Too Many Murders(142)
Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.
It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB—a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.
There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!
The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.
“I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger—rarely expressed until now—let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”
Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.
He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I abominate obscenities, but she is a bitch—a stringy, fawning female dog. Six days ago she came to me in hysterical tears to tell me that Desmond had finished with her services as a fellatrix—he’s going back to Philomena. Oh, the tears! The grief! ‘But I love him, Phil, I love him!’ So what? was my answer. You continue to do your patriotic duty! You will be nice to him, you will feed him business inspirations that I have fed you, and he will be grateful, he will be impressed, he will advance you even higher. All that and more I told her while she shivered and howled, the stupid bitch.
“Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.
“I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…
“Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’
“I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it—convincingly. I have my lever!”