Death Benefit

PART III
45.

BELMONT SECTION OF THE BRONX NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 3:28 P.M.

Aleksander Buda ended the call on his cell phone and held the device in his hand, then used his spatula-like index finger to tap the end-call button. There was now a problem in an operation that had gone so smoothly up to now, and he hated problems. Problems gave him terrible heartburn. He found the container of different-colored antacid tablets he always carried, took a handful, and chewed them quickly, one after another. Buda was fifty-something-fifty-what he didn’t know for sure, because his family had left Albania with a few pots and pans and a little money but no documentation indicating when he was born. Over time, first in Italy and then in the United States, he had acquired the paper trappings of the immigrant, including a date of birth in 1958, but he had no idea if it was true.

Buda wasn’t a big man, perhaps five-nine, but he had close-cropped hair with a scar that ran into his hairline on the right side of his broad face and enough prison tattoos on his arms, should he care to show them, to make anyone think twice about approaching him. Buda dressed unobtrusively, today in a tan long-sleeved shirt and jeans and sneakers. One might imagine he actually was a handyman for a group of East Side co-ops, work he showed up for every now and again, rather than what he really was: the head of a crew in the Albanian mob.

Buda’s crew, or clan, was less hierarchically organized than a Cosa Nostra family, and leadership was often fluid and based strictly on results. Through a combination of caution and brutality, Buda’s power had remained unchallenged for years. The members of the crew shared their compatriot’s reputation for ruthlessness and violence, gained over more than twenty-five years of aggressive criminal activity. The Albanians had come late on the New York scene and they had been keen to make up for lost time. They took low-level positions in Italian organizations only to rise up and challenge the longer-established Mafia stalwarts.

In Europe, Albanian groups established a strong presence in hard and soft drug trafficking, dominating the heroin trade in many countries, running the raw materials from Afghanistan through Turkey to Albania. Processed heroin and other drugs could then be distributed anywhere in the world, through hubs like the terminals at Port Newark, New Jersey. Heroin was just one business the crews were involved in. They also had interests in such prosaic activities as extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling. Aleksander Buda had lieutenants working such operations so he could keep a low profile and take on more lucrative projects, such as the one he was working now, the one with a problem.

Buda was very aware that Albanian crews had developed a profile. One based in Queens had been taken down by the FBI a few years before; another in Staten Island was broken up in 2010. There were now more than two hundred thousand Albanians in the New York metro area, maybe three hundred thousand. The vast majority, all save a couple of hundred, were hardworking and law-abiding. Buda and his men drifted in and out of this Albanian diaspora, hiding among them in plain sight. The mob groups were clannish and secretive, hypersensitive to any kind of insult, and quick to use violence for the sake of vengeance. Under the Albanian code of besa, a man’s word was his bond and a handshake was a cast-iron seal. Buda had an agreement to complete this task, and he realized he was going to have to expose some of his men to take care of this particular problem. And doing work in public was another thing that made him nervous.

After Jerry Trotter made his proposal to Edmund three weeks previously, it had taken Edmund two days to call the number Trotter gave him. Ten, fifteen times he had told himself that he wouldn’t call, that he’d throw the piece of paper in the fireplace and forget all about it. Other times, he convinced himself that this was a test of his resolve set by Jerry, that if he called the number, Jerry himself would answer the phone. But at times, usually in the dead of night, when he sat by himself in his study drinking whiskey, Edmund ran through what such a call would be like to make. Say this guy actually was a killer for hire; how do you introduce yourself to someone like that? What do you say? He figured that if you called on business like this, you didn’t use your own phone.

Edmund finally called the number from a pay phone in a Laundromat on Second Avenue in the Sixties in Manhattan, a busy spot without any obvious security cameras trained on it. Edmund steeled himself, inserted his money, and dialed the number. Someone picked up but didn’t speak, and Edmund ran through his rehearsed lines.

“Hello. I got your number from a friend. I have a proposition for you. This isn’t a joke.”

Edmund didn’t say any more; the phone line quickly went dead.

An hour later, Edmund called again, from the same pay phone.

“Can we meet somewhere? I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say-”

Click.

The next day, on the fourth attempt, at ten in the morning, a thickly accented voice said, “Call in an hour. Pay phone bank at Grand Central. Main-level concourse.”

Edmund did as he was told.

“Take six train to Morrison Avenue, exit platform north side and wait.”

Edmund was at a point of no return. All he’d done was make a few phone calls, but now he was going to meet someone he knew was a killer. He looked at the commuters walking through Grand Central, ordinary people like him. If he went ahead with this, he would no longer be ordinary. In the recent endless days and sleepless nights, Edmund had weighed the possible costs of doing what Jerry demanded and doing nothing. If he failed to act, he’d be ruined financially and personally. But Jerry’s terrible scheme gave him a chance.

Another thought had occurred to Edmund and was proving impossible to ignore. These doctors were destroying his business. It was their fault he was in this position, and he was damned if he was going to let them get away with it.

Edmund rode the subway north to a section of the Bronx he’d never visited before. He got off the train on a windswept elevated platform. There was hardly anyone else around at eleven in the morning, just two men who had alighted at the station-one who had sat in Edmund’s car, another from the car behind his. Edmund left the station, walked down to the street, and stood by the exit. He checked his phone, and crossed and recrossed the street, looking for some sign of life.

Suddenly, a dark blue panel van drew up, and the back doors opened. A voice from within told Edmund to get in, and he did. The van drove away, and immediately Edmund’s arms were seized, tape was secured over his mouth, and a cloth bag was roughly forced over his head. His body was patted down, hands thrust into his armpits and groin. Then his clothes were removed, all of them, and he was left naked, bound, and gagged on the floor of the van, first as it rattled along the street and then, for what seemed like an age, parked someplace.

“Okay, Mr. Edmund Mathews, rich banker man from Greenwich, how did you get that phone number?” The voice came from the front of the van somewhere.

Edmund tried to talk but his mouth was taped shut. He mumbled and the voice said, “How rude of me. Let the man speak.”

The tape was ripped away crudely, and Edmund reeled from the shock.

“A friend of mine gave it to me. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”

“We’ll see. So what you want?”

Edmund laid out what he wanted. It didn’t take long, but he had to explain a couple of times the need for using polonium to effect the killings.

“Okay, this is what we do. You come to Middletown Road subway station, eleven tomorrow. Bring a deposit for me. As a gesture of goodwill. Say, fifty thousand dollars in Ben Franklin notes. Nonrefundable. Give the man back his clothes.”

Edmund’s arms and legs were freed, and he dressed quickly. The van moved again and stopped after a few minutes, and the doors opened. Edmund got out in a bleak parking lot behind an abandoned building. He figured out where he was, less than a half-mile from where he had been picked up, and he took the subway back to Manhattan.

More than at any point throughout the whole ordeal, Edmund’s flight reflex was strongest that night. If he called the FBI, surely he could give them Jerry and this guy, whoever he was, and at least he would be free from this crazy plot. But he wouldn’t be free of LifeDeals and Gloria Croft and his own imminent destruction. The Statistical Solutions data had finally come in, and merely underscored what Russell and Edmund already knew. Their model was shot to pieces the moment regenerative medicine became a reality. His need to stand and fight kicked in.

Edmund traveled again to the Bronx, and was again driven away in a van, this time of a different color. Again, he was bound and stripped, but his clothes were returned more quickly this time and his mouth wasn’t taped, a small mercy for which Edmund was grateful. He could feel that the envelope with the $50,000 was no longer in his jacket pocket.

“Thank you for the money,” the same voice said. “A more cautious man would throw you out of the van now and be happy with good takings for one day’s work. But I read about you, Mr. Mathews, and I am intrigued. Then I read about the people you say you want to die and I think, What are they doing? I don’t understand, I am a stupid peasant . Then I think, This guy must be for real. I don’t know why but I do. I also think this is a very expensive idea. Someone has to go to Russia, buy this radioactive material from some very bad men and not get caught. They have to give this material to the marks, plus the bacteria, and not get caught. We can do it, but not for one million dollars.”

“How much, then?”

“Two. And a half.”

“Jesus.”

“Mr. money guy, I see where you live, how much money you make. You are not doing a trade, here, on Wall Street. I don’t negotiate-that is the price. And tomorrow, the price is more.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, speak up, please.”

“Okay,” said Edmund.

The two men met once more, three days later. Edmund told Russell he needed a huge amount of cash but not what it was for. Russell asked once, and Edmund bit his head off so Russell just did what he was told. It took Russell two and a half days to assemble one and a half million dollars from various business and personal accounts. Edmund packed it into a large baseball equipment bag and drove to the address he had been given on the phone. It was the same parking lot where he had been let out the first day. Once more, Edmund got in the van and went through the same degrading procedure.

“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”

The man gave instructions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.

“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”

“No.”

“So, who was it?”

Edmund was silent.

“I really want to know.”

So Edmund told him.

“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”

From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.

“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”

The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.

Aleksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.

“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”

The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?

“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.

“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”

“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”

“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”

Buda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.

“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”

“You see,” Genti said to Prek, “we should have done her when we had the chance. Like I said last night, knocking her around wasn’t going to be enough.” He turned to Buda. “She’s a tough bitch.”

“I can see that,” Buda said. Genti had been nursing a black eye all day. “Now this whole thing is about to go down the drain because of her. She knows what happened, God knows how. You gotta get back over there right now and take out her boyfriend and grab her off the street.”

“Boyfriend?” Prek said. “What boyfriend? You mean the kid she was hanging around with last night? Unless he’s with her when we grab her, I don’t know if we’d recognize him.”

“He’s the guy with his tongue in her ear!” Buda snapped. He was steaming, but he quickly realized Prek was right to be cautious. Killing the wrong man would be counterproductive.

“I’ll get a picture of him from the medical school database and send it to your phones. His name is . . . George Wilson,” he said, referring to a note.

“And remember, pick up the Grazdani woman,” Buda said. “And don’t touch her, you animal, unless she’s not related to anyone important, in which case she’s all yours. Understand, Genti? Word is she was in Rothman’s lab just a few minutes ago, poking around. Take her to the summer house and call me when you get there. And take Neri Krasnigi with you. It seems like the two of you can’t handle her.”

Krasnigi was relatively new to the crew, younger, inexperienced, and more vicious than either Genti or Prek. The two men were affronted by the order but didn’t show it.

As the men exited the trailer, Buda shouted after them, “Use the white van for the pickup and then dump it. Take the blue one to the house.”

Prek gave a thumbs-up sign and walked away.

Prek and Genti found Neri Krasnigi sitting in a battered old armchair at the back of the warehouse reading a German Playboy. Prek told him to follow, and the three men got into the white van. The plates were obscured with what appeared to be dried mud but which was actually cleverly painted plaster.

As they pulled out into Lorillard Place, heading quickly toward East Fordham Road, Prek filled Neri in on the afternoon’s operation. What they had in mind to pull off was a pair of Albanian specialties: a blindingly fast hit and snatch, in broad daylight if necessary. In the Albanian mind-set, it didn’t matter. Neri was excited; this would be his first official hit. They checked that their automatic pistols were loaded. Duct tape, blankets, balaclavas, two Columbia University Medical Center police uniforms, and a can of Ultane, a volatile, rapid-induction anesthetic, were piled into the back of the van.

The white van pulled into a garage and Genti got out and climbed into a blue van. Starting it up, he followed Prek in the white van. They parked the blue van near the George Washington Bridge and set out again in the white van toward Columbia University Medical Center.