The Twentieth Day of January

CHAPTER 4

Powell sat in silence in the white MG as Dempsey drove him to the airport, and as the car swung into the VIP parking area and stopped, Dempsey turned to look at Powell’s face. It was drawn and tired.

“I’ve fixed a temporary suite for you at the Sheraton and Rod’s arranging office accommodation on the same floor, as from tomorrow.”

Powell turned to look at him.

“Can you fix for Jenny to come over from New York?”

“You mean now, tonight?”

“Yes.”

“That’d be crazy, man. Just asking for trouble. You’ll have the press and security and the whole circus round your neck. Let the dust settle, for God’s sake.”

When Powell didn’t speak Dempsey went on, “Remember, it’s taken weeks to get Laura to co-operate. We need all that; at least until the inauguration. Why rock the boat? An out-of-town girl will be noticed. Look, I’ll be across in Washington tomorrow. I can fix you the prettiest gals in town. At my place. No problems. If anything leaks they’re mine then, not yours. OK?”

“OK. Give her my love.”

“Sure I will. If I see her.”

There was a crowd of reporters waiting in the main hall but the airline staff escorted Powell through to the manager’s office. They were holding the Washington flight, and after a drink he walked across to the plane, accompanied by four security men. Dempsey walked across to the campaign helicopter carrying his own bag.

It was four weeks to Christmas, but the snow was Christmas snow. Drifting slowly past the windows on the thirtieth floor, it lay in big soft cotton wool folds along the window ledges, and was piled up on the balcony, reflecting in pale gold patches the lights inside the apartment. It was so thick that you couldn’t see the Island. You couldn’t even see the East River.

Dempsey sat in his green corduroy jacket, perched on the edge of the polished table, with one long, jeans-clad leg stretched out to keep his balance. As he looked out at the falling snow he slowly sipped a drink and listened to the music. It was Oistrakh playing Khachaturian’s violin concerto off an old Moscow filmtrack. When the music stopped abruptly he slowly turned and looked at the man who stood alongside the tape-recorder.

“They’ll have to give you the Order of Lenin at least, Viktor.”

Kleppe turned, his face impassive as he walked across to the table. He waved to another chair as he sat down.

“There’ll be no medals, my friend. Remember I told them it wasn’t possible. That was your opinion too.”

Dempsey laughed and shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been possible with any other man but Powell, I swear it.”

“He thinks he did it himself ?”

“I wouldn’t say that. He acknowledges helping hands here and there. And when he doesn’t like what he sees he turns a blind eye. You’ve got to remember that he doesn’t know most of what has been done.”

“Is he fully under control?”

“By no means. I can pressure him but I can’t just snap my fingers and make him jump.”

“Moscow assumes that he is under control.”

“Then Moscow should be disabused of that idea. At once.”

“You mean you can’t make him deliver?”

“Sure I can make him deliver; and when I’ve told him the facts of life there’ll be even fewer problems. But it’s not a press-button service. He feels his power, and I don’t want to destroy that. Just programme it.”

“Is there any chance he could renege?”

“No. He’s been sour with ambition from the moment he became State Governor. Every little aspect of presidential privilege and protocol he knows by heart. He can’t wait to get the emperor’s clothes on. Like all the rest of them he’s promised to slash taxes, cut unemployment, and achieve peace on earth. He doesn’t know how he’s going to do it but, by Jesus, he’s gonna do it.” He paused, smiling. “And we’ll show him how.”

Kleppe nodded. “I’m leaving for Moscow tomorrow. I’ll be back next Wednesday. Can you see me that evening?”

“God knows. It’s going to be chaos. Maybe you’ll have to come over to me in Washington or Hartford. And don’t forget we’ll be surrounded by FBI men, White House security, and all the rest of them.”

“D’you want to stay here tonight?”

“No. I promised I’d see Jenny.”

“She’s still got the photographs.”

“I know she has. But I won’t need them, Viktor. I’ve got enough without them.” He laughed softly. “It’s really gonna shake him.”

“Does he still see her?”

“Sometimes. He wanted her to go over tonight. He’s crazy. He uses her like a hooker, but thinks of her place as a sanctuary. I guess he’s fond of her.” He grinned. “Provided he can take her pants off.”

Kleppe shrugged. “It’s a wicked capitalist city, my friend. And I love it.”

Andrew Joseph Dempsey was twenty-nine, slim, about 5 feet 6, and attractive to women who fancied poets with a Byronic air. He wasn’t a poet but he looked like poets are supposed to look. Pale, hollow-cheeked and with fair wavy hair. His aesthetic aura was helped in the eyes of some ladies by his being heir to the Dempsey insurance fortune. But it would be only fair to the younger generation to make the point that with girls up to twenty-five his fortune had small significance. His looks and charm were enough.

Dempsey senior was the son of an Irishman from Skibbereen, who had earned a living gutting fish in New Haven. It had taken him five years of mean living before he had his own business buying and selling fish. And another five before his was the biggest outfit on the coast. People say you can’t go wrong in food because whatever happens people have got to eat. Joe Dempsey and the 1930s proved them wrong. As Joe himself said, “There just weren’t enough Fridays.” The 1930s didn’t bankrupt him, but it had been tough, and so was getting his boy through high school and university.

Joseph Junior had taken the first job he could get and that was as a clerk to an accountant. By the time he was twenty-seven he had his own small insurance business, and by the time he was thirty he was able to look after his old man. People still called him Joe Junior long after his father had died, and not even his friends could say that they really knew him. He was a real businessman, that was for sure, but he dabbled in things that his business circle found odd. He read a lot. History and politics, books about Europe, and different religions. And, as if this part of his life was nothing to do with them, he never talked about these interests. Except to his son, of course. He had talked to him for hours, from the point when the boy’s mother had died, when he was almost eight and a half. And there had been no financial problems in putting his boy through school and university. Nor had there been any pressure on the young man to join the business. In fact there was no pressure for Andrew Joseph Dempsey to work at all. His father was a happy victim of his charm; and even others said that when the boy smiled he looked very like his mother. After a few years painting in Paris he had ended up as part-time art critic on one of New York’s more esoteric magazines, with an occasional contribution to arts shows on TV.

In the New York streets the snow was a grey slush, and as there were no cabs free he walked. A biting wind came off the river as he turned into 42nd Street and it followed him down South Park to 38th.

The porter recognized him and walked over to the elevator to press the button for the penthouse floor. There were eight penthouse flats, and Jenny’s was the one facing the elevator. She paid a little less because of the barely audible noise of the gates opening and shutting. She would have paid extra had it been necessary because her visitors could leave her apartment so easily without being seen.

Dempsey pressed the door-bell of P4 and stood waiting. A couple of minutes later he pressed the bell again and the door opened immediately. Whoever opened it was behind the door and he walked in slowly as the door closed behind him. The girl who stood there, smiling, could have come straight off the cover of Vogue except that she wasn’t flat-chested and she was naked. And her eyes weren’t the eyes of a woman in love, but they were big and blue and friendly.

“Why so long?” he said.

She shrugged. “There was a john on the phone.”

“Business good?”

“Never better. Two conventions in town.”

The telephone rang and he watched her as she walked over to answer it.

“Hello… yes it is… which Joe Taverner is that… from New Haven… yes, sure. What did you want, Frank… well, not tonight I’m afraid, my daddy’s in town… that’d be OK, Frank… that’s right… yes, two hundred bucks… sure you can, anything you want, I’d like that… tomorrow at three then, Frank… you bet. Bye.” She hung up and then took the receiver off the cradle. She stood looking at Dempsey and he looked at her. And finally she said. “Are you gonna stay, Andy?”

“Sure I am, if it’s OK.”

“It’s OK,” she said softly.

Viktor Kleppe had been born Viktor Aleksandrovich Fomin in Yerevan in the Soviet Republic of Armenia. He was seven years old when the war ended, and an orphan. But a bright orphan who went straight from school to university, and from there to the KGB training school just outside Moscow. After two years at the old building in Dzerzhinsky Square he had been filtered into Norway with genuine papers and an identity taken from a headstone in a small churchyard in Stavanger. Two years later he had emigrated to Canada and worked at a boatyard in Hamilton, Ontario, until he’d got a work permit for the United States.

Despite the parsimony of Moscow he had converted the KGB’s 5,000 dollar fund into a small jewellery business that he operated from his apartment in Brooklyn. He was used as a cut-out for one of the KGB men at the United Nations, and then he was given a low-grade solo mission to penetrate the US Navy yard at Brooklyn. Although most of the information he got there was classified, none of it was news to Moscow. But they sent him down to Mexico for a coding and radio course, and when he came back to New York he was told to set up an espionage network to cover computer technology and electronics. By 1968 he was Director of all illegals covering New York and Washington. He dealt only in precious stones now, and his success and reputation were cover enough for the apartment in Sutton Place. His valuable stock was cover enough, too, for the extraordinary security precautions that he installed. He had perfect cover for his journeys inside the USA and overseas, and his business provided an almost check-proof channel for illegal funds which came in as the diamonds and rubies in which he specialized. He had acquaintances and contacts, in business and politics, at every level. And no friends.

He did favours large and small, and never asked anything in return from either individuals or organizations. He wasn’t a soft touch, he listened to the stories, and asked pointed questions; and when he paid out he knew whether it was for the expansion of a business, influence in a political party, a demanding mistress or an impending audit. He made no judgements and gave no advice, but it all went down in the little black books which, when they were full, were sealed in plastic bags and taped inside the cold water tank in the roof space. Not that there were all that many people in New York who could read shorthand in Armenian.

After Dempsey left, Kleppe walked over to the control panel alongside the row of hi-fi equipment. There were twenty-four heat-sensing buttons, a few of them marked with symbols, the majority coloured but blank. Kleppe’s forefinger lightly touched eight of the sensors and alerted the elaborate security controls that protected the apartment.

He walked slowly up Sutton Place, and used a public telephone to speak to his contact at the UN. He turned left at 57th, and two blocks later he took out a bunch of keys from his coat pocket and opened the door of a small jewellery shop. Inside he switched on the showroom lights and walked through to a small back office. On the glass table were piles of invoices and receipts, and he leaned over, looking at a typed list of figures on a sheet of paper as he took off his coat. Still reading, he pulled up the chair and sat down. He reached inside his jacket and took out a small calculator, and one by one he totalled the receipts and invoices. He sat for a moment looking at the totals and then scribbled a note on the pad by the telephone. When the door-bell rang he stood up and walked unhurriedly through the showroom, and nodded to the man who stood there brushing snowflakes from his hair.

“Come in, Yuri, you can do that inside.”

The other man stamped his feet on the mat inside the door, and leaned with one arm against the wall as he slid off his galoshes.

Kleppe closed and locked the shop door, and walked back to the office. He was sitting on the edge of the desk when the other man came in. The man had an unsmiling face, and he lowered his big frame awkwardly into the chair, pulling his wet coat loosely together, as if to exclude himself from the luxurious setting. His hands were enormous, with finger and knuckle joints so large that they looked swollen. One eye didn’t move, and he squinted up at Kleppe with the other.

“Is this place safe, comrade?”

“It has been for the last five years, Yuri. But you don’t have to stay long.”

The man’s big hand lay flat on the glass table and unconsciously smoothed its surface as he spoke.

“Colonel Rhyzkov was not impressed. He assessed him as a neurotic, and arrogant with it.”

Kleppe half-smiled. “Dempsey is an American, well educated, intellectual and independent. He would be bound to react aggressively against a man like Rhyzkov. Dempsey wasn’t impressed by Rhyzkov, for that matter.”

The big face jerked up quickly. “What were his comments about him?”

Kleppe swung a leg as he sat on the table, apparently looking with interest at his black shoe and its silver buckle.

“He just asked if we couldn’t afford to pension off old soldiers.”

“But Rhyzkov isn’t old. He’s barely fifty.”

Kleppe sighed, and turned to look at his companion. He spoke very quietly.

“I suggest you keep him out of sight in this country, Yuri. He gives a bad impression. He’s a political dinosaur and he looks it.”

The big man’s eyes blazed with anger. “That is a scandalous thing to say, Viktor.”

Kleppe smiled with cold, hard eyes. “You must accept my judgement, comrade. I have survived for years among these people, Rhyzkov would not survive for a day. I don’t want him near my operation. Is that understood?”

“Are you threatening me, comrade?”

“Threatening, no. Warning, yes. Moscow have instructed me to do something. Leave me alone to get on with it.”

The one blue eye moved to look at Kleppe’s face.

“Have you no sort of real hold on this man?”

“It’s not necessary, Yuri. The man is committed to us. Has been since he was in Paris. Always will be.”

The big man stood up, his one sound eye still on Kleppe’s face. Then he turned and walked slowly to the shop door and let himself out. It was still snowing, but his mind was too occupied to think of his galoshes. He carried them in his hand. It was a strange, wild country, America. He was glad that he could keep to the Soviet enclave in the UN building, and the apartment on East End Avenue.