who got murdered is to make sure their killers don’t get away with it.”

She thought about that, then nodded.

“To do that, we have to stay alive.”

“Okay.”

“These people whacked Goncharov at a top secret safe house. Before we go walking into a police station or FBI office, we had better figure out how they did it. We make one mistake, we’re dead.”

She tossed off the last of the whiskey, then snagged a piece of ice and sucked noisily on it. She looked at Dorsey, then met my eyes. “I want to see the bastards dead.”

“That’s the spirit.” I stood and took the empty glass. “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll talk in the morning. I warn you. Don’t make any telephone calls. The killers know we got away. They’re going to be moving heaven and earth to find us. Let’s not make it easy for them.”

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she objected. “And parents and a couple of girlfriends who really care about me. They are going to be worried sick.”

“We’ll worry about that when and if your name gets in the press.”

“You don’t think that—?”

“Bet the press never hears a whisper. Now get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Okay.”

I shooed Dorsey out of the room and turned off the light, then pulled the door shut.

“Who’s the guy?” I asked Dorsey, referring to the pork chop by the fireplace.

“Just a friend.”

“Sorry about dropping in on you like this. If you’ll give him a raincheck, I’ll tell you how we spent our day.”

To her credit, Dorsey didn’t hesitate. She led the way down the stairs. I went to the kitchen while she said good-bye to her guest. I knew where the liquor and ice were, so I made myself a drink while she attended to that. When she came into the kitchen I was sitting in the breakfast nook working on bourbon and a chunk of cheese from the fridge.

She poured herself some wine, then sat down across from me.

“How you been?” I asked conversationally.

She brushed that aside. “You used the word ‘killers’ to that woman upstairs. This had better be good.”

“Your cook and maid? They here tonight?”

“No.”

I shrugged. We needed her cooperation, so I told her about the bodies in the rain, the assassins, and the fire.

The archivist awoke when the woodstove began cooling. It took several seconds for him to remember where he was, why he was there. The stove still had glowing coals in it, so he added more wood. He left the iron door to the stove open and, when the wood burst into flames, used the dim light to explore his surroundings.

The cabin had no electricity. He found a candle and lit it. With that in hand, he examined the contents of the cupboard. A box of crackers caught his eye. He stripped off his damp clothes, arranged them on a chair to dry, then wrapped himself in the blanket and attacked the crackers.

Bunks lined the wall opposite the door. Fishing rods stood in one corner. An old coat hung from a peg near the door. The little cabin was snug and warm, much like the vacation dacha he used to visit in Russia. With Bronislava.

All that was past, finished. She was dead, murdered.

The killers would probably find him soon. If they thought him dead in the rubble of the CIA outpost, he would have a little time before they came. But they would come. Of that Mikhail Goncharov was certain. He knew the Russian secret police — for more than twenty years he had spent his working life reading their case files. They never gave up. They would hunt an enemy of the state to the ends of the earth no matter what the cost, no matter how long it took. They would get him. One day, as inevitably as the turning of the earth, they would find and kill him.

He had traded his life and her life for…

For what?

He fed more wood into the stove and sat staring at the flames.

He had spent his life surrounded by evil. In the end it had consumed all that he loved. Consumed everything and left him with nothing.