The Latvian Gambit
an excerpt

from Chapter Sixteen--The General

"But they would have implicated him," I said.

Cepuritis sighed. All he wanted to do was go home and be rid of me, but I wouldn't shut up. I thought that if I wasn't careful, he might decide on reflection to toss me into a cell after all.

"Perhaps not, Mr. Mallory. If I am any judge of my former colleague's character, most of his associates would have died in their attempt to resist arrest. At least the official report would have read thus. In any event, I think that only Kuzmin--the man you knew as White--was fully aware of his participation."

I shook my head. "There had to be an easier way."

"He was obviously an emotionally disturbed individual. Although we are evaluated frequently for such disorders, it would be a simple matter for him to fool the evaluators. Sakevics also had political connections. It was a complicated situation. And--" he paused and smiled, "I never told you a single thing about any of it."

"About what?" I asked, playing along.

"I beg your pardon?" he answered.

That was that. Done deal. I did have more to ask, but if Cepuritis was as tired as I was, we'd end up falling asleep on each other's shoulders there in the hall in the next few minutes. Or, alternatively, I would end up spending the night in the clink. Another question, and he might really have done it.

"Forgive me, Major," I said. "I've kept you far too long."

"Not at all, Mr. Mallory," he said, and we shook hands again. "You can find your way out?"

"I can," I said. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye," he said, and then walked away in the opposite direction. I hoped that his drive home wasn't a long one.

At a few minutes after eight p.m., I met Julie and Cramer in the commissary. She ran to me and we hugged, while he observed the proprieties of etiquette by raising a half-eaten submarine sandwich in silent salute--silent only because he was then involved with chewing what I conservatively estimated to be the other half.

He returned his attention to the sandwich, and I took Julie's face in my hands and just looked at her.

In bed the other day, we had alluded briefly to the Rocky IV movie; now she looked like one of the participants. Her glasses, which she was wearing again, were dirty and askew; behind the glasses, her gray eyes were bloodshot almost to the point of being completely red. Her hair was all over the place, and whatever makeup she had put on this morning was either smudged or obliterated.

In other words, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

"You look so tired," she said, in a voice small enough to be almost inaudible.

I was even too tired to joke, that's how tired I was. "I am," I said, and I brushed a wayward strand of her hair back into an approximation of its assigned position. "You are, too."

She nodded, and laid her head on my shoulder. "It doesn't matter," she said. "You're here now, and you're safe. Nothing else matters."

We just stood there and held each other. The room was empty except for the two of us and the big guy with the sandwich. At length Cramer finished chewing, and put what was left of the sandwich down. He looked as if he had done nothing more strenuous all day than walk across the street.

Julie would have called him at about eleven p.m. New York time last night, and he would have been awake since then. He'd flown four thousand miles, landed in Latvia, gone to the embassy and set things in motion, then brought Julie here--and yet he looked totally unaffected by it. He was still impeccably dressed, in a suit that the money he owed me wouldn't have covered the down payment on. His tie was carefully knotted and in place, and his shoes were shined to the highest possible gloss. The creases in his slacks were sharp enough to have cut through tempered glass; and when he spoke, the concern he habitually demonstrated for the hired help illuminated the room like a bank of stadium lights.

He unleashed a phony sigh that I was afraid would raise the carbon dioxide concentration in the room to an unsafe level. "How much bail do you need?" he asked, and made an elaborate show of reaching for his wallet.

I was far too beat to want to play. "Not a cent. As far as they're concerned, I'm good to go--but the only place I'm going tonight is to bed." Then I remembered that Julie had checked out of her hotel this morning--God, was it only this morning?--and was supposed to have already been gone.

"What about you?" I asked Julie. "Where is all your stuff? Where are you going to stay? How are you going to get another flight?" An impartial observer would have thought I was babbling, and I suppose I was.

Cramer cleared his throat and we looked at him. "Her suitcases are in your room, you incompetent clod. Unless you want me to get her a separate room, which will come out of your pay." He sat back and attacked the other half of his sandwich.

Julie and I looked at each other. In spite of everything we'd been through today, we both grinned. She was the first to speak, after pretending to give the idea serious consideration.

"I think we might just be able to rough it," she said.

Cramer nodded in satisfaction, and a few crumbs escaped from his mouth. He knocked them aside in mid-flight, before they got anywhere near his clothes: despite his immense bulk, he could move more quickly than almost anybody I knew. I had found that out the hard way one afternoon, many years ago, when he invited me to play squash with him. The scores were easy to remember: 9-2, 9-1, 9-0. He was the one with the 9s. Every muscle in my body hurt for a week after that--even some that I didn't know I had.

He finished off his sandwich and stood up. "Do you two want to spend all night in a Latvian police cafeteria, or can we get out of here?" he finally asked. "I'm hungry."

We walked out into the police parking lot. In among the patrol cars and some distinctly middle and lower middle class private automobiles was a vast black Cadillac stretch limousine, complete with driver.

I don't know how he does it...but it doesn't surprise me any more.