The trick was to set the muscles in the desired position of abnormal stress, then go about one's business as normally as possible, overcoming the discomfort by fighting it, as older people fight the strain of age and cripples do the best they can with their deformities.
Essen. He had been to the black jewel of the Ruhr twice, neither trip recorded for they were sensitive assignments involving industrial espionage---operations Moscow did not care to have noted anywhere.
Therefore, the Matarese had no information that could help it in Essen. No contacts to keep under surveillance, no friends to seek out and trap, nothing. No Yanov Mikovsky, no Lodzia Kronescha.
Essen. Where could he begin? The scholar had been right: he was looking for a fifty-year-old ghost, a hidden absorption of one man and his family into a vast industrial complex during a period of world chaos. Legal documents going back more than half a century would be out of reach-if they had ever existed in the first place. And even if they had, and were available, they would be so obscured that it could take weeks to trace money and identities-in the tracing, his own exposure guaranteed.
Too, the court records in Essen had to be among the most gargantuan and complicated anywhere. Where was the man who could make his way through such a maze? Where was the time to do it?
There was a man, a patent attorney, who would no doubt throw up his hands at the thought of trying to find the name of a single Russian entering Essen fifty years ago. But he was a lawyer; he was a place to start. If he was alive, and if he was willing to talk with a long-ago embarrassment.
Vasili had not thought of the man in years. Heinrich Kassel had been a thirty-five-year-old junior partner in a firm that did legal work for many of Essen's prominent companies. The KGB dossier on him had depicted a man often at odds with his superiors, a man who championed extremely liberal causes-some so objectionable to his employers they had threatened to fire him. But he was too good; no superior cared to be responsible for his dismissal.
The conspiratorial asses in Moscow had decreed in their wisdom that Kassel was prime material for patentdesign espionage. In their better wisdom, the asses had sent their most persuasive negotiator, one Vasili Taleniekov, to enlist the attorney for a better world.
It had taken Vasili less than an hour over a trumpedup dinner to realize how absurd the assignment was. The realization had come when Heinrich Kassel had leaned back in his chair and exclaimed- "Are you out of your mind? I do what I do to keep you bastards out!" There had been nothing for it. The persuasive negotiator and the misguided attorney had gotten drunk, ending the evening at dawn, watching the sun come up over the gardens in Gruga Park. They had made a drunken pact: the lawyer would not report Moscow's attempt to the Bonn government if Taleniekov would guarantee that the KGB dossier was substantially altered.
The lawyer had kept silent, and Vasili had returned to Moscow, amending the German's file with the judgment that the "radical" attorney was probably a provocateur in the pay of the Americans. Kassel might help him, at least tell him where he could start.
If he was able to reach Heinrich Kassel. So many things might have happened to prevent it. Disease, death, reloca- tion, accidents of living and livelihood; it had been twelve years since the abortive assignment in Essen.
There was something else he had to do in Essen, he mused. He had no gun; he would have to purchase one. The West German airport security was such these days that he could not chance the dismantling of his Graz-Burya and packing it in his carry-on travel bag.
There was so much to do, so little time. But a pattern was coming into focus. It was obscure, elusive, contradictory... but it was there. The Corsican fever was spreading, the infectors using massive sums of money and ingenious financing methods to create pockets of chaos everywhere, recruiting an army of 61ite soldiers who would give up their lives instantly to protect the cause. But again, what cause? To what purpose?
What were the violent philosophical descendants of Guillaume de Matarese trying to achieve? Assassination, terrorism, indiscriminate bombings and riots, kidnapping and murder... all the things that men of wealth had to detest, for in the breakdown of order was their undoing.