Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 7

  Finally Nimec shook his head.

  “Maybe later,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost eight P.M. “I’m driving on over to HQ. There’re lots of odds and ends that need wrapping up before my trip, and I might as well get some things done while the building’s quiet. You want to stay, work in some more practice, that’s fine with me. I won’t worry about you pulling the gate afterward.”

  Ricci stood without moving and watched as Nimec turned to leave the room.

  “Pete,” he said.

  Nimec paused near the door, looked at him.

  Ricci nodded toward his darkened shooting lane.

  “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Strictly about procedure.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “That hostage situation before the timeout,” Ricci said. “If you’re in my place when it comes up, how would you handle it?”

  Nimec thought about it a second, then shrugged again.

  “Hope to God I never have to find out,” he said.

  * * *

  The personal ads appeared on the first Thursday of every month in newspapers throughout Europe. Although each entry was different from the preceding month’s, its content would be identical to those printed on the same date in various countries and languages. In Italy the personals ran in l’Unita. In Germany, Die Zeit. The London Times carried them in Great Britain, Liberation in France, El Mundo in Spain, and De Standaard in Belgium. Because Cyrillic script had to be avoided out of practicality, the ads were placed in English versions of Hungarian, Czech, and Russian papers — the Budapest Sun, Prague Post, and Moscow Times, respectively. Also for practical reasons, the Greek daily chosen to print them was the German-language Athener Zeitung. As in eastern European nations, the character sets unique to Greece’s alphabet would interfere with a consistent application of the simple code embedded within the messages. And a code without fixed rules amounted to no code at all.

  For some time now the recipient of these secret contacts had rented a luxury suite in a restored nineteenth-century home on the Gran Vía in central Madrid. Built as a manor for relatives of the second Bourbon Restoration king, Alfonso XII, it was now occupied by an apartment hotel of four-star excellence and high discretion, appropriately named La Casa Real — The Royal House. This was the busiest part of the city, and he had once explored the idea of settling into the quieter but equally lavish Barrio de Salamanca east of downtown. Both had residences to his liking, and cost was not a factor. His sole concern about Gran Vía had been the dangerous number of eyes that might slip onto him. In the end, however, his instincts snarled at the soft faces of the pijos, or children of affluence, who dallied in the bars and cafés of the latter neighborhood, and he had decided it would be better to hide in full view at the city’s center than to hear their bleating voices and smell the mother’s-milk stink coming off their pores.

  La Casa Real held a further advantage of convenience for him. It was a short walk west to the green line Metro station or east to the Iglesia de San Jose on Calle de Alcalá. Past the church on that same street was the circular Plaza de Cibelles, where its statue of the Roman fertility goddess Cybele — known as Rhea to the Greeks — sat in her stone chariot hitched to stone lions on a stone island from which her naked stone cherubs, their forever-young, never-innocent faces bloated like the faces of dying cats, poured their bowls of water into the surrounding fountain pool. There at the lower rim of the fountain he could bear right into Paseo del Prado and then cross the green toward the great old art museum, where he would admire Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death in its ground-floor Flemish gallery, only paces beyond the Puerta de Goya entrance.

  These past days as September rain clouds arrived to douse the summer heat, he had been drawn to another destination at the corner of Calle del Arenal and Calle de los Boradores, in the ancient district north and west of Gran Vía — Iglesia de San Ginés, whose bell tower struck its Sunday calls to worship mere hours after the Joy Eslava discotheque in its shadow had its last call for drinks, and the Saturday-night crowds that flung heatedly across its dance floor emptied, staggering and shuffling, onto the streets. With the lens of his digital camera, he had photographed the church from every angle to capture its solid ledges and brickwork, the architectural repetitions that hinted at that deep-rooted Moorish tendency to hold fast, the forceful and domineering thrust of the tower’s spire. Back in his suite, he had used the images for detailed reference as he sketched out plans for a wooden scale model of the church.

  Without any previous experience, Kuhl had scrupulously crafted three such models during his extended hibernation. The gothic Saint Jean Cathedral of Lyon was his first; if his goal was to task himself, he would move with audacity to capture a resplendent citadel of heaven, an archbishop’s throne. The next church he had built was the Basilica of Santa Croce, where the bones of Galileo, the seeker of answers accused of heresy, and Machiavelli, the seeker of power banished for conspiracy, lay entombed. His most recently completed model was the Church of Saint Thomas, in Austria. The small, severe building was a relatively undemanding bit of work for him, but he had known that in advance, having mastered his woodcraft long before the project was undertaken. And the church’s cloistered austerity had seemed a perfect expression of his circumstances as one year of withdrawal and cover made a slow passage into another.

  A man who hungered for action, Siegfried Kuhl had needed to remain dormant. It was an adaptation that ran against his innermost grain, and he had often thought of surfacing to face the Sword operative whose seething cathexis of revenge had made his pursuit of Kuhl a constant threat. But Kuhl had been advanced a handsome sum to vanish from the face of the earth, with additional payments of one million dollars a year deposited to a numbered Swiss account in monthly installments. A soldier of fortune by self-definition, he was bound to honor this contract — and his sponsor’s exceptional reach of imagination, his resourcefulness, was no less an inducement than the monetary retainer. There was in him nothing of the mediocre or the common. His mannered delicacy en-framed a hot rebellion against the boot of order that Kuhl recognized and found impressive. While the payments toward their unwritten agreement continued, he would stay out of sight, and attempt to stanch the dreams of combat bleeding into his mind.

  Kuhl’s work on the model churches was the wrap, the tourniquet he applied, a means of control that had come to him in an unexpected, almost startling moment of revelation back in Lyon. He did not know what precipitated it. Saint Jean Cathedral was on the Saône not far from his hotel, and Kuhl had passed it along the river walk many times before the day he paused to gaze up at its buttresses and pinnacles, its transept spire piercing the sky. All at once, Kuhl believed he had come upon an understanding of the aggressive vision it must have taken to conceive and raise so magnificent a structure… a thought followed immediately by his own visions of the torch, the bonfire, and the raised sword. What furies of the human soul must have needed such an elaborate, soaring cage? How great a will to contain them must have driven its construction? And what if its deconstruction were achieved with comparable purpose and discipline? What measure of will would that be? What consecration of the fervent thing within?

  Kuhl had decided to put himself to a private test. Soon afterward, he started his model of Saint Peter in his hotel room, working at a sunlit window that overlooked the site where one of Caesar’s lieutenants had founded the city, declaring it a home to his veteran warriors. And his work in each of its phases had been ongoing ever since.

  Here today, however, Kuhl had no room in his affairs for the final camera shots of San Ginés tower he felt were necessary for the accurate weathering and detailing of its twin on his scale miniature. Nor was the Breughel a present lure to him. Leaving his hotel at six A.M. under a Madrid sun that had arisen hot and contemptuous of autumn, he had instead gone toward Calle de Alcalá and the San Jose church, a structure of lesser distinction than San Ginés that interested him only because of the daily hours its dioces
e kept and how they in turn determined the hours of a sidewalk newspaper and magazine stand down the street from its steps.

  In Madrid even churches neglected by travel brochures held valuable art and artifacts, and admittance was generally restricted to scheduled prayer services to ensure the presence of a watch against thieves who might drift in among the worshipers and sightseers. It was unusual for a church to open its doors before nine or ten o’clock in the morning, but Iglesia de San Jose was an exception, opening at seven to accommodate legions of international travelers, VIP businessmen, and morning traders at the nearby stock exchange in this most visited district of the city.

  The news vender outside Iglesia de San Jose capitalized on its early hours by getting a similar jump on his sales. He received the morning papers well before any competing dealers in town and would arrive at his stand at the break of dawn to set up his display racks and have them filled for his sidewalk trade as the congregation moved on from its prayers at the church.

  Kuhl presumed the vender had convinced his delivery-men to make him the first stop along their routes with ample greasing of their palms, but that was of no importance to him. The relevant point was that it enabled him to pick up his first-Thursday-of-the-month copy of El Mundo almost as it shipped from the press. The window of opportunity for which the personal ad would be useful was an hour, not one second more or less. Precisely when that hour commenced was part of the information relayed by the code, and any chance that Kuhl could miss it was eliminated by his getting hold of the paper on release.

  The electronic editions of El Mundo and other papers that Kuhl read for the communiqué in his scattered lodgings across the Continent would not do. Their posting times could be irregular, and the Web sites sometimes went down. Moreover, the online sites were not uniformly comprehensive. Some of them omitted personal columns, and some offered partial or alternate listings. For Kuhl to be confident, his sources had to be dependable. Thus he relied exclusively on the print versions of the newspapers.

  This morning Kuhl’s brisk pace had carried him to the stand as its owner was still slicing open the wide plastic straps of his newspaper bundles. With a few minutes to spare before the papers were separated, he had turned into the church and paused at a side altar to light a votive candle for a lover he remembered with particular fondness, and whose life he had reluctantly taken to preserve secrets of which she had known far too much, leaving her body in the beautiful rolling hills of Castilla y León in the Spanish countryside. The votive was a memorial Kuhl believed she would have appreciated.

  Now he came down the porch onto the street, noticed El Mundo had been put out for sale, took a copy, dropped his pesetas into the vender’s hand, and pushed his way back through the thickening foot traffic on Calle de Alcalá to Casa Real. Waiting for a stoplight to change at the street’s busy intersection with Calle de Hortaleza, Kuhl folded it open to the classified pages and traced his eyes down columns of personal entries. Most were straightforward casts for sex or companionship that shared a certain banal, desperate vocabulary. There were the people seeking long-term partners, thrill dates, discreet adulteries. The common descriptions of age and appearance, and predictable mentions of candlelight, music, and travel.

  Kuhl found the entry meant for his eyes in the third column. Adhering to the established format, it was a brief lettre d’amour, identifiable by distinctive matched, reusable pairs of sender and recipient names chosen from a list of twenty-four he had committed to memory — twelve of them male, twelve female. In fact, mnemonic triggers were the basis of the code. Information stored away in his mind provided the context for its key elements, making it absolutely foolproof. Kuhl knew the first letter of the recipient’s name always corresponded to a time at which he would, if necessary, have the ability to reach his sponsor over a secure Internet live conferencing connection. The letter “A” matched with one o’clock, “B” two o’clock, “C” three o’clock, and so forth. Whether the start time for the viable SILC was before or after noon depended on the sender’s first initial: a vowel pointed to the morning while a consonant marked it for the afternoon.

  Here, Kuhl instantly noticed that the ad began with “My Darling Anya” and ended with “Your Unforgetting Lover, Michael-Sebastian.”

  These routine elements of the message elicited no reaction from him besides a rapid noting of the timetable. The short window of contact would open at one o’clock Greenwich Mean Time that afternoon — the GMT standard was used, again for consistency’s sake — and shut at two o’clock after the predetermined hour passed.

  It was something in the body of the message that quickened his pulse.

  The text between salutation and closing said:

  Our ardor lifted me to a place beyond the stars, and I cannot bear the fall now that you are gone. Could we have gone too high, too fast, too far? Did our hearts burn too brightly for their flame to last? As I must endure the lonely darkness of love’s ashes, I think it would have been better if we had taken flight without them.

  Kuhl stared at the newspaper, his eyes locked on a brief possessive phrase in the message’s fourth and last sentence.

  Love’s ashes.

  Moments passed. Kuhl kept staring at the paper, at that pair of simple words, the sounds of automobiles and pedestrians in the intersection tamped and dulled by the bloodrush in his ears.

  Love’s ashes.

  Together they formed a second mnemonic. Codewords he had hoped for, but never truly allowed himself to expect.

  Kuhl thought of the flame he had lit in the church, that tiny surrendered spark of memory and passion. Then he closed his newspaper and resumed walking quickly toward his apartment hotel as the traffic light across the street changed from red to green.

  For the next several hours he would do nothing but wait in his suite to make contact.

  * * *

  “This place is exquisitely nifty,” Megan said. “All we need now is for the Blob to come glooping over us.”

  “The what?” Nimec said.

  “The Blob,” Megan said. “As in that old fifties make-out movie. Starring Steve McQueen and a thousand tons of gelatin.”

  “Oh, right,” Nimec said. He was staring out the windshield of his reconditioned ’57 Corvette roadster at an orange neon sign shimmering the words BIG EDDIE’S SNACK SHACK into the night.

  Megan looked at him from the passenger seat.

  “The gelatinous lump was known to be gracious and humble in real life, but tended to play very slimy characters. I suppose it was the usual Hollywood typecasting.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Winning an Oscar for its role must have been some consolation, though,” Megan said. “The story goes that nobody in the Academy knew whether to nominate it for best actor or actress, so they created some kind of special category. Best Performance by an Amorphous Gender-Neutral Green Thing.”

  Nimec kept gazing silently at the entrance to the drive-in restaurant as a pretty, ponytailed carhop who seemed about the right age for a college sophomore came roller-skating out to the car.

  He pushed in a chrome dashboard knob to douse the lights and glanced over at Megan.

  “What are you having to eat?”

  “I’m torn between the fried popcorn shrimp and fried clam strip baskets.”

  “That time we stopped in Maine a couple years ago, you told me you didn’t like clams.”

  “Whole clams,” Megan said. “Much too chewy.”

  Nimec looked at her.

  “Let’s get one basket of each and split them,” he said.

  “Yum, yum,” Megan said. “And don’t forget our side of potato skins. And my Diet Coke. While you’re treating, dear man.”

  He grunted and rolled his window halfway down. Rockabilly music burst into the ’Vette from speakers above the diner’s wraparound awning — somebody who sounded like Buddy Holly but wasn’t.

  “Hi.” The carhop outside leaned toward him with a pad, a pencil, and a very cute smile. “Will the two
of you be needing menus?”

  Nimec told her they wouldn’t and placed their orders and watched the carhop roll off across the parking lot with the diminishing clatter that skate wheels make when spinning away over paved surfaces.

  Then he became quiet again.

  “About the Blob winning an Oscar,” Megan said. “A nonhuman superstar of undetermined sexual identity must have caused quite a ruckus at the time. This was 1957 or ’58 and couldn’t have been more than three or four years after the McCarthy hearings, blacklisting… did you know even Lucille Ball came under investigation, by the way? Lucy, of all people in the world. But what’s odd about how it came about was that Desi—”

  “Meg, give me a break.” Nimec glanced over at her. “There’re some things we need to discuss.”

  She gave him a look of mock surprise.

  “No kidding,” she said. “Here I thought you only dragged me out of my apartment at ten o’clock at night to go hot-rodding around the Bay Area and chowing down fast food.”

  Nimec sat there unconsciously tapping the steering wheel.

  “Ricci was over at my place before,” he said. “I asked him to come for shooting practice at the range. Figured it might loosen him up, get him talking. The way it did sometimes before he left here.”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  Nimec shook his head no.

  “A big piece of him’s still gone,” he said. “Maybe most of him. He won’t tell me what he’s thinking, or what he’s feeling. I can guess some of it. But just enough to know he isn’t right.”

  “Does it worry you?”

  “Some, yeah,” Nimec said. He moved his shoulders. “Could be I’d feel different if I wasn’t heading off for Gabon the day after tomorrow. Once Ricci got back, I had myself convinced the normal routine would help him. You start on an everyday grind, it can smooth the edges from the outside in.”