TEN

  “PROWLER OR WHAT?” the doctor asked us an hour later.

  Jerry was pale but had a cocky look on his homely face. He was stretched out on the sofa in pajamas and bathrobe. The Luger slug had gone clear through the fleshy part of his left thigh. His right temple and cheek were lacerated and swollen where he’d been kicked.

  “Better just say ‘or what’ and let it go at that,” he told the doctor.

  “I can’t do that. If I treat a gunshot wound I have to make a police report, Jerry.”

  “Let it go, Jake.”

  “I’m not supposed to,” Jake said. He was a small slender man about Jerry’s age, with close-set smiling eyes. Theirs was no doctor-patient relationship. Jake lived half a mile down the road with his wife and two kids. They were old friends.

  “Bridge,” Jerry said.

  “What?”

  “Not to mention tennis. Find yourself another partner.”

  “This,” Jake said with a reluctant grin, “is blackmail.”

  “Call it what you want. But no police report, please. My law firm wouldn’t like it.”

  “Your law firm,” Jake said dryly. He looked at me. “Are you a member of the firm, Mr. Drum?”

  “I’m a free lance,” I said.

  “A free lance what?”

  “Private detective.”

  Jerry said: “Make something out of it. Lawyers hire private detectives all the time.”

  Jake looked at Christy. She shrugged. She looked worse for wear than her husband did. Jake winked at her.

  “I,” Jake said formally, “am prepared to bargain. The whole road plays a guessing game about you, Jerry. I won’t say a word, but I want to know. Tell me and I’ll forget about that police report.”

  “I signed something,” Jerry said after a small silence. “It says I can’t tell.”

  “I’ll bet it says you can’t even tell your wife, but she knows, doesn’t she? Don’t you, Christy?”

  “No comment,” Christy said. “I’m sorry, Jake.”

  “CIA?” Jake said suddenly.

  “Actually,” Jerry said, “I’m a Russian spy. Mr. Drum here is the paymaster. We just had a gun battle with the FBI. Fortunately, they’re lousy shots.”

  “CIA,” Jake said, not making it a question this time. “You the same as admitted it.”

  “I can’t help what erroneous conclusions you draw.”

  “I require medication, Christy,” Jake said. “In the form of a large Scotch and water. And since this husband of yours has the constitution of a bull and isn’t even suffering from shock, he can have one too.”

  “I’ve been shot at before,” Jerry said. “Sometimes their aim is better. I’m used to it.”

  “Not here in Westchester you haven’t.”

  “All over the world. I’m a portable target.”

  Christy made drinks for all of us. “Is there any chance they’ll come back?” Jake asked. “If there is, a police report’s a pretty good idea.”

  “They won’t come back,” I said. “They got what they came for.”

  “You sound bitter,” Jake told me.

  “I let a friend down,” I said.

  “Jerry?” Jake guessed. He looked puzzled.

  “No,” I said.

  “Look,” Jake said, “I’m still bargaining. I don’t have friends and patients who are CIA agents all the time. I want to know what’s going on. We’re old friends, for Chrissake. You want to give me an ulcer or something? Let me in on it, will you? It will stop right here.”

  Jerry sighed. “Colonel Vladimir Katukov, chief of the Spetsburo, the Special Terrorist Section of the Komissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnotsi, the Russian Ministry for State Security, paid us a visit tonight. The Spetsburo is the Russian department of dirty tricks. It deals in assassination, kidnapping and like that. Colonel Katukov is trying to protect a billion dollars in gold, which Mr. Drum is trying to steal and return to its rightful owners. We had a heated discussion, and one of the colonel’s underlings shot me. Okay? Now will you let me have the rest of my drink in peace?”

  “Very funny,” Jake said sourly.

  Jerry sighed again. “He doesn’t believe me. You can’t say I didn’t try.”

  Like many doctors, Jake was a guy who took himself seriously. He couldn’t bear being made fun of. “You win,” he said. “No police report. But I’m going to stay here all night if necessary until I learn what’s going on. I mean it, Jerry.”

  “Unfortunately I believe you,” Jerry said, “but Mr.Drum and I have some talking to do. Hey doll,” he told Christy, “let me have the phone, will you?”

  She brought it, and he dialed. “Halpern,” he said. “Give me central casting. Yeah, of course I mean you-know-who, doll, but I’m in a fey mood tonight.”

  “He always gets on the phone like that with them,” Christy said. “It’s, you know, a password.”

  Jake snorted. I didn’t snort. Jerry spoke into the phone: “What do you have on a Russian named Bazarov? B-a-z-a-r-o-v. Sure I’ll wait.”

  He told me: “They’re looking up the cover. Hello? Yeah, uh-huh. Nicolai Bazarov,” he repeated slowly, “on temporary duty at the Russian Embassy, desk man for a troupe of Cossack dancers playing New York, Washington and Boston. That’s the cover, Virginia. I hate to tell you this, but there is no Nicolai Bazarov. His real name is Vladimir Katukov, of the Spetsburo Katukovs. No, Virginia, I am definitely not kidding. I can’t help it if I sound drunk, I don’t get shot at every day. Just a scratch, I am assured, but I’ve been told to play hooky a few days. Yes, doll, I would be glad to receive visitors. Uh-huh. I do indeed know why Katukov is in New York, and I will tell all when you come out and see me in my palatial estate up here in Westchester tomorrow. Bring an artist. There are three of us out here who can give you a solid description of Katukov, and it would be nice to have on file a likeness of our old buddy, don’t you think? Anytime, I guess—sure, lunch sounds okay.”

  Jerry hung up. “Who’s Virginia?” Christy asked.

  “My wife’s the jealous type,” Jerry said. “My mention of my old girl friend Virginia’s name indicates to Virginia,” he explained, “that I am not talking under duress. We’re all a bunch of goddamn paranoids. Now, Jake, will you kindly get the hell out of here and let us have our talk?”

  “The Spetsburo,” Jake said. “A billion dollars in gold.” He shook his head. “The care and feeding of Mrs. McGillicuddy’s sciatica is going to seem pretty dull after tonight.”

  “So’s being a desk jockey in New York,” Jerry complained. “It’s Drum here who’s going after the loot.”

  “Out,” Christy told Jake. “Our hero needs his sleep.”

  “I’ll drop around tomorrow,” Jake said.

  “Not at lunch, please,” Jerry said.

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  Jake left, looking like a man who’d been given the right number on the Irish Sweepstakes fifteen minutes after the betting closed.

  What talking we had to do before Christy and I helped Jerry upstairs and into bed took just a few minutes.

  “The Russians always play it cagey,” Jerry said. “They send a number like Katukov over here to do a job and they give him an embassy cover. He’s got diplomatic immunity, so we can’t touch him. Hell, he could have been found burning his initials in Dr. Sain’s skin with a lit cigarette and the best we could do would be to declare him persona non grata and kick him out of the country.”

  “But—murder?” Christy said.

  “Murder or sabotaging Air Force One or blowing up the White House, it wouldn’t matter. Which means we can give Chet no help by holding Katukov here while he goes off to Yugoslavia. Diplomatic immunity is a two-way street and the minute we start playing fast and loose with it the Russians will do the same.”

  Christy nodded soberly. “I guess I understand. But it—it’s galling. The chief of the Spetsburo—”

  “Don’t think we don’t have our own department of dirty tricks,” Jerry told her. “I said it was a two-way street, and it is. Our department can be of some help to Chet, if he wants the kind of help they can give him.”

  “All I want,” I said, “is to get Marianne Baker off that Polish freighter alive when it docks in Rijeka.”

  “Meaning you call the shots?”

  “Either I call them or we don’t play.”

  “I read you,” Jerry said. “But how do you know the firm will okay it?”

  “They’ve been very successful getting their hands on the Spanish gold till now,” I said dryly.

  “Who said they wanted it?”

  That stopped me for a minute.

  “Relax,” Jerry said. “The firm’s interest is in Katukov. It’s mostly academic interest. They’ll want to flush him out in the open and see how he operates. If you can do that for them, they’ll give you all the room you need. Don’t worry about the firm. They’ll cooperate.”

  “I take it,” I said, “I’ll be under surveillance in Yugoslavia.”

  “You take it right, Virginia,” Jerry said.

  “I’m not sure I like that.”

  “With the guarantee that nobody makes a move to help you until you ask for it?”

  “What about hindering me?”

  “Why would they want to hinder you, for crying out loud?”

  “It’s a funny situation,” I said. “Spade wants the gold, I want Marianne Baker, the firm wants to bring Katukov out in the open. There could come a time when we’re working at cross purposes.”

  “Forget it,” Jerry said. “I’ve been with the firm for twelve years. I’m as high up as you can get without a presidential appointment, approved by the Senate and all that jazz. Daddy Helms doesn’t exactly jump when I crack the whip, but he’ll let me call the plays, if you don’t mind me mixing my metaphors. I always mix my metaphors when I’ve been shot at.”

  “What kind of plays are you going to call?”

  “One, you will be under surveillance. Two, as of now you are working not for but with the CIA. Three, the firm’s men in Bern and Vienna will be on the lookout for—what were their names?”

  “Sitnikov in Bern and Abel in Vienna,” I said.

  “That’s in case Katukov adheres to his itinerary, which is doubtful now that he has Spade’s papers. But in any event, you’ll know. Four, here’s the phone number of the American Embassy in Belgrade.” He told me the number. “Say hello to Virginia when you get on the phone, that will identify you in case of trouble.”

  “What do I do if I can’t get to a phone?” I said. “Drop back five and punt?”

  ELEVEN

  IT WAS VERY HOT that August in Dubrovnik.

  It is hot anywhere on the Adriatic or the Mediterranean in August, but the Dalmatian Coast has a wind they never mention in the tourist guide books. It is called the bora. It blows down off the bone-dry, gray, hump-backed Karst Mountains as hot and searing as the blast from an open Bessemer furnace. It can blow for days on end, a low-pressure wind that does things to people. It makes them want to kill their neighbors instead of loving them. Murder seems much more suited to such a climate than amour, and the People’s Courts are very tolerant of crimes of violence when the bora blows.

  It was blowing when I reached Dubrovnik in the airport bus. I had flown from New York to Geneva, Geneva to Zurich, Zurich to Yugoslavia—fifteen hours and a budding hangover from all those free in-flight drinks. The afternoon light had a brassy, eye-stinging quality. Heat waves shimmered over the white walls, white buildings and white streets of the city. Limp tourists filled all the chairs in all the sidewalk cafés. They sweated and the hot wind dried the sweat on them. They had the angry, bewildered faces of people in a city under siege. Determined summer tourists are the most indefatigable people in the world. Back home they won’t remember the heat, or the way the hot wind parched and cracked their lips, or how they lay sweating at night, not sleeping, in the beds in the overcrowded hotels, or the overheated cars lining the new coast road from Dubrovnik to the Albanian border, their radiators spewing steam, their former occupants standing on the road-shoulder and staring at the heat haze and knuckling the grit deeper into their eyes and wishing they could strangle the travel bureau people back in Ice Box, North Dakota, or Loden Coat, Czechoslovakia. They’ll forget all of it and the word of mouth about Dubrovnik, which is indisputably the most beautiful Renaissance city in the world, will get around, and the same limp tourists, or ones just like them, will come again next August, when the bora blows and when for eight or ten days running it is a hundred degrees in the shade if you can find any shade.

  I got a room in a hotel on the beach at Ploce. It was one of those cookie-cutter modern hotels that are springing up all over the coast of Yugoslavia, poured concrete and glass in any shape as long as it is not rectangular and in any state to receive summer guests as long as it is not efficient. This one was festooned with balconies and a cantilevered overhang out front to give the doorman enough shade if he stood with his back against the wall and didn’t inhale very deeply.

  Blame it on the bora. Dubrovnik is really a swell place, but I was feeling mean and hung-over and cynical and wishing that his quest for a billion dollars in Spanish gold had taken Axel Spade to Tierra del Fuego, where August meant winter and where it is cold all the time anyway.

  My mood changed after I showered, got into a pair of chinos and a white shirt and made my way ingenuously to the concierge’s desk in the lobby and asked:

  “If I wanted to see Jovanović, how would I go about it?”

  The kid at the desk, who couldn’t have been nineteen, smiled and said: “My English not good. You are saying Ivo Jovanović?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He told me to sit down and went away. Ten minutes later, a girl came through the doorway behind the concierge’s desk, and that was the precise moment that my mood changed. She was tall and deeply tanned and had dark glossy hair hanging almost to her waist in that no-style that is the height of fashion these days. She had wide Slavic cheekbones and the darkest gray eyes I had ever seen, smoky and smouldering but interested too. She was wearing what they call a simple white shift, the most difficult of all garments for a girl to wear, short of a monokini, because it can tell absolutely no lies about her figure. She had no trouble wearing it. She was as stunning as the heat and as sultry as the bora.

  She studied and interpreted my long stare. A slow smile quirked her lips. “My name,” she said in excellent English, “is Enisa Zemko. I am the Putnik representative here at the hotel and I am not permitted to date the hotel’s guests, which seems a shame at the moment because you are handsome in the rather brash American style and no doubt charming. But then you probably have a wife and four children on the beach or back home in Minni-noplace. Aside from all that, what can I do for you?”

  “Why’d you say Minni-noplace?” I asked.

  “There was a man staying here from Minneapolis once. He called it that. Is it really that bad?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  Only a very beautiful and self-confident girl can interpret a lecherous stare as a small shared joke. Enisa Zemko had done it effortlessly. She had probably learned how the hard way, by spending the better part of her eight-hour day warding off passes. She had a contralto voice and a fine command of English. Putnik, which she said she worked for, means traveler in Serbo-Croat. It is the state tourist outfit.

  I debated saying I wished I was a fellow-traveler. I decided against it, certain she’d heard that one before.

  “A man named Ivo Jovanović recently came home to Dubrovnik,” I said. “I’d like to see him. How do I go about it?”

  She laughed. It was disconcerting.

  “A man named Ivo Jovanović,” she said. “That’s almost like walking into Washington and saying a man named Lyndon Johnson. Ivo Jovanović is Dubrovnik’s most famous citizen, and after the Marshal the best-known figure in all Yugoslavia. And you want to see him. The whole world wants to see him. What makes you so special?”

  “I’m stubborn,” I said.

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “I’m a writer,” I improvised.

  “A journalist? Why didn’t you say so? That’s different.”

  “Not exactly a journalist. No press card or like that. I’m strictly free-lance.”

  Enisa looked disappointed. “You’d need a press card.”

  “Can you get me one?”

  “The Ministry of Information and Tourism issues press cards only to accredited foreign journalists.”

  “Here we go again,” I said dolefully.

  “Again?”

  “The twentieth century,” I said, “is rough on freelance types. It’s discouraging.” I was serious. There is a strong bond between private eyes and free-lance writers. Maybe it explains why so many of the latter write about so many of the former in the fiction they produce. They can see the problems. The modern bureaucratic world is no place for the lone wolf, whether he totes gun or typewriter. He doesn’t have a number and a pigeonhole. The machinery whirrs smoothly and ingests numbers that are people and disgorges neat answers that are what people do. The maverick makes the machinery grind to a gear-stripping halt. He doesn’t fit. He is going the way of the Dodo bird, and when he finally gets there, there being extinct, the machinery will do whatever machinery does to heave a sigh of relief.

  “I wish I could help you,” Enisa said.

  “You can. Have a press card issued in my name.”

  “What’s your name?”

  I told her and added: “You mean you’ll do it?”

  “No, I was just wondering what your name was. Chet Drum. It’s a nice name. I like it.”

  “To get way back,” I said, “no wife or kids on the beach or in Minni-noplace or anywhere.”

  “You’re funny,” Enisa said. “You don’t look like a writer. What else do you do?”

  “I once lasted two rounds in the Golden Gloves light-heavy semi-finals in Baltimore, when I was a kid.”

 

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