Complex 90 Read online

  I was under the sheet and two blankets and hadn’t quite fallen asleep yet when I sensed somebody at my bedroom door. My hand reflexively went under my spare pillow for the .45 that I’d left in my apartment back in Manhattan. My heart started to work overtime, but just enough ambient light bled in to give me a silhouette of the figure.

  A female figure.

  Baba Yaga?

  A witch with a silver smile, maybe. But a good witch, like Glinda.

  I flipped the switch on the nightstand lamp and it provided a yellow campfire-like glow. She was wearing a belted terrycloth robe, white, which covered all of her, but the hourglass outline of her was evident. The smile gleamed at me. Oddly, she had put on jewelry, several winking gem-studded bracelets, maybe fake, maybe not, but anyway examples of the decadence denied her.

  “The desk gave me a key,” she said. “Since I work with you.”

  “I figured.”

  She came over quickly, a little girl running in the rain, and sat at my bedside.

  “I know I am bold,” she said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “You are America.”

  Not American—America.

  “No argument,” I said. “Listen, kitten, you don’t have to do this. There’s only so much a girl should give up for the state.”

  “To hell with the state.” She gripped my sleeve; she had painted her fingernails the same red as her mouth. “Can you help me?”

  “Help you how?”

  “Get out of this place.”

  “Good thing for you I yanked the bugs from this room. I left the rest active.”

  “Can you help me?”

  I patted the hand that held my sleeve. “Sugar... no. I don’t think so. I have some contacts in this part of the world. Maybe I could put something in motion for you when I got back, but...”

  “It is all right. No strings.”

  Still seated, she half-turned toward me and unbelted the terrycloth robe and dropped it to her waist. She put her shoulders back to emphasize breasts that were already full and high with copper-colored areolae and reddish accusatory tips. The damn things were like the nose cones of missiles she was threatening to launch at me.

  Fire away, a voice in my skull suggested.

  But I brought the robe up around her shoulders and tucked the rockets away. She looked at me confused, and perhaps a little hurt.

  “If I could ever help you,” I said, “it wouldn’t cost you anything. Not everything is capitalism in my country.”

  She began to cry, covering her face with both hands.

  I edged closer to her. “Kitten, no... no tears.”

  “I am not a whore. But I love America. I love the idea of America.”

  And I guess I was as close as she could come to that—in Moscow on the night before November 7, anyway.

  She flung herself into my arms, in a non-sexual fashion, though those breasts were heaving, and I patted her back, soothing her like the kid she was. Then she curled up on top of the covers, and I lay next to her, keeping a little distance. It was a double bed. Plenty of room.

  “Pretty girl like you,” I said, “must have a guy. Stay true to him.” I just hoped the lucky stiff deserved her.

  “I... I had a... guy.”

  “Had one?”

  She snuggled closer. My arms were winged behind me against a pillow and the headboard, and she rested her soft cheek against my bare chest.

  “I was young,” she said. I almost couldn’t hear her. “He was young, too, but older than me.”

  “What became of him?”

  “Khrushchev sent him to Hungary. He didn’t come back.”

  “Sorry, kid. When was this?”

  “In 1957.”

  “No man since?”

  “No man since.”

  That was a damn shame.

  She looked up at me. Her purple eye shadow and mascara were smudgy, but it was kind of sexy. “You... you are a man who has a woman, don’t you? Back home?”

  “I do.”

  “You want to be true to her.”

  “I try.”

  “My man isn’t here. Your woman isn’t here.” She gave me a wicked little smile, though no steel showed. Still, it was worthy of Baba Yaga. “Why don’t we... make détente.”

  She kissed me, that mouth moist with lipstick, wide with passion, her tongue tangling with mine, and the steel of those teeth was cool, almost cold compared to the surrounding warmth and it was odd and it was strange and it was exhilarating.

  Now I unwrapped the entire terrycloth package and she crawled on top of me like a confident cat, and I buried my face in those breasts as they hung over me like ripe fruit, nestling between them, then giving each the attention it deserved but only the hard tips and their surrounding territory could fit in my mouth, there was just too damn much to conquer, and when her head bobbed down below my waist, I heard the little clunk of that silver upper plate as she rested it on the nightstand.

  I guessed those long-haired kids back home had a point.

  Make love not war, all right.

  * * *

  Special passes were required to get into Red Square on November 7, but the ever-reliable Zora Tabakova had them ready for us. The senator was in his topcoat and I was in my trenchcoat, the wind blowing little clouds of crystalline snow around, as we presented our passports to red-cheeked militiamen who regarded us with suspicion as chilly as the overcast day itself.

  The Square today was hung with scarlet bunting and vertically displayed banners of Marx and Lenin, Stalin conspicuous in his absence. This sure didn’t feel like Independence Day back home, and it wasn’t just the weather—no children hung on roofs or peeked from Kremlin windows. The concession stands were limited to guys hawking coffee at a rouble a cup—in this cold, a public service. But there were plenty of people, all right, blocky men in fur hats and blockier women in scarves, brandishing balloons and bouquets and banners.

  Zora got us in a good position to take it all in. We were facing the Lenin—Stalin Mausoleum, a flat-looking dark red stone structure with a modern look unusual for this city. This is where the bodies of Lenin and Stalin were kept on public view, utilizing some mysterious embalming process, maybe courtesy of Madame Tussaud. Thousands daily came to view the bodies—some out of respect, others maybe to make sure the bastards were really dead. We had seen such mourners from our hotel window, lined up four abreast, waiting hour upon hour.

  Not today. Today this was a platform onto which the high pooh-bahs of the Communist regime, after a twenty-four-gun salute, strode out in black coats. The crowd cheered and more guns blasted, cordite meeting snowfall, tinting it blue. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen took up positions before the mausoleum in full military array, and a little gray car with a little gray dignitary rushed out into what I could only think of as centerfield. The car looked like a toy from where we watched, as the mucky-muck went around addressing each contingent with his vehicle never stopping, his voice amplified so loud it was distorted.

  This was followed by a military version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The floats were traveling billboards of what I figured were socialist slogans, with grinning, waving idiots riding along, and that much, anyway, was just like home. For once, Russia looked colorful—young women athletes paraded in purple gym suits and bright orange stocking caps, their male brethren in yellow sweaters and blue trousers. Soldiers marched by, displaying more goose-stepping than a Hitler rally, though one platoon softened the blow by carrying little streamer-waving kids on their shoulders. In the background, brass bands and choruses fought for attention while tanks and assorted armaments rolled proudly, ominously by.

  Maybe it made sense that they had allowed a hawkish senator like Jasper in to see all that hardware firsthand. He would go home and let his fellow congressmen—and his president—know that these Rooskies weren’t kidding around.

  But there was something about it that tried too hard. The military men wore looks of blank resignation not pride
, and for all the cheering, I’d never been at a parade so damn joyless. And I kept thinking about those paper-mache planes on the Riga runway.

  That evening Jasper was due at a meeting at the American embassy. Our driver would take him there and back. I was prepared to go along with him, but he raised a hand and said, “Take the night off. Maybe you can spend a little time with our cute little translator.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Jasper knew Zora had visited me last night—she had slipped out before he got up. On the other hand, we might have made some noise....

  “I feel about as useful as a screen door on a submarine,” I told him. “Or is that tits on a bull?”

  “No, Mike, I’m glad you’re here. This trip isn’t over yet, and not everybody loves us here.”

  After the senator left, I called Zora’s room, but she didn’t pick up. She might have been showering or maybe just stepped out for a while. Looking out the window, I could see that the snow had let up, and Moscow was quiet again. The November 7 festivities had moved indoors, where presumably a lot of sunshine would be filling stomachs.

  My stomach was already filled. We’d eaten at what Zora said was one of the few first-class restaurants in Moscow, the elegant six-story Praga, where I’d had sea bass with a tasty sauce on rice and, among other things, one too many slices of chocolate cake from a justly famed in-house bakery.

  That’s when I decided to go out and walk off my rich meal.

  * * *

  “So you did have a meeting lined up with somebody,” Rickerby said.

  “No. There wasn’t any contact.”

  “You admit thisyoung woman, your translator Zora Tabakova, approached you about helping her defect.”

  “Not defect. Escape. And I had no way to help her do that.”

  “You weren’t meeting her?”

  “Why would I leave the hotel to do that?”

  “For a money hand-off. You made it clear that you might have smuggled in just about any amount with no trouble.”

  “But I didn’t know that till I got in country, and anyway all I had was five Cs. Shy what I’d already spent, by then. No, Art, no contact. Zora was just a cute kid who wanted out of a stinking country. And me? I was just walking off a meal, catching some air.”

  “On a cold night like that?”

  “Yeah, I know. Stupid, right? And I’ve had more relaxing walks...”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hands in my trenchcoat pockets, my breath like a ghost I was chasing, I took a nice brisk walk, even if my Praga feast remained a lump in my belly. Famous buildings were scattered around the Hotel National as if dropped there by a bored giant—St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Bolshoi Theater, this museum, that art gallery. After all the pomp and circumstance of the day, the grand citadel of the Kremlin was asleep on this nearly moonless night.

  Fifteen aimless minutes later I found myself on Arbat Street, once a main drag in Moscow but now a largely residential area. Here the quiet night was broken by the loud talk and laughter of drunken revelers spilling from bars and luxury apartment buildings—not your everyday workers, but party members, enjoying a better life than the rabble naive enough to buy the flapping crap on those banners at Red Square today.

  When the black vehicle pulled up, I thought at first our driver with the limo had come looking for me. Was that the senator on the passenger side? Then I realized the car wasn’t a Zi but its somewhat smaller brother, the Zim, and the guy at the wheel wasn’t in an M.V.D. uniform. Nor was his front-seat passenger the senator.

  Whoever they were, they sat with the motor running as two guys in black piled out of the back. This pair might have been Brooklyn thugs with their ex-pug’s pusses and big bulky bodies wrapped up in big bulky topcoats, only instead of shapeless fedoras they wore childish-looking caps with ear flaps.

  There was nothing childish about the nine millimeter Makarov PMs in their leather-gloved hands; those snubby-looking automatics could do plenty of damage. They kept a drop on me while their superior took his sweet time getting out on the rider’s side of the Zim. Tall, imperious, with an Oriental cast to his features, he sported a gray fur Cossack cap matching the fur on the lapels of his black topcoat. His black boots had a military shine.

  He yanked off my trenchcoat, checked the pockets, found nothing, and discarded it like a candy wrapper. He nodded at my neck and I understood he wanted me to remove my tie. I did, tossing it aside—the guy was pro enough not to let a guy like me wear the makings of a garrote. Then he patted me down, finding no weapons but taking my passport and wallet. Then he retreated to the Zim and opened the back door, giving me a razor-cut of a smile as he gestured for me to get in. Polite as a hotel doorman, which he somewhat resembled.

  In Manhattan, I’d have the .45 with me, maybe even already in my hand in my trenchcoat pocket, and these refugees from a comic opera would be dead or bleeding to death on the sidewalk or in the gutter, depending on where they fell, and the guy at the wheel would just be a blank face behind a spider-web of glass with a hole between his startled eyes.

  But I was in Moscow

  I got in the car.

  The two-man goon squad sat on either side of me in back, their Cossack leader up front.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked, just in case somebody besides me spoke English. “Key to the city?”

  Turning ever so slightly, the Cossack allowed another razor-slash smile to decorate his oblong, hooded-eyed face. He appeared bored. I hoped I wasn’t keeping him up.

  “You are being taken in for questioning, Mr. Hammer,” he said, in a voice as thin as his smile.

  “What about, Ivan?”

  “Perhaps you did not understand. A subject taken in for questioning does not do the questioning.”

  I was a subject now.

  “Thanks for the clarification, Boris. You guys don’t look like M.V.D. What are you, secret police?”

  “There is no such thing as secret police in Russia, Mr. Hammer. That is just another Western phallus.”

  I think he meant “fallacy.”

  “K.G.B., then,” I said.

  No answer.

  And that was it for conversation as I got taken for a Russian ride.

  But if I’d been expecting the same as the Chicago variety, I was wrong. We were not headed for some remote spot in the country and a snowy ditch worthy of a Tsar. The drive was a short one, probably less than two miles, into central Moscow. I’d been working out how to handle these boys with their pistols on either side of me, but suddenly we were there.

  In an area of the city given over equally to residential and industrial, the prison with its several buildings—this one gray, that one red, a stubby tower here, a tall turret there—seemed like just another rundown factory complex, albeit one behind a high brick wall with barbed-wire trimmings.

  We passed the expected towers with their machine-gun cradling guards and scanning spotlights, but when we got to the massive metal main gate, it did not swing open for us. Instead the Zim rolled on by and all the way around to the back of the facility, where a wire-mesh gate in a wire-mesh fence yawned open, welcoming us into a parking lot about half the size of an A&P’s. The Zim slipped in between a Volga and a Pobeda, two of maybe a dozen cars, all parked on my left. The driver stayed with the car—my guess was he was the Cossack’s chauffeur—and was lighting up a smoke as they walked me across the cement apron, no handcuffs, just either of my arms firmly gripped and a crossfire of Makarovs pointed at me. Aging electrical enclosures along the brick wall of a low-slung building to my right indicated this was the ass-end of the place. The guards’ entrance was my guess.

  I managed not to grin. I was being carted in the back way, and these clowns were inadvertently showing me the prison’s weak spot and the best way to get back out.

  And I would need a return trip, all right, and damn soon, or I would be dead. I didn’t recognize this facility, but I knew it was not the infamous Lubyanka Prison, which was where these K.G.B. boys by all rights should be takin
g me. That they weren’t made this an unofficial detention, an off-the-books arrest.

  A kidnapping.

  But what the hell did they want with me?

  The double yellow doors near what looked to be a garage weren’t even guarded. To let us in, the Cossack unbuttoned his topcoat to make use of a key on a ring of them on his belt. For the first time, I glimpsed the Makarov on his own belt, in a cross-draw rig. The flap-cap pair hauled me inside, the Cossack shutting us in and then following us through an area where small snow plows and other maintenance vehicles were parked. We stopped at an iron door that the Cossack unlocked with another key from the ring on his belt, a massive heavy number that stood out from the rest.

  For a change, a guard was waiting inside, a callow-looking kid in a green uniform with star-emblazoned cap; a baby with a baby in his arms, a very special one—a Shpagin PPSh-41, the classic “burp” gun the Russians had handed out like party favors to the Chinese and North Koreans a few years back.

  The guard stayed near the door while we moved down a surprisingly wide, yellow paint-peeling hallway, so any thought I had about getting that burping baby away from this young-looking Russian was fleeting, with the Cossack at my back now and his two minions with their Makarovs on either side of me. I figured to bide my time and stay alert.

  Not that it wouldn’t have been hilarious if those two clowns both shot me with their Makarovs only to have each other’s slugs go through me and into them. Still, not the kind of last laugh I had in mind...

  This area was obviously not cells, and appeared given over to offices and locker rooms, though this time of night there were neither typing sounds nor the camaraderie of comrades to confirm that theory. Still, it seemed I really had been taken in through the ass-end of the place, which would make it easier for them to make me disappear but also gave me a shot at escape, if I wasn’t walked too deep into this place.

  At the end of the hall waited a locked iron door, and through that—the Cossack using another large key—we were finally in an area where the green-painted metal doors with food slots indicated these were cells. A few curious heads peeked out their slots at us, saw nothing interesting, then pulled back in like turtles into their shells.