The Day Before Midnight (38 page)

The doctor simply glared at him. Then he stepped back and let him in.

Uckley stepped into a terrible silence. The two older people sat on the sofa. The woman was crying. The man looked numb. There wasn’t enough light in the room. The neighbor, Kathy Reed, fussed at the dinner table. She had evidently brought some casserole over, but nobody had eaten and the food lay on the plates glazing with grease in the dim light. There were still chips of wood and plaster and shreds of tufting everywhere from the gunfire, and a gritty layer of dust lay over everything, but evidently the police had covered the blown-out windows with plastic. The room filled Uckley with the nausea of memory and terror.

“Kathy,” said the doctor, “do you think you could go up and get the girls? This officer says it’s urgent that he talk to them.”

“Haven’t they been through enough—” began Mrs. Reed, her voice rising with emotion.

“I’m sorry,” said Uckley. “It’s necessary. But maybe I only need the oldest one. Uh, Poo?”

“Bean,” she said. Then she started up the stairs. But she turned.

“You were so
positive
this afternoon. You were so
excited.
And look what happened. Look what you did to this family.”

Uckley didn’t know what to say. He swallowed again.

“They were such a happy family. They were a
perfect
family. Why did you have to do this to them?”

Uckley just looked at his shoes. The doctor came up to him.

“Were you the man who went upstairs?”

“Yes,” said Uckley, swallowing. “You’ve got to believe I didn’t want anything like that to happen.” But the doctor looked as though he didn’t believe it at all.

In a few minutes Kathy Reed brought Bean down the stairs. The girl’s face was wrinkled from sleep, and she had on a pink robe and a pair of rabbit slippers. She was scrunching her eyes, but when she saw Uckley waiting for her, she just grew still and grave. She had a peculiar presence to her, an almost eerie luminescence. Kathy Reed led her down the steps to Uckley.

“Hi there,” he said, his tone chipper. “Hey, I’m real sorry I had to wake you.”

“You don’t have to talk to her like a chipmunk,” said Mrs. Reed.

Uckley had no talent with kids. He somehow never saw them, and his few exchanges with them in the past had been perfunctory and stupid. But now, looking at the girl, her solemn face, her pale button nose, her huge, dark, questing eyes, her perfect little hands gathered in front of her, he had the terrible urge to kneel and clasp her to him and beg her for forgiveness. The skin of her neck was so soft.

“My name’s Jim,” he said. “Honey, I have to ask you to look at some pictures.”

“Are you going to shoot me?” she asked.

The ache he felt splintered into a couple of thousand pieces, and each of the pieces began to hurt.

“No, honey. What happened was a terrible, terrible accident. I am so sorry. I’d do anything if it wasn’t so.”

“Is my mommy in heaven? Nana said you sent her to heaven because Jesus wanted her as his best friend.”

“I guess so. Jesus, uh”—he didn’t know what to say—“Jesus is sometimes a mysterious guy, you know. But I guess he knows what’s the best thing.”

She nodded gravely, considering.

“Jesus loves us very much but he loved Mommy best of all. My mommy will be very happy with him,” she said.

“I’m sure she will. Now, sugar, please, do me this one little favor and I’ll get out of here forever. I’ve got some pictures. They sent them from Washington. I want you to look at them and tell me if these are the men who took your daddy away.”

He led her to the table, and she went through the pictures, one after another, in her deliberate way.

Finally, she picked one, and handed it over.

“Him. He was here this morning. He’s my daddy’s new boss. He took him to his new job. He was Herman’s friend.”

Uckley looked at the picture. It displayed the remarkably robust face of an obvious professional soldier, a man with a broken nose, a short crew cut, and a set of hard, flinty eyes. He wore some kind of camouflage tunic, and Uckley could make out the spout of an AK-47 over his shoulder, obviously carried on a sling. The picture had a fuzzy quality in its background, as if taken from hundreds of feet away through an extremely powerful lens.

He scanned the accompanying sheet.

“Is he a nice man?” asked Bean.

“Yes, honey, he’s a very nice man.”

“Will he bring my daddy back to me?”

“Yes, honey. I promise you, he will.” He looked at her eyes, bold and honest. “Honey, I promise you, hell bring your daddy back to you.”

The phone buzzed and buzzed.

“Hello?”

Gregor’s heart leapt! The sound of her voice was lyric pleasure, so intense he thought he’d gag. He was almost too dumbfounded to say anything, and then he found himself blurting out, “Molly, oh, Molly, it’s you, sweet Jesus, it’s you!”

What he heard in response was equally marvelous.

“Oh, God, Gregor, darling, I was afraid I’d missed you and you weren’t going to call anymore! Gregor, I’ve got it! You won’t believe what’s going on, Gregor. It’s incredible, and I’ve got the whole story for you.”

“Molly, what is it? Please, tell me now. I have to know.”

“Gregor, this is more than you could have hoped for. You won’t just save your career, you’ll make it. It’s incredible. I’ve got it all for you. Where are you?”

Gregor was in another bar, this one on 14th Street, one of the few remaining go-go places in the District itself.

“Uh, I’m in Georgetown,” he lied.

“Gregor, how soon can you get here? I’ve got documents, I’ve got pictures, I’ve got reports. God, you won’t believe it. It’s going on right now, out in central Maryland. It involves—listen, darling, get here as fast as you can.”

“I’m almost there now. Oh, Molly. Molly, I love you, do you know that? I love you, I’m so grateful.”

Sniveling with joy, Gregor lurched out of the bar. The night air was fresh and clean; it smelled of triumph. He
needed a drink to celebrate. He looked, saw a liquor store open down the block. But when he got there and stepped into its fluorescent brightness, he found he had only three dollars.

“Vodka. A pint, how much?” he demanded.

“Russian stuff’s best,” the clerk said. “Stolichnaya, four twenty-five. Absolut, five fifty. Then, there’s—”

So Gregor, as he had that morning, bought something called Vodka City, an American concoction which, quickly sampled outside, had the mere strength of a small woman’s slap to it and didn’t quite amplify the joy he felt hugely enough.

Well, no matter. Any vodka being better than no vodka, he took several more hits on it as he ran back to his car, which had picked up a fresh parking ticket. Merrily, he crumpled the ticket into a ball and sent it sailing into the street. He climbed in, and drove to Alexandria.

It took twenty minutes and several more bolts of the drink before he pulled into her parking lot. He’d left it this morning in the dark and now he returned in the dark: full circle. From despair to triumph, his course magically assured by superior cunning and tactics. He slid the vodka into his coat pocket and raced to the foyer. There he took the elevator up and all but flew down the hall.

He knocked.

She threw the door open.

“Gregor!”

God, what a lovely woman! Molly, as usual, wore a muu-muu, but her meaty shoulders gave her the odd look of a professional football player. She’d applied two great vivid smears of blue eye shadow; her hair was waved and exquisite; and she wore, at the end of her stocky legs, two gold lame strapped high-heeled slippers. Her toenails were painted pink.

“I wanted to look beautiful for this evening,” she said.

“You do, my dear. Oh, you do, you look glorious.”

She took his hand and pulled him into the room. He was so eager, his heart was beating like a metronome. He had an erection like an SS-24. He was set to blast off. The room was
candlelit; he could see a bottle of wine on the table in the rear and two beautiful dinner settings.

“I thought we had something to celebrate,” she said.

“We do! We do! This means I can stay forever!”

“Please sit down darling,” she said. “May I pour you some champagne?”

“Champagne! Yes! God, wonderful!” The champagne would combine with the vodka to incredible sensations.

He sat in the big easy chair in the dim living room. She returned immediately with an unopened bottle and a glass.

“Now, darling. I’m all ears,” he said, smiling in the face of her extraordinary radiance, sucking all the pleasure from the moment he could.

She sat opposite from him.

“Now, Gregor,” she said, “there is one little thing I should tell you before I begin. One widdle ting.” The baby talk brought a foolish, girlish smile to her plump face. “Puwheeze don’t be angry with me.”

“I forgive you anything,” he said. “I absolve you of all your sins. You can do no wrong. You’re an angel, a dear, a saint.” He took her surprisingly tiny little hand and looked into her eyes. Odd he’d never really noticed before now, she didn’t even have cheekbones. Her face was a white pillow with eyes.

“I am also,” she said, “a special agent in the Counter-Espionage Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She smiled.

He thought it was a hilarious joke.

“Oh, Molly, you’re such a
character,”
he said, laughing, and then he noticed that the reason the room was so dark was that there were so many other people in it, and he was so swiftly gobbled up by men in suits, it stunned him. The lights came on. An agent walked from the bedroom and snuffed the candles. Others emerged from closets, the bathroom. It was like the terrible moment at the theater when the play is over, the lights come up, and you see you’ve only been in a drafty old building all along.

Molly stood.

“Okay, Nick,” she said. “He’s all yours.” She turned to
him. “Sorry, honey. Life’s sometimes tough. You’re a pretty good guy, but Jesus, you’re a shitty spy.”

Molly disappeared into the bedroom, and a middle-aged man sat across from him.

“And so,” he said, “we meet at last, Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov. Name’s Mahoney. Nick Mahoney. I’ve been a close observer of you for two years now. Say, isn’t that Molly a peach? One of the best. She’s really terrif, huh?”

“I—I—”

“Now, Greg old guy. We got us a problem.”

Gregor stared at him, stupefied.

“Can I have a drink?”

“Sorry, Greg. Need you sober. Oh, Jesus, do we ever need you sober.”

Gregor looked at him.

“Greg, we got us a real, pure-D mess. A grade-A, godawful, major league mess.”

He looked at his watch.

“You ever heard of a guy named Arkady Pashin?”

“I—”

“Of course you have. Well, right about now, Arkady Pashin is the most powerful man in the world. He’s sitting inside an American missile installation fifty miles outside of Washington and he’s about to start the Big One. Shoot off a bird that will start the last dance. He’s got some Spetsnaz jokers along with him to see that he gets his way. You’ve heard of Spetsnaz?”

Gregor swallowed. “Raiders. Cutthroats. Heroes. The very best killers, it is said. But
why?”

“Well, evidently he’s trying to goad your people into a first strike while there’s still weapons parity. He’s going to fire a ten-warhead bus targeted against your command and control network, and he knows you guys will launch on warning. Presto, bingo, World War Three. He knew he could never get it by the Politburo. So he just did it, you know? Can you feature that? I mean, you kind of have to admire the guy’s gumption.”

Gregor said nothing. Yet it sounded like Pashin.

“Ever hear of some kind of nutsy outfit called Pamyat?”

“Memory,” said Gregor. “Lunatics. The ones who hate Gorbachev and glasnost and INF and everything modern and hopeful and wish to return to the years of Stalin. Yes. They frighten all of us.”

“Yeah, well, it appears your pal Pashin is a charter member. He’s got a great memory, that’s for sure. Well, the long and the short of it is that we have about eight hundred of our best boys up there, just about to jump off for what looks like a very busy evening, to try to stop this guy from—”

“But the world will end when you retaliate,” Gregor said in horror.

“There you go,” said Nick Mahoney with a phony smile. “Our strategic people think there’s another wrinkle. That it’s not enough for Comrade Pashin to twit your people into a first strike, but that he’s also got to do a little something to give your team a big advantage in the seven-minute envelope between launch and detonation. So that when our birds fly, they fly poorly, they are uncoordinated, they are clumsily handled. Hell, brother, they may not even fly at all. You ever hear of this doctrine the intellectuals call ‘decapitation’?”