Detour

TWENTY-SEVEN

His name was Moshe Skolnick.

He was a Russian businessman, Miles said.

What kind of business? Paul asked.

“I have no idea,” Miles answered. “But he’s awfully good at it.”

Whatever the nature of his business, Moshe did a lot of it with Colombians. “He’s got contacts there,” Miles said. “He flies to Bogotá at least three times a year.”

Plan B, going to Moshe, was preferable to Plan C, going to the authorities, Miles said, because Paul needed someone who knew the right people. Or, more accurately, the wrong people.

“Someone who’s got credibility with both sides.”

Paul had agreed to give it one more shot. If Paul was fueled by sheer unadulterated panic, Miles seemed fueled by sheer stubbornness, as if giving up would be a personal affront. Once upon a time Miles had promised them a baby and he’d only half delivered. He seemed determined to finish the job.

They were driving to Little Odessa.

“How do you know him?” Paul asked.

“That’s the thing about being in my line of work. You meet all sorts of people you wouldn’t ordinarily meet.”

“He was a client?”

“More like a client of a client.”

“Not a friend?”

“You don’t really want him as a friend. You don’t want him as your enemy either. He owes me a favor.”

First Miles dropped Paul off at his apartment.

He needed his own clothes; Miles’ pants felt like they were cutting off his circulation. He needed his own surroundings and his own life. Lying low didn’t much matter anymore. He and Miles had decided that if he ran into his friends John or Lisa, he’d blame Joanna’s absence on a visa screwup, something Paul had come back to work out from this end. With any luck he’d avoid seeing them.

He took the stairs to lessen the odds. He made it to his apartment without running into anyone he knew.

When he shut his door, very gently because he didn’t want John or Lisa to hear, he saw a crib sitting in his living room. It had pink wooden slats and frilly bedding decorated with teddy bears. An oversize red bow was stapled to it, looking like an enormous hothouse flower. It was conspicuously empty.

He walked over and picked up the card Scotch-taped to the headboard.

Congratulations on our new grandchild! Figured you’d need this when you got home. Matt and Barbara.

Joanna’s parents, making their first down payment on grandparenthood.

He felt a stab of pain somewhere under his heart. If heartache was a misnomer, if emotions resided somewhere in your brain and not lower down, why did it physically hurt there?

They should’ve been home by now. The three of them.

Friends would’ve come calling, toting bakery cakes, bottles of champagne, tiny pink baby clothes. Joanna’s parents would’ve settled into the guest room for a solid week or so. The apartment would’ve been pulsing with life.

Its current emptiness seemed to accuse him of something. He knew what too.

All he had to do was look at the clock sitting on the living room TV, the time and date prominently displayed in numbers the color of blood.

Miles would be back in fifteen minutes to pick him up. He dressed in chinos and a T-shirt, threw his cellular phone into his pocket, and headed for the door.

His answering machine was pulsing green.

Oh well.

He hit the play button.

Hello, Mr. Breidbart. I’m calling on behalf of Home Equity Plus. We’re offering a special rate on refinancing good for this month only . . .

Hey, it’s Ralph. When you get back, give me a call, would you? I couldn’t find your charts on McKenzie. By the way, congrats on the baby. Cigars to follow.

Hiya! It’s Mom, honey. Got your letter, but we don’t know when you’re coming back. The hotel said you checked into another one. Call us, please! Love ya! How do you like the crib?

Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Breidbart. This is María. I’m calling to check up and see how everything is.

María Consuelo, making that follow-up call she’d promised them.

This call was followed by two more follow-up calls from María. Then a spectacular one-time-only offer from a carpet company. Followed by an automated solicitation from an assemblyman up for reelection. Then another message from María.

By this fourth one she clearly sounded annoyed. She’d called them four times, four, and there was still no word. She’d appreciate it if they would do her the honor of calling back and letting her know how things were.

Hi, María. As a matter of fact, things aren’t going so well. The baby you gave us was kidnapped by your nurse and driver. I smuggled drugs into the country to try to get them out, but we were attacked and almost burned to death. So, all in all, things could be looking better. Thanks for asking.

LITTLE ODESSA SEEMED LIKE ITS NAME. LIKE ANOTHER COUNTRY. The evening had turned gray and misty, and a strong wind was whipping in from the ocean. You could see flecks of white foam out there and little whirlwinds of sand dancing across the beach.

Half the store signs were in Russian. The street fronting the beach was crowded with nightclubs, most of them named after Russian cities.

The Kiev. The St. Petersburg. Moscow Central.

Lack of shut-eye was catching up to Paul. He’d nodded off going over the Williamsburg Bridge—only the combination of metal grating and worn shocks revived him, bouncing him awake to a scene of stark black and white. The little bit of sleep had been painfully sweet—once his eyes were open, the dread quickly returned.

Moshe worked at a sprawling warehouse.

Miles pulled into the back lot. Two men were leaning against the only other car—a maroon Buick—smoking cigarettes and jabbering in Russian.

When they got out, Miles waved at them, but they didn’t wave back.

“Friendly guys,” Miles said. “They love me.”

The parking lot faced a half-open loading door. They ducked underneath. The inside was astonishingly huge—the size of your average Home Depot. It might’ve contained just as much merchandise.

There were rows of washers, dryers, refrigerators, TVs, stereos, computers, and furniture. There were bicycles, basketballs, golf clubs, clothing, and tires. There were video games, books, lawn furniture, and gas grills.

A group of men were milling around the home appliance section. One of them turned and waved.

“That’s Moshe,” Miles said.

Paul thought he was slickly dressed for a warehouse. He was wearing what looked like a thousand-dollar suit, complete with blue silk tie and nicely buffed shoes that came to a distinct point. He had a goatee and thick eyebrows, which seemed to give him a look of perpetual amusement.

He walked forward and grabbed Miles in a bear hug, bestowing a kiss on both cheeks.

“Heyyyy . . . Miles . . . my favorite lawyer.” He had a smoker’s voice, husky and low, layered with a thick Russian accent.

After Moshe had put Miles back down—in his enthusiasm he’d actually lifted him a good inch or so off the ground—he turned to Paul and smiled.

“Paul?”

Paul nodded. “Hello,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

Moshe shook his head. “Not so nice, I think. Miles tell me your . . . situation. Catastrophe. My sympathies. Your wife and child, huh? Those guerrilla—” He uttered what must have been a Russian curse. “You know what we do to guerrillas in Russia, huh? Remember that theater in Moscow—those Chechen bastards? Boom—boom—gassed them to fucking hell.”

As Paul remembered it, the Russian authorities had also gassed about two hundred innocent hostages to hell as well. He thought it better not to mention this to Moshe.

Instead, he asked Moshe if he could help.

Moshe put a large arm around Paul. “Look, I know those bastards. Some of them. We see what we can do, okay? Sometimes things can be negotiated. They are about as Marxist as we were—everyone’s a businessman, okay? Listen—they won’t kill them. Not likely. I make some calls.”

“Thank you. Really.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t done shit.” He smiled. “We see.”

He looked through the half-open loading door and shook his head.

“Hey, Miles, my fucking genius lawyer, how many times I tell you not to park there? You’re blocking the door.”

Miles said, “Oh, sorry. I’ll move it.”

“Give your keys to one of my guys. He move it for you, okay? We go to the office and talk.”

“One of your guys dented my fender last time they moved it for me. I’ll do it,” Miles said.

A man walked by, groaning under the weight of an enormous crate on his left shoulder. It looked in imminent danger of tipping over and smashing to bits. The man had CCCP tattooed on his arm—the letters of the old Soviet sports federation.

“Go ahead,” Miles said to Paul. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Park it on Rostow, okay, meshugener,” Moshe said. “You park it on Ocean, they gonna ticket you.”

Miles said okay. He slipped back under the loading door.

“Paul.” Moshe motioned him to follow. They went through a side door and into a hallway where the walls were paneled in cheap imitation wood. Moshe’s office was down the hall—El Presidente, it said on the mottled glass. Paul assumed that was a joke.

“We wait for Miles, okay?” The office had a waiting room with two couches. He pointed to one of them. “Please.”

Paul sat down as Moshe slipped into the inner office.

RING.

Ring.

He’d fallen asleep. Apparently, his cell phone had jolted him awake.

How long had he been out?

His phone had stopped ringing—he remembered its ring like an echo. He fished it out of his pants pocket, flipped it open, and checked the number. An area code he didn’t recognize.

Where was Miles?

The inner door opened and Moshe was standing there smiling. He looked down at his watch—a shimmering kaleidoscope of gold and diamonds.

“What the fuck,” he said. “We get started.” He walked back into his office.

But Paul’s cell phone rang again.

“Mr. Breidbart?”

It was María Consuelo.

“Yes, hello.”

“I have been calling you for three days. Do you know that?”

“Yes, María. We’ve been—”

“I always make a follow-up call to the new parents. I told you and Mrs. Breidbart this, yes?”

“Yes, you did. We were . . . staying at a relative’s.”

“I was getting worried. We need to make sure our new families are settling in. How is everything? Is the baby fine?”

“Yes, she’s fine.”

Moshe was just visible through the half-open door of his office. He was pointing at his watch.

“Just a minute,” Paul said to him. But Moshe couldn’t hear him; he cocked his head and cupped his left ear like a comedian searching for laughs.

“What?” María said.

“No, not you. I was talking to someone else. The baby’s fine. I really have to run. I certainly will—”

“Can I talk to Mrs. Breidbart, please?”

For a moment Paul couldn’t bring himself to answer. “No,” he said. “She’s not here.”

“Oh? She is well?”

“Yes, she’s well. She’s just not with me. Not at the moment.”

“Can she call me? I’d like to speak with her.”

“Yes. She’ll call you.”

“All right. You’re sure everything is good?”

“Yes, everything’s okay. Couldn’t be better.”

“All right, then.”

Paul was going to hang up, was just about to, but he suddenly couldn’t resist asking a question of his own.

“María?”

“Yes?”

“I’m just curious. How long have you been using Pablo? How well do you know him?”

“Pablo?”

“Yes. The driver you gave us. Have you been using him a long time?”

“I gave you a driver? No.”

“No? What do you mean, no? I’m talking about Pablo. You hired him to take care of us in Bogotá.”

“No. I didn’t hire him.”

“Okay, someone from your staff. Someone took care of it for you.”

“Accommodations and transportation are not supplied by us. The contract clearly stipulates this, yes?”

“So who . . . ?”

“Who? Your lawyer. Mr. Goldstein, yes?”

Your lawyer, Mr. Goldstein.

“Miles,” Paul said.

“Yes, certainly. It’s his responsibility to provide accommodations and . . .”

“Transportation.”

“Yes.”

Moshe was still waiting for him in the office. He was still smiling.

“Mr. Goldstein called you two days ago, María,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. “Remember—he asked you for Pablo’s number.”

“Called me, no. Mr. Goldstein didn’t call me.”

“He didn’t call you. He didn’t call you and ask you for that number? Two days ago—Wednesday night?”

“No.”

A vision came back to Paul. Miles on the telephone—smiling, nodding, laughing, emoting for someone who wasn’t actually there in front of him. But someone was there in front of him.

Paul.

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Was there a problem with your driver?”

“No problem.”

“Please have Mrs. Briedbart call me.”

“Yes. Good-bye.”

He was operating by rote—the way you can steer your car left or right, stop at lights, and accelerate on highways, even when your mind is somewhere far away. Paul’s mind was far, far away, stuck in a place between terror and helplessness.

“Coming?” Moshe was suddenly standing right in front of him.

He was still smiling, but Paul understood that it was like Galina’s smile when she’d opened her front door and welcomed them into her home.

“Is there a bathroom?” Paul asked. “I need to use the bathroom.”

It’s amazing how the survival instinct takes over.

How you can be frozen to the spot, your body positively numb with fear, and you can still move your mouth and ask for the bathroom—ask for anything that will prevent you from walking into that office. Because you know with absolute certainty that if you walk in, you won’t be walking out.

Moshe seemed to contemplate this request for a moment.

“Back there,” he said, pointing with his thumb. “Out the door to the left.”

Paul stood up. His legs felt like they had back in María’s office, like soft jelly. He was trying not to let Moshe know that he was in on the big secret, that he understood he was the only actor in this charade who hadn’t been given his lines.

“Down the hall,” Moshe said, but Paul noticed that he’d stopped smiling.

“Okay. Be right back.” He turned to go.

Moshe put his hand on his shoulder. Paul could feel sharp fingernails digging into his flesh.

“Hurry,” he said. His teeth were yellow and misshapen, something that hadn’t been evident from a distance. Now that Paul was close enough to smell him, he could see the physical legacy of what must’ve been an impoverished Russian childhood.

“Sure. I just need to use the bathroom. Then I’ll come right back.” It sounded like bad exposition—he was giving too much information.

“Good,” Moshe said, seemingly unawares. “We got lots to do, huh?”

“Yes. Lots to do.”

Paul walked through the door, resisting the overpowering urge to run. It’s what you do in the face of mortal danger, isn’t it? It’s wired into your system—this need to churn your legs and take off like a bat out of hell.

He could hear Moshe stepping out into the hall behind him, evidently making sure Paul was going where he said he was.

The bathroom was about ten yards down the hall. Hombres, the door said—perhaps it came with the El Presidente model in the Spaghetti Western Collection.

He didn’t have a plan when he said he needed to go to the bathroom. He didn’t have a plan now.

Just a goal. To make it out of there alive.

He could sense Moshe still there in the hall. Watching him.

He went through the bathroom door.

It had a sink, a dirty urinal, and two narrow stalls.

What now?

His phone.

He could call the police. He’d tell them he’d been threatened, that he was trapped, in physical danger.

He went into the first stall and locked the door. He sat down on the toilet seat.

Paul pulled out his phone and dialed 911—a number that was now and forever associated with the date of the same number.

Nothing. That grating three-note announcement heralding that he’d done something wrong. That his party has moved or changed numbers.

He checked the number in the display window: 811.

Okay, nerves. He dialed again—wondering if his cell phone was on vibrate and ringing, since it seemed to be shaking in his hand. Even as he asked himself this, he knew perfectly well it wasn’t his phone that was shaking.

This time he got through.

“Emergency. How can we help you?” A female voice that sounded vaguely automated.

“I’m in danger,” Paul whispered. “Please send the police.”

“What’s the problem, sir?”

Hadn’t he just told her what the problem was?

“These men . . . they’re trying to kill me.”

“Is this a break-in, sir?”

“No. I’m somewhere . . . in an office. Not an office . . . a warehouse.”

“Have you been attacked, sir?”

“No. Yes. They’re about to attack me.”

“Where are you located?”

“Uh . . . in Little Odessa.”

“Little Odessa. That’s in Brooklyn, sir?”

“Yes, Brooklyn.”

“What’s the exact address, sir?”

“I don’t . . . Somewhere by the . . .” There were footsteps coming down the hall. Paul stopped talking.

“Give me your name, sir.”

The footsteps stopped just outside the door. The door opened. Two men walked in, one of them whistling “Night Fever.” The faucet turned on, one of the men began washing his hands.

“Sir? Your name, sir?”

Someone coughed up phlegm, spit it into the sink. The men began talking. They spoke in a haphazard mixture of Russian and English, switching from one to the other seemingly at random.

The man washing his hands said something in Russian, then asked if someone named Wenzel made the vig?

The whistler stopped. “What?”

“Wenzel. He pay vig or not?”

“Oh, sure thing.”

“Fucking GNP of Slovakia, right?”

The other man answered in Russian, and they both laughed.

Then some back-and-forth, mostly in English—you see Yuri around, tell that motherfucker he eat me—interrupted by the sound of one of the men urinating.

“Sir . . . are you still . . . ?”

Paul clicked the phone off. He suddenly realized that he’d been holding his breath ever since the men walked in. When he let it out, it sounded like the whoosh of a just-turned-on air conditioner.

Both men turned around and faced the stall. That embarrassing moment when you realize someone’s there, has been there the whole time you’ve been speaking.

Paul could just make out their feet underneath the stall door. Those hybrid sneaker-shoes, felt with garish nylon racing stripes.

One of the men said something in Russian.

When Paul didn’t answer, he switched languages.

“You whacking off in there, Sammy?”

“No.”

Silence. They didn’t recognize the voice.

“Okay,” one of the men said. “Just checking—we’re with whack-off patrol.” They laughed, then turned and walked out.

Paul was about to press send again, but he could hear them through the closing door. Someone was out there speaking to them—Moshe?

He’d be asking them if Paul was in there.

Yes, they’d say. There was someone whacking off in the stall.

Okay, that gave him maybe five minutes. Less, before Moshe himself walked in or sent one of his men back. To do what?

Pull Paul out of the stall and finish him off.

The emergency operator had asked him for the address, but he didn’t know it. They should hold seminars on this: If you’re going to be killed somewhere, note address. Note name too; he’d forgotten the name on the warehouse roof.

He stood up and pushed the stall door open. There was one small window. He lifted it open. Almost. Halfway up it stuck tight. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, at least not from inside—dead spiders were littered between the window and rusty screen.

And one not-dead spider. Black, fat, and stubbornly sticking to its fly-littered web. Spiders—stuck alphabetically between retroviruses and ticks on Paul’s long list of things to be frightened of.

Paul flushed the urinal to cover the noise, then gave the window a monumental push. It flew open.

First things first. The spider.

He attempted to crush it against the screen with a wad of rolled-up toilet tissue, but the screen was so rusted it fell off.

Good. Double good—the spider disappeared with it.

Paul stepped onto the sink and, using it for leverage, began to push himself through the window. He was facing the back lot. Miles was long gone. Only that maroon Buick remained; the man with CCCP tattooed on his arm was leaning against the driver’s side door, smoking a cigarette.

If the man turned just a little to his right, to scratch his arm or spit or just stretch his neck, he’d have a perfect view of a terrified man squeezing himself through a window.

It didn’t matter. Going back wasn’t an option.

It was a tight fit. The window was about the size of the window in the Bogotá house, the one he’d put his arms through in an effort to make that bewildered schoolgirl understand they were crying out for help. He was still crying help, but if the smoker saw him, he wouldn’t get it.

Keep worming.

The window frame seemed to be scraping off layers of skin; he thought he might be bleeding. He remembered a startling scene from Animal Planet, an enormous python actually coming out of its skin. If only he could do that—leave his burned and battered self behind for something fresh and new.

The smoker threw his cigarette to the ground and watched it for a moment, seemingly hypnotized by the little wisp of smoke undulating in front of him.

Paul was down to his lower half, but there was nothing to hold on to. His upper thighs were taking the entire weight of his body. It felt as if he were literally going to break in half.

He felt a tickle on the small of his back. He twisted his head back.

The spider.

Black, hairy, and back. It was taking a constitutional across his naked skin where his shirt had ridden up.

He pushed and strained with renewed vigor, keeping one jittery eye on the spider.

He should’ve been looking the other way.

When he finally turned around to check on the man with the CCCP tattoo, he was staring right at him.

He’d straightened up off the car; he’d begun to amble over as if he were trying to get a better look. What an odd sight—a grown man crawling out of a window.

Or not crawling. Paul was pretty much stuck. He could feel the individual prickly hairs on each of the spider’s eight legs.

“The fuck you doing?” The man had stopped about ten feet from him. A Russian bear. He had serpentine stretch marks on his arm where his muscles bulged enough to give the tattooed letters an odd lilt. He looked like a poster child for steroid use.

“There’s a spider on me,” Paul said. It was the first thing that flashed into his mind, probably because other than the giant standing in front of him, it was the first thing on his mind.

“Spider?”

“Yes. I panicked,” Paul said.

“Huh?”

“I jumped through the window.”

“Spider?” He began laughing. Real, gut-wrenching, roll-in-the-aisle laughter, like a laugh track on the WB. Any minute, tears were going to start copiously flowing down his cheeks.

“Scared of spider?” he said. “Ha, ha, ha.”

Okay, at least he believed him.

“Can you get me out of here?” Paul asked.

The Russian sluggishly stepped forward and grabbed Paul by his arms.

Paul could feel the enormous strength in the man’s muscles—like something inhuman, even mechanical. When he pulled, Paul thought either he was going to come flying through the window or his arms were going to come flying out of their sockets. Fifty-fifty.

Suddenly, he was on the ground, arms intact.

That might not have been a good thing.

The man had walked over to his left, where he made a show of picking up a large chunk of cement, which had broken off the base of a parking meter that for some reason was lying there in the yard. He weighed it in his hands, then looked at Paul with an odd smile.

Paul stepped back.

The man lifted the ragged chunk up over his head and began advancing toward Paul.

“Wait . . .”

But he didn’t wait.

The Russian brought the cement block down with full force. About six inches from Paul’s right shoe.

He smiled, lifted it up, admired the ugly starburst of brown blood. Some of the spider’s legs were detached but still twitching.

“No more,” he said.

Before Paul could move, there was a sudden sound from inside the bathroom. Moshe’s face was staring at them from the open window.

No one said anything.

Moshe looked confused. Paul had evidently just crawled out his bathroom window—how else could he have gotten outside the warehouse?—but he must’ve been wondering whether Paul actually knew. He had to be undecided as to which Moshe he should be playing here. The concerned friend of a friend, out to help Paul save his wife and daughter?

Or the man who’d been asked to murder him?

“He was scared of spider,” Paul’s benefactor said, still looking amused by the whole thing.

Moshe didn’t share his amusement. He looked at Paul and said, “What spider?”

“On my back,” Paul said. “I was standing at the sink and the spider landed on me. I have a kind of phobia. I panicked.”

“Phobia?” He evidently wasn’t familiar with the term. He was probably very familiar with lying. He was staring straight into Paul’s eyes—the way the gamblers on Celebrity Poker lock onto their competitors’ faces in order to know whether they’re bluffing. It felt physical, like an actual pat-down.

Moshe said something in Russian, out of the corner of his mouth.

What?

Paul decided not to wait to weigh its nuances.

The man with the tattoo on his arm could’ve easily moved, flattened Paul with one lazy punch, or simply knocked the cement block out of his hands. The one he’d discarded in the dirt but Paul had picked up. It must’ve been a complete and utter shock that someone scared of spiders was capable of committing a physical assault. The man didn’t actually move until the cement block made contact with the top of his head. He went down with a sickening thud.

Paul ran.

“Paul!” Moshe shouted behind him.

He’d never make it out of the yard. He’d gotten rid of the steroid user, sure, but in a minute there’d be others. Lots and lots of others.

He heard shouting, the sound of the loading door sliding open.

He didn’t have enough of a lead. It was hopeless.

Sometimes you get lucky.

As any good actuary could tell you, sometimes the odds are just that. Odds. Numbers. They don’t matter. You can be absolutely certain that if you live long enough, one day they’ll rise up and bite you in the ass.

Or kiss you on the mouth.

His path to the open gate took him right past the parked Buick. Even in a full-out sprint—okay, not much by Carl Lewis standards, but okay by your average weekend warrior’s—he was able to glance inside.

The keys were dangling from the ignition.

He stopped short, pulled the front door open, and slid in. He turned the key and put the pedal to the metal.

He whooshed out of the gate. Just as three men came running after him.

But their cars weren’t in the lot.

They were parked on Ocean or Rostow so they wouldn’t block the loading door.