"Oh yes. Many things."
"Such as?"
"Whatever you wish."
"You're Russian. Maybe we should talk about that."
"If you like. We can talk about anything… We can talk about the byliny or the beguny or the Black Hundreds — anything. I am a regular Peter Kirillov, Mr. Thorne. Just ask me, and I'll point you where you want to go."
A car, leaving the lot, came up to the window. The kid stuck the ticket into an electric timer, which came down with a clunk, then passed it outside.
"Mr. Thorne?"
"All right."
"Good. It is four o'clock now. In one hour and a half, at five-thirty, come to 362 Grayson Street. It is just an old garage, but from there we can go somewhere else."
"All right. I'll be there."
"Very good. And of course you will come by yourself. No police. This is not for them. It has nothing to do with them. You must realize that. I am serious. I will tell you about Brightman, but I will tell you something else. That will be personal, Mr. Thorne. You understand? Something you wouldn't want a policeman to hear."
Silence.
"What do you mean?"
"What I say."
His breath, rustling into the mouthpiece… and then the line went dead and I was standing there, the phone squeezed in my hand.
Something personal. Something you wouldn't want a policeman to hear…
I put the phone down. I had no idea what he was talking about — but for some reason my palms had started to sweat. From the very beginning, I'd had the feeling that all this would double back on me. And here it was. Yet none of it was tied to me personally — there was nothing I wouldn't want a policeman to hear… May. She was my connection. And it could not be more innocent. Russia? It linked us all — me, Brightman, the man on the phone — but I had no guilt there… That made no difference, however. My skin had gone clammy, and I'd begun to feel very queasy, as if… as if what? As if, somewhere inside, I already knew—
"Sir?"
I turned around.
"That's okay, sir. Just wondered if you was finished using the phone."
I dug up a couple of dollars and got out of his booth. The wind, gusting off the Detroit River, pressed my raincoat tight to my body, and grit, blown across the huge lot, stung my cheeks. For a moment, I wandered among the long aisles of cars. Turning my back to the wind, I got a cigarette going and tried to calm myself down. There was no time for soul-searching — I had some decisions to make. First, what should I do? Call Katadotis? But even as I thought this, I knew that I wouldn't. Even ignoring the warnings my mysterious caller had issued, he would obviously be very cautious and at the first hint of the cops he'd take off. But that raised the next question. If I kept our appointment, what would happen? One Russian yesterday, a second today — and the first had a gun. It made you think. Certain initials even began blinking at the edge of my brain. But it was too incredible and it just didn't feel right. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti may be hard to pronounce, but after eight years in the U.S.S.R. I could smell a KGB officer a mile away and certainly sniff one at the end of the phone. This smell was different; not official at all.
I flipped my cigarette away. In truth, I didn't have the faintest idea what it all meant, or could possibly mean. But I knew I'd go anyway: I'd never forgive myself if I didn't. And there was, I realized, no time to debate about it. My hour and a half had already shrunk fifteen minutes. Grayson Street, an old garage — I had to find out where they were, then get myself there. Not in a cab; I'd want my own transportation. And not in Brightman's car, which had already been recognized. Therefore…
My mind began steadying itself on these practical details. I looked around. By now, I'd wandered into the middle of this vast parking lot. To my left, behind a high wire fence, was the muddy trench of the Detroit River, with Canada huddling glumly on the opposite bank. In front of me, rising up like some urban mirage, were the towers of the Renaissance Center. I made for them, thinking I could rent a car there, but in the end caught a taxi out front. I was curious: the man on the other end of that phone must have been following me all morning— unless he'd been following May and had picked me up later— and I wondered if he was still on my tail. After ten minutes, I decided he wasn't. By then we were on Michigan Avenue. The cabbie turned around, headed back downtown, and dropped me at a Hertz office on Washington Boulevard. After the usual routine, they put me into the driver's seat of a Pontiac and the clerk showed me Grayson Street on a map.
Heading north, I nosed up Woodward, resolutely keeping my mind on my driving: it was the easiest way of forgetting how nervous I felt. Five o'clock. A gloomy dusk hung over the city as the rush-hour crowds fled toward Ann Arbor and Flint, Ypsilanti and Lansing. I joined the escape. Caught up in the edgy panic, I let the traffic suck me up Gratiot, then down the Chrysler Freeway. Like most Detroit expressways, it's built below grade, a canal full of carbon monoxide and noise. Overhead, an electric sign gave the temperature (49 degrees) and flashed the fact that 5,467 Fords had been built that day, while on WXYZ the disk jockey intoned, "Like Mr. Ford used to say, 'I don't believe in caging birds or animals or any living thing.'"
I fought clear of all this at the Plymouth Plant exit. I was now in Hamtramck and began hunting for Grayson. Trapped between the expressway approaches and an old railway spur, it turned out to be almost impossible to get to: blocked off by high fences or separated from ordinary roads by immense vacant lots. But I made it on my third pass, bumping across an abandoned siding and then turning down a stretch of gravel until the street signs started.
It was getting dark now. Only a few kids were out on the sidewalks, and a pair of black men in boots and overalls plodded slowly home. Though not as bad as St. Jean and the area near the auto pound, this was still a melancholy place. The houses were identical cinder-block bungalows. Most were shabby and the lawns were minuscule, though a few — somehow even more pathetic — boasted a spindly hedge of suburban shrub by the door. I slowed down, trying to spot house numbers, but just then the garage itself loomed up. It appeared abandoned, and was built in an old-fashioned style that made me think of gas stations you sometimes find in country towns.
The pumps had rounded tops and the building itself was peeling stucco. Accelerating a little — why give myself away? — I continued past it and turned down a side street.
I parked and looked at my watch. Ten minutes early. I stared down the street. Lights were on in the houses; a door banged somewhere and a woman's voice harshly called out a name. About four blocks along, the road petered out at a railway embankment protected by a sagging metal fence and lit by a single curved light. I cranked down my window. Behind me, in the side-view mirror, the lights of a car drifted down Grayson, and a moment later a black kid on a bicycle came riding up, his shining eyes quietly marking my ofay face. Then he disappeared in the gloom.
I lit a cigarette, smoked it slowly. I thought about a time in Moscow when I'd waited like this. I'd been doing an article on the Soviet Army and had made contact with a Mladshü Lieten-ant in a Guard's Division. He was only going to tell me about the food, his leave, his pay — the ordinary miseries of day-today life in any army — but we both knew that this was technically espionage, and that only the most technical definitions would interest a Soviet court. Now, by comparison… but maybe it was a comparison I'd better not make. I flipped my cigarette out the window, got out myself. The street was empty except for the beat-up old heaps drawn up at the curb, one of which was resting right on its wheel rims. I locked the car door and walked back toward the corner, my steps grittily crunching on the cement of the sidewalk. At Grayson, I paused a moment, looking around. To the left, a block away, a few indistinct figures were grouped around a car. Somebody laughed. Then the car door opened and in the glow of the interior light I caught the shine of legs and shoes and the flash of a smile. Kids, I thought, horsing around… I looked right, toward the garage. I couldn't see it from this angle, but a dark, empty space marked where it was. On the far sidewalk, a single man was walking toward me, hands thrust deeply into the pocket of his windbreaker; on this side, further on — beyond the garage — two men were walking away from me. Streetlights spread shadows into the gloom. As the two men passed into one of these areas of light, I saw that they had green garbage bags over their shoulders: heading for the coin wash, doing their laundry before the crowds came after supper.