mixture.”
Two of the three remaining boxes contained money, each to the sum of $100,000 in mixed denominations.
“But Carmine, he doesn’t need money!”
“His cache for a fast getaway,” Carmine explained. “Once he got to Canada, it’s enough to hire a private jet to anywhere.”
The last metal box contained a 9mm Luger automatic with spare clips and assorted travel documents; among the passports was a Canadian one for a Philippe d’Antry.
“There are none here for his wife,” Delia said sorrowfully.
“Rats and sinking ships, I’m afraid. Just as I’ll bet he’s left her to fend for herself in this crisis. If she has any sense, she’ll have a cache of her own, and disappear.”
“Remain only the exercise books,” Delia said, handing them to Carmine.
“Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,” he said as he tossed each of the top five onto the FBI pile. “Ah! We have English!” He read for a moment, then looked at Delia, his face puzzled. “It’s as if he has two personae. The spy thought, wrote and worked in Russian. The killer thought, wrote and worked in English. His entire life is compartmentalized! If ever a man was made to be two different men, it’s Mr. Philip Smith a.k.a. whatever his Russian name is.” He reached for the phone. “I’d better tell Desdemona I won’t be home early. With any luck, I’ll find out who his assistant is, maybe even his hirelings.” He held up five of the exercise books. “Straight down the middle. Five in Russian, five in English. And I can’t leave until I’ve read my five and digested their contents.”
He leaned over, took Delia’s hand and lightly kissed it. “I can’t thank you enough, Miss Carstairs, but your part in this is done. Go home and relax.”
“It was my pleasure,” Delia said gruffly, “but I’m not going home. First, I’m off to Malvolio’s to get you a snack and one of Luigi’s thermoses of decent coffee. A burger, a bacon roll or a roast beef sandwich?”
“A burger,” he said, crumbling. Two dinners wouldn’t hurt for one night, would they?
“Then,” she continued, “I’m going around to see Desdemona and Julian. I’ve been so busy since they got back from England that I haven’t had a chance to find out how my potty papa is.”
“From what I’ve been told, potty,” Carmine said.
The first exercise book contained the sketchy details of Smith’s occasional forays into crime during the first fifteen years of his tenure on the Cornucopia Board. The first entry of all, however, predated his appointment.
“The first Skeps has to go,” it said in part. “My orders are explicit, as the son will be much easier to fool. It will be perfect KGB-as much powder as will fit on the head of a thumbtack, made from the same plant my mother used as an aperient when I was a child. A smaller dose would do it, but the swifter the better. In the first teaspoonful of the caviar I buy him, old miser. He wonders at its quality.”
And then, some entries later: “The old man died, and the clock stopped, never to go again. A good song, I like it. The second Desmond Skeps has inherited, and Phil is there. Phil is always there. But I have refused to sit on the Board.”
Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.
It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB-a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.
There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!
The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.
“I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger-rarely expressed until now-let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”
Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.
He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I
“Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.
“I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…
“Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’
“I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it-convincingly. I have my lever!”
What a world you live in, Mr. Smith, Carmine thought, the book dropped as he poured himself another mug of coffee. What a world you live in! Dog-eat-dog is too kind. Snake-eat-snake, more like. It’s Smith who is the financial genius, not Desmond Skeps, not Erica Davenport. They were his pawns, he used them to build that company ever upward. More and more secrets. And that’s how come he could finally dispense with Erica-a written confession for Moscow, himself the head honcho of Cornucopia. He didn’t fear her Moscow bosses anymore.
His plans were made with KGB thoroughness.
An entry on the tenth of December read: “Not a peep about Ulysses the master spy as yet, but I have been thinking, and thinking hard. If there is a peep, I must be ready to move as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and with the same devastation. It won’t be Desmond who makes the accusation-I’ve spoken to him many times since the banquet, and he suspects nothing. All he feels for me is gratitude that I gave him my special hangover cure. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he brought Dee-Dee Hall, and when I asked him why he had, he looked utterly blank. In the end he said it must have been a combination of booze and her ability to perform fellatio-he was
