Harry had given him the money and extracted the promise that he would take a cab home. I was standing right there. I saw the whole thing. This image of the three of us in the hotel lobby makes it even more surreal when I see the back of Korff’s jacket. The collar is still wet with his blood as he lies facedown on the concrete, a few feet beyond the steps leading up to the bridge.
Standing in the crowd holding our suitcases and looking at his dead body on the ground, Harry and I feel as if we’ve been sucker-punched.
Police officers are standing around, a couple of them in plain clothes-detectives, I am assuming. One of them is taking pictures with a large SLR camera, moving in for different angles around the corpse. The flashes of the strobe light up the cold night air each time he snaps the shutter and fires. The uniforms are telling the crowd every few seconds to step back.
“Why didn’t he take the cab?” says Harry. “He said he would.”
“Maybe he needed the money,” I tell him.
“The cost of a taxi wasn’t worth his life.”
“I’m sure he knows that now.” What is troubling to me is not just the violence of the act, but its utter futility. “Why? Why do it at all?”
“What do you mean?” says Harry.
“Why bother to kill him?”
“Obviously because he knew too much,” says Harry.
“Yes. But he’d already told us everything he knew. Whoever killed him had to know that. They were either tailing him or. .”
“Or what?” says Harry.
“Or they were tailing us. Either way they had to know he already met and talked with us. If the purpose was to silence him, why not kill him before he talked instead of after? It’s the pattern. The same thing happened with the girl, remember?”
“I wasn’t there,” says Harry.
“That’s right. It was Herman and me. They waited until after we talked to her in the motel room. And then they killed her. Killed both of them, Ben and her friend. And Graves. I met with him at his office. We talked. Next morning he’s dead in the underground. Each time they waited until after they talked to us, and then they killed them.”
“Kiss-of-death syndrome,” says Harry. “Maybe we need to stop talking.”
“But we’re still alive.”
“We may not be if we stick around here much longer.” Harry checks his watch. “We can still make the three o’clock train if we hurry.”
We make it to the station, Harry checks our tickets, three-day rail passes, good for another two days. He squats down to tie his shoelace. As he does it he sees something on his bag down near one of the rolling wheels.
I turn to check the illuminated sign showing departure times and cities to make sure we get to the correct platform.
When I turn back Harry has his finger to his nose. Seems he’s rolled his bag through something foul.
“What is it, errant dog?” I say.
He ignores me, stands up, grabs the handle of the rolling bag, and walks away.
“Where you going? The platform’s the other way,” I tell him.
Harry doesn’t say anything. He just keeps walking. He pulls his bag over against the far wall inside the station, away from the crowd. I follow him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you have anything valuable inside your suitcase?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Some clothes, underwear, extra pair of shoes, my shaving kit. Just the usual.”
“Anything with your name on it?”
I think for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.”
“You want to be sure,” he says. “You can replace everything when we get home. In the meantime, tear the ID label off your bag.” Harry is doing this with his own luggage as he talks.
“What?”
“Just do it,” he says. “And while you’re at it make sure there’s no stick-on barcodes from the airlines on the outside, anything that can identify you.”
“Why?”
“How much time did you have to carefully go through your bag before we left the hotel?”
“What are you talking about? None. Neither did you.”
“Exactly!” says Harry.
He turns his head and looks at me, and suddenly it dawns on me that maybe it’s not what they took out of our bags we should be worried about. Harry knows something he’s not telling me.
“Is there something on board?” I ask.
“You bet.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Could be.”
A cop in a uniform with a dog on a leash forty feet away is sniffing bags. Suddenly this has Harry’s full attention. “Right now I’m wishing it was more crowded. Rush hour or something,” says Harry. “If he starts to come this way”-Harry nods toward the cop-“just walk away and take the bag with you. Don’t run. Go out the way we came in.”
“Listen, why don’t we roll them into the bathroom, use the handicapped stall,” I tell him. “Open ’em up and check them out.”
“Unless I miss my bet we’re not gonna find anything unless you can come up with a sharp knife. I’m thinking they slit the lining and slipped it between the inner lining and the outer case. I’ve seen it done,” says Harry. “Super-glue the cut. .” Harry suddenly looks down at his shoes and smiles. “I don’t want to keep looking at him. If I do, I’m gonna look guilty and he’ll come over here with the dog. In which case we won’t need a knife,” he says.
“What is it, explosives?”
“No. If they wanted to do that they would have left the bags alone and slipped a couple of devices under our beds,” says Harry. “I think you’re right. I don’t think they want to kill us. At least not yet. At the moment I think they have something else in mind.”
“I’m listening.”
“The suitcases in the room. The comb on the bed. Everything tossed and put back so carelessly inside the bags. No one is that stupid. What they wanted was to send us a message,” says Harry. “Let us know they’d been in the rooms.”
“Why?”
“My guess is so we’d panic and run.”
“And here we are,” I tell him.
“Yes, but we’ve had time to think. That and some really fine luck,” says Harry.
“What are you talking about?”
Harry’s eyes keep tracking the cop with the dog as the canine and his master move toward the platforms. “My bag. I’m gonna hate to lose it,” he says. “I’ve had it at least ten years. It’s been everywhere with me. Thing like that grows on you.”
“You make it sound like a family pet.”
“Well, it just did me a favor no dog at the airport is ever going to do.”
“What?”
“It told me what I had in my bag. About a month after I bought this case it got hung up on one of the convey jobs at one of the airports. Brand-new case and suddenly it has a small rip in the outer canvas down near the left wheel. You can imagine how angry I was.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.”
“Well, between the little rip and the bouncing ride over the cobblestones, if that dog over there picks up the powder trail I’m leaving, he’s probably gonna OD,” says Harry. “I’m surprised he hasn’t already found it. If he does, you’ll want to get out of my way, ’cause I’m gonna have to outrun him dragging the suitcase all the way to the river.”
“What? You mean cocaine?”
“No. Hell,” says Harry, “over here that’s a party favor. Get caught and you gotta say ten Hail Marys and write ‘pardon my sinuses’ eight times on the blackboard. No. Don’t look now but I think that snow coming out behind from my wheels is China White.”
Harry is talking heroin. “Why kill us,” he says, “when they can dump us in some European dungeon for a few decades? In the meantime, everybody who’s chatted with us is turning up dead.”
“So what do you want to do? We could just leave the bags here and walk away.”
“We do that, two abandoned bags, they’ll find them before we can get halfway to the platform.” Harry is looking at the cop with the dog again.
“We could take them back to the river and dump them,” I tell him.