Angel Eyes (57 page)

This stark, rather cold shell was in direct contrast to the furniture in the rooms, which was sybaritic. Long leather couches with sensuously curved backs, plush chairs wide enough to accommodate two, luxurious chaise longues across which were thrown animal pelts-all contributed to the bizarre, almost schizophrenic interior design.

"Mr. Michita is expecting us," Yen Yasuwara said to a heavyset man with a scar on the lobe of one misshapen ear.

The man looked from the young lawyer to his two companions and back again. Then he nodded. "This way," he said, beckoning to them. "Mr. Michita is taking tea in the Green Room."

Each environment within Kaijin was named for a different color which corresponded to either its design or location. The Green Room happened to be set as a traditional tea house overlooking a minuscule but dense interior garden. Though the garden was surrounded by walls on all sides, its design and tiered lustiness fooled the eye into believing that one was at some countryside ryokan, where, in the distance, wooded slopes stretched away into the distance.

They were led down a hallway with polished wood floors. The walls were painted a molded pewter and beige to resemble the plaster-cracked walls of an ancient villa. More facade to fool the eye.

Koi noted that they were taken past seven rice-paper and ash-wood fusuma doors. All were closed. She paused outside each one, pressed her fingertips against the rice paper to see if she could pick up any minute vibrations that either movement or conversation would impart. She felt nothing.

And yet she fell farther and farther behind. Once she glanced over her shoulder. What was bothering her? Perhaps it was that the man with the misshapen ear had made no comment concerning the condition of the side of Yen Yasuwara's face. Perhaps it was because he did not seek the identity of Yasuwara's guests. (Of course, it might be that he was already familiar with Big Ezoe, but Koi refused to make such an assumption.) But most of all, she did not trust Yen Yasuwara.

The three men had stopped outside the sliding fusuma to the Green Room, and Koi hurried to catch up. When the man with the misshapen ear put his hand on the door, Koi stopped him.

"I'll do that," she said and, before he had a chance to refute her, she whipped the fusuma back and slammed the heel of her hand into the small of Yen Yasuwara's back, catapulting him into the Green Room.

Nothing happened.

The man with the misshapen ear stared at Koi, and, turning around inside the room, Yen Yasuwara did the same. Big Ezoe ignored them both. He was looking at Kunio Michita, who, sitting cross-legged on the tatami mats, had twisted around.

"What is the meaning of this?" Michita said in a voice of flint.

"I'll tell you," Big Ezoe said as he stepped across the threshold.

Koi heard the soft phut!, saw Big Ezoe's body stagger backward into the hallway. He fell to his knees. His eyes were turning upward in their sockets, and there was blood on his chest where his frantically pumping heart was sending it through the hole made by the bullet from the silenced gun.

Koi did not step into the trap so carefully laid out for them. She saw that she could no longer help Big Ezoe, grabbed the man with the misshapen ear, pushed him hard into the Green Room, and took off back down the pewter and beige hallway.

Behind her, Hitasura stepped carefully over Big Ezoe's body, smiling on the corpse's opaque eyes. In his hand was a Beretta.

"One shot," he said. "That's all it takes to silence anyone."

Then Russell Slade was beside him, saying, "I've got to get back to Tori." Hitasura nodded.

Three of Hitasura's men rushed from the Green Room down the hall. "That's right," Hitasura told them, still staring at Big Ezoe with satisfaction. ''Track her down. Then make quite sure you kill her." But it was clear that he had already found the most important measure of his revenge.

Comrade Volkov is incapable of any real form of understanding. What did Odysseus mean by that? All of a sudden it seemed important for Irina to find out. She felt like Methuselah, stirring from a centuries-old sleep, her brain still not at full speed, still partly cobwebbed, moving through a world she had not made, of which she would never be fully a part.

Using the key Valeri had given her, Irina let herself into his apartment on Kirov Street. It was silent. There was the smell of boiling cabbage down the hall, and Irina quickly shut the door behind her.

She went methodically through the apartment, looking in all the rooms, in the closets as well, feeling somewhat foolish, but less anxious, for all that, when she had determined the place was empty.

She paused at the bedroom window that overlooked the Church of the Archangel Gabriel. She knelt, then bowed her head, made the sign of the cross. She said a little prayer, then rose, turned away.

/ am concerned by your dependence on men.

. . . Seeing the future as the past, Irina thought of the devastation visited on her family when her father had been taken away by the KGB. How are we to live! her mother had wailed. Holy Mother, protect us!

Irina's mother did not sit around the house for long, however. A week after her husband was taken from her, she dressed in her best clothing, went out day after day. Irina assumed she was petitioning the state for the release of lrina's father. Later, when her father did not return, she assumed her mother had found a job.

As it turned out, Irina's mother was far more pragmatic than Irina could have imagined, because one day she came home with a man, and introduced him to Irina and Yvgeny. Pavel was a short, glowering man of partial Lithuanian descent. He was a hod carrier, and his bulging muscles and hulking posture frightened Irina.

Pavel was only recently widowed, Irina's mother told her, and he was very sad. Irina's mother had determined to provide Pavel with a new family.

Though Irina's mother said nothing of this, Irina understood immediately from her mother's demeanor that it was vital that they all do their best to make Pavel happy and content so that he would not leave them.

Yvgeny, older than Irina by four years, reacted badly to another man's presence in his father's house. He was twelve, an age of rebellion. Yvgeny was, by nature, a rebel anyway, and Pavel's presence merely served to drive him further along that path, so that he began to disappear evenings, staying out most of the night.

Irina's mother was so visibly distraught that, once or twice, Pavel went out after Yvgeny, bringing him forcibly back. But after Yvgeny set fire to Pavel's shoes, in the process almost burning down the apartment, Pavel gave up.

"He's not my son," he said with a shrug. "Why should he listen to anything I tell him?"

"But he will get into trouble," Irina's mother said, wringing her hands.

"He's already in trouble," Pavel said. "But you can't chain him to the bedpost."

"Dear God, he needs his father."

Pavel got up and left the room.

Irina's mother and Pavel were married some weeks later. That event hardly helped matters with Yvgeny, who did not show up for the ceremony. During the next months, Irina's mother spent more and more time at church, praying for her son.

Irina found Pavel to be kind but dull-witted. He had no ambition, seemed unaware, in fact, that a world existed beyond the confines of Moscow. Irina remembered him coming through the door each night, white with concrete dust. She used to watch him at the kitchen sink while she was preparing his dinner, meticulously washing the flesh beneath his fingernails free of ground red brick.

His hands were so large they seemed swollen, and when she ran her fingers over his palms, they felt like slabs of wood. He was invariably gentle with her, though he spoke very little, mumbling something unintelligible when she set his dinner before him.

Irina would watch him eat, longing for him to say something, or even look at her, but he seemed totally absorbed with eating, as if he would die if he did not cram every bit of food on his plate into his mouth as quickly as possible.

One night when Irina was alone with him, she chanced to pass the bedroom, and saw Pavel undressing through the partly open door. He had his back to her, and as he raised his shirt over his head, she stifled a gasp. The ridged muscles of his curved back were disfigured by the crisscrossing of many scars. They were not new, but the cuts had been so deep that they never healed properly.

Hearing her, Pavel whirled around, stared hard. Irina was terrified that he would be angry at her, but instead Pavel sat down on the end of the bed, held out his hand to her.

Irina walked hesitantly into the bedroom. She saw her mother's wood and gilt icon on the wall over the headboard, the cheap prints of the Russian countryside her father had loved so dearly, the rocker that was always Babushka's when the family had lived outside Moscow.

Pavel took Irina's hand in his scarred callused ones. "Have I frightened you, koshka? I am sorry. I am not a handsome man. I know I am lucky to have found your mother. Most women would not look at me. My first wife used to mock me, but I like to think she loved me nonetheless." He frowned. "Do you understand this? No, perhaps not." He shrugged. "Well, it has nothing to do with the scars on my back, except that when my father used to beat me, he'd say, 'You beast, you monster! You cannot be mine! What nightmare did you come from!' "

"Oh, how awful!" Irina had cried.

"In a way it was,'' Pavel said softly. ''But only in a way. You see, I was happy to take my father's anger, because I knew that then he would leave my mother alone. On the nights when he would come home drunk and couldn't find me, he'd start on my mother. I can still hear her screams. Oh, but they were terrible! They would make me weep. My brothers would huddle together in the far corner of our room, but I would go out into the hall because I had to help her." Pavel's eyes were turned inward, and at last there was a spark in them. "One night I couldn't stand it anymore. I ran into the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife and-"

"You killed him?" Irina's eyes were opened wide.

Pavel's eyes returned to the present, focusing on her. "No, no, koshka. My father took the knife out of my hand and whipped me. Oh, how it hurt, but I had stopped him from beating my mother, and that was a good feeling, I can't describe how good.''

"What happened to them?"

"My parents? My father died of a liver disease brought on by his drinking. But that was three years after my mother had died.''

"That time must have been bad."

"Bad, yes. Very bad." Pavel looked at her, then impulsively hugged her to him. ''But do not think of these evil things, koshka. I am here to protect you and your mother."

Pavel had kept his promise for as long as he had lived. But he, it seemed, like Irina's father, was in a hazardous profession. He developed acute emphysema from the quantities of harsh dust he inhaled each day on the job. By then Yvgeny was dead, and the family, spinning helplessly out of control, fell apart. Irina's mother was not good at taking care of him-she was not even capable of taking care of her own children.

Irina stared now at the Church of the Archangel Gabriel, where her mother had taken her so often. Abruptly, it, too, seemed alien, part of another time, another place, a sanctuary for another Irina, not this woman who stood here, at last breaking free of her memories, her rage at the helplessness of being a child, and far worse, a female child, set adrift in a world made for men. All this emotional baggage seemed removed, a distant report like thunder booming far off, diminishing with each moment.

White Star.

Irina turned back into the apartment. Somewhere in here, she thought, there must be some hint of the information Valeri held on the nationalist group. She crept carefully through every inch of his closets, looking in the pockets of his trousers and suit jackets, opening unmarked boxes, sifting through piles of linen, old photographs. At his desk she leafed through official papers, personal correspondence, blank paper.

Her exposure to the films of James Bond-a favorite of the students she knew-while she was in America had taught her to look behind pictures hung on the walls, inside the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. In the living room she unzipped slipcovers, got down on all fours, running her hand around the bottom part of the furniture frames.

She ended up in the kitchen, peering inside metal canisters of flour, sugar, and tea to make sure there wasn't some bit of paper secreted there. All her sleuthing came to nothing.

She sat wearily down in a dinette chair, stared blankly at the dark screen of the Toshiba lap-top. An hour and a half of combing through Valeri's apartment, and nothing to show for it.

Sitting here, alone, reminded her of all the mornings she had sat in this very spot watching Valeri prepare wonderful breakfasts. In the winter it was always warm in here, as it had been in Babushka's kitchen, the mouthwatering smells irresistible. It was difficult if not impossible for Irina to reconcile this image of Valeri-and the one of the man so tender and loving in bed-with the knowledge that Valeri was a colonel in the KGB. She recalled his saying that the KGB's new accountability to the Congress of Peoples' Deputies had changed nothing; it had merely swept KGB operatives further underground. She shuddered.

The computer screen, witness to everything, repository of all truths, sat silent and dead, mocking her.

All of a sudden she recalled an American film called Charade she had seen in the small Cambridge art theater, and she began to look for anything in plain sight that would be so familiar the eye would automatically pass over it.

Then her eyes focused, and jumping up, Irina whispered, "My God, it has been visible all the time!''

She turned on the Toshiba. She was familiar with the software Valeri had had installed. Quickly she got a list of the directories on the hard disk, but nothing looked sinister. In fact, all that came up were recipe files. She looked for Macros-"hidden" strings of commands activated by a double keystroke-but could find none. Her excitement faded. Well, naturally, she thought sourly, this isn't a movie. Of course, Valeri could have the White Star material secreted on a hidden floppy disk; but she had been all through the apartment without turning up anything.