“As you wish.” The salesman sank to his knees.
Gavra stepped back, disoriented, before realizing the man was using a large pair of scissors to snip off the price tags.
He paid in cash, and as he was leaving, Rog called, “Sir?”
Gavra looked back. “Yes?”
“Your clothes? The ones you came in with.”
“Keep them.”
That seemed to please Rog immensely.
In the center of the mall, Gavra stopped between another tiled fountain and an information desk where two white-capped girls chewed gum. It was busy here, loud with voices and Muzak. He considered leaving by another exit and stealing a car. But if the police caught him, they’d easily connect him to the body of Lebed Puton-ski back in the motel room registered to Viktor Lukacs. He couldn’t toss the Lukacs passport, because his real one had no American visa. So he headed back to Sears.
Halfway there, he spotted his blond shadow standing beside the dark entrance to Spencer’s Gifts, drinking from a large paper cup of Coca-Cola.
The shadow was staring back at him.
Despite the lessons that Brano Sev had hammered into him during his two-year apprenticeship a decade and a half ago, when he met those eyes, the panic hit him hard. Rationally, he knew that if this man wanted to kill him, he would have tried it back at the motel, but Gavra couldn’t hold on to the numbers anymore.
An old woman bumped into him, then went around, muttering something. The shadow lowered his drink and smiled. Then the panic became solid, because Gavra could see his position here with complete clarity. He was in a foreign, enemy country with false papers, and there was a dead man in his room.
Gavra turned and walked quickly away.
He followed bathroom signs into a white corridor and entered the door marked with an abstracted male figure. He ignored the men lined at the urinals and closed himself in a vacant stall, then squatted, feet on the toilet seat, and tried to catch his breath. He took out his pistol.
Fifteen minutes later, his knees felt like sacks of stone. He tensed when an old man came in, taking the stall beside his, then again when a father and son entered and went to pee together, but he didn’t move. He knew that, whatever orders the shadow was working under, he would inevitably have to come in here.
It was a momentary advantage, but he had trouble visualizing how to utilize it. The numbers were a mess. All he could do was wait for a sign that the man was out there. A voice, a cocked pistol, or someone opening the stalls one at a time.
What he got was water running, then the explosion of a door kicked open.
But it wasn’t his door. The old man in the next stall screamed in pain as the kicked door struck his knees.
Gavra leapt off the toilet, ripped open the door, and pressed his pistol against the base of the shadow’s neck. His hand still shook, but he could visualize it all now. “Drop the gun and kick it away,” he said in English.
The young man did so, kicking a compact Bren Ten over to the sinks, shaking his head in disgust.
When Gavra told him to step back to the vacant urinals, the old man in the stall whimpered. Gavra picked up the Bren Ten and, through the door, told the old man to stay where he was. “This will take a few minutes. Then we’ll go. Keep your door closed.”
He heard a grunt as the old man pushed on his broken door.
His shadow seemed strangely unconcerned by this turn of events. Gavra switched to his own language. “Documents.”
The blond man smiled, hands at shoulder height, and said, “I don’t speak Swahili, partner.”
It was the voice from Lebed Putonski’s telephone. Possibly CIA, or a Ministry agent who did a good impersonation of an American. Gavra repeated his demand in English and watched the man reach slowly into his blazer and take out a brown leather wallet. He handed it over.
“And you were sent by…?” Gavra asked as he used a thumb to open the wallet. “Well?”
The man shook his head.
Gavra found a Virginia driver’s license with a picture of this man, the same passivity, beside the name, FRANK JONES.
“Tell me why you killed Putonski, Frank.”
Jones blinked, as if the question were unexpected. “I’m a simple man. I follow my orders.”
“Who gives the orders?”
Jones grinned. “That’s rich, Comrade Lukacs.”
At least the man didn’t know Gavra’s real name.
The bathroom door opened, and a fat man stepped in. They looked at him as he registered the pistol in Gavra’s hand. He fled.
Gavra took Jones by the elbow and stood close behind him, the pistol in the small of the shadow’s back-the same way, earlier that day, he’d walked Lebed Putonski out of Clover Hill High School.
Lets go.
Gavra pulled open the door, and they slowly entered the white corridor. The Muzak returned, and voices from the mall rolled toward them. When they reached the packed line of stores, shoppers jostled into them. Gavra kept his pistol up under Jones’s jacket.
“It’s impossible,” said Frank Jones.
Gavra’s eyes swept the mall, watching for security guards. “It’s possible.”
But as he spoke, Jones raised his arms high above his head, and that’s when Gavra realized he was right.
“You can’t shoot me, not here. You’ll be caught before you reach the doors. They run your name, and they’ll find a dead man in your motel. Killed with the gun in your pocket.” He turned to face Gavra, hands still up. He had the ecstatic pride of youth in his smile. “Go on, Comrade Lukacs. Get the hell out of here.”
Around them, oblivious Americans cooed at shop windows.
“Look behind you,” he added.
Through the crowd, by the corridor to the bathrooms, the fat man stood with the still-trembling old man and two burly security guards. The fat man was pointing directly at Gavra. The guards started to work their way through the shoppers.
“Good luck,” said Jones.
Gavra ran.
21 DECEMBER 1989
THURSDAY
SIX
Lena kept me up most of the night, shifting and turning in our bed, sometimes saying, “Emil? You awake?” I played dead until the alarm buzzed at six thirty. She was finally deep in sleep, but I got up. After forty years of rising at the same hour, I doubted I’d ever be able to sleep late again. And it says something that this was the thought that first came to me that morning. I didn’t want to think about revolutions, massacres, or even a dead lieutenant general. All I wanted was a little quiet, a little simplicity, and a peaceful retirement party the following night-and even that, I didn’t give a damn about.
Only while waiting in vain for the hot water, then suffering through a cold shower, did I remember what I had promised Agota I would do. It would have to wait until the post office opened at eight thirty; I wasn’t looking forward to it.
The roads were empty for that hour. I was used to swerving around Gypsy families who came into town to search through trash before the Militia arrived to send them away. That should have told me something, but without
