Liars & Thieves: A Novel Read online

  “To visit a friend of mine.”

  “She a plastic surgeon? You and I are going to need one if we hope to live out the year.”

  “Naw. She’s a rich socialite. Never worked a day in her life, inherited a huge heaping pile when her parents had the grace to die young.”

  “So how do you know her?”

  “I was her boy toy for a while,” I said flippantly.

  “Good Lord! She must be ancient if you were the best she could do.”

  “She’s a real old prune,” I snarled. “And she’s got servants. A maid and a cook. Better keep your lip zipped and let me do the talking or we’re liable to wind up in drawers at the morgue.”

  “This is your gig, hero. I’ll cling to you and look deeply into your eyes while you talk us into the house. But I want my own bedroom.”

  I wasn’t about to tell Erlanger about robbing a safe deposit box for O’Shea. “You don’t know Dorsey,” I explained. “She’s a friend. She’ll be delighted to help. You’ll see.”

  Dorsey O’Shea had a long winding drive, which was cool; you couldn’t see the house from the road.

  A Porsche was parked in front of the place. I didn’t think it was Dorsey’s, because she always parked in the garage around back. I parked the heap beside the Porsche and hoisted the suitcase from the trunk. Kelly climbed the stairs and crossed the formal stoop and pushed the doorbell.

  I joined her on the stoop with the suitcase.

  After a bit the porch light came on.

  I heard someone unlocking the door, then it opened.

  Dorsey was wearing a slinky black silk thing and a set of high-heeled slippers, and apparently not much else. She had a glass of wine in her hand. It was brutally obvious we had interrupted something.

  “What in the name of God are you doing here, Carmellini?” she snarled.

  Kelly Erlanger tittered. She leaned against the doorjamb and held her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders began to shake as the laughter went off the scale and she fought for air.

  I pulled her hands down. “Hey, get a grip.”

  Her whole face contorted and she lost it. Just went to pieces.

  I picked her up in my arms and marched through the door, pushing Dorsey aside. “Get the suitcase,” I growled at O’Shea. “This woman’s been through hell and needs a place to sleep.”

  As I strode through the living room to the grand staircase, I got a gander at Dorsey’s romantic interest, a balding twit twenty pounds overweight standing by the fireplace with his mouth open.

  The guest room that I picked had a nice double bed all made up. “A glass of whiskey on the rocks would be appreciated,” I told Dorsey, who followed me up the stairs and stood twisting her hands in the doorway. She scurried away. I stripped off Erlanger’s shoes and put her between the sheets, then sat down on the edge of the bed as she tried to control her sobbing.

  “You keep doing that, you’re going to get the hiccups something terrible.”

  Dorsey was back with the whiskey within a minute. I took a sip, just a taste test, then offered it to Kelly. She shook her head no.

  “Hey, this is medicine. Settle you down.”

  She grasped the glass with both hands and took a long pull as if it were milk.

  The sobs stopped. She hiccupped once, then belted back another big slurp.

  “How can you be so calm?” she asked.

  Dorsey was still in the room. I heard her moving behind me.

  “What should I be doing?”

  “I don’t know.” She worked some more on the whiskey.

  “The best thing we can do for those people who got murdered is to make sure their killers don’t get away with it.”

  She thought about that, then nodded.

  “To do that, we have to stay alive.”

  “Okay.”

  “These people whacked Goncharov at a top secret safe house. Before we go walking into a police station or FBI office, we had better figure out how they did it. We make one mistake, we’re dead.”

  She tossed off the last of the whiskey, then snagged a piece of ice and sucked noisily on it. She looked at Dorsey, then met my eyes. “I want to see the bastards dead.”

  “That’s the spirit.” I stood and took the empty glass. “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll talk in the morning. I warn you. Don’t make any telephone calls. The killers know we got away. They’re going to be moving heaven and earth to find us. Let’s not make it easy for them.”

  “I’ve got a boyfriend,” she objected. “And parents and a couple of girlfriends who really care about me. They are going to be worried sick.”

  “We’ll worry about that when and if your name gets in the press.”

  “You don’t think that—?”

  “Bet the press never hears a whisper. Now get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  I shooed Dorsey out of the room and turned off the light, then pulled the door shut.

  “Who’s the guy?” I asked Dorsey, referring to the pork chop by the fireplace.

  “Just a friend.”

  “Sorry about dropping in on you like this. If you’ll give him a raincheck, I’ll tell you how we spent our day.”

  To her credit, Dorsey didn’t hesitate. She led the way down the stairs. I went to the kitchen while she said good-bye to her guest. I knew where the liquor and ice were, so I made myself a drink while she attended to that. When she came into the kitchen I was sitting in the breakfast nook working on bourbon and a chunk of cheese from the fridge.

  She poured herself some wine, then sat down across from me.

  “How you been?” I asked conversationally.

  She brushed that aside. “You used the word ‘killers’ to that woman upstairs. This had better be good.”

  “Your cook and maid? They here tonight?”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. We needed her cooperation, so I told her about the bodies in the rain, the assassins, and the fire.

  The archivist awoke when the woodstove began cooling. It took several seconds for him to remember where he was, why he was there. The stove still had glowing coals in it, so he added more wood. He left the iron door to the stove open and, when the wood burst into flames, used the dim light to explore his surroundings.

  The cabin had no electricity. He found a candle and lit it. With that in hand, he examined the contents of the cupboard. A box of crackers caught his eye. He stripped off his damp clothes, arranged them on a chair to dry, then wrapped himself in the blanket and attacked the crackers.

  Bunks lined the wall opposite the door. Fishing rods stood in one corner. An old coat hung from a peg near the door. The little cabin was snug and warm, much like the vacation dacha he used to visit in Russia. With Bronislava.

  All that was past, finished. She was dead, murdered.

  The killers would probably find him soon. If they thought him dead in the rubble of the CIA outpost, he would have a little time before they came. But they would come. Of that Mikhail Goncharov was certain. He knew the Russian secret police—for more than twenty years he had spent his working life reading their case files. They never gave up. They would hunt an enemy of the state to the ends of the earth no matter what the cost, no matter how long it took. They would get him. One day, as inevitably as the turning of the earth, they would find and kill him.

  He had traded his life and her life for …

  For what?

  He fed more wood into the stove and sat staring at the flames.

  He had spent his life surrounded by evil. In the end it had consumed all that he loved. Consumed everything and left him with nothing.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When I finished my summarization of the day’s events, Dorsey O’Shea asked, “Who are you, Tommy? Really?” She was sitting across from me in her breakfast nook in her silk hostess dress that looked as if she had nothing on underneath, her chin on one hand, staring at me with narrowed eyes.

  “Just a guy in over his
head.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe all that hooey, do you?” She got up from her chair. “Killers, car wrecks, Russian spies … sounds like something from a movie. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Give me a break !”

  The irony of the moment was not lost on me. Why do women refuse to believe me when I tell the truth, yet buy every word when I lie to them? I finished my drink and stood. “Help me unload the car.”

  She didn’t want to—that was plain. While she was trying to figure out a way to toss me out of the house on my keester, she reluctantly trailed along behind me. The first thing I pulled from the trunk of the car was the MP-5. I handed it to her. “Carry this. And be careful—it’s loaded.”

  I got my soft bag, closed the trunk, then led the way back into the house. She followed along carrying the gun in both hands.

  I sat down on one of the sofas near the fireplace, took the gun from her, and laid it on the floor.

  “That’s a submachine gun?”

  “Yep.”

  “Never saw one before.”

  “Help me with this suitcase.” It was sitting by the end of the couch. I pulled it around and opened it, then brought out several handfuls of paper, which at this stage of the game were smashed in there like so much trash. I passed her a couple handfuls.

  Goncharov had tiny, cramped handwriting, nearly illegible. The fact that he used the Cyrillic alphabet and wrote in Russian didn’t help. It could have been Sanskrit for all I knew. I pondered that verity for a moment—the bodies I had seen that morning had been real enough, and the man I killed hadn’t faked it, yet I had no verification for Kelly’s statement that these notes were purloined copies of KGB files. Were they? Really?

  After a minute or two Dorsey put the pages I had given her back in the suitcase. She placed two more slabs of wood on the fire, poked it up some, then sat down beside me on the sofa and stared moodily at the flames.

  The silence grew and grew. “Was the guy the fiancé?” I asked finally.

  “Oh, no. We broke up months ago.” She shrugged dismissively. “Geoff is an outside artist. I am thinking about sponsoring him.”

  “Outside? He does statues in the park?”

  “No, silly. He’s outside the establishment. He has no formal artistic training.”

  “Oh.” The fire popped a few times, then settled down. “Guess I’m an outside artist, too.”

  She gave me a withering look.

  “How come you never suggested sponsoring me?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Tommy! You killed several men today, and now you’re sitting here in front of my fire trying to be funny.”

  “I’m just happy to be alive.”

  “I never met anyone so callous.”

  I made a rude noise. Then I kicked off my shoes, stretched, wiggled my toes, and indulged in a huge yawn. Frankly, I felt pretty good … tired and mellow. You gotta admit, being alive has its attractions.

  “I want a drink,” she said, and stood. “Do you?”

  “Sure. Whiskey, please.”

  While she was gone I surveyed the room. It didn’t look as if she had changed anything since I last saw it, back when I thought that she and I …

  Dorsey’s great-grandfather was a bootlegger, had been mobbed up, bribed cops and judges and county officials, shot it out with the competition, all of that … got modestly rich and retired when they repealed Prohibition. He bought this estate in the thirties and built the mansion. He had only owned it a few years when his ticker stopped dead one night while he slept.

  The bootlegger’s only daughter married a fast-talking salesman who thought cars were the coming thing. He used the bootlegger’s money to build a string of car dealerships around Washington in the late thirties. During and after World War II he got rich when Washington’s population exploded and the mass exodus to the suburbs began.

  The car dealer’s daughter, Dorsey’s mother, was a hippie. She flitted off to San Francisco, smoked pot, sang peace songs, and stretched the concept of free love nearly to the breaking point, according to Dorsey. She and Dorsey’s father—another hippie who didn’t need to dirty his hands with work after he married Dorsey’s mom—filled their days with manifestos, politically significant demonstrations, general hanging out, and recreational drugs. They joined communes several times. They were in California protesting the Vietnam War and searching for the meaning of life when they drove their car over a cliff near the ocean one morning during the wee hours. Dorsey thought they were probably strung out at the time.

  When her grandparents died Dorsey inherited it all, the mansion, the estate, the money, and the dealerships. She dabbled in starving artists and porno filmmakers and hard cases like me.

  She came back from the kitchen with the whiskey and nestled beside me on the couch. Amazingly, after the day I’d had, the heat and pressure of her body against mine felt very good.

  “Aren’t you chilly in that outfit?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  I pulled an afghan from the back of the sofa and put it over her.

  “So what are you going to do about this mess?”

  “Haven’t decided.” I couldn’t help myself. I draped an arm over her shoulder and pulled her close.

  “Could call the police, you know.”

  “And have a hit team show up instead of the cops? No thanks.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder.

  The fire burned down as we sipped our drinks. I was acutely conscious of how she felt snuggled up against me. And smelled.

  My eyelids grew heavy. Getting up the stairs was going to take some doing. “Sorry to barge in on you like this,” I said.

  “I’m glad you came. The artist was a bit of a snob.”

  “A big house like this, moldy old money, a beautiful woman? What the hell does he want?”

  “It was pretty obvious that I didn’t know much about art.”

  “So it was a rescue! Glad I got here in the nick.”

  “Oh, Tommy, what’s wrong with us? You and me? Why didn’t it work for us?”

  “If I could answer questions like that, woman, I’d be getting rich with my own call-in radio show.” Actually I had a theory, but that didn’t seem to be the time or place. The fire felt good and she felt better, snugglely, with promising bulges and curves.

  As I sat there basking in her aura, my mind wandered. Who were those guys?

  That was a problem I couldn’t solve just then.

  I dropped it and slid my hand inside the afghan. Yep, she was wearing nothing under that slinky thing. A scene from one of those porno flicks shot through my little mind. Feeling guilty, I retracted my stray appendage and used it to put the whiskey where it belonged.

  When I finished my drink, the moment could be avoided no longer. “What bed do you want me in?”

  “Mine.”

  That response made me smile. “I was hoping you would say that,” I told her warmly. I hoisted the submachine gun and carried it up the stairs while she locked up and turned off the lights.

  I awoke about three in the morning. I had been sound asleep and a moment later was fully awake. Dorsey O’Shea was curled up with her back against mine, breathing deeply, totally relaxed.

  I checked my watch, then lay in the darkness listening to the sounds, wondering why I had come so fully awake.

  I sneaked out of bed, and pulled on trousers and a shirt. The submachine gun was where I had left it, propped on its butt in one corner. I put the pistol in my trouser pocket and picked up the MP-5. Dorsey didn’t awaken as I eased the door open and crept out. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood in the darkness listening.

  The old house was deathly quiet. The bootlegger built it solid.

  I eased open the door to Kelly Erlanger’s room, stood and listened to her breathe as she slept. Finally I closed the door as softly as I could, making sure it latched.

  I worked my way slowly down the stairs, stopping frequently to listen.

  Okay, maybe
I was being paranoid. I didn’t think yesterday’s killers could possibly find us this quickly, but what the hey, I had a lot to be paranoid about. The truth of it was that I was damned worried. I assumed the Russians wanted Goncharov dead. Yet those guys yesterday weren’t Russians. And they knew precisely where to find Goncharov, ensconced in a top secret government safe house and surrounded by armed guards. They arrived armed with serious weapons—you can’t buy MP-5s at your local sporting goods store. These popguns came from an arsenal somewhere … probably a government arsenal.

  And who were the killers? What did they do during the day when they weren’t sneaking around in ghillie suits gunning people down? Where did they live? Were they on some kind of retainer, or were they an ad hoc group hired for one job?

  Regardless of how those questions shook out, if the assassins wanted to make the job a clean sweep they were still after Kelly Erlanger and me.

  I was going to have to find out who was hiring these dudes if I wanted to get very much older. Somehow, some way, I had to put that someone out of action.

  I padded around the old house from window to window, cradling the submachine gun in my arms and looking out into the dark, wet night, thinking about the problem.

  The guy I needed on my side was my boss, Sal Pulzelli.

  Dorsey kept her telephone books in the kitchen in a large drawer under the phone. I rooted through the one she had for northern Virginia. There he was, in Dunn Loring. An apartment building, apparently. I made a note on a piece of scratch paper and put the telephone books away.

  Most householders in metro Washington have books of maps; Dorsey was no exception. After locating Pulzelli’s street, I figured out how to get there. I took the map with me, just in case.

  At this hour White’s Ferry at Leesburg probably wasn’t running, so I drove southeast to the beltway and crossed the Potomac on the Legion Bridge. Traffic on the beltway was fairly light at that hour of the morning. The eternal rebuilding efforts were apparently occurring someplace else that summer.

  As I drove I thought about Salvatore Pulzelli, a career soldier in Washington’s army of paper-pushers. He didn’t smoke, drink, or cuss—a real party animal, I’m telling you—watched his weight, wore conservative department-store suits and drab, uninspired ties, kept his desk neat and shipshape, and, truly, was a decent sort of guy. If he had any hobbies he didn’t talk about them.