The Fourth Courier Read online

  “Keep it,” Sergej told him.

  “Are you trying to bribe me?”

  “With only a flask? Ha! I have a full bottle to bribe you!”

  A horn sounded close by up the road.

  “I can’t miss my bus!” Sergej fretted.

  “Don’t worry. It’s a fifteen-minute warning. So where’s that bottle?”

  Sergej looked between the two suitcases. “My wife bought me matching suitcases and all they do is confuse me!”

  “It’s your bus to catch.”

  “I think it’s in this one.” Sergej sprung open the suitcase’s latches and shiny tubes of lipstick exploded out its sides, bouncing off the bench and rolling in every direction. Futilely Nikita grabbed for them, trying to help Sergej stem their escape, but the brassy cylinders slipped through their fingers and bounced at their feet.

  “Oh! Oh!” Sergej cried. “Oh this is terrible! They are for my new customer!”

  Boris came to the hut’s doorway. “What’s happening, Nikita?”

  The bus driver blew his horn again.

  “Please help me! I can’t miss my bus!” Sergej opened his suitcase to fish out empty plastic bags that he’d brought for just that moment. He pressed them on the soldiers. Not all the lipsticks had escaped, and at the bottom of the suitcase, floating in a sea of shiny tubes, was the promised bottle of vodka. The soldiers eyed it hungrily.

  The teletype machine clattered to life.

  Boris looked around at it. “There’s something coming across the ticker.”

  The machine stopped.

  Nikita started scooping lipsticks into his bag. “Come on, Boris, give a hand!”

  “Piss off! Just take the bottle and let him catch his fucking bus.”

  “Ah come on, he was a border guard like us. Now he’s trying to make an honest living.”

  Reluctantly Boris picked up a few scattered tubes. “Who makes an honest living selling lipstick?”

  “I do,” Sergej answered, grabbing their plastic bags and tossing them into his suitcase. “I can’t miss my bus!”

  Again the teletype machine started clacking away and abruptly stopped.

  Nikita said, “Sounds like trouble on the line again.”

  Sergej handed him the vodka. “To Mother Russia! May she rest in peace.”

  The teletype started again.

  “Someone is trying to reach us.” Boris went back inside.

  “What’s in your other suitcase?” Nikita asked.

  “More lipsticks.”

  “I’ve seen enough of those tonight. Go on, grandpa, go make the Polish girls pretty. I’ll lift the barrier.”

  Dr. Ustinov ducked under it and handed Nikita a lipstick. “Why not have some fun tonight and paint your balls with this? Won’t your friend be surprised!”

  The handsome soldier burst into laughter. “You kinky old man!”

  “Ha!”

  Sergej disappeared in the fog.

  “Crazy Ruski!” Nikita called after him and slipped the lipstick into a pocket.

  Boris was back in the doorway. “Did he go?”

  “He’s gone. What came across the ticker?”

  “Something about missing kosmonauts!”

  Nikita paled. “You mean someone is missing from Kosmonovo?”

  “I thought you called it Kosmonaut City?”

  “The old guy was from there. Just now.”

  Boris snorted. “I don’t think you have to worry about his being a missing kosmonaut. They’re probably required to have teeth.”

  “Maybe he’s wanted for a lipstick heist!” Nikita joked. “How did he have so many of them when half the time my mother can’t find one in the stores?”

  “What’s it matter? Come inside. It’s fucking cold out here.”

  Dr. Ustinov had paused to listen to their exchange. So word was out about his disappearance, but the two border guards weren’t going to try to drag him back. He set down the suitcases and removed the safety mechanism on the second exploding lipstick mechanism. He was ready for a second performance with the Polish guards. The lipsticks had been a gamble, but one he had considered and reconsidered endless times over the five years or so he had collected them. He needed a ploy that was unexpected but harmless, that would deter the guards from opening the second suitcase if they thought the same silliness might happen again. If the soldiers insisted on examining the other suitcase, his options would have been to surrender or to set off the bomb and be done with it, though Sergej never seriously considered that either would come to pass. He had always been a trickster. As a boy, he earned rubles playing sleight-of-hand games along the rat-infested quays of Odessa’s harbor, and his inventive gadgetry won him the attention—and benevolence—of a science teacher who recognized his genius and secured him a place in the local academy. Sergej never doubted his ability to trick a couple of soldiers with a dozen lipsticks.

  He picked up the suitcases and continued through no man’s land until he came to a second brick hut with its door ajar. It looked so similar to the first hut that for a moment Sergej feared that he had become disoriented in the fog and mistakenly returned to the Russians. Then he heard Polish and, relieved, stepped up to the door. He tapped on the door and said, “Hello.”

  Two soldiers glanced up from their chess game. A third stopped doing push-ups and asked for his papers. He spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing his bogus commercial papers. Sergej realized it was time for another bottle of vodka to appear. He pulled a flask from a deep jacket pocket, and as soon as the soldier saw it, he exchanged his papers for it.

  “You can just scoot around the barrier,” he told Sergej.

  “Can you raise it?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not how I’ve imagined it.”

  The soldier snorted. “I should’ve guessed. Another first-timer out of Mother Russia, are you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hey guys, it’s another loony who wants me to raise the barrier,” he said to the chess players.

  “To freedom!” they both shouted.

  The soldier joined Sergej outside. The barrier was a simple metal crossbar resting on two posts, with a spring mechanism on one end and fastened by a rope on the other. It would have been easy enough to walk around, and was in fact only symbolic, which was precisely why Dr. Ustinov wanted it lifted. He wanted to walk to freedom with his head held high. It was a moment he had dreamed about, and only he had made it possible.

  He stepped up to the crossbar as the soldier slowly let the rope slip through his hands. “The bus is up the road,” he told Sergej. “You’ve got five minutes. You’ll make it.”

  Finally the bar was high enough.

  Sergej took his first step into freedom.

  With his second one, he landed in a rut and twisted his ankle. He yelped in pain.

  “Are you all right, grandpa?” the soldier asked.

  He wasn’t all right, but Sergej was determined to make it. He gripped the suitcases and took the next painful steps. Every time he landed on his left foot, he winced in pain. Soon he saw the red taillights of the bus, then the dark hulk of the bus itself tilting slightly on the edge of the road. Sergej didn’t relax his urgent walk and hobbled toward the bus as fast as he could.

  The bus horn sounded.

  The driver started its engine.

  “I’m coming!” Sergej shouted.

  He heard the hiss of the brakes being released.

  “I’m coming!”

  The driver shifted into gear.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming!” he begged.

  But the driver didn’t hear him. He pulled onto the asphalt and started down the road.

  “I’m coming. I’m coming.” Sergej, distraught, fell into a heap in the middle of the road. “I’m coming.”

  Suddenly spotlights illuminated the road and the driver saw Sergej in his rearview mirror. Sergej lifted his head, realized the bus had stopped, and struggled to his feet. He hobbled to it.

&
nbsp; The driver opened the door. “Welcome to the free world,” he greeted him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  GENERAL DRAVKO MLADIC AVOIDED STAYING at Warsaw’s flashy new hotels, preferring the comfortable guesthouse run by the same hotelier who had once catered to the Party elite’s assorted whimsies. He ran a discreet establishment and knew when to be absent. The rooms still retained their brothel-like decor, though the wallpaper’s red flock was noticeably worn and the tassels on the loveseat frayed. Standing at the wet bar, Dravko tossed back a shot of scotch and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror overhead. He thought he still cut a dashing figure.

  He pulled back a curtain to look outside. Snow swirled in the streetlights as pedestrians, bundled against the cold, hurried along the sidewalk. How small their lives must be in that shabby neighborhood, the brooding husband or wife they went home to, the television and children, the mediocrity of it all. General Mladic could not conceive of passing through life with so little claim to it.

  He crossed the room to close the closet door on the steamer suitcase that Sergej had instructed him to buy. Multiple mirrors of varying sizes (some were only shards) hung everywhere—walls, corners, ceiling—creating infinite images of him, or parts of him, depending on their angle. In the bathroom, too, handy mirrors let him admire himself as he took a piss. Once handsome in a strapping way, Dravko’s paunch had surrendered to the combination of gravity’s pull and his wife’s relentless sausages, but he did not yet see himself as other than desirable. He would soon be king of his new Serbia. He stood straighter, admiring His Highness from many perspectives, when the doorbell rang. He zipped up and opened the door to Basia Husarska.

  As she stepped inside, her knees knocked open her full-length fur coat to reveal a miniskirt cut short. “Someone is parked up the street pretending to be asleep,” she said.

  “Someone who just saw a whore come into the lodge.” Dravko closed the door behind her. “They only care if it’s a person of interest, and a whore is never interesting unless she’s yours for the night.”

  “Who watches you here?”

  “I’m a person of interest wherever I go. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s still a camera over the bed.”

  “There’s not. I had it removed.” Basia flung her fur onto the loveseat. “But just in case, I’ll act like your whore.”

  He smiled. “Of course you will. Champagne?”

  She joined him at the bar. “And caviar? You have made a love nest, Dravko.”

  “‘Black, from the Caspian,’” he said, imitating her husky voice. “Those were your first words to me.”

  “And my first caviar.”

  “You sounded like you’d been raised on it.”

  “How long has it been since the Academy? Sixteen years? You were handsome, Dravko. I remember you on the target range. So selfassured, and you never missed.”

  The cork popped. He filled their glasses and raised his to say, “To Piła.”

  They clinked glasses and sipped.

  “Unfortunately, you’ve gotten fat,” she said.

  “I was always too skinny.”

  “No you weren’t.” Basia smeared a cracker with caviar. “Have I changed so much?” She stuck the cracker in his mouth. “Don’t answer that.”

  All those years they had known each other, fucked each other, in cautious terms almost said they loved each other, neither wanting to change personal circumstances enough to make living together a possibility. They were both too ambitious to abandon what they might still achieve. After the police academy, Dravko returned to Yugoslavia, and it proved easy for them to arrange a rendezvous two or three times a year, at conferences or trainings or occasional secret vacations, until they became less secret, but by then it didn’t matter. They had both become too lethal to blackmail. Nor would Dravko’s wife have cared. Ulia would have been more curious that Basia had somehow managed to arouse him; for Basia’s part, her Party bosses encouraged her relationship with Serbia’s most popular nationalist.

  “You’re sounding nostalgic tonight,” Dravko said.

  “Maybe it’s the reminder that it’s been sixteen years.”

  “We’ve been friends a long time.”

  “Why does that sound like goodbye?”

  “It’s not. And you haven’t changed very much,” he added.

  “You’re such a liar.”

  “It’s my professional training.”

  “Even that’s a lie. You never needed training.”

  “But it’s true, you aren’t fat.”

  “Then why haven’t you kissed me?”

  They did, and he watched them kiss in the mirrors. His whimsy was to watch himself make love, or more specifically, watch him make love to himself. He could almost always find mirrors angled in such a way that, in a third mirror, they created a reflective montage in which he appeared to be kissing himself, or blowing himself, or fucking his own ass. When he kissed himself, he saw himself kissing a man, and that specter fueled his arousal. He pushed his tongue deeper into Basia’s mouth.

  She wasn’t ready for sex and rolled out of his arms to light a cigarette. She dominated the mirrors, tall in black boots, hundreds of Basias exhaling a long stream of smoke. “I need to know more about the couriers,” she said. “Your smuggling operation has turned into an international murder investigation. Even the American FBI is involved.”

  “I’m finished here after tonight. It won’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. I need to know what I’ve been doing so I can protect myself. I’ve organized the pick-ups, Dravko, and each courier has been murdered.”

  “Not on my orders.”

  “You never told me about the uranium until it was accidentally discovered. What are you doing? Building an atomic bomb?

  “Three. The fuel has already been delivered. Tonight’s courier is bringing a prototype delivery mechanism with designs to replicate it.”

  “Then what?” Basia asked.

  “What else but Serbia? They called me Mad Max at the Academy, do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Am I so mad now that my mad dreams are coming true?”

  “The world won’t let you resurrect the old Serbia. Not on the scale that you dream. That’s why you’re mad, Dravko.”

  “The world will have no choice.”

  “You are mad.”

  “It’s destiny.”

  “Can you tell the difference?” Basia stubbed out her cigarette and wagged her empty glass at him. “You are forgetting me.”

  He refilled their champagne flutes. “To a seventeenth year!” he toasted.

  “No, I won’t drink to that,” Basia replied. “I want a seventeenth year but more than the status quo. You’ve promised me more. When you talk about your future Serbia, I imagine myself seated next to you, in a chariot or on thrones next to each other. Am I there, Dravko? Am I the one next to you when you imagine yourself the happiest? Because I will be there if you want.”

  As soon as she mentioned a chariot, or twin thrones, Dravko saw himself seated in them, but not with Basia beside him. She could not be the Mother of Serbia. Ulia, his barren wife, wore the headscarves of tradition, and it was from tradition’s lore that Serbia would be born again, not from Basia’s irredeemable loins. Ulia would ride beside him in that imaginary chariot. “I never promised you that,” he answered.

  “I’ve taken the risks for that,” she reminded him. “You wouldn’t have your couriers without me. But like you, Dravko, I am finished here. At some point, my tapes won’t protect me anymore.”

  “Your blackmail still works?”

  “Why not? The last ones are only three years old,” Basia reminded him, “and sometimes I still watch the early ones of us. I believed it when you said you loved me. You did say it, Dravko. I have it on tape.”

  “There was a time when I was mad about you, but this is foolish talk. Or is it a threat?”

  “The boys, Dravko? When did they start?”

&nb
sp; “Of course you would know.”

  “Why else do you get such pleasure from torturing men? And it is only men. You don’t care enough for women to torture them. Your torture is narcissistic. You torture yourself.”

  “You are a psychologist now?”

  “You are obsessed with men. I have never seen you look at a woman on the street unless she is looking at your medals.”

  “I admit, sometimes I want men more than you.”

  Basia lit another cigarette. “It’s true, Dravko, you never promised me a throne. But you promised me an island. I’m redeeming it now.”

  “Now you’re the one who is mad.”

  “Not a whole island, Dravko. Only an apartment that’s not a communist dump and with a sea view. Mad Max owes me that. Some promises you have to keep.” Basia sat on the loveseat and patted the spot next to her. “Come. Sit next to me, Dravko.”

  He drained his champagne and joined her.

  “I’ve made it easy for you tonight,” she said and unfastened the top button on her thin sweater. She undid a second button to reveal her shoulders.

  He brought his lips to her neck while watching himself in the mirrors.

  “Are you already planning your escapes from your acceptable wife?” she asked.

  He murmured, “I won’t be able to stay away from you.”

  He tickled her ear with his tongue, and in a mirror saw himself tickling his own ear.

  She pulled off her sweater and reached to embrace him.

  He stopped looking in the mirrors long enough to glimpse a bruise in the bend of her arm. “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing. I had a blood test.” She tried to pull him into a kiss.

  His lips landed on her neck instead. “Are you healthy?”

  “I’m healthy. Don’t worry, I won’t infect you.”

  Basia drifted a hand across the front of his pants. Coaxingly she toyed with his zipper and pulled him out. He felt the first stirrings of arousal at seeing himself reflected from so many angles in the mirrors. “Let’s make your little soldier healthy, too,” she said in her sexy voice, and wiggled down the bed, opening his prolific buttons as she did, biting his nipples and nuzzling his soft belly hair before burying her nose in a wirier patch. With her every move, Dravko shifted ever so slightly to find the melded triptychs in the mirrors that showed him biting his own nipple and nuzzling his belly. When he went down on himself, he instantly exploded in Basia’s mouth.