The train was in motion.
Nothing could stop it now, unless Hel backed out – which he wouldn’t – or Singleton called it off, which was unlikely.
Still, Haverford hoped he would and sat waiting for the “abort” cable.
54
VOROSHENIN SAT by the phone.
The damn thing was quiescent and the clock not his friend. Barely three hours now until his appointment with Hel.
The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that “Guibert” was Hel and the more concerned he became that whatever Hel’s assignment with the Americans, he had really come on a mission of vengeance.
If this were Russia or one of the Eastern European satellites, he would simply have the young man killed. Or if it were a city in Western Europe, he could arrange for his quiet disappearance. Even in China, just a few years ago, a few coins and a whisper in the right ear and the young Hel would be fish food by now.
But not in China these days. Even with the Soviets’ enormous influence, Beijing wouldn’t easily tolerate an unsanctioned killing on its territory. There would be an incident, and an incident could very well send him back to a cell in Lubyanka.
Better there than dead, though, he thought, fingering the pistol he had slipped into his belt that morning before leaving his quarters. If it is Hel, and if he does intend to kill me for some fancied transgression against his slut of a mother, I do not have to play the sacrificial lamb.
They say he killed that Jappo general with a single strike to the throat.
Well, let him try.
I have three bodyguards, all trained in judo, all armed. And if somehow he gets through them… Voroshenin touched the gun butt again and felt reassured.
But why is my hand shaking? He took another sip of vodka. When this is over I shall have to do something about the drinking, he thought. Perhaps go off to one of those spas in the mountains. Clean air, exercise, and all that.
Hopefully it won’t come to my shooting Hel, he thought. Hopefully they will have picked up the elder Guibert, sweated him, and made him admit that his real son died in that car crash. Then I will not have to worry about it at all. I can enjoy the opera knowing that young Hel will be singing a different kind of aria, to a tune of Kang’s composition.
But ring, damn phone.
55
THE OLD MAN WAS tougher than he looked.
“I have met the Surete,” he told them, “the Gestapo, L’Union Corse, the Green Gang. What do you
They threatened to kill him.
He shrugged. “I’m old. I take one decent shit every three or four days, get one good hard-on a week, if I’m lucky. I sleep three hours a night. Be my friends, kill me.”
They threatened to hurt him.
“What can I tell you that I haven’t told you?” Guibert answered. “You show me pictures, I’ve told you, yes, that is my worthless son. The one who thinks that money squirts out of chickens’ asses and that you should always hit on sixteen. Hurt me.”
He was a tough old bird, and one that didn’t sing.
“ ‘Is Michel in Beijing’?” he parroted after they had wrenched his thin shoulders almost out of their sockets. “What can I say except that he’s supposed to be. Does that mean he really is? You tell me.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Supposed to be buying guns,” Guibert said, “but if I know my boy, he’s chasing pussy. Is there still pussy in Beijing? If you’re looking for him, look there. If you don’t find him, look for a pair of loaded dice. He’ll be betting against them.”
“Your real son died in a car accident,” they told him. “This man is an imposter.”
“I don’t know my own son? Why do you bother to ask questions of a man who doesn’t know his own child? How stupid must you be?” Then the old man got aggressive. “This is Hong Kong. There are laws here, not like the shitholes you must come from. I know every cop and every gangster. The tongs call me ‘sir.’ You let me go right now, I’ll forget about this, call it a mistake. You don’t, I’ll be tickling your feet while you’re hanging from meathooks. Now untie me, I have to take a piss.”
They untied him and walked him into the toilet.
The phone rang.
Voroshenin had the receiver in his hand before the ringing stopped. “Yes?”
“He’s tough.”
“So?”
“We think he’s telling the truth.”
Voroshenin didn’t. He looked up at the wall clock. Three hours and fifteen minutes. “Have one more go.”
“I don’t know what to -”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” Voroshenin said.
When Guibert came out of the toilet, Winifred was on her knees in front of the chair, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth wrapped around the pistol barrel that his interrogator held in his hand, his finger on the trigger.
The interrogator looked at Guibert and said, “Three, two…”
56
NICHOLAI EASED into the steaming bath.
Karma’s gift to him, he thought as he lowered himself into the near-scalding water, took a deep breath, and then exhaled, relaxing away the slight pain. Then he lay back and let the hot water soothe his muscles and his mind.
As a boy he would spontaneously slip into a state of total mental relaxation, his mind taking him to lie down in a serene mountain meadow. But the vicissitudes and sorrows of the war had stolen that tranquility from him and he mourned that loss deeply, as he also regretted the loss of his freedom and control over his own life.
The best that he could do now was to control his breathing and clarify his thoughts.
That this was in all likelihood his last night in the trap of life saddened him only because of Solange. Recalling the Buddhist tenet that all suffering comes from attachment, he acknowledged that he was in love with her, in a very Western, romantic way, and that the thought of leaving her was painful.
The thought that Diamond and his minions would escape justice also saddened him, but he comforted himself with the idea that karma was perfect.
So if I live, he thought, I will avenge myself; if I die, let them be reborn as maggots on a dung heap.
He turned his mind to his mission.
Envisioning it step by step, he walked himself through the evening. Chen would pick him up at the hotel and drop him at the theater. He would go to Voroshenin’s box, sit down, and enjoy the opera. At precisely the right moment – as the drums pounded and the gongs clanged – he would strike his mother’s tormentor with a single, explosive blow to the heart. Then he would simply walk out of the theater, elude his watchers, and make his way to
