The Fourth Courier Read online

  “I suppose we should hope he is not finished,” Kulski said, “because if he is finished, perhaps it means someone has a bomb.”

  He backed up to turn around and retreated up the rough track past the nightclub, gunning his engine when he turned onto the riverside road.

  “I didn’t know Polish policemen carried weapons,” Jay remarked. “I was told that I couldn’t for that reason.”

  “You didn’t bring a gun?”

  “What’s the correct answer to that question?”

  “Not to answer it.”

  Jay nodded. “How can you carry a gun when nobody else can?”

  “Almost all my cases are violent.”

  “What happened to Billy’s face?”

  The detective winced. “Would you ask him?”

  “No, but I would want to. Do you believe he never saw a car on the nights of the murders drive up close to the river? The road isn’t exactly good, and not everybody wants to risk their oil pan even if they’re hoping for a fuck. Wouldn’t he be curious who did risk it?”

  “He’s right, people come every night, even in winter. I used to bring Magda here. Living in two rooms with two children and her parents, where could we make love? Especially love like we really wanted to make?” Kulski grinned and shifted into gear. “So did everyone else who was here on those nights. She won’t come here now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Her parents moved out. We don’t need to now.” Kulski veered up the ramp to the Dambrovski Bridge. “Are you going to the hotel or embassy?”

  “Hotel.”

  A few minutes later, Kulski pulled into its circular drive.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Jay asked.

  “I promised Magda I’d try to be home early.”

  “Anything special?”

  “Nothing more than fatherhood, and my wife has modern ideas about it.”

  “You don’t seem to mind.”

  “I don’t. Not for one minute.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MELTING SNOW DRIPPED FROM HOLES in the rusty gutter running above the train station’s entrance. Dr. Sergej Ustinov tried dodging the water and only managed to splatter mud on his cuffs. Lugging two suitcases, he pushed through the double doors, which swung back to smack him from behind and propel him into the lowslung hall. He had always felt insulted by the station’s ungrateful design: its spare construction might be suitable for the gold rush towns of Vladivostok or Magadan, but not the country’s premier nuclear facility. Kosmonovo deserved better.

  He followed a trail of muddy footprints to the ticket counter. As cold indoors as out, he could see his breath. From behind a glass partition, a clerk, preoccupied with yesterday’s newspaper, glanced up. A heater burned perilously close to her long coat.

  “A ticket to Moscow, please,” Sergej said. “First class, no smoking.”

  She dropped a hand into the gully under the partition. “Your pass.”

  He slipped it to her.

  She studied it. “You are authorized to go to Reutov, not Moscow.”

  “It’s a suburb of Moscow. I’ll pay the difference in fare.”

  “Your pass says Reutov.”

  “I was hoping to go into the center to buy a gift for my wife. It’s her sixtieth birthday next month. She’s depressed about getting old, and I want to find something nice to cheer her up.”

  “Looking at you, I’d guess a nice young boyfriend might do the job.”

  “Ha! My wife already complains that I still act like a young man!”

  “I don’t think she’d be complaining if you did.” Again the woman dropped her hand in the gully. “Identity card.”

  He passed it to her. She glanced between him and his picture.

  “It’s me!” Sergej sang, pulling at his disheveled hair.

  The clerk pushed his documents back under the glass. “I can issue a ticket to Moscow Central. It’s the same fare. The regulations allow it.” She bent over her desk to write out his ticket, pressing hard through multiple carbon copies. Sergej, always hoping for a glimpse of cleavage, leaned closer to the partition, but his breath fogged the cold glass. He was ready to pay with exact change—he had researched every detail of his journey—and carried his suitcases to the platform. They were identical, dark tan with buckled straps, and each weighing twenty-two kilos. He had been precise in matching the weight of his personal possessions in one with the bomb’s physics package installed in the other. Just add uranium, which was waiting for him in Warsaw, to make it atomic.

  Sergej knew he didn’t have to hurry even after the train hissed to a stop alongside the platform. The stopovers in Kosmonovo were lengthy, giving the stevedores time to load reprocessed fuel for delivery throughout the former Soviet Union. He stopped at a kiosk, bought hard mints, and took his time unwrapping one while peeking over the shoulder of a man thumbing through a sex magazine devoted to women in black leather.

  A whistle blew to signal the train’s readiness to leave. Sergej struggled aboard the first-class carriage and bumped his way down the corridor, peering into compartments at the seat numbers above the facing banquettes. He found his and heaved his suitcases onto the overhead rack before crumpling into the seat and inadvertently farting in the confined space.

  The door slammed open hard enough to rebound halfway on its track before a woman stuck out a sturdy shoe to stop it. Rather sturdy herself, she wrestled with a duffel bag as she came into the compartment. Sniffing, she wrinkled her nose accusingly at him. He instantly leapt up to help with her luggage, which turned out to be two duffels, not one, and both clumsily laden. Their clunky contents moved around as he struggled to tuck them securely on her overhead rack.

  The woman checked her seat number and plopped next to the window opposite him. When he sat back down, his pointy knees bumped her dimpled ones. They both turned in the same direction at the same time, first one way then the other, each time touching knees again, which made them laugh. People were always surprised when they saw his mouth full of gold teeth. Some were repulsed, but most were curious or freakily attracted. The woman admired them with a cannibalistic look, as if she envisioned his fillings strung like sharks’ teeth around her neck.

  “Is it all eighteen-karat?” she asked.

  “Twenty in front.” He showed his teeth.

  “Oh yes, now I see.”

  “It’s my savings account.”

  “For so many teeth, of course, so expensive.”

  “For me they were free.”

  “Free?”

  “Because of my job.”

  “People have jobs in Russia? I thought they only worked.”

  “Ha!”

  The woman turned her attention to making herself comfortable by testing the armrest and wiggling her bottom deeper into the plush seat. Her slick dress, in a creamy satin material, rode up her thighs and scrunched at her midriff. She squirmed and yanked its hem to smooth it out, which managed to accentuate her generous bulge.

  A mother, coaxing along two mewling infants, peered into their compartment. Sergej prayed she would move on and she did, visibly disappointed when she checked her ticket and continued down the corridor. The whistle blew a final time and the platform began to slip past the window. The next stop was hours away. Until then, Sergej and the woman would have the compartment to themselves. He slipped over to sit by the door.

  She asked him, “Where are you going?”

  “Moscow.”

  “Me too, but first I visit relatives. In Gorky.”

  She spoke accented Russian. Sergej asked where she was from.

  “My grandfather was Russian fisherman,” she told him. “He fished between Russia and Alaska, and when the communists came, he said, no more Russia. He finished with Russia.”

  “Is this your first trip here?”

  “Of course! Until this year, it was not possible to come here unless—” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you a communist?”

  Dr. Ustinov guffawed loudly and let that stand as his answer
.

  “Good, because communists make me nervous. We can see them from Alaska.” She scooted still lower in her seat, until she was halfreclining, her face pressed to the cushioned corner and her legs jutting at him. “My name is Emma,” she said.

  “Huh?” he replied, distracted by her columns of marbled flesh.

  “Emma. My name.”

  “Dr. Sergej Ustinov.” He always included his title at introductions. He couldn’t remember not having it, nor a life unrestricted by it.

  “A doctor, how lucky! My foot hurts so much. At it will you look?”

  “I am a physicist, not a physician.” He enunciated both words even though they sounded nothing alike in Russian.

  He had no idea what Emma thought she had heard when she replied, “Oh, a foot massage, how wonderful!” She started to unlace a shoe.

  “I said I’m a physicist.”

  “Yes, I know, it is almost the same word in English: physical.” The shoe came off, and Emma wiggled her toes at him. “You have such long fingers. I predict you to be especially good.”

  Sergej tried to ignore her and stared into the corridor. The late winter’s feeble sunset, draining through their compartment, reflected on the long sideways window. They were passing through a birch forest, and Emma’s silhouetted toes sprouted like mushrooms in its blurry mulch.

  She slipped even lower in her seat, until she was reclining, and dropped a foot on his thigh. “Please. It hurts, and my relatives, they will make me hike all the time. They have no car!”

  Of course he couldn’t exactly ignore her foot resting on his leg, nor entirely block her squirming toes from view. Her nails were painted cherry red, which he realized did make her feet attractive, certainly more attractive than the coarse yellow nails his wife hadn’t painted since their first anniversary. Oh, why not massage her foot? he decided. It might be fun, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched someone’s foot other than his own. Tentatively he wrapped his fingers around her arch and squeezed. “Is that where it hurts?” he asked.

  “Oh yes … but harder …”

  He gripped her foot tighter and massaged it with his thumbs. He found he rather enjoyed it; there was an unfamiliar sensuality to it, and as a bonus, from this angle he could peek up her skirt to where her heavy legs disappeared in a dark shadow. Gradually his fingers migrated to her toes, which they worked vigorously, rooting down between them, and bending them to crack them. For the first time he understood why some people sucked toes for sexual pleasure, and if his back had been more limber, he might have dared to bite hers.

  Emma sighed. “I can tell you are professional. Yes … oh yes …”

  Suddenly the situation, and certainly his fantasies, seemed ludicrous to Sergej. He released her foot and said rather coldly, “I hope it feels better.”

  Emma, who had also been enjoying the massage perhaps a tad too enthusiastically, was puzzled by his sudden dismissal. She pulled herself upright in the seat. “It does feel better. Thank you,” she said, putting her shoe back on. “Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry?”

  “Of course you are, after all that work!”

  She stood to unzip a duffel, wagging her wide bottom close to Dr. Ustinov’s face. The shiny cloth stretched before him like a movie screen and reflected passing images. He leaned closer and grinned to see a reflection of his teeth. In that moment a cascade of tin cans fell from Emma’s bag, and she jumped back, bumping his nose.

  “Uch!” he cried.

  “Soup!” She held up a can to display its red-and-white label. “I bring all my relatives soup.”

  “Soup?” To Sergej, it seemed more an offering than a gift to bring soup to a country that survived on it.

  She pulled a paper sack and loaf of bread from her bag, repacked the cans of soup, and sat back down. She offered him the sack.

  It was oily and he was suspicious. “What is it?”

  “Dried fish.”

  Sergej detested dried fish. He had eaten too much of it as a boy, the only source of protein his family could afford. It reeked of poverty and his mother’s nagging reminder: Never say no, say thank you. Reluctantly he peered into the sack and picked out the smallest piece he could find.

  Emma tore bite-size pieces off her loaf of bread, pressed morsels of fish into the soft dough, and popped them into her mouth. Soon the compartment reeked. Sergej nibbled at the piece he’d taken and declined her offer for more. When she finished, she licked her lips and loudly closed the bag. Again she stood to rummage in her duffel and sat back down with what appeared to be a limp balloon. “Sleep, sleep,” she said and blew into it. A pillow expanded to reveal Oregon: The Beaver State stenciled above crossed rifles.

  Sergej wondered if she hunted.

  Emma wedged the pillow into the banquette’s corner, took off her shoes, and tried to find a comfortable position in the upright seat. The pillow squeaked annoyingly. She blinked at the overhead light, hinting that she wanted him to dim it, but Sergej was too engrossed in watching the roll of her legs. He jumped when she unexpectedly tapped him with her unshod toes and pointed to the switch over the door. He dimmed the light until only a purplish glow illuminated the compartment and drew the curtains to block the light from the corridor.

  Sergej leaned against the cushioned headrest. It smelled like someone else’s face. He was drowsy but not sleepy, and by the way Emma fidgeted, he knew she feigned sleep as well. He squinted, blurring his vision to bend the gray light, and tried to imagine her in a different way: slimmer, or slinkier, or not what she was. But he couldn’t. She was too solid to remake.

  Night closed in. Spotlights mounted on posts at irregular intervals hunted the compartment’s corners to reveal their faces. Sometimes their eyes met, or so Sergej thought; he could never be sure. His eyes, finally growing heavy from the train’s comforting rhythm, sagged until he could hardly keep them open, and a moment later he was free-falling into Emma’s abundant breasts. He jerked awake and realized he was aroused. He discreetly pressed a hand to his lap to conceal his state. A light swept the compartment and he saw Emma was watching him. She puckered her lips and sent a kiss in the direction of his crotch, or so he fancied, but the hypnotic rails blurred the edges of wakefulness until he was uncertain where his dreams began when Emma twisted in the seat, her broad knees rising to his face, and he fell between her weltered thighs—until his head rolled off the banquette and hit the glass door. His eyes popped open and again she was staring at him. Was she provocatively flicking her tongue or simply licking her lips? He grew more aroused, and again dropped a hand to conceal himself. Emma slipped her foot under his hand and touched him. Now Sergej knew he was awake. A moment later, her knees, round as moons, orbited his face as she dropped the latch on the door. Yanking at his belt buckle, she pulled him free and mounted him, flashing a breast as they grappled in their unaccustomed positions. The passing chunks of light took snapshots of them. Immediately they succumbed to the rhythm of the chugging rails as their fingers mashed the other’s flesh in their hurried coupling.

  “Tickets!” the conductor cried from the end of the car.

  Emma pressed Sergej into the angle she needed.

  “Tickets!”

  He shifted under her.

  “Tickets!”

  “Don’t stop!”

  “Tickets!”

  “I can’t stop …”

  “Don’t …”

  “Tickets!”

  The next compartment’s door slid open.

  “Tickets, please.”

  Emma’s eyes pleaded for a moment more, and it was all he needed, too.

  “Tickets!”

  The conductor knocked on their door. “Tickets!”

  Emma wrestled her skirt over her hips while he repaired his trousers.

  The conductor rattled the handle harder. “Tickets!”

  She pressed her face to the plastic pillow.

  Sergej unlatched the door.

  A rectangle of light fell into the com
partment.

  Emma snorted, awakening to it. “Are we already in Moscow?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LILKA PULLED TO A STOP behind the other cars waiting for demonstrators to pass. Several hundred of them, mostly elderly men, were shuffling through the intersection. Some carried banners painted with hammer-and-sickle symbols, others with the wobbly signature of Solidarity. Even Jay, new to Poland, recognized that their act of political solidarity was unusual. “What do they want?” he asked.

  “I don’t know the word in English,” Lilka answered.

  “Try Polish.”

  “Emerytury.”

  “Fur hats?” he asked facetiously.

  “No! More money.”

  “Everybody wants more money.”

  “But these are old people. Many have problems now.” Lilka told how her father, after years in the diplomatic corps, had a monthly pension that was less than what Jay’s breakfast had cost that morning.

  Drivers, impatient with the delay, blew their horns, but the bedraggled protesters paid them no heed. Instead, a rare young woman among them started to sing the national anthem, and soon they all took it up, the old men an especially gravelly chorus for her soaring high notes, all praising one country despite different visions of what it should be. Finally the last demonstrator passed, and the cars behind them flashed their lights as if Lilka could hurry up the cars ahead of her.

  Soon they left the city and entered low-lying country where rusty fences demarcated small garden plots. The Polish dzialka had survived because their unwelcomed overlords, the Russians, also had a tradition of dachas. For the Party elite, that translated into cozy country homes with sizable gardens; for everyone else, it meant scrappy patches for growing vegetables that weren’t available in the stores. In the Everyman Society, every man had a right to fresh tomatoes.

  Lilka turned onto a track that lost its asphalt in a hundred meters. She pulled over and parked, and they continued on foot, winding through gardens bruised by winter. A few plots had shacks with smoke billowing from their chimneys. Lilka stopped at one where a man, his back to them, was snipping rose hips and collecting them in a handkerchief spread open on a tree stump. “That’s my Tata,” she told him.