Little Odessa Page 9

  The clerk smiled knowingly. “Some of our best customers are people,” he said. “Actually, the dewoofer is a very safe device. It’s a top-of-the-line cowhide collar like any other, but with a computerized sensor built inside. The computer responds to any unnecessary barking by firmly instructing your pet to cut it out.”

  “Yeah?” Harry said, intrigued. He picked up the collar for a closer look, pinching a hard-edged bulge in the thick leather. “How’s it do that?”

  “By means of a lightweight, six-volt power pack also housed in the collar.”

  Harry tossed the dewoofer on the display top. “You mean it shocks the shit out of him whenever he opens his yap.”

  “Gently,” the clerk said, “very gently.”

  “You call that coddling?” Because the salesman, who carried about 225 pounds on a thirty-inch waist, looked as though he might, Harry took a step back, then said, “I keep Isaac home with me, not in a concentration camp. He’s my good buddy, a man’s best friend and all that. I wouldn’t do that to a dog.”

  “But the dewoofer was invented by a dog handler from the Swedish army. It can’t hurt.”

  “What else you got?” Harry asked.

  “It depends on the animal’s problem,” the clerk said. “Could it be cage trauma?”

  Harry shuddered. “Only if it’s catching.”

  “Perhaps it’s some form of anxiety hysteria? Our cananalyst offers therapy three times a week, individual and group, and Coddled Canines gives a money-back guarantee that when treatment is complete the animal will respond to your every command with an appreciative attitude and wagging tail.”

  “I don’t know what the problem is,” Harry said. “He just won’t eat. I tried the canned foods and then the dry, but he turns up his nose at everything.”

  “Have you investigated our Gourmand Grub?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A nutritious, flavorful, haute cuisine diet for the finicky eater prepared by our own trained chefs. Yesterday’s menu, for example, featured an entree of sirloin tips, and today there’s roast beef au jus.”

  “Sounds yummy,” Harry said. “I’ll try ’em both.” As the clerk reached under the counter for a couple of foil trays, he added, “Better make that two of each. Maybe the mutt’ll go for it, too.”

  The clerk didn’t laugh or stop stacking trays on the glass. “Some of our best customers,” he said again, “are people.”

  Isaac Grynzpun liked the sirloin tips but loved the roast beef, loved it with the sirloin tips for dessert, and two days later Harry was back at Coddled Canines to start a tab. On the weekend, down close to sixty dollars, he phoned Kate at the house. “It’s me,” he said.

  “Who’s me?” she asked grumpily.

  She sounded exhausted—nervous, too—probably worrying her head off over the dog. He was on his way. “Me,” he tried again. “The burglar.”

  Kate’s throat caught so hard she was sure he heard it. She watched with some relief as Bucyk’s wire took it all in. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “You know what I want,” Harry told her. “You found it yet?”

  “I’m still looking.”

  “Open your eyes. It’ll go faster.”

  “I still don’t think there’s anything here.” She glanced toward the stairs. “I mean, where didn’t you look?”

  “Do us both a favor and don’t think. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Kate snapped. “How’s Isaac?”

  “Cryin’ his eyes out,” Harry said. “He misses his own bed.”

  “Is he eating?”

  “Is he what? Lady, eat’s all he knows how to do. I’d of guessed what it cost to keep him in biscuits, I’d of taken you and left him to hunt for the stuff.”

  “That’s cruel,” Kate said. “Isaac can’t survive on dog biscuits.”

  “You want it from him he ain’t suffering? I’ll call him.” He whistled and Kate heard him say, “Hey, Isaac.” Then he told her, “He can’t come to the phone now, he’s too busy stuffin’ his face.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’re so worried, you’d be better off doin’ what I told you, not asking if he’s gettin’ three squares.”

  “I can’t help it if I’m upset,” Kate pouted. “Isaac is my responsibility.”

  “No,” Harry said as if he hated having to admit it. “He’s mine now. You sure this deal wasn’t your idea, to stick me with him?”

  “If he’s too much trouble, why don’t you give him back?”

  “You wanna take his place? I got plenty of biscuits left over. A little roast beef, too. TV’s got ghosts, but I’m gettin’ cable. You’d like it here.”

  “Oh, would I?” Get him talking about himself, Bucyk had said. Find out all you can. “Where, exactly, is here?”

  “I’m exactly in bed.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Kate said. “That’s the most exciting offer I’ve had since you threatened to shoot me.”

  “Hey, don’t be sarcastic,” Harry told her. “You asked where I am, I’m tellin’ you. I didn’t say we had to stay all the time.”

  “Where would we go? Don’t you think people might stare if they saw you holding a gun to my back?”

  “Listen,” he said, “this isn’t gettin’ us anywhere.”

  “That’s your fault. If you weren’t so unreasonable, we could work things out. You suggested we get together, why don’t we?”

  “For a crybaby,” Harry said, “you’re all of a sudden awful brave.”

  “You don’t scare me any more. In fact, you never did. I think face to face is the only way.”

  “I don’t,” Harry said. “I don’t like your attitude.”

  “But you just said you wanted to—”

  “Forget what I wanted. Your bein’ so cooperative, it makes me wonder. Turns me off, too. You’ve been robbed, you know? Ain’t you got any pride?”

  “Would you be happier if I was difficult? Should I work at that?”

  “I got a hunch,” Harry said, “you don’t have to work on anything.”

  She was dialing his number when she heard his ring downstairs, one long, three short—Morse code, he’d said, for the letter B. She went to the landing deliberately avoiding the mirror, preferring to look half undone. Right off she hit him with, “You didn’t tell me you’d bugged the phone, too.” While he was deciding what to make of that she said, “He called.”

  “Something else we have to discuss, something shouldn’t go on tape. That’s why I dropped over.” He saw the excitement wither on her face. “It can wait,” he said. “What’d he give out?”

  “A lot of nothing, really.”

  “He must’ve had something on his mind.”

  “He told me I had a poor attitude,” Kate said.

  “He’s smarter than you let on.”

  She showed him the cassette and he dropped it in a pocket, went upstairs ahead of her like he owned the place. He kicked off his shoes and leaned back in bed while Kate perched on the footrest of the Barcalounger.

  “I was running back everything we talked about,” he told her, “and I got to thinking there’s something more I can do for you, solve a number of problems at the same time.”

  “A new way to get Isaac back?”

  “Forget the dog for now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Give me a minute to explain, huh?” Kate shut up and Bucyk used most of the minute to fumble in his jacket for a pack of fancy cigarettes in light brown paper. Another expedition inside yielded a silver lighter. He lit up with a flourish and waved away the smoke with his hand and she saw a pinky ring with a blue stone. “You should’ve figured it out by now,” he said, eyeing her intently.

  “I’m FBI,” he said at last, and Kate leaned back to hear more. “That’s the new job, doing contract work for the Bureau.” He let that sink in. “You see why I couldn’t let on before, before I got to know you better, why I was trying to?”

  Kate acknowledged it with a barely perceptible n
od. “Is that why no one at the station house would tell me anything?”

  “They’d be in deep shit they gave out my hat size.”

  Kate sat forward again. “I feel so foolish, wasting your time on a dog. You must have found it comical, an FBI man …” The thought trailed off.

  “Tell you the truth, I’ve been enjoying it,” Bucyk said. “It’s like … like a conductor’s holiday.”

  “Aren’t there enough kidnapped children to chase after? It’s all you see in the papers.”

  “Only when it’s interstate,” he told her, “and even then, unless the vic’s spitting silver spoons, it’s small potatoes. I’m counterespionage,” he puffed.

  “You mean like James Bond?”

  “You noticed the resemblance,” he said, and Kate didn’t know whether it was okay to laugh until he beat her to it. “It’s kind of like that, only without the perks—the blondes, the Aston Martin. There’s some running down spies and hunting for terrorists, but usually it’s making sure our industrial secrets don’t end up backside of the rusty rug, you know, with the Russkies.”

  “Don’t look at me,” she said uncomfortably. “I may have been born there, but I’m not a … what do you call them, a sleeper agent.”

  “It’s a load off my mind,” Bucyk said. “I’ll inform the director.”

  Kate flushed. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “It occurred to me maybe I could find something for you, something you could hang your hat on, subcontract work for me.”

  “Because I’m from the Soviet Union? I hate to disillusion you,” she said, “but I’m about as Russian as a Cabbage Patch doll.” The idea made her laugh. “Do you think I’m from a red cabbage patch?”

  Bucyk wasn’t laughing. “You got it right the first time,” he said. “A doll.”

  “I still don’t see what I can do—”

  “Keeping tabs on foreign diplomats is our A-number-one priority,” he said. “There’s a striped pants we’re interested in who’s attached to the permanent trade delegation of an East European country I can’t give out, and I was thinking you two’d make a cute couple. It could mean a feather in your bonnet and dollars in your pocket. The Bureau is not a cheapskate …You do speak Russian?”

  “Da. With a bad New York accent.”

  “So does he,” Bucyk said. “His father was Soviet … well, that puss just squirted out of the bag … undersecretary in the Soviet UN mission in the late 1950s and he was raised here in the city. Went to the best schools, the Lycée, Columbia University. Now he’s back.”

  “And you want me to snuggle up to him?”

  “Don’t make a face. He’s not your average vodka-blotter in a drip-dry suit. The guy’s debonair, drives a Porsche, lives in a mansion out on the Island and hardly ever wears his blue socks with the brown shoes. Has an eye for the ladies, too.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any Soviet envoy I’ve heard about.”

  “Same here,” Bucyk said. “What it seems, he’s working both sides of the street, socking away the rubles while the proletariat’s taking the lumps. If we could find out more, we’d be able to stick it to him, turn him around or give him back to the Russkies to use downwind on a rifle range.”

  “I thought the CIA handled that kind of thing.”

  “Overseas only,” Bucyk told her. “Their charter doesn’t let them jaywalk in the States without clearing it first with The New York Times. Forget all that crap you hear what a gang of thugs the Company is, they follow the charter right out the window. A setup like this, it’s the Bureau’s.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  Bucyk inhaled deeply, stubbing out the tan butt on his heel, held it at arm’s length while Kate went out of the room for an ashtray. “Thank you,” he said when she came back. “Say that.”

  “But why me? Doesn’t the Federal Bureau of Investigation have enough trained women of its own?”

  He flicked a crumb of tobacco from his teeth, making a spitting sound and a sour face at the same time. “You answered your own question,” he said. “Trained women.”

  “What you’re saying is no one else will take your money to screw him,” she spit back. He didn’t argue the point. Out came the cigarettes and she helped herself to one, took a light from his. She said, “It’s no different with me.”

  “Sleeping with him’s your choice. All we care about is putting him in place.”

  Kate hid a puzzled look behind a wisp of smoke.

  “…You know, getting him working …”

  “I already have a boyfriend like that,” she said, pleased with herself when Bucyk didn’t come back at her right away.

  “Or maybe you don’t think we can meet your price.”

  Kate’s nostrils flared again, and this time Bucyk loved it. “You really know how to butter me up,” she said.

  “Whatever it takes.” He waited. Then, “Nothing I can say to change your mind?”

  “Not even if he was chief of the KGB.”

  “Sorry I brought it up.” He got off the bed and stretched. “Let me buy you supper. You look like hell.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He gazed past her and a little above, and she turned around to catch herself staring gauntly from the mirror. Her hands went automatically to sweep the taffy hair out of her eyes.

  “It’s not the do,” he said. “Don’t you eat any more?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Getting back to cases … your case … you still haven’t told me everything’s on the tape. What do you say you do it at a restaurant? You don’t want to eat, you can watch me.”

  Kate began brushing her hair in the glass. She was humming. If she started talking to herself, Bucyk was going to call 911. “Give me ten minutes to get ready,” she said without missing a stroke. “Please?”

  They came out of the park off Columbus Circle, locked in traffic which released them on Fifty-seventh Street. At a bus stop in front of Carnegie Hall Bucyk put his PBA card on the dash and they walked toward the Russian Tea Room.

  “Don’t you think you’re carrying this too far?” she said, not hiding her annoyance.

  He went to the window and looked in through a collection of tarnished samovars. He seemed surprised. “I don’t see what we’re so worried they’re gonna invade,” he told her. “They’re already taking over.”

  A few doors away a twenty-story office tower hovered self-consciously over its neighbors like the tallest kid in class. A uniformed starter brought down an elevator, monitoring its descent on a tiny screen as if he were previewing Hollywood’s next blockbuster.

  “Funny place for a restaurant,” Kate said.

  “It would be,” he agreed. “We’re going to an opening.”

  On the fourteenth floor they stepped off into a steamy loft of summer furs and linen suits, straw hats of both sexes. Track lighting rebounded off pale walls Kate decided would provoke less anxiety without the jumbled canvases trolling for acclaim. Blocking access to the windows and fresh air was a table draped in a spotted cloth she suspected had been snatched from a frame. At one end was wine punch in a glass bowl and in a starched waiter’s jacket a thin-hipped young man, also starched, ladling it out.

  “An art gallery,” she said, turning up her nose. “I thought you were buying me supper. You didn’t say anything about mooching it.”

  “We’ll only be a minute,” he promised. “There’s something I want you to help me with.”

  He bulled through the crowd into elbow room which moved with them toward an office behind a butcher-block counter. Bony blond girls of a style which never changes, dressed in styles which change day to day, were drinking white wine from plastic cups, sipping like it was private stock. In a quiet gallery on the other side, paintings in ornate frames glowed warmly under incandescent bulbs, and Kate made out golden halos and Eastern churches. The program heralded RUSSIAN ICONS 1825-1917.

  She went quickly past Byzantine caricatures of Saints Florus and Lavrus and Nic
holas the Miracle Worker, whose reproving stares followed her around the room. Bucyk caught up to her in a corner, asking, “What can you tell me about this stuff?”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” she said. “Next you’ll want me to brief you on what they’re saying inside the Kremlin.”

  “How’d you know?”

  She glowered back at Saints Basil and Gleb, Saint Catherine the Martyr, laying blame for the pogroms her grandmother had sobbed over for sixty years. She sneaked away for some cheese and when she came back Bucyk was in the office making time with the blond girls. From the way they fluttered their hands they knew as much about the icons as she did. Then one brought him to a tall, broad-shouldered man with polished black hair, a cream-colored suit set off by a perfect tan. Kate carried her Brie close enough to eavesdrop.

  “These the genuine article?” Bucyk was asking.

  Kate expected the stranger to beg off. Instead, he put down his cup—some of the private stock—and looked at Bucyk earnestly. “Are you a collector?” he asked.

  “Not just yet,” Bucyk said. “This kind of stuff, it’s a little out of my price range. But it’s so damn beautiful, I wish I could afford it.”

  “I do too,” the man with the polished hair laughed. “They’re all first-rate pieces.”

  Kate saw that Bucyk was looking at the blondes. “Not real old,” he said.

  “For the most part, these are late-nineteenth-century works. The large orders for the Petersburg cathedrals had dried up by then and most painting was being done in rural villages by artists lucky to scrape together enough to eat. The artists considered this hack work, but were glad to get it. And so are we. Wonderful, don’t you think?”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” Bucyk said.

  “Is there anything else you need to know?”

  “I’m still trying to digest what you told me. It was an education.”

  “Don’t mention it. And if ever you’re ready to enter the market—”

  “Yeah, I’ll come to you first.”

  The man with the polished hair went back to the girls and Bucyk picked up a catalogue and moved on. Kate followed him into the large gallery, where the punch was running out ahead of the crowd. “I didn’t know you were interested in art,” she said.