Murder in the House Read online

  Vani Fodorov went to the kitchen and busied herself at the sink. Yvgeny stood in the center of the room, unsure of where to move next. She turned. “How have you been?” she asked, wiping her hands on a towel.

  “Good. Fine. You?”

  “Working hard. I’m finishing a novel.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to read it when I’m done.”

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he put the shopping bag down next to a chair and went to an open door at the opposite end of the room. It was his mother’s office. A computer screen glowed blue. The desk was piled high with books, some open, some closed. Others were on the floor, surrounding a green office chair. Free-standing bookcases sagged under the weight of the volumes they contained. One wall featured framed photographs.

  “Go ahead.” His mother had come up behind; the closeness of her voice startled him. “Afraid to enter my capitalistic den?” She laughed.

  Yvgeny faced her. “I’m not afraid—of anything.”

  “Of course not. Look at the photos on the wall. They’re some of your favorite people.” Her tone was sarcastic.

  Yvgeny pushed past his mother into the living room, her laughter following. Then, silence. She came to him and placed her hands on his arms, looked into his eyes. “Yvgeny, Yvgeny, poor Yvgeny. Don’t you understand the wonderful thing that has happened to us? We’re free now, Yvgeny. Free.”

  “Free to do what?” he said.

  “Free to—”

  “Free to starve? Free to let the Americans and the British and all the rich bastards of the world own us? You call that freedom?”

  “Yes, I do,” Vani said. “You don’t remember what it was like under Stalin and Lenin, under the Communists. Your father was arrested and sent to the camps because they didn’t like what he wrote. I had to write in secret, with pencil and paper because they refused to register my typewriter and took it away. Don’t you see? We’re free to be who we are and what we wish to be. You’re young, Yvgeny. There is now such promise in Russia for young people.”

  He guffawed and pulled away.

  “Communism is over, Yvgeny. It is finished. Gone. Things are hard because we’ve never experienced freedom and capitalism. But in time—”

  “Capitalism does not fit the flesh and blood, the customs of the psychology of our society, Mother. Once already it caused a civil war. It is not taking root now, and it will never take root.”

  “Good God,” she said, leaning against a table. “You’re still spouting that garbage. And look at you. The way you dress. You want to be a Communist? Dress like one, like a Communist peasant content to work for the State. What are you, a gangster now? That suit. Is that what you take from our new freedom, to join a gang? To be a criminal?”

  Yvgeny turned from her and clenched his fists, breathed against the heaviness in his chest. He couldn’t look at her. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt; no bra kept her nipples from pressing against the fabric. Her jeans were tight over her lithe figure, American designer jeans with the name on them. She didn’t look Russian. She looked to him like some French trollop or American prostitute.

  Writing a novel! he thought.

  Trash, undoubtedly. Like the articles she and her friends wrote for rags like Moskovskiy Komsomolets and Nezavisimaya Gazeta. She had such pretensions about her writing. Vani Fodorov idolized the iconoclast Soviet writer Ivan Turgenev, who’d indicted serfdom in his writings and was banished to exile in Europe as a result. Yvgeny’s father, also a writer, preferred the writings of Gogol; as a child, Yvgeny sat through nightly dinner table debates of the relative merits of those writers and others.

  Yvgeny was a young boy when they took his father away. He didn’t understand it then—something about having written things that were illegal. He never saw him again. From the moment his mother told him his father had died, less than a year after he’d been arrested, everything about Vani Fodorov changed in Yvgeny’s eyes. New friends seemed always to be at their Moscow flat, secretive people drinking all night and talking in hushed voices, most of them members of the Soviet Writers’ Union, of which his mother was an active, enthusiastic member. Some became her lovers, the sounds of their copulating causing him to hold the pillow over his ears.

  When the painful process of perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet Communist system, commenced in 1988 under Gorbachev—and glasnost followed, allowing free discussion of all issues without fear of State reprisal—Yvgeny again saw his mother change. He was fourteen, a sullen, angry teenager who viewed his now gay and vibrant mother as the cause of all his problems, his lack of friends, slowness in school, and wan, sickly looks.

  It was as though she’d been reborn and he had begun his death spiral. They fought. He dropped out of school and stayed away from home for days at a time.

  On his seventeenth birthday, Vani confronted him with an ultimatum: either he change his ways and begin to build his life, or he could live elsewhere.

  Yvgeny moved in with an older friend, Felix, who shared his views of what was happening all around them in Moscow. Felix earned money by running errands for local mobsters, who promised he would move up in the ranks one day. He introduced Yvgeny to his employers, and they gave him chores to do.

  Yvgeny rarely saw his mother during the ensuing five years. She kept the apartment in Moscow, but bought the dacha in Zagorsk, where she spent most of her time, returning to the city only when the winter became too foul to enjoy the countryside.

  This visit represented the first time they’d seen each other in almost a year. Vani had been surprised when Yvgeny called to say he intended to visit. Had she been totally honest, she would have said that she did not want to see her only child. His involvement with the burgeoning criminal element of Moscow—of every Russian city—disgusted her.

  Still, he was flesh and blood. Was he coming to Zagorsk to announce a change of heart, to tell her that he realized the error of his ways and intended to set a new course in his life before it was too late?

  “I would love to see you, Yvgeny,” she’d said. “Yes. I look forward to it very much.”

  And now here he was, as defiant as ever, dressed in his silly black suit and mouthing tired Communist clichés.

  “Yvgeny,” his mother said, “why did you come here today? Would you like to have lunch and talk about pleasant things? You can tell me about what you’ve been doing with your life. I’ll tell you about my novel, what it’s about and why I have such high hopes for it.” Her laugh was forced. “I suppose you won’t agree with its … politics … but there’s much more to it than that. It really isn’t a political novel, although there is some. Yvgeny, I would like this to be a happy visit. I haven’t seen you in too long a time. You look well. I must admit I do not like that sort of suit, but it’s your choice. You are an adult. I’ve met someone. He’s an artist, a very good one.” When he said nothing, she added, “I mean I’ve met someone I’m falling in love with. His name is—”

  “I brought you a present,” Yvgeny said.

  “Oh?” She looked to the red shopping bag on the floor. “Is that it? May I open it?”

  “Da.”

  She removed the wrapped gift from the bag and took it to the kitchen, where she slowly began to undo the green ribbon, out of habit not wanting to cut it, to save it for another day. As she did, her back to him, she said, “It was sweet of you to bring me a gift. I think, Yvgeny, this might be the day we put our lives together again. I mean, as mother and son. There’s so much I want to share with you. I was thinking just this morning that you come from the blood of two writers. You showed writing promise in school. I wish you hadn’t dropped out, but it isn’t too late to go back.”

  She was as careful and deliberate with the wrapping paper as she had been with the ribbon.

  “What would you think if I suggested that we—?”

  Her fingers stopped peeling the tape from the wrapping. She sensed that he’d come up behind her, that something was wrong.

&nb
sp; She started to turn but never had the opportunity. Yvgeny touched the 9-mm to the base of her skull and pulled the trigger, causing Vani Fodorov’s head to erupt in an explosion of blood the color of cardinals.

  2

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—A FEW DAYS LATER

  “I don’t care what the Chinese ambassador said, Sandy. The fact is they’re trying to do an end-run around the treaty and I’ll be damned if they’ll get away with it. Put it in the strongest possible terms at the press briefing. Put it in Chinese if you have to.… What? You don’t speak Chinese? I suggest you remedy that as soon as possible.… Sure. Thanks. Check in with me after the briefing.”

  Joseph Scott hung up on his press secretary and pushed a button on the intercom. “Is Congressman Latham here yet?… Good. Send him in.”

  An aide opened the door, and United States Representative Paul Latham strode into the Oval Office. Scott got to his feet and came around the desk to greet him. “Welcome back, Congressman.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  The two men were tall, but that was where physical similarities ended. Joe Scott was a strong, beefy man, six feet five inches tall and solidly built, with brown hair tinged with red and just the right touch of gray at the temples. Everything was oversized about him; people on the receiving end of his handshakes often commented on the size of his hands.

  Paul Latham was six feet tall, but slender in body and face. Although both men needed glasses to read, the president was reluctant to wear them, especially when in public or facing a camera. Latham’s half-glasses were perpetually perched at the end of his aquiline nose. “Professorial” was the term often used by the press to describe him, causing him to laugh and say, “If that’s true, anybody wearing glasses would automatically be smart. And we all know that’s a crock.” He looked more professorial than he sometimes spoke.

  “Sit down,” Scott said, settling into his leather chair and indicating the seat he wanted Latham to take. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” Latham replied. “It might keep me awake.”

  “We can’t have that. So, Congressman, how did things look to you on your latest jaunt to the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma?”

  “Pretty much as Winnie said it, Mr. President. The Russians may have officially opened up to the rest of the world, but that doesn’t translate into letting it all hang out. Depends on who you talk to. Yeltsin’s people say everything is fine. But our intelligence people at the embassy have a different take.”

  “I spoke to Yeltsin last night,” the president said. “He sounded drunk.”

  “He doesn’t drink anymore since the surgery.”

  “According to the press releases. How’s Ruth?”

  “Fine. Mrs. Scott?”

  “Complaining that the White House is aging her prematurely. Other than that, she’s top-notch. Always asks for you.”

  The president of the United States and the California congressman went back a long way together. Both Democrats, although not always in agreement, they’d been through the political mill. That Joe Scott would one day run for and win the presidency was never a surprise to his friend. He had a bigger-than-life quality about him, star power that drew people to him, made them want to touch him, lose their hand in his, be the recipient of his engaging smile and fast, firm slap on the back. Paul Latham, eight terms in Congress and going for his ninth, had backed Scott at every step of his rise from Chicago ward politics to the House of Representatives, then on to the Senate and finally, firm possession of the White House.

  Latham had been especially helpful a year ago when Scott ran for the presidency. The towering Joe Scott was known as a domestic candidate, comfortable and effective with issues at home, but lacking experience—lacking understanding, according to his opponent—of foreign affairs. Latham’s leadership as chairman of the House International Relations Committee, and his special interest in that committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy and Trade—coupled with his being in the enviable position of having Scott’s ear—helped balance the voters’ perception of the man who would become president.

  Naturally, there was speculation that Scott would nominate Paul Latham as his secretary of state. But once Scott became president, there were other debts to be paid. The nomination went instead to the distinguished international attorney Jacob Baumann, who was easily confirmed by the Senate, and who’d done so far what most Washington pundits felt was a credible job.

  What most people didn’t know was that President Scott had approached Latham first about the job, and that Latham had politely declined. The odd fact was that Paul Latham loved his position in the House of Representatives. Chairing a committee as important as International Relations, with the particular emphasis he placed upon economic policy and trade, was immensely fulfilling to the former college professor, attorney, and think-tank advisor.

  “I appreciate the confidence behind the offer, Joe,” he’d said, “but it’s not for me. Go with Baumann. He’s a good man, will sail through confirmation and do the job for you.”

  That was the last time he’d called his old friend “Joe.” From that moment on it was “Mr. President,” even when they shared quiet moments together and the president suggested Latham drop the formality. Formality, ritual, and precedence were important to the congressman from California.

  “So, Mr. Chairman, tell me about your trip,” the president said.

  Latham pulled a sheet of paper from the inside breast pocket of his conservatively cut blue suit and consulted it while giving the president a thumbnail report, ending with “The single thing I found most disturbing, Mr. President, was what our intelligence people told me at a briefing just before I left. It’s their opinion that an unholy alliance is being forged between the Communists and the mafiya. All those out of work KGB types are becoming Russian mobsters. The ranks are swelling.”

  Scott’s eyebrows went up. “Why would the Communists and the blackbread mob join hands, for Christ’s sake?”

  A small shrug from Latham. “Desperation. The Communists are becoming increasingly desperate while Yeltsin bullies the economy into some semblance of success. He may be the duly elected leader of Russia, but he runs things like he was still a Communist bureaucrat. A few embassy people feel there’s a calculated reason for the Russian mob to hook up with the Communists. Here it is: Yeltsin’s biggest problem is crime. You can’t do business there without paying off some goon or gang. They call it krisha. ‘Cover.’ Built into the budget like rent and paper clips. The more crime, goes the theory, the harder for Yeltsin to make things work. The bigger he fails and the worse off people become, the better the chances for the Communists in the next election.”

  Scott grunted. “You buy the theory?”

  “It’s as good as any I’ve heard lately.”

  “The FBI’s East European unit briefed Justice a couple of days ago. Here’s a synopsis.” He slid it across the desk to Latham.

  “Can I take this?”

  “Sure. Anything devious going on over on the Hill I should brace for?”

  Latham smiled. “I’m sure there is, Mr. President, but I haven’t been back long enough to tap in. If there is, you’ll be the first to know, as usual.”

  “Glad you’re back, Paul. Staying in town a few days?”

  “Exactly. Just a few. I’ll be heading back home for the election.”

  “If you need anything, let me know.”

  “Things are good there,” Latham said, standing.

  His district in Northern California, which included a large area of San Francisco, was known as one of the more solid districts in Congress. There had been an occasional threat to his reelection over the years, but nothing to cause him sleepless nights. Still, you couldn’t take anything for granted. The voters wanted to see you on your home turf, press the flesh, hear your answers at town hall meetings and on TV debates with your opponent. Local issues. That was what it was all about. The minute you lost sight of it, you lost elections. Paul Latham beli
eved in what President Harry Truman once said about running for office: “When there’s a hundred people applauding you, look for the one who isn’t, and find out why.”

  “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. President,” Latham said. “You’re looking good. Rested.”

  Scott laughed and came to where Latham stood. “I wish I could say the same to you. You look like you need two days of sleep.”

  “As usual, you’re right. I—”

  The door opened, causing Scott to scowl at the intruder. It was a senior aide. “What is it?” the president asked.

  “Sir, this just came in. It’s … very important.” He crossed the room and handed Scott a piece of paper.

  The president frowned as he read it, lowered his head, and mumbled an obscenity.

  “Mr. President?” Latham said.

  “Thank you,” Scott said to the aide. “I want the crisis group together in a half hour. Fifteen minutes. Get Sandy in here now!”

  The aide left the Oval Office. “From Hopkins in Ops,” Scott said, handing the paper to Paul Latham. He read its terse message: URGENT, AIR FORCE AIRCRAFT CARRYING SECRETARY BAUMANN AND GROUP REPORTED DOWN IN CHINA. CAUSE UNKNOWN. INITIAL REPORT NO SURVIVORS.

  3

  THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL—FIVE DAYS LATER

  Secretary of State Jacob Baumann’s funeral was held in the cathedral’s tenth-of-a-mile-long nave. It was attended by six hundred people, two dozen of whom eulogized him.

  The religious portion of the service was conducted by the Right Reverend George St. James, bishop of Washington and dean of the cathedral, imposing in his purple, black, and white clerical garments, a pectoral cross resting comfortably on his chest. St. James spoke directly to God on behalf of Baumann’s soul.

  Those who stepped forward wearing secular attire directed their flowery comments to Baumann’s family, friends, and to the television cameras and sizable press contingent among the mourners. In Washington, D.C., you grabbed your photo ops where you found them.