“Raúl,” Murov asked, “does the fact that that bastard Castillo killed your nephew in Uruguay change our conversation from ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI?’ to ‘What can the DGI do for the SVR?’”
President Castro considered that a moment.
“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Where we are now is ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI, in exchange for what the SVR wants the DGI to do for the SVR?’”
When Murov didn’t immediately reply, Castro went on, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Sergei, but neither Fidel nor I ever really liked Vincenzo. But he was our sister’s kid, and you know how that goes: We were stuck with him.”
“And between you and me, Sergei,” General Jesus Manuel Cosada said, “the sonofabitch was always sucking up to Fidel. He wanted my job.”
“But then why did you send him to Uruguay?” Murov asked.
“Sending him there,” Cosada said, “is not exactly the same thing as sending him there and hoping he got to come back.”
“Jesus Christ, Jesus!” Raúl said. “If Gloria ever heard you say that, you’d be a dead man!”
“I asked why you sent him, feeling the way you apparently felt, to Uruguay,” Murov said.
“Well, when the Iraqi Oil-for-Food people told us what they wanted…”
“Which was?” Murov asked.
“They wanted the UN guy, Lorimer, dead.”
“Because he ripped them off for sixteen million dollars?”
“Well, once he’d done that, they knew he couldn’t be trusted. And he knew too much, too many names. He had to be dead. They didn’t seem to care too much about the money,” Raúl said.
“Which got Raúl and me to thinking…” Cosada said.
“What would happen if we sent Alejandro down there with the Hungarians…” Raúl said.
“For which they were offering us a lot of money,” Cosada picked up. “And they took out Dr. Lorimer…”
“But then we told them there was no sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds in his safe.”
“And somebody tipped the Uruguayan cops to what the Hungarians had done, and where to find them.”
“And Alejandro brought us the bearer bonds,” Raúl said. “Getting the picture?”
“Brilliant!” General Murov said.
“The Oil-for-Food people were not about to make a stink. They would have gotten the important part of what they wanted — Lorimer dead — and the money wasn’t that important to them. The money those rag-headed Iraqi bastards made from Oil-for-Food is unbelievable, except it’s true.”
“So that’s what happened,” Murov said.
“No, that’s not what happened,” Raúl said. “What happened was this goddamn Yankee Castillo killed Alejandro and killed the Hungarians and made off with our sixteen million dollars. The notion of that thieving Yankee sonofabitch sitting naked in a cell in Lubyanka getting sprayed with ice water — I presume that’s what you have in mind for him — has a certain appeal. I don’t like it when people steal sixteen million dollars from me. Tell me what you have in mind, Sergei.”
“Well, so long as they were in Argentina—”
“‘Were in Argentina’?” Cosada interrupted.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus, for Christ’s sake stop interrupting my friend Sergei,” Raúl snapped.
“As I was saying,” Murov went on, “so long as the three of them, ‘the Unholy Trio,’ so to speak, are in Argentina, we can’t get at them. Not only are they protected by Aleksandr Pevsner’s private army, but that goddamn Irish cop Liam Duffy has my photograph on the wall of every immigration booth in the country.”
“So what are you proposing?” Raúl asked.
“Just as I got on the plane to fly here—”
“Speaking of flying, Sergei,” Raúl said, “we have to talk about the Tupolev Tu-934A.”
“What do you mean, ‘talk about it’?”
“Fidel wants one. He told me to tell you his feelings were hurt when you gave one to the late Fat Hugo…”
“I did not give one to Fat Hugo.”
“… and didn’t give one to him,” Raúl said. “And I can see his point.”
“Read my lips, Raúl. I did not give a Tupolev Tu-934A to Fat Hugo.”
“That’s not what we heard,” Cosada said.
“If you didn’t give one to Fat Hugo, what was that airplane our friend Castillo stole from him? A Piper Cub?” Raúl challenged.
“What Castillo stole from Fat Hugo’s island was General Vladimir Sirinov’s Tupolev Tu-934A,” Murov said.
“I don’t think Fidel’s going to believe that,” Raúl said.
“Raúl, listen to me. I don’t want this to get around, but we don’t have that many Tupolev Tu-934As. We don’t have enough for us. Do you think I would have come here on that Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet 100-95 if I could have talked Vladimir Vladimirovich into letting me use a Tu-934A? That so-called Superjet is a disaster. I didn’t uncross my fingers until we landed here, and I’m going home on Air Bulgaria. They’re flying DC-9s that are as old as I am, but their engines don’t fall off.”
“Well, I’ll tell Fidel what you said, but if I were you, I’d try real hard to get him a Tupolev.”
“Can we get on with this?”
“You’d be in a better bargaining position, Sergei, if you got Fidel one of those Tupolevs, but go ahead.”
“I thought you were the president now.”
“I am, but Fidel is still Fidel. He just doesn’t come to the office as often as he used to.”
“I found out just before I got on the plane to come here that Castillo and his fiancée, the former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and a couple of Castillo’s people, the Merry Outlaws, just left Bariloche for Cozumel.”
“Couple of questions, Sergei. Castillo’s fiancée?”
“He’s going to marry her. That’s what ‘fiancée’ means.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Unbelievable! He’s not a bad-looking guy. And no offense, Sergei, but every female SVR podpolkovnik I’ve ever seen looks like a Green Bay Packers tackle in drag.”
“This one doesn’t. Believe it.”
“Merry Outlaws?”
“That’s what President Clendennen calls Castillo’s people. If that’s good enough for him…”
“What are they going to do in Cozumel?”
“I gave that a good deal of thought before I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“What they’re going to do in Cozumel. It’s going to be a great big wedding. All the OOOR — and there’s a hell of a lot of them.”
“All the what?”
“Like ROCOR, which, as I’m sure you know, stands for Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.”
“No, I didn’t,” Raúl confessed.
“Me, either,” Cosada said. “What the hell is it?”
“We don’t have time for that right now, maybe later. OOOR stands for Oprichnina Outside of Russia.”
“And what the hell does Oprichnina mean?” Castro asked.
“I really don’t have the time to get into that with you either, Raúl. But trust me, there’s more of them than anybody suspects and they’ll all want to come to the wedding. The Berezovsky family — and Svetlana was Svetlana Berezovsky before she married Evgeny Alekseev and became Svetlana Alekseeva — is one of the oldest, most prestigious families in the Oprichnina.
“If anybody in the OOOR gets invited to the wedding, and they all will, they’ll go. Just the Oprichniks in Coney Island would fill a 747. And they’ll all bring their security people, now that I think of it. So two 747s from Coney Island alone.”