Death Benefit

62.

GREEN POND, NEW JERSEY MARCH 26, 2011, 12:03 A.M.

Buda gave his men their marching orders. He would drive back to the Bronx with Prek and Genti, while Neri would remain at the house and clean it and the van thoroughly to erase all traces of Pia’s stay. Buda was quite specific about what products Neri would use and how long he should spend on each part of the task. Buda emphasized what a good job he wanted Neri to do and that it would take him the entire weekend to complete. That would give Buda time to figure out what to do with Neri. Before he left the house, he put the van’s keys in his pocket. Fatos had to drive Drilon back to the parking lot at the restaurant to pick up his car because Pia flatly refused to get into a car with Drilon. She wasn’t about to explain why.

Pia sat in the front seat of Burim’s vehicle and stared straight ahead as the men said their goodbyes in the driveway. Burim and Pia set off, heading for Weehawken. Burim turned up the heat for Pia’s benefit.

“What’s your problem with Drilon?”

“I’m not going to talk about it,” Pia said.

“I hope you will later. So, tonight we’ll go to my house.”

Is he kidding? thought Pia. She was desperate to get away from this man.

“No, I want to go back to the hospital.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Burim said.

“Sure you can,” Pia said. “I promised not to meddle any more and I’m not going to. You’ll have to trust me. It’s the same tonight as it will be in a week, in a month. I have to check on something.”

“The place will be swarming with cops.”

“I’ll have to talk to them eventually. Or do you think I’ll move in with you and live in New Jersey and play happy family? Because that’s not happening. You can’t just walk back into my life, don’t you understand that? We have an arrangement, that’s all. You have to trust me, I have to trust you. We shook hands, remember?”

“You can’t tell the cops anything, obviously, you know that. Anything about Buda or his men or about seeing me and Drilon.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be difficult to forget you.”

Burim ignored the barb.

“So we have to come up with a story for what happened to you,” he said.

“The police will know as much as I do, about the polonium. But I don’t know who did the killing, I just know the why.”

“The less I know the better too.”

“They’ll find my system was full of drugs, I imagine,” Pia said. “So I’ll say I was drugged, then I was held in a house outside the city, but I escaped.”

“So how did you get back to New York?”

“Okay, I woke up in New York, and I don’t know where I’ve been.”

“Where did you get the clothes?”

“I don’t remember where I got the clothes and that’s the truth.”

“So it’s this: You were out of it, drugged. Some guys drove you around, but you never saw their faces. Then they stopped in a house somewhere, and you were given different clothes. Then they drove again and let you off in Manhattan. I can’t drive to the hospital myself, I can’t risk being seen. You better get in the back, stay out of sight of the cameras on the bridge. I’ll drop you at the top of Manhattan, on Broadway somewhere. You can take a cab from there.”

“All right.” Pia climbed into the backseat and curled up. She was exhausted and still shivering.

“Pia, we have to stay in touch. What’s your cell phone number?”

Pia figured he could find out if he wanted to so she told him, and Burim said he would remember it. He didn’t bother telling Pia his number.

Burim continued to talk, telling her little anecdotes about times he remembered from when Pia was a child. Burim convinced himself that his memory was correct, that these things had happened the way he remembered them. He concentrated on the road, and he knew Pia probably wasn’t listening. He would try to reach out to her, but he wasn’t confident she’d respond. After a while he stopped talking, and they rode in silence.

After forty minutes, Burim reached Broadway at the very tip of Manhattan. In the middle of a quiet block, he slowed down and Pia hopped out of the car without saying a word and didn’t look back. Burim stopped the car and watched as Pia walked to an intersection and held out her hand to hail a taxi. A gypsy cab pulled over, and Pia leaned toward the window and told the driver something. Before she got in the car, Burim thought she looked small and vulnerable in her crazy mismatched outfit. But he had a feeling she’d be okay.