'We have no choice,' Leon Witold said. 'We don't know who this Russian is, and even if we did, what would we do about him? We're not operators.'
'I was an operator,' Grandpa said.
Leon said, with exasperation, 'Grandpa, that was seventy years ago, for Christ's sake. Things have changed.'
Carol Spivak said, 'Why should they hurt us? Seventy years of good service for the motherland, and now things change, so we retire. So what? They can always set up another ring.'
'But we're in place, and we're good at this, and they never lost a single person who they sent here,' Wanda Witold said, a note of despair in her voice. 'We have the shelters, we can move people in and out, we can get them down the St. Lawrence and out through the Maritimes… That's what they want. They'll never let go.'
More silence, finally broken by the old man.
'So we talk, talk, talk, delay, delay,' Grandpa said. 'That's all we can do, if they come back.'
They argued some more, and came to only one conclusion: they would resume the old emergency routines. They decided they would not meet again except in the most extreme circumstances.
'I don't think they could have surveillance in place this quickly,' Grandpa said, and they all looked up at the ceiling, as if for bugs. 'But from now on, especially with the Spivaks, and with me, no face-to-face contact. Somebody knows us, but we don't know if they know the Witolds or the Svobodas. If the Witolds or the Svobodas need to get in touch, or we need to get in touch with them, we use cold phones and code.'
Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: 'What's going to happen to us?' she asked Grandpa Walther.
Grandpa shook his head: 'If we're careful, we should be okay. Back in the forties, and the fifties, there were some close calls, but we came through. Compared to those times, this is nothing. We stay calm, we deal with one fact at a time.'
They left in ones and twos, carrying white paper bags full of doughnuts. Carl drove the Taurus station wagon. After the meeting, he felt more and more like a spy, and he watched the street with narrowed, careful eyes. Grandma rode in the passenger seat, while Grandpa sat in the back with her wheelchair. Grandma watched the street go by, and suddenly asked Grandpa, 'Do you remember when we came down here to dance?'
Carl looked at her: her head was up. This was the first intelligible thing she'd said in a week.
'Every day,' Grandpa said, looking out the window at storefronts. 'Every day I remember: I liked the snowy nights, when we'd come down, and see the lights all along the street with the big flakes coming down. Remember that wet-wool-on-the-heating-register smell? When you'd cook your mittens to dry them out. You don't smell that anymore, everything is synthetic.'
Grandma nodded, smiled, and dozed, gone again.
'What's going to happen?' Carl asked after a minute.
'That's what we need to talk about,' Grandpa said. 'You learned something valuable today-you saw it, anyway. Groups of people have trouble deciding anything. They also have a tendency to panic. Sometimes, for the safety of the group, you must act in secrecy, on your own, to protect the group. You have to do it even if the group is against it, because they are too frightened or too divided. You must act! That is the thing. To act!'
'I can act,' Carl said. 'But I don't know what to do.'
'Think,' Grandpa commanded. His eyes were sparkling.
Carl thought, then said, 'The only thing I can think of, is we have to… cauterize the wound.'
Grandpa recognized the phrase-he'd used it himself, before the killings of Oleshev and Wheaton. Carl had picked it up. He was pleased.
'How do we do that?'
Carl thought again for a moment: 'We could get rid of the Spivaks, all of them. Couple of problems-it'd be hard to kill four people. You'd have to do it all at once. Then, the others might figure it out. Or maybe just freak out and go to the cops. Some of them are not so… emotionally tough as we are.'
'Good. Do you think you could do it? I mean, anyway? Handle it, technically?'
He was asking whether Carl could go through with it. 'Sure. Not a problem. But I'm not sure we could control what happened afterwards.'
'I'm not sure, either. Because that's so cloudy, we put it aside. The other problem is, we still don't know what's going on. I can make a phone call tonight-I might be able to find something out.'
'Call who?'
'A man in Moscow. If he's still alive. He should be, he'd only be, let's see…' He did some quick calculation, moving his lips. '… about seventy. He might be able to tell us something.'
'What if he can't?'
'The other possibility is that we simply sow confusion. We deliberately confuse everything, so that nobody knows what is coming from where. Except us. My Russian is still good; if we make the right phone calls, make the right threats, we could perhaps create a charade, an illusion, that this is all gang warfare.'
'Boy.' Carl was impressed, both by the analysis, and the fact that Grandpa could call a man in Moscow. 'When would you make the call?'
Grandpa looked at his watch. 'Right now. It's four o'clock in the afternoon in Moscow.'
'I've got to be at school in an hour.'
'That's enough time. If my friend's number doesn't work, I don't know how I'd find him.'
They went out to a Wal-Mart, left Grandma in the car. Grandpa used a phone card from a public phone, looked at a piece of paper as he punched in a long phone number, then the card number. There was a wait, and then he blurted something in Russian, smiled at Carl, gave him a thumbs up, and then turned his back, hunched over the phone for privacy, and started talking. Carl knew no Russian; he stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
Grandpa was on the phone for fifteen minutes, doing a little talking, but mostly listening. When he was done, he hung up, looked at the phone for a few seconds, then turned to Carl and said, 'Let's go.'
On the way out, when they were clear of other customers, he said, 'I love to hear the old language. You should learn to speak Russian. It's much more musical than English. A beautiful language.'
'Maybe when I go to college,' Carl said. 'What'd the man say?'
'Bad news, I'm afraid. He says the department would do anything to find Oleshev's killer. Nobody cares about Oleshev except Maksim Oleshev, but many people care about Maksim. There is a struggle going on in Moscow, a fight over the oil, and Maksim is a big man in the fight. Putin wants him; and Maksim wants the killer.'
'That puts me in a tough spot,' Carl said, grinning and wrinkling his nose.
'It's not funny,' Grandpa said. 'It puts all of us in a tough spot. My friend says that they would throw all of us overboard if it would make Maksim happy. Except… he says that they don't know exactly who we are. That is why Nadya Kalin is here.'
'And we can trust him? Your friend.'
Grandpa smiled and tipped his head. 'Not exactly… trust. But. He is with the party. He is like me, he is a believer. I think he was as happy to hear from me as I was to talk to him-for him to know that there are still people out here, working.'
Carl looked at his watch. 'I've got to get going, get you home and get to school.'
'And I've got to think,' Grandpa said. 'It's like a chess problem, with so many pieces. But you should be ready, because one way or another, we have to act. Don't doubt it.'
'I'm ready,' Carl said. 'Should I come over this afternoon?'
'Yes… Maybe I'll have figured out something. This Kalin, and her shadow… they are a problem.'
On the way back to Grandpa's, Grandpa said, 'We need some way to communicate. Everything can be tapped, now. Cell phones, everything. We could work out a routine where you come over four or five times a day. Before school, at lunch, after school… but in an emergency…'
'Walkie-talkies,' Carl said.
'What?' Grandpa focused on him.
'When I went hunting with the Wolfes last year, old man Wolfe gave us walkie-talkies,' Carl said. 'Everybody had one-he uses them with his construction company. You couldn't call me if I was down in Duluth… but around town here, you could. He said they've got a range of six or seven miles, lots of privacy channels, everything, so they'd cover the town. But they're expensive.'
'How much?'
