In for a Ruble

CHAPTER 40

Never underestimate the impact of boredom on a teenager. I didn’t experience any. My daily concern was getting through the day. The cold, the work, the guards, the whole system, even many of my fellow zeks—they all had it in for me. I wasn’t unique, they had it in for everybody. That was life, if you can call it that, in the camps. Whatever energy you managed was focused on making it to tomorrow. Looking back, I’ve often wondered why we bothered—tomorrow would only replay today.

Andras Leitz could not have come from a more different time and place, and holed up, as I came to find out, in a suite at the Regency Hotel, with only a TV for company—no one to talk to, no one to friend or tweet or text—he was bored. So, only somewhat to my surprise when I called him from the lobby, he told me to come up to his room. Of course, the news that Irina was on the run might have had something to do with it too.

I got lucky at Thomas Leitz’s school. A construction crew was collecting weekend overtime while they drank coffee and laid a new floor in the main hallway. They didn’t give me a second look when I told them I’d forgotten some lesson plans. I went from the school to the office and made a copy of the note Thomas had hidden for the last four years. It answered one set of questions and opened another. I put the copy in my wallet and the original in the safe. I walked home hoping I wouldn’t encounter the emptiness that was there. No more empty than I was used to, but all the more so because of what I’d hoped to find.

I could have called her. What would I say? I’m still working for your man, Batkin, because he has a hold on me I can’t explain? Ever hear of Beria? My father, Beria? She probably blamed me for Irina being on the loose as well.

I got the vodka from the freezer and spent a lonely evening thinking about Leitz and his family. I’d wandered into the middle of it, eyes wide shut, and had them opened to the horrors of the kind that can only be delivered by those closest to us. I’d grown up with a different set of horrors until I got the opportunity to join the enemy I couldn’t beat. But even today, I was still victimized—by my past and by Taras Batkin because he knew how much he could hurt. Stop, I told myself. You’re still a victim only because you allow Batkin to make you one. I could have called his bluff this morning. I still could. But I didn’t—and wouldn’t. I was afraid. I had the chance to right a thirty-year wrong, but not if Batkin blew it up before I even got started. Maybe Aleksei wouldn’t care. Hard to know, but I was scared to take that bet. So I’d sold a piece of my soul to Batkin—at least for the time being. I had the sense that the Leitzes had made a similar deal some years ago.

Beria put in a brief appearance, across the room, chuckling.

I know all about selling souls. You’ll get used to it after a while. We all do.

He didn’t leave when I told him to go away, but he didn’t say any more either.

As I sipped my vodka, I kept thinking that some event had set off the horrors of the Leitz family. The obvious candidate was the suicide of Sebastian’s daughter, Daria. Everything from Pauline’s breakdown to Marianna’s drinking to Thomas’s blackmail dated to four years ago. But I was guessing there was something else, something earlier, something that had been, in Thomas Leitz’s words, swept under the rug—an open wound growing more infected with each passing year. At some point, nothing short of amputation would cure it. Perhaps Sebastian and his siblings believed that the early death of their parents was sufficient tragedy for one lifetime, that they were entitled to bury any others. They were justified in doing whatever was necessary to avoid the heartbreaks that inevitably came later, as they do to all families.

My deliberations were punctuated with refills of my glass and checks of my watch and the hope that the next sound would be the chime of the elevator and the scrape of Victoria’s key in the lock. Beria shook his head.

No key by 9:30, and the Leitzes were growing foggy in a vodka haze, so I took myself and Lavrenty Pavlovich over to a brew pub at the Seaport that makes a passable burger and pretty good beer. Neither shed further light. When I got home, the apartment was still empty and I had the first unhappy premonition of what that emptiness could feel like if it lasted beyond the next day or two.

I went to the office early and worked the Basilisk. Irina had hit eight ATMs after she took off, withdrawing a thousand dollars from each as she made her way downtown. I’d spelled out the game plan for her, two nights ago in the car. The last withdrawal was on Canal Street—Chinatown. Not where I’d expect her to run. Unless…

In the last few years, low-priced bus service between New York and Boston has become a booming business. The Fung Wah Bus company was the pioneer, running hourly coaches from Chinatown to Chinatown. Irina wanted her car. That would give her freedom. I reached for the phone to call Gina and stopped. Too much time to get to Gibbet. There had to be a faster way.

Feeling a touch of the same satisfaction I used to get when I fed some Yasenevo desk jockey the kind of bullshit that would make his life miserable for a week or two, I called Philip Paine. Dragon Lady had been tamed, she put me straight through. He didn’t sound happy to hear from me.

“I need a favor, on behalf of Leitz and Batkin.”

“We’re not in a position to—”

“There’s a barn near your campus, on Martin Lane, right off Hayfields Drive. I want to know if there’s a car in it, a BMW Three Series with New York plates.”

“This is a very irregular request.”

“It’s important.”

“Do Ambassador Batkin and Dr. Leitz know you’re calling?”

His reliance on titles grated—if only because they slowed everything down. I ignored that and put down my bluff.

“Call them if you wish. I’ll hang on.”

An easy bet, and I won.

“What does this have to do with…”

I raised just to make sure. “It has to do with a group of students at your school who’ve been running a porn ring right under your nose. The Feds are aware of it, and I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t blow up in everybody’s face.”

A very long silence.

“Pornography?”

“Child pornography. A crime—good tabloid copy too.”

“Oh, my God…”

“You’ll get someone to check the barn?”

“Please… Don’t do anything. I’ll call right back.”

The car was gone, as I suspected. Paine peppered me with panicked questions, which I evaded. He grew increasingly excited until I hung up. I felt more guilty pleasure—akin to what the Germans call schadenfreude, delight in someone else’s difficulties. Paine should have kept better tabs on his students. In loco parentis, as he said.

With the cash and her car, Irina was going to be tough to track. My one link was Andras. I called Leitz.

“I need to talk to your son.”

“Not a good idea.”

“I’m not concerned with good or bad. I need to talk to him.”

“He’s in a safe place. Like you suggested.”

“I’m not going to give him up. He’s in a world of trouble—of his own making. I’m his best chance to get out of it, maybe in one piece.”

“The answer is still no.”

“He may feel differently.”

“You’ve been paid. You’ve gone to extra trouble, I’m aware of that. Tell me what you consider fair compensation, and I’ll consider it.”

Did he think I was shaking him down? Or was he trying to buy me off?

“How do I get in touch with your pal Konychev?”

He paused. “Why?”

“It could help your son.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“You have investors you don’t know how to contact? I find that hard to believe.”

“I know where to find his lawyers. I only met the man once.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was telling the truth, just being cagey, or outright lying. I didn’t have time to think about it.

“Talk to your brother recently?”

“Thomas? Why?”

“He had Nosferatu outside his apartment yesterday, he’s looking for your brother-in-law’s computers.”

“What would Thomas know about those?”

“He’s been blackmailing Coryell for the last four years.”

“WHAT? Thomas? Walter? Blackmail? What the hell are you talking about?”

“One of the things this is about. One of the reasons I need to talk to your son.”

“What blackmail?”

“I suspect it has to do with the death of your daughter.”

A long silence. Then a whisper. “Daria?”

“That’s right.”

Another silence. “Your services are finished. Don’t call again.”

I started to respond. But I was talking to a dead line.

CHAPTER 41

I’d told Leitz to take it away, but I asked the Basilisk if Andras was using his cell phone.

No deal, it responded.

Okay, what’s Sebastian Leitz been up to?

Ah-ha, the beast said, you’re not as dumb as you look.

But Leitz was. For a supposed genius, he was rock-fucking stupid. He’d used his American Express black card to guarantee a suite at the Regency for a guest named Robert Klein.

I left a note for Foos to be on call before I caught the subway uptown. I spent most of the train ride cursing Leitz. Not just for his overprotective stubbornness, but his idiocy. The Regency was a well-known luxury hotel and exactly the kind of place a rich Wall Streeter would park his son. Worse, at Park and East Sixty-first, it was right around the corner from his mansion. Leitz probably figured—again foolishly—he could look in on the kid on his way to and from power breakfasts with his Wall Street advisers over fifty-dollar eggs in the Regency restaurant.

I called “Robert Klein” from the lobby. He shouldn’t have answered but he did.

“It’s Turbo—your chauffeur, remember? We need to talk, about Irina. I’m downstairs.”

“What about Irina?”

“She’s gone. On the run. What room?”

“My dad said…”

“I know what he said. I told him to say it. Things have changed.”

Silence.

“She’s in trouble Andras. Big trouble. You can help her. You may be the only one who can. I’m Foos’s friend, remember? Call him if you want.”

More silence.

Then, “Room eight-oh-one.”

He answered the door wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. He was tall in a way that I hadn’t noticed over the weekend, in my haste to get out of Gibbet. Almost six one, with blue eyes and a soft-featured baby face. His hair was curly, like his father’s, more brown than red, and cut neatly around his head. His eyes looked past me and darted up and down the hall, before he stood aside. I wasn’t sure who he was looking for, but I would have bet his bank account on his old man. We shook hands. His grip was firm enough, but uncertain, quick to let go.

A suite at the Regency was not the way I’d treat my son if I’d just found out he’d been running a porn ring, but Aleksei would say I had my own fatherly shortcomings. The living room reflected someone’s idea of what wealth should look like. Expensive wallpaper, striped fabrics, chintz pillows, solid, anonymous furniture. Three doors leading elsewhere, two bedrooms and a bathroom, I guessed. The kid standing in the middle of it looked out of place.

“Thanks for letting me come up,” I said, starting easy. “How’re you doing?”

“Okay, I guess.” He plopped on a striped couch. “To tell you the truth, I have no idea.”

“You’re going through a rough patch.”

“Yeah. What about Irina?”

“She’s run away, like I said. You heard about her stepfather, yesterday?”

He nodded. “It’s my fault.”

“I don’t know that. I want to hear your story.”

His hand sliced through the air. Tough kid. Or kid trying to play tough. “What else do you know about Irina?”

I settled in on an upholstered chair across from the sofa. “She took off right after the shooting, like she was waiting for a chance to run. She withdrew eight thousand dollars, went to Gibbet, and picked up her car. I think she had a destination in mind. I think you might know where it is. She doesn’t believe this—she thinks she’s smarter than he is—but if Karp, the assassin, finds her before I do, he’ll snap her in half like a little bird. I like his chances a lot better than hers. Any idea where she went?”

He put his head in his hands and said nothing.

“Andras—you can help her.”

“It’s all my fault.”

I had no patience for that self-pitying refrain, but I backed off to give him a chance to think.

“Tell me about the Players? Your idea?”

He shook his head. “It just happened, you know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He shook his head again. “I can’t explain. It just kind of happened.”

I’d thought, perhaps, the events of the last few days would have been traumatic enough to make him want to talk. He wasn’t ready. Part me, the Cheka part, said sweat him, punish him, the kid was guilty, a child-criminal, criminal first. Would’ve worked, more than likely. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe we’d get to that. But not yet.

“How long ago? When did it start?”

He shrugged. “Few years.”

“Why? How? Who rented the place above the liquor store?”

He shrugged again. “We all did.”

“We?”

“Yeah. We.”

“Who’s we?”

“You already know that. If you don’t, then…”

The kid was thinking.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d you do it?”

“We had our reasons.”

“Had or have?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just asking if the reasons are past or present? You want to tell me about them?”

He shook his head.

“You know we’re going to get there sooner or later, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure I should be talking to you. I think I should call my dad.”

“Go ahead.”

He didn’t move. Neither did I.

“You ever think you’d end up here?” I asked. “A spot like this, looking at options, or absence of options? In a box?”

He took a minute before he shook his head, no. The first positive sign since I arrived.

“Life works like that. You think you control it, to the extent you think about it at all, then fate intervenes, shit happens, shit multiplies, and here you are. I’m not sure you know half your own story. Want to hear it?”

He paused, then nodded. He didn’t look happy. I wouldn’t have either.

I took him through the whole tale. The bug on his father’s computers. The interviews with his aunts and uncles. The junkies at the Black Horse. I skimmed over uncles Walter and Thomas for the moment, we’d come back to them. It took maybe half an hour.

“You tricked your uncle. You used Irina’s—Salomé’s—e-mail to set up the date at the Black Horse. She found out and followed you there. You weren’t expecting her, you were waiting for him. He didn’t show. You didn’t know he’d been busted with a kid in his car a hundred miles away.”

“That’s what you were talking about Saturday? When you said rape?”

“Rockville, Connecticut, is where it happened.”

“How do you…?”

“Know what I know? I have lots of sources. Your friend Foos helped.”

I retraced the ground we’d covered in the car—I wasn’t sure how much had sunk in—I figured the repetition wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t interrupt. He stayed head down, then stood and walked around the room, looking here and there, but seeing little. He returned to the couch where he curled up in a fetal position. He made me feel worse than a Cheka interrogator. Every piece of information I flung inflicted pain.

I wound down the story. He was in tears. Tough kid evaporated. This was a family matter, except the failings of the family had let others in, to take advantage. Thousands of kids victimized in the pictures and videos Walter Coryell and the BEC enabled. I couldn’t rectify that, but I couldn’t let it go on either.

“You know where this is going, don’t you?” I asked.

He shook his head, still crying.

“Sure you do—Uncle Walter.”

“What about him?”

I took out the note from Thomas Leitz’s locker and put it on the coffee table in front of him.

“I’m sorry, Andras, you have to believe that. This is from your sister.”

He unwound himself slowly. It took a minute or two for curiosity to win out over self-pity. At least that was my unkind perspective.

He unfolded the paper and read it. He crushed the note and dropped it as if it burned his fingers. He cried loud, hard enough to shake the walls of the hotel.

“OH, NO, JESUS GOD. I DIDN’T… I COULDN’T…”

“Walter was the bad guy. He caused this. Do you understand that?”

He curled up again, shaking his head.

“Andras?”

“Leave me alone.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

He shook his head.

“It’s his. He’s the reason you’ve done everything you’ve done. The reason you all have. You’ve got to acknowledge that.”

No response.

“Andras?”

“I need… I need some time… alone.” The voice was below a whisper.

I didn’t like that idea, but I didn’t see any way around it, if I wanted to stay on his side.

“Okay.”

He got to his feet and wandered aimlessly off toward one of the bedrooms. I started to follow, to see where he was going. He closed the door in my face.

I went back to my chair. The family had delivered nothing but trouble since I’d met them, each member finding a deeper mine to dig. The note on the table looked up at me. The key, I’d told Andras, not sure I was right, until he reacted. None of us can make excuses for abuse, especially of a child. But all too often we seem able to find an excuse for covering it up. For all the right reasons, we tell ourselves, oblivious to the magnification of the crime.

My cell phone buzzed.

Victoria said, “Turbo, where are you?”

“Can’t say.”

“Can you talk?

“A little.”

“I’m outside your office. I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m… I’m having a hard time reconciling all the conflicting things that are going on.”

“And I don’t make it any easier.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. But…”

“I know. I’m sorry too.”

“Will you be back?”

“Not sure when. I’m trying to find the girl before Nosferatu does.”

“That what Batkin wanted?”

“Yes. But I’d be doing it anyway.”

“He still your client?”

“Not voluntarily. I tried to walk away.”

“I don’t understand.”

Beria was sitting in a chintz-covered chair.

How are you going to explain that, smart guy?

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. If you’re asking whether I still feel any obligation to him, the answer is no.”

Beria frowned at that.

Victoria hesitated a moment. “I thought about what you said. There are things you should know.”

“About Konychev?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t, on the phone.”

“I can’t leave here now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Your stubbornness is going to be the death of one of us.”

She hung up. More in frustration than anger this time, or so I hoped. She was trying, I wasn’t helping. That’s the way fate works. Beria smiled.

I picked up the note and pulled apart the crushed-up ball. I flattened it on the table. Daria Leitz’s tidy script reached through the years, grasping for vengeance.

If you want to know how this happened, ask Uncle Walter.

CHAPTER 42

The first crash was a thudding bang, behind the bedroom door. The second was accompanied by breaking glass. The third, more glass.

Door locked. Another crash. More shattering glass.

I kicked the door. Once. Twice. Some give on the third try. The wood cracked on the fourth, and I hit it with my shoulder. It crashed open. Andras was climbing through the shattered window across the room. A blast of cold air blew through my clothes.

“ANDRAS!” I shouted.

He turned, just for a moment, enough for me to grab the leg that dangled inside the sill. I hung tight while I gathered my feet under me.

“ANDRAS!”

“LET ME GO!”

“NO! THAT’S NO ANSWER.”

He pulled hard, twisting and squirming. My grip slipped. I reached around his knee.

“LET ME GO!”

“NO!”

I got my legs underneath and pulled.

He wasn’t giving up. He grabbed the window frame for leverage. Blood splattered from his slashed hands.

Fuck this.

I locked my left hand on his knee and reached for his belt with my right. It closed around leather and denim. I braced my feet against the wall and yanked with everything I had. He fell back into the room on top of me.

“NO!” He was up in a flash clawing back for the window.

I caught the belt again and pulled him back. He fell to the floor. I rolled on top. He kept fighting. I rolled him over and struck him across the face.

“NO! LET ME GO. I DESERVE TO DIE.”

He kept squirming, but I was forty pounds heavier and spent more time in the gym. I got his arms to his sides and pinned them with my knees. His legs kept kicking but to little effect. The carpet was stained with blood. His hands looked badly cut. Not long before someone came to investigate. Robert Klein’s cover, flimsy to begin with, was blown.

The thrashing slowed. He was breathing heavily, strength spent. “You should… you should have let me jump.”

“No way.”

“Why?”

He was still thinking, and his thinking was still focused on him. What makes kids—adolescents—so goddamned confident the whole world revolves around them?

“I’ve already seen a lifetime of pointless deaths. We’ve got Irina to worry about, remember? I still need your help, for her.”

He stared up for a moment, some sense returning.

“Listen to me. We’re going to wash your hands. You’ve got glass in those cuts. Then we’re going to get help. You try one wrong move, you do one more stupid thing, I will knock you cold and leave you there, wherever there is. And that’ll be last call for Irina. You understand?”

He nodded. He was scared and in pain.

“Let’s go.”

The sink ran red as we flushed blood and glass. The palms were shredded. He was lucky not to have severed fingers. I wrapped his hands in towels and grabbed a couple extra for the road.

“Get your coat. We can’t stay here.”

“But…”

“Do as I say. You need medical attention. Move.”

He got a wool coat from the closet.

“Put your hands in the sleeves so they don’t show. We’re going downstairs, outside, turn right and right again on Sixty-first.”

A man in a black suit with a silver name tag came off the elevator as we got on.

“You hear anything unusual up here?” he asked. “Disturbance? Breaking glass?”

“Nope.” I pushed the button for the lobby.

“What room are you in?”

“Eight-fourteen.”

“Thanks.”

The man hurried down the hall. The door closed. We made it through the lobby. An empty cab cruised East Sixty-first Street, and I hailed it. There was no time to check for Nosferatu or anyone else. I gave the driver an address on East Seventh Street and worked my cell phone as we sped downtown. Andras slumped against the door and didn’t say a word.

“Lucky kid. He’s lost more blood than’s good for him, he’s got a dozen stitches in each hand, and he’s fortunate he’s still got hands to stitch. Looks like he crushed a beer bottle in each one and refused to let go.”

“Something like that,” I said.

Petro Lutsenko, M.D., said, “I know. Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask.”

He walked around his desk and sat across from me. A good looking forty-something man of Ukrainian descent with a large nose and smiling eyes, the looks a bit marred by a pair of unusually hairy ears. His father had been on the Cheka’s payroll for the occasional discreet medical repair when I was stationed here in the eighties. Petro had joined the old man’s practice, with his newly minted M.D. from NYU, and kept up the family tradition. For which he was well compensated. I’d been waiting a long hour while he treated Andras.

“All built into the fee,” I said.

“Speaking of which…”

“On its way here.”

“He’s resting and should keep resting for a day or two. I’ve given him a light painkiller and a sedative. I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics. What name…?”

“Warren Brandeis.”

He looked up from his pad. “Very funny.”

I shrugged. “Not my joke. It’s a real name.”

“If you say so.”

It was. One of Foos’s straw men. The actual Warren Brandeis must have had left-leaning lawyer parents, which hadn’t mattered much when he dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty-two. Foos had loaded a couple of bank accounts with twelve grand and given him three credit cards and a driver’s license, all of which were on the way to Lutsenko’s office along with a checkbook so I could pay the good doctor off. My picture was on the license. An SUV was waiting for Brandeis at Avis on East Eleventh Street. We were burning one of our better identities on Andras.

Foos arrived and exchanged small talk with Lutsenko, whom he likes well enough to use as his own internist, while I wrote out a thousand-dollar check on Brandeis’s account. Foos agreed to wait while I picked up the car. I trotted through the cold streets, checking my rear periodically, but saw nothing. To be sure, I took a subway to Grand Central, the shuttle across town, the Seventh Avenue IRT back downtown and a cab to East Eleventh Street. If Nosferatu was following, he’d need help not to have lost me. On the other hand, he could be waiting back at Lutsenko’s office.

I double-parked the Ford Explorer outside. The block was empty. Lutsenko brought Andras outside. His hands were wrapped in white gauze. He looked tired and unhappy. I got out and helped him into the car.

“You’re going to have to deal with Leitz,” I said to Foos.

He nodded. “Figured that.”

“He’s gonna be pissed. Tell him it’s for the kid’s own good. Putting him at the Regency was asking for trouble.”

“Figured that too. What do I say when he asks where he is now?”

“You don’t have any idea.”

“Has the benefit of being true. He might go to the police.”

“If he does, tell him the Post will be digging into Walter Coryell and Franklin Druce by morning.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Tell him I’ll be in touch.”

“That’ll make him feel much better.”

We got snarled in rush hour traffic. I kept an eye on the hundred cars behind me as they pushed and jostled for position on the way into the Holland Tunnel, where we’d all sit in place as the snake worked its way though its underground skin. If there was a tail, I had no way of spotting it, but I kept watch anyway. Andras leaned against his door, eyes closed. Traffic remained heavy along the turnpike extension until we reached the tolls at the junction of I-78. I took the interstate west thirty miles into New Jersey and switched for I-287 south. Another twenty miles and I exited with the neon sign for the Doubletree Hotel in sight. The hotel was close to the highway, surrounded by a few office parks and not much else. I bought a suite for the night, certainly less luxurious than the Regency, using my own name. We’d be gone before daybreak.

We went up to the room. Inexpensive, functional, well used, and all the atmosphere of the office park next door. No chintz here, but plenty of polyester. Andras took off his coat and dropped himself on the sofa.

“Now what?” he said.

“Something to eat?”

“Okay.”

I called room service and ordered two steaks with fries, a Coke for him, and beer for me. I kept watch at the window, which overlooked the parking lot. A few cars pulled in, but their occupants appeared harmless. I found myself musing on what we all did for luggage before the invention of the wheeled suitcase. Andras kept his thoughts to himself. Time enough to let those loose.

The food came and we ate in silence. The steak was tough and tasteless, but I was hungry. I took heart in the fact that he ate hungrily as well.

When he finished, he fell back against the sofa and said, “All right, you brought me to the middle of fucking nowhere. What do you want?”

CHAPTER 43

“Start with Uncle Walter.”

“Asshole. I don’t want to talk about him.”

“You’re going to have to. Sooner or later. To me or the police.”

He shook his head.

“You kill him?”

“NO! He was…”

He turned away.

“He was what?”

“I’m not going to talk about that.”

“He was what, Andras? Dead when you got there?”

He turned further until I was looking at the back of his head. The kid had spent his whole life overprotected by a rich father. The idea of vulnerability hadn’t sunk in.

“Listen carefully.” I put the telephone on speaker and punched in Nosferatu’s number.

“What the fuck now, dead man?” he said in English.

Andras faced the phone.

“Fuck your mother,” I said. “What are the ConnectPay servers worth to you, Karp?”

“Your life—maybe.”

“The kind of stupid answer I’d expect from a pidar gnoinyj. Try again.”

The slang translates literally as “rotten faggot,” but as with so many Russian expressions (this one actually originates in the Ukraine), the meaning is much stronger. I was accusing him of being a passive homosexual fuck-bag with an acute case of the clap. No reason he should have a monopoly on the insults.

“You pathetic pizda”—cunt—“I will make sure you swallow your own balls before I break your neck.”

“That what happened to Druce? You kill him on purpose, or did you fuck that up too?”

“I didn’t kill that petuh”—male jailhouse whore—“I didn’t need to. Oy’ebis’l!”—Fuck off!—“Why the fuck am I talking to you?”

“The servers,” I reminded him.

“I want them. And the kid.”

“What kid?”

“Don’t waste my time. You’re a zek, too stupid to live. The Leitz kid. Thinks he’s clever. Thinks he can fuck the girl and steal the money. He’s going to pay.”

The voice was like ice. Just above a whisper. Andras sat frozen on the couch. I looked at him and put my finger to my lips.

“Who do you want more, Karp—the kid or the girl? Maybe we can make a deal.”

“No deal, zek. I’m going to take care of everyone—you too—in my own time.”

“Guess I was wrong, then.”

“You’ve been wrong your whole life, zek. Fortunately for you, it’s almost over.”

A click and the line went dead.

Andras stared at the phone then back at me. “Who… Who is that guy?”

“The assassin. The one I told you about in the car. He means what he says. He’s been told to get rid of you and Irina both. He’s headed here—probably an hour or two away.”

“Here?!”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be long gone. Feel like talking about Uncle Walter now?”

Andras walked around the room, animated, not stopping. Karp had gotten his attention, maybe even more than sister Daria’s note. Up until now, it had been some sort of game for him. All played out long distance, anonymously, through computers and the Internet. He could stay removed, in his own world, protected by his technical expertise and his rich dad. After he made three or four perambulations, I had the feeling the shell of protectiveness was crumbling.

He was at the window when he turned back to face me.

“Why didn’t you let me jump?”

Cracking, not crumbling. He was still thinking about himself.

“I grew up in a tough place. Too many people died. For no reason. Kids, parents too. Other parents fought to keep themselves and their kids alive. Most failed. Kids were left to fend for themselves. Man eat man. Man eat woman. Most of us ate whatever we could. That was the deal, every day. You learn the hard way about the value of life.”

Blank stare.

“You study history at Gibbet School?”

“Sure.”

“World War Two?”

“Yeah.”

“Concentration camps?”

“Yes.”

“Russia? Soviet Union?”

He shook his head.

Another strike against American education.

“I grew up in a concentration camp, Soviet version. They were different, they weren’t about murdering Jews, but no less brutal. They were about murdering everyone. I saw more kids die than you have classmates. I’m one of the lucky ones. I made it.”

It struck me I was using the same technique Batkin had on me—to the same end. We were both Chekists. Whatever works.

“You were in a concentration camp?”

I had his attention—finally.

“That’s right. Labor camp. Gulag camp.”

“Irina said her stepfather…”

“Was too. Same deal.”

“But he’s…”

“He’s what?”

“HE’S A PIG!”

Maybe my history lesson was a mistake. He resumed his walk.

“Andras, tell me about Irina. She’s a beautiful young woman. What’s the deal between the two of you?”

He arrived back at the couch and fell backward on it, face held in bandaged hands. “She… We… Shit, you’ll never understand.”

“Try me. You have to know by now I’m trying to help.”

He shook his head. “No. You can’t.”

“I think I can. Uncle Walter—he abused your sister. That’s what the note meant, right?”

He looked up, pain penetrating every part of his face.

“Where’d you get that note?”

“It’s going to hurt worse if I tell you.”

“Can’t hurt any worse.”

I didn’t want to do this, but I needed him to trust me and open up. More pain, for him, was the price.

“Uncle Thomas was the first to get there, right? First to find the body?”

He snuffled. “I came in right after. It was…”

“Horrible. I’m sure. Daria wrote the note before she… she used the gun. Thomas took it. And used it for years to blackmail Walter.”

“Uncle Thomas? Blackmailed Uncle Walter? I don’t get it. What for?”

“Thomas needed money. He spent… He spends more than he has. It’s an addiction, like any other. People do bad things, even in families. Maybe especially in families.”

He shook his head violently. “I always thought Uncle Walter… I always thought… It was supposed to be…”

“Thought what? What was supposed to be?”

He shook his head again and buried it in the cushions.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to say it, but no avoiding it now. I told myself it was for the best and hoped I wasn’t rationalizing.

“He abused you too, didn’t he?”

I’d hit home. He sobbed into the sofa. I let him cry. There was no comfort I could offer.

After a while, I said, “It’s not your fault, you know.”

He raised his head and looked at me, face red and stained with tears.

“IT IS MY FAULT! I didn’t do anything to stop him.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. Nobody else will.”

“You don’t get it. You can’t. He made me feel like I was special, you know. I realize it sounds sick now, but that’s how it works. It was our special thing. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t want it to stop, because then I wouldn’t be special anymore. I didn’t know about Daria. I didn’t.”

“It wasn’t your fault Andras. He manipulated you. The same way he manipulated your sister. And lots of others. It was his disease. Not yours.”

“NO! That’s not it. That’s not what I mean. You don’t know. YOU DON’T!”

I had a bad feeling. “Okay. I’m listening.”

His voice dropped to a whisper, as if he feared he’d be overheard.

“Everybody knew. Mom and Dad. Aunt Julia. Everybody. Nobody did anything about it.”

“That’s still not your fault.”

“Yes it is—I didn’t make them.”

CHAPTER 44

We sat in the rented SUV, heater running, while Andras finished his story. He’d got most of it out upstairs before I announced it was time to move. Two reasons. We had a destination now—back to Massachusetts—and we’d have visitors shortly. I’d made it easy for Karp to trace us. I didn’t have a plan, just the gamble that if he was focused on me, I could stay a step ahead and protect Andras while we kept moving, and he’d have a harder time hurting anyone else, like the girl.

As with many people who have held a secret for as long as he had—especially as painful as this one—it all came tumbling out once he started. The abuse, which had gone on for several years. The Christmas party when Julia had barged in, Walter’s hands in Andras’s underwear. The whispered arguments that followed, among his parents, his father and Julia, everyone but Walter. Andras was twelve years old. He understood they were talking about him, about him and Walter. What he didn’t understand was why nothing happened. Everything went back to the way it was before. Except he was no longer special to Walter. He hadn’t understood why, although he put it down to getting caught—and that was somehow his fault in his mind. He figured out some years later that Walter had been effectively exiled. He didn’t show up at holidays or family functions anymore, some excuse was made about how busy he was. That was how the Leitzes dealt with it. What Andras didn’t know, what no one apparently knew, according to him, was that Uncle Walter had already started on Daria and somehow managed to keep it up even after being banned. Andras suspected as much when Daria committed suicide, but there was no proof, and he kept his fears and accusations to himself.

The suicide led to his mother’s breakdown and his parents’ divorce. She never said so, but it was clear to Andras that she blamed Leitz for everything that had happened. Andras was confused and frightened—his own experience and his family’s response, or nonresponse—still weighed on his young mind, as did his guilt over Daria. He was glad to seek refuge in boarding school, far away from the whole scene.

It was a boy named Kevin, three years ahead of him at Gibbet, who introduced Andras to the world of online porn for a fee. Somehow he knew to seek him out. He’d been there too. In Kevin’s case, it was his next-door neighbor, a doctor, who initiated secret touches and more—and then a whole, huge world of men who were only too happy to buy computer gear, pay apartment rentals, and shower gifts and cash on kids like Kevin and Andras if they were willing to strip, jerk off, and do things with their friends in front of a Web cam. Turned out there were several kids at Gibbet with similar experiences. That didn’t make the school unusual, maybe just par for the course. One came up with the idea of the Oscar Wilde theme. Andras was the computer expert. He wired and equipped an earlier, two-room apartment in Crestview, before doing the same in the expanded playhouse above the liquor store. The clients paid for it all, then the kids started charging on a fee-for-service basis. No client complained. None of the kids took it that seriously. It was kind of a lark, a joke. They felt more pity than anything for these sad perverts who shelled out thousands to watch them prance and preen in costume before jerking off or jumping into the sack. Hooking up with monetary benefits. Andras hadn’t even focused that seriously on the money. He didn’t need it, but he kept opening new bank accounts to hold the growing stash of cash.

“So you were all abused kids?” I asked, just to be sure. “That was the common bond?”

“Yeah.”

“Usually family members?”

He thought for a moment. “Usually, not always… like Kevin.”

“What about Irina?” I asked as gently as I could.

“What about her?” he snapped, immediately on the defensive.

He shook his head violently from side to side. I got ready to grab him, in case he tried to run. But he only swiveled in his seat and looked out the window. Not the time to push it.

“Okay,” I said. “What happened next?”

What happened next was that he started to have feelings for Irina. She held him at bay, but relented with time, and they began going out as well as hooking up for the benefit of their growing Internet audience. He found nothing odd about this progression of events—I understand it’s the way it often works with kids today (minus the online show-and-tell)—but it still seemed odd to me. On the other hand, everything about his story was bizarre. He began to feel protective and wanted her to stop performing. She told him to mind his own business. I could hear her, and I guessed her language was more colorful. He couldn’t let it go. He began to monitor her online activities, especially her “private auditions.” He grew increasingly jealous of “frankyfun” as franky took up more of her time. He hacked into franky’s account at ConnectPay and was horrified—but not necessarily shocked—to find it belonged to a guy with the same address as Uncle Walter. It didn’t take him any longer than it had me to make the connection.

Andras started toying with franky electronically—inserting minor malware programs into ConnectPay’s servers, causing modest data corruption and periodic operating glitches. He confronted Irina again. She told him to back off, she could manage her own affairs. So he sent a message to franky, from Oscar, telling him bad things would happen if he continued to pursue Salomé. Franky didn’t believe him. Salomé kept performing. Andras hacked into ConnectPay’s servers, accessed the company’s bank information and moved three million dollars through several accounts into his own and Irina’s. He figured that was enough to get franky’s attention. Oscar sent franky another e-mail informing him of the “fine” for not obeying the rules and warning him the next one would be double. When franky continued to pursue Salomé, Andras hit ConnectPay for five million in November.

He told the tale calmly and precisely, without emotion. Except when I asked about Irina. Somewhere along the story line, we moved from fact to fiction. I let him keep talking. We’d go through it again, maybe more than once, and the inconsistencies would begin to show themselves.

Things stayed quiet through December, but franky was all over Salomé as soon as they got back to school. So Andras, using her e-mail address, made the date at the Black Horse. Only franky didn’t show. Irina did, and she was royally pissed off.

I felt no sympathy for the late Walter Coryell. I did wonder if there were any members of the Leitz family who weren’t putting the squeeze on another.

Andras figured the only way out of Irina’s doghouse was to resolve things with franky once and for all. As soon as his uncle got sprung from the Tolland County jail, Andras arranged to meet him on Wednesday in New York. But when he arrived at Coryell’s office, nobody answered the buzzer. Uncle Walter didn’t answer his cell phone either. He went looking for Coryell at home. He wasn’t there, neither was Julia, of course, but the kids let him in. He hung with them until they got reabsorbed in their videogames, then he tossed his uncle’s bedroom, taking every key he could find.

Two of the keys got him into YouGoHere’s offices—and another world of trouble. Coryell was dead at his desk. The body wasn’t yet bloated, and it didn’t stink. If Andras was telling the truth, Coryell had been killed sometime Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

Andras had been clever—not smart, but clever. Smart would’ve walked away—or called the police. As it was, he’d acted with coolness well beyond his years and done the job he decided to do, leaving the slimmest of trails. But he didn’t know that he was going to have someone like Karp looking for him.

He locked the door to YouGoHere and toured Long Island City on foot, withdrawing a few hundred dollars at the ATMs he passed along the way (he hadn’t counted on the Basilisk either, but who does) until he found a motel where no one would notice one more person coming and going. He rented a room for two nights, cash. He returned to Coryell’s office, stopping at a UPS store to buy cardboard boxes. He dismantled the servers and the server rack, packed them up and transported the lot by gypsy cab to the motel. Leaving everything there, he took the subway to Manhattan and the Fung Wah Bus to Boston, got to Gibbet, picked up Irina’s car, and returned to Queens. He loaded up the servers and went back to Massachusetts, one step ahead of the snowstorm. He stored everything in the barn and went into hiding at the playhouse while he figured out what to do next. He’d confessed the whole thing to Irina, of course, and she persuaded him to go back to school, as if nothing had happened. Then I showed up.

It was a good story, especially for a seventeen-year-old. I wondered how much was his and how much hers. I knew one thing—only about half was true.

“What were you planning to do—with the servers?”

“Don’t know. I just thought… I couldn’t just leave them there, you know?”

I was about to tell him I didn’t believe that when a black Escalade swung into the hotel drive and stopped just past the lighted entrance. New York plates. No way the occupants could see us thirty yards away, but I pushed Andras down in his seat and slid lower in mine. Two men climbed out awkwardly, as if something under their long overcoats inhibited their movement. They went inside. A third descended and followed more slowly. His head just cleared the hotel door.

Nosferatu.

The boxes holding the servers were still in the barn, covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin. We loaded them into the Explorer and started back toward New York. When we got off the Mass Pike onto I-84, I called Foos.

“I’m traveling with the kid and ConnectPay’s servers. Don’t want to bring them into town.”

He grunted. “Where you feel like stopping?”

“How about Stamford?”

“I’ll call back.”

Ten minutes later, he said, “Super Eight Motel, I-Ninety-Five, exit six. I’ve booked three adjoining rooms. Brandeis. I’ll take the first train out, gets in at six forty-four.”

“Call Victoria before you leave. Tell her I’m on the move and will call when I can.”

“She gonna appreciate a five a.m. wake-up call?”

“Doubt it.”

He grunted again and hung up.

I set the cruise control at sixty-eight. It occurred to me, as I crossed Connecticut for the second time in three days, this was better support than I ever had when I was with the Cheka.

CHAPTER 45

The Super 8 was clean, functional, and anonymous. In other words, perfect. Or almost—too close to the highway and train station for my purposes, but I would have taken us to the center of Siberia if we didn’t have business to conduct.

We rolled in at 5:22 A.M. Andras hadn’t said much during the drive, leaving me to my ruminations. I couldn’t tell whether he was sleeping as he slumped in his seat, or ruminating as well. Moody, Aunt Marianna said. Introspective, Jenny Leitz corrected. He certainly had enough material to occupy his thoughts, starting with how he was going to stay out of jail—assuming he stayed alive.

I went back over his story a couple of times. I believed the abuse and his desire to keep his uncle away from Irina. I didn’t believe he’d ripped off ConnectPay—or the BEC—as a means to that end. I certainly didn’t believe he’d taken the servers—going to all the trouble to cover any trail—with no idea of what he planned to do with them. I also wasn’t convinced Coryell was dead when Andras got to his office. Hard to see a seventeen-year-old murdering his uncle—never mind by breaking his neck—but no less difficult than seeing him running a child pornography operation. I could check part of Andras’s story with Victoria, if the FBI had reestablished its stakeout in time—and if she was still talking to me. That gave me something else to ponder as I drove through the night.

I saw her face, more than once, floating in the night air, just outside the windshield, smiling one time, pouting the next, intruding when she decided to, just as she’d done in the months she’d been gone. She faded and was replaced by Beria, his all-knowing grin mocking from beyond reach. Fuck your mother, I told him. He frowned and disappeared. Victoria came back. Call me, she said. I have things you should know.

Not now, was my response. What was that? Leitz’s dangerous arrogance? Partly. My own hubris? Certainly. Doing things my own way for too long. More certainly. Worse, was I unwilling to let her into a part of my life I was determined to wall off as my own? In that territory, maybe I really did want to fly solo. Beria reappeared, nodding vigorously. Good thing Andras was with me. Otherwise I might have stopped at the first hotel with an open bar.

I made Andras wait upstairs while I carried the servers up to the motel’s second floor. He was all but sleepwalking, exhausted, emotionally drained, and functioning at about one-third capacity. I suggested a shower before we went to the train station and stood guard outside the bathroom. I skipped mine, I didn’t trust him not to run. He perked up when I said we were going to pick up Foos.

“Really?! He’s coming here?”

“You weren’t listening last night.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, I was caught up in my own space, you know?”

This kid had been through more than most boys his age. Still, his self-centeredness grated, but maybe I was just tired.

Not much activity around the Stamford station. The train pulled in right on time. A few people got off, Foos among them, carrying a duffel bag with a backpack over his shoulder. Andras took off like a shot. He was still trying to wrap his arms around the big man as I caught up.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Andras said to Foos. “I think it’s going to be okay.”

“Don’t count on it,” he said. “You fucked up, big time.”

The skinny arms fell away as Andras recoiled.

“I thought you…,” he said.

“I know what you thought,” Foos said. “Don’t make assumptions. About me or anyone else. You’re in a shitload of trouble and you’ve put me on the hook with your old man, who’s my friend. Turbo too. This is not how I was planning to spend my day.”

Andras turned away. Foos nodded at me. I nodded back. The psychology was honest and perfect. Setting himself up as the bad cop made Andras’s only option to rely on me. I’d have to reconsider my views on mathematicians.

Foos said, “I’m hungry. Let’s get breakfast. You hungry, Andras?”

Andras nodded meekly.

“Turbo, we’re in your care. Find us a diner, preferably one with superior pancakes.”

Andras smiled faintly, and I went with the program, meaning I stopped at the first place I spotted on the way back to the motel.

We ordered, and I sat back chewing my bacon, eggs, hash browns, and toast, sipping coffee while Foos devoured a platter-size plate of pancakes and worked Andras over in his own huggy bear merged with porcupine style. He extracted the same story. All the weak points sounded weaker the second time through. When it was finished, he asked the same question.

“What were you planning to do with the servers?”

Andras shook his head and looked at his plate.

“Don’t know,” he whispered. He was having a harder time lying to Foos than he had to me.

“Bullshit, man!” Foos said. “I get up at five a.m., travel all the way up here for this kind of crap?”

He said it with a smile, but the voice was bordering on hard. Tears formed in the kid’s eyes. He was between a rock and a hard place—and the hard place’s name was Irina.

Andras shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s true. I…”

“Don’t make it worse,” Foos said. He looked at me. “Let’s blow. We got work to do.”

I used some of Warren Brandeis’s cash to pay the bill, and we drove back to the motel. Upstairs, Foos eyed the servers and took out a laptop and a handful of cables from the duffel bag.

“Set ’em up, let’s see what we got.”

“I can help,” Andras said eagerly.

Foos turned to him, the usually sparkling eyes dark and hard. “Uh-uh. I’ll explain a few facts of life. Turbo here has put his ass on the line for you. There’s guys out there willing to kill for these things. You and I are friends, but I’m on his side, and you’re not playing straight. That means we can’t trust you. So, no, you can’t help. Go get some sleep.” He turned his back, shutting him out.

Andras teared again as he stood there, hoping Foos would relent. When he didn’t, the boy walked slowly to the connecting door to his room, shoulders slumped.

“Leave it ajar,” I said.

He did as he was told.

“That’s some hold that girl has,” I said softly.

“You sure it’s her?”

“Can’t see who else.”

“Thought I could crack the shell, but it’s tough, as you say. I’ll take another shot later.”

I don’t normally bet against him, but in this case I wasn’t ready to give his chances better than even money.

We stacked up the servers, sixteen in all, and connected the cables. Foos plugged in his laptop, sat at the small motel desk, and went to work. I checked on Andras, who was curled up, asleep, still clothed, on top of the bedspread. I felt sorry for him, but he didn’t make it easy.

I thought about calling Victoria, but decided to wait and see what Foos found. I took the shower I’d passed up earlier. Hot, hard spray massaged tired muscles. I stretched out on the bed in the third room and went under immediately. I was dreaming about Victoria and video cameras when I heard him call.

“Turbo! You better check this out.”

The bedside clock radio said 8:15. I felt the stiffness and lethargy you get with too little sleep after too long without any. I stretched, rinsed my cotton mouth in the bathroom and went next door.

Foos’s laptop screen was filled with rows of data—names, numbers, amounts. A digital carpet of information.

“Remember that case I told you about, the one the Feds busted? Based in Belarus, ninety thousand customers?”

“Yeah.”

“Double it. They’re close to two hundred thousand accounts here, averaging ten K a year each, maybe more. I need more time with the data. But we’re talking two billion a year, minimum. Say ConnectPay took five percent, that’s a hundred mil.”

“Real money.”

“Uh-huh. Before the scamming.”

“What scamming?”

“Looks as though someone’s expanding the revenue stream by keyboarding the client base. Once they get bank and credit card access, they’ve got an app that starts adding small charges or making small withdrawals. Money moves through a series of banks, bogus accounts no doubt, then overseas. Guess where?”

“Belarus?”

“Very good. Looks like they’re still testing the waters. Started a few months ago. They’ve only hacked a few thousand, netted about twenty mil so far. Tip of the iceberg. They’ve got endless material to work with.”

In my exhaustion, I had another vision, this time, a lineup of old-fashioned western wanted posters across the wall, Konychev, Batkin, Lishin, Coryell, Nosferatu. At the end of the row, looking out of place, but maybe not, were Andras and Irina.

I shook my head and the image vanished. “I never met the guy, but this sounds a little too advanced for our late friend Walter Coryell.”

“Actually, you can buy apps like this online if you know where to go. But you’re right. The scamming’s being run remotely. Some other computer, some other place working through zombies, hacking in. That and the money trail that heads for your old ’hood suggests other involvement.”

“Like BEC involvement?”

“Good place to start.”

“BEC ripping off the BEC?”

“Technically, no. BEC ripping off BEC’s customers.”

I had a thought. “Or the reason Alexander Lishin is no longer among the living. He had the expertise. He tried a solo venture, figuring what Konychev and Batkin didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Probably would still be getting away with it too, except Konychev had someone searching for whoever was ripping them off, and that guy found Lishin’s trail.”

“Works for me.”

I lowered my voice. “Where do the kids fit in?”

He shook his head. “It’s not the scamming. Timing doesn’t line up, for one thing. For another, I can see where someone hacked into the frankyfun account months ago, and it’s a whole different picture. Does leave hanging the question of what Andras was going to do with the servers.”

“I’m guessing it was her idea—and that’s why he’s so close-lipped. He’s told us all about himself, but every time the story gets close to her, he veers off in another direction.”

“Protecting her?”

“Could be what he thinks.”

“Then what’s she up to?”

“No good, I’m all but certain, but beyond that…” I shrugged. “She’s also gone underground with eight grand in cash.”

“She’ll fuck up. Everyone does.”

“Maybe. Time’s not on her side—or ours.” I told him about Nosferatu.

“Think he really wants the kid?”

“Yeah, I do. Get the Basilisk to recheck Coryell’s calls on Tuesday, after he got out of the slammer.”

He worked the keyboard and the ConnectPay data field was replaced by the familiar Q&A screen. A short list of numbers, then names, came up. Andras. Nosferatu. Sebastian Leitz.

“Leitz call Coryell or the other way around?”

“Leitz placed the call.”

“And got through on the first try?”

“Right.”

“How’d he know Coryell was out? Anybody call Leitz right before?”

“Hold on… Guy named Patrick Burns.”

That name didn’t mean anything, unless… “Burns call Leitz two Tuesdays ago, from Bedford?”

The key board clattered. “Called from Bedford twice that morning, then from Midtown that afternoon.”

Tan Coat. I had a bad feeling.

I told Foos what I was thinking, and he grunted, which is what he does when he doesn’t have anything constructive to add.

I called Leitz. “We need to talk. Meet me at your house in an hour.”

“Where the hell’s my son?”

“Safe.”

“I could have you arrested for kidnapping.”

“I saved his life last night.”

“What the hell happened? The hotel said broken window…”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“Where are you?”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Can you baby-sit?” I asked Foos.

“No problem. Maybe I can convince our young friend to be more forthcoming when he wakes up.”

I called Victoria from the road.

“Where are you this time?” she asked without preamble, her voice flat and neutral. I listened for anger or concern or hostility. Nothing there—yet.

“Just leaving Stamford.”

“And what’s in Stamford?”

“The Leitz kid. Foos. Me. ConnectPay servers. Which I came by without breaking any laws that I know of.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute.

Then, “It’s a good thing for you—I think—that you arranged that wake-up call from Foos this morning. Not that I was getting much sleep. I was worried sick.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been in a place where I could call.”

“You have time to explain?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. Can we meet at your place? Noon?”

“Why my place?” Her voice was suspicious.

“I’ve got business uptown. Then I’m probably on the move again.”

“On top of everything else, you’ve turned into a gypsy. Okay. Noon.”

Beria appeared, shaking his head.

CHAPTER 46

I caught the tail end of the rush hour and reached East Sixty-second Street at 10:45 A.M. The sky was dark gray and presaged more bad weather. 1010 WINS confirmed the forecast—another storm on the way, possible accumulations of eight to twelve inches. With only two days to recover from the last one, everyone was back on blizzard alert.

Snowbanks packed the side streets, parked cars crusted in place, covered in dirty white. I found a vacated spot on Leitz’s block, full of shoveled snow, and forced the Explorer in. The same Filipina maid answered the door, and I climbed the two flights to his office. Impossible to pass through the Rothko chamber without pausing for one revolution of mystical color. I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs, but I had the idea that this was what it could be like. I pushed on.

Leitz was at his desk, under the Kline. The Malevich was in its place, and I felt two tinges of regret. One for Leitz. His life was probably over, at least as he’d known it. The other for the painting, which was unlikely now ever to grace my wall. Fate having its fun once again.

“Where’s Andras?” Leitz said, angry.

“Still safe.”

“I thought you were bringing him.”

“You don’t want him here, for all kinds of reasons.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

I took the copy of Daria’s note from my pocket, unfolded it and placed it on his desk, smoothing the crinkled paper. Then I stood back, out of range.

He read it, looked away and reread it. He turned the paper over and back again and read it one more time. When he looked up, he had tears in his big eyes.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Your brother, Thomas. Daria left it when she… Thomas was the first to get there and he took it. He’s been holding it over Coryell ever since. I know for a fact Coryell’s been paying Thomas’s bills whenever they got out of hand.”

He dropped his head and shook it. “Jesus. I thought… I thought we had that worked out years ago.”

“Hard for some to kick their addictions.”

He shook his head again. “Thomas, Marianna, Julia, and Walter—I’ve made a hash of all of it.”

He didn’t include Andras in the list. I waited.

He held up the note. “Does Andras…?”

I nodded. “He tried jumping from the Regency last night. That’s the broken glass. He blames himself.”

“Blames himself?” Leitz looked confused, and I had to assume the confusion was sincere. Memory can do that, rearrange history, along with responsibility, if you let it. The Soviets were masters of this kind of manipulation—they twisted the collective memory of an entire nation. The current crowd plays the same games.

“He blames himself for what happened to Daria,” I said, taking another step back. “For not doing anything about Coryell.”

“But it wasn’t…” Leitz pounded the desk with both fists. “IT WASN’T HIS FAULT!”

He looked around for something to throw, but the desktop was clean, except for a pad and some pencils. He swept those away. His face reddened and he started to rise, fists still balled. I got ready to powder.

He made it halfway up before he collapsed in his chair. His head fell on his arms. I stayed where I was, unsure what he’d do next.

He sobbed—and sobbed some more. A long time, maybe ten minutes. I hoped it was catharsis. When he finally looked up, he said, “It wasn’t his fault. Don’t you understand that? You have to understand. It wasn’t his fault. It was… It was mine.”

I’m not sure who he thought he was talking to. He seemed to be appealing directly to his son. Maybe, in grief and confusion, he transferred Andras onto me. Not so odd—I’d spent the last several weeks talking to a man who’s been dead since 1953. I nodded slightly, to show I did understand, and said nothing.

“What…? What should I do?” he whispered.

“Tell me what happened two weeks ago. Tuesday. You went to Queens, right? To see Coryell?”

He looked confused again at the change of subject. Then the eyes clarified. “Yes.”

“You talk to him?”

“Yes.”

His voice was still at whisper level. He knew where we were headed, alarms were sounding in his head, but we were beyond his ability to do anything about them.

“He tell you he’d just bailed himself out of jail?”

“That’s right.”

“After he was caught with a kid in his car?”

Leitz nodded.

“That when you killed him?”

He looked around as if help might be coming from somewhere. He didn’t really expect it. When it didn’t show, he looked down at the desk.

Another long wait. But when he looked back up, he whispered, “Yes.”

I took the chance of coming into range, taking the chair across the desk. Eye level seemed important. I brought my own voice down.

“Tell me.”

He looked around again. Still no help coming.

“I… I don’t know where to start.”

“Start anywhere, as someone once said.”

“Walter… Walter had a problem, but you know that. He called it ‘the Urge.’ He thought he could control it. But…”

“It ended up controlling him,” I said.

“That’s right. I didn’t know that back then. The first thing was Andras, obviously. We got him help, child psychologists who specialize in this kind of thing. That seemed to work. But…”

He stopped and looked around again. Help still didn’t arrive.

“I guess I was wrong about that too. The question I kept asking myself, after that day Julia walked in and we all came to realize what we were dealing with, is how am I supposed to analyze this? It’s not the kind of question you ever expect to face. What am I supposed to do? How do I stop the pain? It’s not long before you get to the question of who don’t I want to hurt? Or hurt least? It’s hard to come to grips with the idea that pain is inevitable for someone, and you’re the one who decides who hurts and who walks away. That’s where I found myself. I won’t tell you I made the right decisions, I don’t know. Everything appeared in shades of gray, and I just don’t know.”

I knew the feeling.

“I made a calculation. We did what we could for Andras. That was the first thing, as I said. The question was, did we turn Walter over to the authorities? Julia was just getting her business off the ground. She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s so good at what she does, and for better or worse, she loves the guy. Scandal would have killed her. I was raising money. My second fund. Scandal would have killed me too. I’m not afraid to say it. I didn’t want to inflict pain on myself. So we made sure Walter got therapy—far away and out of sight. You can say it, if you want, but, yes, we swept it under the rug.”

I wasn’t going to say it. And I wasn’t going to point out that Thomas Leitz already had.

“The therapy seemed to work. So Julia claimed. Things returned to normal. Pauline was the most adamant but she calmed down after a while. We kept Walter at arm’s length. Julia knew he wasn’t welcome, of course. We did family gatherings without him. There was always some excuse and after a while, it became… normal, I guess. If Pauline or I mentioned him, it was never by name. Of course, we had no idea until…”

The fists balled again. But his temper was spent, overwhelmed perhaps by years of denial and deception. Perhaps that was unfair—I’d never been through this particular kind of hell.

“When Daria… We all jumped to the same conclusion, of course. But there was no evidence. Walter denied everything. Julia said he was never around. We didn’t focus on the question of whether Julia, with her twenty-four–seven schedule, would know. Maybe we didn’t want to. I’m not sure now. It’s all a blur. Pauline broke down. She blamed me, blamed the whole family, and I don’t fault her for that. Especially since…”

She was right, of course, but I didn’t say it.

“I truly didn’t know about Andras. He seemed a normal kid. Maybe too much involved with his computers, but I took that as a positive. He was applying himself to something, he was good at it. His grades were good. He was talking about Stanford or Cal Tech. I had dreams of… I had dreams…”

He got ready to weep again. Hard not to feel for him, but he was avoiding the point.

“Go back to Tuesday,” I said.

He took a minute to shift gears.

“I had the man who was following you watch Walter’s building. He called me when Walter arrived. I went over. You told me how he’d helped the tall man bug my system. I was furious. I confronted him in that… hovel. I’d never been there before. It underscored everything about him, the fraud, the deception. He tried to evade, obfuscate… He did everything he could to say it wasn’t him. I wouldn’t let him get away with it. When we got to where he’d been for the last week, I lost it. Just went berserk, I guess. We fought. The next thing I knew, he was slumped over the desk, not moving. If you ask me now how it happened, I couldn’t tell you. It was… It was just one of those things.”

Murder. Just one of those things. Andras had used almost the same language, talking about the Players.

I got up and walked. Kline and Motherwell and Malevich fired truth, albeit abstract truth, from the walls. Easy for you, I thought. You just had to get it onto canvas. Of course, they had to live it before they could paint it.

Leitz sat motionless at his desk.

“What now?” he asked, pained but resigned.

He was asking me to face the same question he’d wrestled with. Who do you hurt least?

Leitz was a murderer. On the other hand, the world was better off without his victim. Victoria would tell me that didn’t matter, and she’d be right. Also hard to ignore that Leitz’s actions had set off the chain of events that brought us here today. There were plenty of victims, including his own son and the kids at the Crestview playhouse.

I’m used to making my own decisions, but I’m no good at being a judge. The ones we had in the Soviet Union were corrupt—they had no concept of justice, they did what they were told. Victoria put her faith in the rule of law, which intentionally took decisions like this out of the hands of individuals like me. I could see the purpose of that, but I wasn’t quite ready to abdicate.

“The first thing now—is Andras,” I said. “I need to get back to him.”

“Wait! You haven’t told me where…”

“Don’t intend to. I’ll take care of the kid for the next few days. You’re in no shape to protect him. If you want to do something, think about coming clean with your family, then the cops. You’ve all got a ton of healing to do, assuming we get through this. It’ll also go a lot easier if you go to the police before they come to you.”

“But… What about…?”

“Jail?”

He tried to nod, but couldn’t manage.

I left him waiting for the help that wouldn’t arrive.

CHAPTER 47

The snow was already sticking as I walked to Victoria’s place at Third and Sixty-fifth. She welcomed me with a big hug and a long kiss and a wrinkled nose.

“You don’t stink this time, but I can feel it—you’re exhausted.”

“Won’t lie.”

“Want something to eat?”

“Sure.” Breakfast seemed a long time ago.

She led me through the living room to her dining area. I hadn’t been in her apartment before. I was struck by its temporary feel. Neutral everything—furniture, fabrics, decorations, not unlike the Regency Hotel or Julia Leitz’s office. Here, they all but announced, I’ll be moving on. Question was, where—and when?

“I got sandwiches from the deli. Something to drink?”

“Beer?”

“Is that a good idea? Never mind, I thought you’d ask, so I got that too.”

She brought a bottle of Heineken, a tasteless brew, but I wasn’t about to say so.

“Perfect,” I lied.

She smiled, and I reached for her hand.

“I’m trying,” she said. “But, as you pointed out, you don’t make it easy.”

“I’m trying too,” I said, biting back doubt. “I’m not very good at it.”

“You can say that again.”

“Want to hear about Stamford?” Get the sincerity ball rolling.

I took a long swallow of Heineken. It tasted better than I remembered.

“Go easy, shug. If I know you, you’re not done for the day.”

She didn’t know the half of it. I put down the beer and picked up a sandwich. In between bites, I told her about Batkin, what he’d said about the BEC, Irina taking off, Thomas Leitz and Nosferatu, and Andras—the note and the overnight odyssey from the Regency to the Doubletree to the Super 8.

“Did you really have to call Nosferatu and rile him up?”

“I wanted the kid to hear what he’s up against and I wanted Nosferatu chasing me.”

“Exactly my point.”

“He doesn’t know where we are now.”

“He knew where to find you that night he beat you up.”

She was right. Arrogance… I chewed another bite of sandwich.

“What are you going to do about Leitz?”

“Don’t know.”

“He should be prosecuted. He could maybe plead it down to manslaughter, but he’s looking at prison time for sure.”

“I figured that.”

“And?”

“I told him to go to the police. But he’s got a terminally ill wife and a seriously screwed-up kid. Not going to do anyone any good if he’s in the slammer.”

“That’s not the point, and you know it.”

“It is the circumstance.”

“Circumstances get considered at sentencing time. The law says you can’t go around breaking people’s necks.”

She staked out the position I expected her to, and I couldn’t argue against it. But coming from a system where the law could be made up on the spot by anyone carrying a card that said ChK, GPU, NKVD, KGB or FSB, I had a hard time seeing it with such absolute clarity.

“I can tell we’re gonna keep having this argument,” she said.

“That’s a good thing, from my point of view.”

She smiled. “At least you’ve answered one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Why they did it—the kids. Some kind of power trip.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You said they were all abused—that was the common bond—usually by a family member or someone close to them. The abuse wasn’t just physical—it takes its psychological and emotional toll too. This was their way of getting back at their abusers. They owned these guys, their customers, psychologically speaking. They told them when to tune in, made them shell out thousands—tens of thousands—to watch. They were the performers, but that didn’t bother them. It was all about control, psychological control. Power trip, like I said.”

“Huh. I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. I wonder… Remember the other day, we talked about how Irina’s the one calling the shots but I couldn’t see her motivations? I think you just put your finger on it.”

“Power trip?”

“Control. Power. And in this particular instance, revenge.” I called Foos on the cell phone that came with Warren Brandeis. “How’s the kid?”

“Just woke up. We’re starting to talk. How’s his old man?”

“Not so good. He admitted killing Coryell.”

Foos was silent, something else he does when he doesn’t have anything constructive to contribute.

I said, “I’ll tell you the rest when I see you. Right now, I need to know if Irina still has her phone offline.”

“Hang on, I’ll check.… Still offline.”

“Keep an eye on it. I have a feeling it’ll be back on shortly.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“What are you thinking?” Victoria asked.

“Business first. You want the ConnectPay servers?”

“You serious?”

“It’s either you or Nosferatu. You’re a lot prettier. Nicer too, most of the time.”

That got me a whack across the back of the head, but it was playful—I think.

“I suppose there’s a price,” she said.

“Of course. This is a capitalist country, as you keep reminding me.”

“Why is it now you’ve decided to listen? What do you want?”

“Couple weeks at the Gage Hotel?”

That got me another hug and kiss. “When can we leave?”

“You’ve got your case, remember?”

“All too well. That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’m guessin’ your mouth will be involved before too long.”

I smiled and kept silent to show I was trying. The Brandeis cell phone buzzed.

Foos said, “You hung up too fast. Someone’s trying to reach the Russian chick. Six calls since four o’clock yesterday. Just a number, no name, must be a disposable.”

He read off the number. Didn’t mean anything to me.

I broke the connection and dialed the number. A man answered, speaking Russian. “Who the hell is this?”

I recognized the voice from the night on Tverskaya and ended the call. Konychev had Brandeis’s number now but that didn’t change anything.

“Konychev’s been trying to reach Irina since yesterday afternoon,” I said to Victoria. “They’re playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game, those two, although mongoose-cobra might be a better description.”

“Dammit. Remember the question about why Homeland Security let Konychev into the country after DoJ and State were keeping him out?”

“Sure.”

“I’m gonna break the rules. This could cost me my job so bear that in mind when you go off to do whatever you decide to go off to do.”

“Okay.”

“It wasn’t DHS, it was us, DoJ, my office. We got DHS to front it so we wouldn’t be seen suddenly reversing ourselves”

“Very tricky. Foos will be impressed.”

“You’re not telling Foos, remember? You’re not telling anyone.”

“Right.”

“Konychev came to us, last month, through umpteen lawyers and intermediaries. He offered a deal. Everything he knew about the Baltic Enterprise Commission and its U.S. affiliates, including everything he knew about one Taras Batkin, in return for immunity, freedom of entry, and cessation of our investigation into his affairs.”

She had my full attention.

“When last month, the first approach?”

“December fifth.”

“Right after the Tverskaya attack. He was asking a steep price.”

“It was a tough call. I wasn’t remotely happy about it. But we were nowhere on the case, we needed a kick-start, and it’s not my job to prosecute Russian hoods unless they’re carrying out their hoodlumming here. Which we believe Batkin is. I made sure we weren’t prohibited from turning what we knew about Konychev over to the Russian authorities. We went to the CPS, by the way. They’re the only ones over there I even partly trust.”

“I’ll tell Aleksei next time I talk to him.”

“I already did.”

I could hear her.

“So?”

“So, we had Konychev, secluded, while we debriefed him. He’s evasive to say the least.”

“Surprised?”

“Don’t start. It’s been difficult, a real pain in the ass, not to tell tales out of school. Then he starts wandering off the reservation. That visit to Leitz was the first. The lunch on Madison Avenue that your pal Ivanhoe latched on to was the second.”

“Now he’s flown the coop?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Lucky guess. Rooted in the assumption that it’s the reason you’re telling me all this. And it’s Ivanov, not Ivanhoe.”

“It’s a good thing you were a spy, because you’d make a lousy diplomat.”

“At the risk of making another diplomatic faux pas, you’re not the first with that observation. Where were you keeping Konychev?”

“Don’t ask too many details. Hotel suite in Midtown.”

“Security?”

“Couple of FBI. But their orders were to keep others out, not necessarily hold him in. We relied on his own sense of self-protection.”

“Self-interest might have been a better premise. When’d he blow?”

“Yesterday, not long before I called you.”

“He’s been playing you.”

“Tell me something I don’t goddamned know.”

The temper was in countdown mode.

“How about some coffee?”

She went to the kitchen to get it.

“There’s something else. We had the suite wired, in case he got talkative.”

“He would have checked for that.”

“No doubt. But the FBI does what the FBI is trained to do.”

Like the Cheka.

“He didn’t talk much, mostly football and crude jokes—almost as bad as yours—and mostly in Russian. But there was one thing. He got a call, Sunday morning. His cell phone, we could only hear his side, but whoever it was had clearly called about Batkin. Konychev said something like, ‘Shit, we won’t get another shot at him now. Not like that.’”

I drank my coffee. “Doesn’t add up.”

“Why not?”

“Batkin told me he made a deal with Konychev. Not voluntarily, they had guns to their heads—Kremlin guns. You don’t renege on that—at least not overtly—unless you want to spend twenty years in Siberia. Konychev was playing a more subtle game. He was going to give you enough to hang Batkin in a U.S. court—ice him in a way that couldn’t be traced.”

“You Russians play too much chess. I’m a simple country girl. Konychev tried to kill Batkin and missed. He said he wouldn’t get another shot. I’ve got the tape.”

“Hang on. He was speaking Russian.”

“Sure. His English stinks.”

“So what you have is a translation?”

“Of course. My Russian’s no better than his English.”

“Where’s the recording?”

“At the office. Why?”

“Can I listen to it? Your translator might have got it wrong.”

“I don’t know, shug… I’m already out on a pretty long limb.”

“I wouldn’t ask unless I thought I could help. It might make a big difference.”

She eyed me long and straight.

“What the hell? It’s only another couple years in the hoosegow.”

She dialed a number and spoke briefly before she handed me the receiver.

“They’re teeing it up. That section.”

A faint but angry voice came over the line, speaking rapid-fire Russian full of slang and expletives. Hardly surprising the translation got screwed up. I handed back the phone.

“Well?” she said.

“Konychev used an expression—pizda lasaya. Means ‘cocky cunt,’ more or less. ‘We won’t get another shot at that cocky cunt.’ Your translator assumed he was referring to Batkin. He got it wrong. Irina was the target.”

CHAPTER 48

Foos called again.

“New data in the Dick. That cell phone called Leitz an hour ago.”

“Shit.”

I dialed Leitz’s number. No answer.

Victoria said, “What’s wrong? You look like you just saw that guy, Nosferatu.”

“I did. I gotta get back to Leitz’s. Konychev’s headed there—or Nosferatu is.”

“You sure?”

“Board lock.”

“Wait! If you’re right, it’s dangerous. Let my people handle it.”

“No time.”

“Nine-one-one. Cops can be there in minutes.”

I was halfway to the door.

“Konychev’s after the kids and the computers. He thinks Leitz knows where Andras is, and he’s the link to Irina. So yes, call nine-one-one. I can use the help.”

“Turbo, please! Don’t go. I’m scared.”

She had tears in her eyes to prove it. I came back and took her hands in mine.

“You’re right back where you didn’t want to be. I’m sorry. But neither of us is going to think much of me tomorrow if I stay here.”

“Okay, I’ll go with you.”

Before I could respond, she said, “I know. Bad idea. Dammit.”

“I’ll be back before your dragons can get warmed up. Promise,” I said.

She looked deep into my eyes before she swallowed and nodded. I took that for permission and kissed her.

“Make that call to the cops.”

It was snowing hard when I reached the street, already an inch or more on the ground. I ran, cursing myself for giving Konychev and Nosferatu too much time.

Leitz’s door was ajar. No one leaves a door open in New York. Nothing to do but keep going, even if someone was on the other side.

I kicked the door wide and backed away in case the someone had a gun.

Nobody fired. I peeked around the frame. The entrance hall looked just like it had ninety minutes before. Plus blood.

A wet trail across the stone floor. I stepped in and listened. Not a sound, but I could feel people in the house. I followed the trail to an open door at the back. It led down a hall to an enormous kitchen. The Filipina maid lay next to the center island, her dress and apron soaked in red. No pulse from her neck.

I grabbed a kitchen knife, found a back staircase and climbed as quickly as I dared. The staircase bisected a narrow hallway on the second floor before it climbed another flight. A large, airy office to my right. Jenny Leitz sat with her back to me, wearing black, bent over a desk, her head turned to one side. I stifled a cry and put my hand to her neck. I knew the answer before I felt the cooling skin. With luck she’d never heard him coming. I took my hand away and made a promise—he’d know I was there, right before he followed her out of this world.

Anger stomping caution, I ran the corridor to the front of the house. I came out at the center hall staircase. Cold air cut through my clothes. The drawing room was untouched but one French door banged in the wind. I leaned out in time to see a long overcoat turn right up Madison, worn by a tall man with a pulled-forward face.

I took the stairs two at a time, caution forgotten now, and barreled through the Rothko chamber. Leitz slumped behind his desk at an awkward angle.

“LEITZ!”

No answer.

He was fastened to his chair with a hundred yards of duct tape. The sleeves of his cashmere sweater were shredded from elbow to wrist, long red slashes ran down his forearms. The carpet was soaked in blood. I slapped his face. No response. I cut the tape. The arms fell away and kept running red.

I don’t know much about bleeding. I called 911 and held his arms above his head, hoping somehow he’d bleed to death more slowly, or maybe the ambulance would arrive in time. I fought to hold down lunch as my shoes squished in the red-soaked rug.

Movement from Leitz. He opened his eyes, ever so slowly, as if the effort was almost more than he could manage. Probably was. He struggled to focus. I think he recognized me because he tried to speak.

“Rest easy,” I said. “Help’s on the way.”

The lips fought to work themselves around a word.

“Just hold on,” I said.

“An… Andras?”

“He’s okay. I still have him. Don’t worry.”

“Tha… That’s who…”

“That’s who they were after, right? Is that what you mean?”

I think he nodded before he slipped into unconsciousness.

Victoria said the cops would get there quickly. She was wrong. But the ambulance was fast, and a second one arrived a minute after the first. I heard the EMS guys shouting downstairs. I yelled, and a man and a woman rushed in and took over. I found the other team and took them to Jenny’s office in the back and the kitchen below.

I went through the rest of the house, still carrying the kitchen knife, but found nothing. While I searched, I called Victoria to tell her I was okay, then Foos.

“What should I say to Andras?” he asked.

“He’s going to blame himself, and he won’t be all wrong this time. But don’t spare the details. He’s got to face up to some ugly realities, one of which is Irina’s been playing him like a well-stocked hand. Tell him another thing—she’s out of cards now. She’s a dead woman unless he wants to try to save her.”

CHAPTER 49

I made the Super 8 just before 3:00. Four inches of snow on the ground, gusty wind whipping the blanket of flakes in the air. The radio promised five inches more. “Local accumulations could be higher,” the announcer added for good measure. Traffic moved at the pace of a cold snail. I was feeling the lack of sleep, but adrenalin was keeping exhaustion at bay, at least for the moment. I told it to keep pumping.

“How’s my dad?” Andras was in my face as soon as I opened the door. His eyes were red, his face full of fear and worry.

“I don’t know—that’s the truth,” I said. “They were taking him to the hospital. He was still hanging on and I’m sure the docs will do the best they can.”

“Which hospital? I’ve got to get there.”

“I understand how you feel, but no go. The one thing your dad was able to ask was about your safety. I told him you were okay. We’re going to keep it that way.”

“Turbo’s right,” Foos said. “Nothing you could do. We got other things to worry about. Tell him what you told me.”

He looked from Foos to me and back again. He had to be struggling with a hundred conflicting emotions.

“Let’s sit down,” I said.

I took the corner of the bed, and he sat on the desk chair.

“You can’t change what’s happened,” I said with a gentleness I hardly felt. “You can change what’s going to happen. That’s what your dad would want you to do. Think about that before you answer the questions I’m going to ask.”

He looked away.

“PAY ATTENTION, MAN!”

I’m not sure I’d ever heard Foos yell before. Andras jumped like a cornered fox.

“It’s Irina, isn’t it? She got you to hack into ConnectPay, right?”

“NO!” he shouted. The force of his own voice took him aback.

“Okay,” I said. “She didn’t. I believe you. Tell me what happened.”

“I hacked ConnectPay. That was my idea. But…”

I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I looked at Foos, who nodded.

“It was Irina’s idea to steal the money?”

I took the absence of protest as assent.

“And again in November?”

He dipped his head slightly.

“She got you to place the worm that corrupted the BEC’s data?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“And when you found Uncle Walter in his office, you called her? She said, ‘Take the servers’?”

“Yes.”

I could have asked, what was he thinking? His uncle was dead, he’d stolen eight million dollars from organized crime. Did he really think he could just go back to Gibbet School and pretend nothing had happened? No point—he hadn’t thought. He hadn’t thought at all. He’d just done as she told him. Maybe it was youth and naïveté, maybe it was first love or blind love, maybe it was just plain stupidity. Two kids, each for their own reasons, had taken down one of the Internet’s top criminal enterprises. In some eyes, they might have been heroes, but in the ones that counted now, they were just targets to be eliminated, the sooner, the better.

“Okay, I understand what you were doing,” I lied. “What about Irina? What was she up to?”

Silence.

I wanted to slap him, then drown his head in the sink. Jenny killed, his father hanging by a thread—because of him. I managed to stifle all that.

“Listen to me. This isn’t about you and your promises anymore. They killed Jenny. They tried to kill your father. They tried to kill Irina Sunday morning. She was the target, not her stepfather. Do you understand that?”

He looked at the ground.

“Do—you—know—where—she—is?”

He looked up. “We… we always agreed if there was a problem… if something happened, we’d meet at my dad’s house in Millbrook. No one ever goes there anymore.”

“Where in Millbrook?”

“White Horse Lane. Only house on the road. It’s more like… a farm. We used to have horses. But not since…”

Daria died, unless I missed my guess.

Foos was already at the computer, pulling up a map. I looked over his shoulder. White Horse Lane was a mile-long cul-de-sac that ran southeast off Route 44, several miles north of town. Foos switched to a satellite image. Rolling fields interspersed with patches of forest the fields had been carved out of. New York horse country. Few roads. He zoomed in on a large farmhouse with an equally large barn, garage, smaller house, pool, and tennis court. The main house, guesthouse, and garage were arranged like a backward “7” with woods north and west. The barn was a hundred yards to the east. The driveway, an extension of the road, split into a “Y,” one prong leading to the barn and the other hooking in front of the main house at the top of the “7,” the guesthouse, set back from the corner, and the garage at the bottom of the long side. The closest road to White Horse Lane, other than Route 44, was Caldecott Lane, another dead end, about a half mile south.

“Where exactly is she?” I asked Andras.

“Guesthouse. She has a key.”

“And you?”

He nodded.

“Hand it over.”

He hesitated.

I thought Foos was going to whack him. Andras must’ve thought so too. He reached into his pocket and took a key off a ring.

“Alarms?”

More reluctance.

Foos said, “Turbo’s on your side, man. But you’re losing me fast.”

“I’ll write down the code.”

“Somebody plow your driveway?” I asked.

“Dad has a caretaker.”

“And if he encounters Irina?”

“She has a letter to show him,” he said quietly.

With a forged signature. Not my concern.

“You set up a communications protocol—a means of contact, cell phone, a way she knows it’s you?”

His eyes bored through the cheap carpeting. If they were lasers, he’d be down to the Super 8’s basement by now.

“Goddammit! You’re wasting time, man,” Foos said.

“I call her three times. First time, four rings. Second time, two. Third time, she answers.”

“Phone has to be on for that.”

Foos banged at the keyboard.

“Back on.”

“Calls?”

“One incoming. Guess who?”

“She answer?”

“Uh-huh. Talked three and a half minutes.”

“Outgoing?”

“Two. One to the old country.”

“Russia?”

“You got it.” He read off a number.

“That’s Moscow. The other?”

“Seven-one-eight number… cell phone… in Brooklyn—Brighton Beach.”

“She’s setting up something—or someone.”

“Wait!” Andras cried.

“No time,” I said. “Foos, check the Yellow Pages—outdoor equipment or sporting goods.”

I was lucky—there was a store a mile away.

“See if there’s a Kinko’s nearby.”

“You’re on a roll. Looks like there’s one in the same strip mall.”

“E-mail a few pages from ConnectPay’s database for printing. They could come in handy.”

“On it.”

Andras shifted back and forth nervously.

“What are you going to do?” he finally blurted.

“First step, convince Irina we’re on her side,” I said.

“I can help,” he said. “I’ll call her right now.”

How do you tell a kid that not only has he been played for a sucker by his supposed girlfriend, but having got what she wanted, she no longer has any use for him?

You don’t. At least, not now.

“Let me get up there first, get the lay of the land. Then we’ll see.”

“But…”

“Turbo knows what he’s doing,” Foos said, shutting the door on discussion. “He calls the shots.”

I was calling the shots. Whether the first statement had merit was anybody’s guess.

CHAPTER 50

Slow going. Only good thing—Konychev couldn’t be moving any faster.

Snow kept falling, wind kept whipping, plows and sanders fought the highway to a standoff. Rush hour traffic inched along. Inevitably, some idiot trying to make time ended up impacted on a guard rail or the back of another car. The Explorer’s four-wheel drive held its own, but that was no protection against the impatient fools around me. One of their miscalculations, and I was done.

Konychev and I started out equidistant from Millbrook, I figured, and we had the same traffic to contend with. I needed to get there first, and I wasn’t planning on the direct route up the driveway. That put me at least an hour behind. I’d stopped at the outdoor equipment store and lucked into a pair of boots that fit. Better yet, snowshoes. Watching one more idiot in an Explorer like mine lose control and take a Honda Accord to the side made me tap the brake and wonder whether Konychev’s Escalade had any better four-wheel drive than my Ford’s.

I turned off I-287 and followed a back road route to the Taconic Parkway. The roads were in worse shape than the interstate, but I had them to myself. As I reached the parkway, 1010 WINS reported a four-car pileup where I-287 and the Taconic met, five miles behind. All lanes blocked. With a little luck, Konychev was caught in the backup and I had the head start I needed.

I checked messages at the office. One, from Aleksei, a few hours before. Call ASAP.

No time for coffee protocol. I used Brandeis’s phone and called his disposable number.

“Thought you’d want to know right away,” he said. “Irina Lishina was treated at a Moscow hospital for a bad wound and infection on December twenty-eighth. She told the doctor she’d fallen on a metal staircase, but he said she’d also been burned. He put her down as a tough kid. She had to be in severe pain the entire time. We’re checking DNA now but I’m betting what we found on the murder weapon matches hers.”

“You got a date of death for her father?”

“Guess. Good tip. I’m grateful.”

He sounded sincere—maybe even a little contrite. Time for that later, I hoped. “You’re welcome.”

“Think she killed him?” he asked.

“Don’t know, but I wouldn’t put much of anything past her.”

“Konychev’s nieces have a penchant for trouble.”

“Meaning?”

“See Ivanov yesterday?”

“No time.”

“He finally ran down the identity of the girl in Konychev’s car on Tverskaya. Tamara Konycheva, daughter of Oleg Konychev. Big wheel in the Barsukov syndicate. And Efim’s stepbrother.”

“Ivanov have any theories on what she was doing in the car, dressed for a night on the town?”

“He says Uncle Efim likes the girls young and younger and isn’t inhibited by family connections.”

I thought about that for a minute. Things continued to clarify. “Can you check a Moscow phone number for me?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. Time’s running out here for someone.” I read off the number Irina called.

“Hang on, this may take a minute.”

It took several. “You’ll never guess.”

“The aforementioned Oleg Konychev?”

“If you knew, what did you need me for?”

“Making sure what I’m getting myself into.”

“And?”

“I have a feeling I’ll meet up with Uncle Efim and his axman later tonight.”

“Be careful.”

“I plan to. But I’ve got another feeling that those two may be the least of my worries.”

I broke the connection and called Victoria. Voicemail. I did the right thing. I told her where I was and where I was headed and that I believed Konychev was headed there too. She’d send the cavalry—but in this weather they wouldn’t make it before I finished my business with Nosferatu.

The snow narrowed the Taconic to one lane, but the traffic thinned too. Impatient commuters turned off as they neared home. Eventually, a sparse parade of well-spaced cars marched north at a steady thirty miles per hour through Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. I kept two hands on the wheel, two eyes and half my attention on the road. The rest of me pondered how a seventeen-year-old girl could so successfully confound organized crime. I thought I understood why she’d want to, but not why she thought she could get away with it. Maybe she didn’t expect to.

A chicken’s hardly a bird, a woman’s hardly a person—one of our less appealing, but no less illuminating, sayings. It speaks more to the insecurity of Russian men than the tough-mindedness of our female counterparts. Still, I was unlikely to cite it to Victoria.

The women I knew in the camps were the strongest people there. They had to defend themselves, not only against the elements, the guards and the system—they had to keep other zeks at bay too. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to a corpse on the sploshnye nary—communal sleeping boards—with a knife wound in the chest or neck, next to where the object of his unwanted attention had spent the night.

In later years, I discovered that in a nation whose history is replete with irony, the position of women was irony amplified. They had no rights under the czars, yet five became czars themselves, including Catherine. History awarded her the same sobriquet as Peter. The Bolsheviks made a big deal of neutralizing gender, but like so many other Communist constructions it was founded on quicksand. Not one woman served in the Politburo under Lenin or Stalin. Khrushchev appointed the first—as (surprise!) minister of culture. She bore the same name as the empress, and with our sense of irony, became known as the second Catherine the Great. After Stalin’s wife committed suicide, he had the wives of his Politburo cronies rounded up and shipped off to jail or the camps. Little wonder that wives of future leaders stayed deep in the background, rarely appearing in public with their sour-faced husbands. The first “first lady” to take a high profile was Raisa Gorbachev—with the predictable result of undermining public confidence in her husband and his reforms because people thought she was calling the shots.

As Russia moved from Party control through glastnost and perestroika to democratic chaos to pseudodemocracy run by the Cheka, women came out of the back room. Some flaunted their sex and control over the oligarchs who rivaled the Politburo bosses in coarseness but showered their newfound ornaments with gifts and wore them like prizes—often two, three, four at a time—on their arms. Tamara Konycheva’s predecessors.

Others excelled in sports and culture. Still others made their mark in business and professions such as journalism. Many of the crusaders who have been cut down for carrying the flame of truth close enough to scorch the powers that be were female. Still others, if Irina Lishina was any indication, had a talent for crime.

Given the history and the lawless, dog-eat-dog society in which she grew up, it wasn’t all that astonishing that Irina thought she could single-handedly one-up the BEC. Her father had helped start it, maybe died because of his role. She’d almost certainly witnessed his murder. Her uncle and stepfather were successful crooks. One of them likely killed her old man. One of them screwed teenaged girls. This was her world. Her actions began to appear totally consistent—an eye for an eye, a wound for a wound, a corpse for a corpse. She’d show she could dish out as much pain as she received.

She’d found a willing agent in Andras. I was betting she had others. I was hoping I wasn’t acting as one more. I couldn’t swear that I wasn’t.

A good time to watch my back—just like I told myself two weeks ago at Trastevere.

CHAPTER 51

Nothing was stirring on Route 44, the main road through Millbrook, at 8:00 P.M. Snow kept falling. I stopped and put down the window a mile north of town. As dark and still as I remembered Siberia to be—no houses, no cars, no lights, no sound. No sky either, just falling snow.

Caldecott Lane was two miles farther on. It hadn’t been plowed, but I made it far enough in for the darkness to hide the Explorer from cars passing on the main road. My new boots sank six inches into fresh snow. Not for the first time, I bemoaned the fact that the sporting goods store hadn’t sold firearms. There are supposed to be more gun dealers in the United States than McDonald’s in the entire world, but Stamford was an empty room in the armory. I’d made do with a large hunting knife in a plastic scabbard and an aluminum baseball bat. The thought of either embedded in Nosferatu’s bucktoothed face wasn’t displeasing.

I climbed a fence and strapped on my new snowshoes. I tucked the hunting knife into the waistband at the small of my back. Standing atop the accumulation of two storms, the top of the fence barely reached my knees. I set off at a clip that surprised me in ease and speed, at a thirty degree angle from Route 44. No moon, no stars, no lights. Just more snow. Even in the middle of an open field, I was invisible.

I was fifty yards from Leitz’s place, climbing another fence, when the barn appeared. The drive in front had been plowed during this storm, but hours ago. It showed no tire tracks or footprints. I pressed on, veering north, around the back of the main house, until I reached the pool. I recognized it from the satellite map and the large rectangle of fence top peeking out of the snow. The guesthouse was on the other side, thirty yards away. Beyond that was the garage. The stately main house stood to my left, woods fifty yards to my right. My watch said 8:55.

I waited a good ten minutes, watching, listening. Not a sound. Not a sight. Not a light. I could have assumed wrong and Irina didn’t have Uncle Oleg’s muscle here after all. More likely, the man—men?—were good and well hidden by the garage.

I moved to the back door of the guesthouse and pressed myself to the building while I removed the snowshoes. The alarm panel showed green. I worked the key in the lock. It turned easily, and the door opened without a creak. I closed it softly and stood in the dark. The heat was on. The house was warm.

I was in a small kitchen. I could make out a counter, stove and sink to my left. Table to my right. Fridge against the opposite wall. Door, cracked open, next to the fridge. More darkness beyond.

Clutching my aluminum bat, I crossed the room in two steps and nudged open the door. Dining room—table and four chairs, fireplace in the left wall, and open French doors at the far end. Still no sound.

I skirted the table to the French doors. A large L-shaped living room wrapped the front of the house. Two windows and a door opposite. The edge of the mantel on another fireplace, backing up on the one in the dining room to my left. Leather armchairs, a leather couch, lots of blankets and throws.

I stood still, sensing someone there I couldn’t see on the other side of the “L.” I listened for breathing, a rustle of clothing, something. If she felt my presence, she was doing the same thing. The silence was broken only by the mild whip of the wind outside. Stalemate. Three to one she was just around the corner. Same odds she was armed. But I wasn’t the one she planned to kill. Or so I hoped. A bad bet. I took a breath and stepped into the room.

She was sitting in the farthest corner, where I expected her to be. Her eyes were wide open and focused on me. Her face showed no surprise. A shotgun rested in her lap, the raised barrel pointed at my chest.

“This is a twelve-gauge pump. I know how to use it. My father taught me. One more step and I will.”

“Put down the bat.”

I did.

“He couldn’t keep it shut, could he?”

“Who?” I asked.

“I’m not stupid, Cheka Pig. Don’t treat me like I am.”

“He’s trying to help.”

She laughed. More of a bray—full of meanness, void of humor.

“He’s always trying to help. A fool, but he’s served his purpose.”

“What was that?”

“You’re so smart, what do you think?”

“Hacking the BEC?”

She grinned.

“Stealing the eight million?”

The grin widened.

“Placing the worm?”

“That’s the best of all. That’s what really got…” The grin disappeared and she shifted in her chair. The shotgun didn’t move.

“Enough, Cheka Pig. I don’t have to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t. But I’m curious. That’s what really got—what?”

She didn’t answer.

She’d chosen her location with care. Tucked in the corner, she was out of the line of sight—and fire—from every window, unless someone leaned far in the big bay to her left, in which case she had him. She had a clear view of the front door. Anyone using the back would end up entering the room as I did—an easy target. She was wearing black jeans and a turtleneck. The gun in her hand didn’t shake or waver. She had a box of shells in her lap.

“Waiting for your uncle?”

Her eyes stayed fixed on me.

“Who then?”

Nothing.

“He give you your scar?”

She seemed to jump in her chair, then settled back down. The impassive mask returned. “What scar?” A touch of something new in her voice—surprise? Fear?

“On your neck. I noticed it the other night, when we stopped at Burger King. I saw it on your WildeTime videos too—but only the recent ones.”

“You’ve seen my videos?!” A possibility she hadn’t considered—and didn’t like.

“Not voluntarily.”

“Pervert.”

“You don’t believe that. What about the scar?”

“You’re not just a Cheka pig, you’re a Cheka pervert.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“NO! I don’t care what a Cheka pervert thinks.”

Her voice said she did. But continuing this while she pointed a shotgun at my chest was foolish.

“Why don’t you put the gun aside? I’ll sit right here. We can talk about it. I’m on your side, even if you don’t think so.”

I eased myself onto an ottoman by the fireplace. It brought me a few feet closer, not that a few feet in the face of a twelve-gauge made much difference.

“I told you, don’t treat me like I’m stupid. You are not on my side.”

I kept an eye on the trigger finger. So long as it stayed outside the guard, I was okay. Maybe.

“When did you last talk to your father?” I asked quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just a question.”

She didn’t respond. The eyes clouded or seemed to. The light was bad, hard to tell for sure.

“You and Andras riled up that nest of vipers—the BEC, I mean. Was that your intention—set father against stepfather against uncle? Or did you have a particular target in mind?”

She shook her head again. She was smiling this time though.

“Come on, enlighten me. You’ve got the gun. I’d like to understand. We’ve got time, nobody’s here yet.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to a Cheka pervert.”

“You’re going to have to say something to someone, sooner or later.”

That got me a quizzical look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We all have to answer, even if it’s only to ourselves in a mirror. That’s the way life works.”

“Don’t give me any heaven and hell bullshit. They tried that at Gibbet. Chapel every morning. I’m way past that.”

“I’m talking about right here, right now.”

“It’s over for me.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s over.”

She said it like she meant it. The finger stayed where it was.

“You sound like Andras.”

“He doesn’t have a clue.”

“Don’t sell him short, Irina. He’s confused, but he’s not stupid. Or evil. Bad breaks, sure. Like you’ve had.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“You know as well as I do. Things happen, not your fault, but they send you down a whole different road. It’s not too late to turn off. It never is.”

“What the fuck do you know about it?”

“I know because before I was a Chekist, I was a zek.”

She put a pitchfork through that admission. “Big fucking deal. So was my stepfather—Vyatlag, Gorlag, wherever. He’s still a pig. So are you.”

So much for the conversational approach. Time was working against me. Two could play the pitchfork game.

“How old were you when he put his hand up your skirt?”

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

“Don’t play innocent, Irina. Uncle Efim. Thirteen, twelve?”

“NO! YOU DON’T GET IT! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

The finger wrapped the trigger. That, I did understand. But I kept at it.

“The Players. Andras and his uncle. Kevin. Andras told me about him, the others. That was the bond, right?”

“NO! It’s between me and him. You have no… I don’t even know what you’re doing here!”

I let that go and looked out the window—with one eye. After a minute or two, her eyes followed mine and the trigger finger loosened. I let my breathing come back to normal.

“How many men outside?”

That made her start—and the finger move.

“What the fuck are you talking about now?”

I put an edge of anger in my voice. Not that she’d care, but she was still a kid, twelve-gauge or no twelve-gauge. “Christ, Irina. You’re not stupid, as you keep telling me. I’m not either. You’re waiting for Uncle Efim. He called right after you turned your phone on. You told him where to find you, told him you’d be waiting. Then you called Uncle Oleg in Moscow. He gave you the number for a man in Brooklyn. He’s got men outside now.”

“SHUT UP! I DON’T HAVE TO TALK TO YOU.”

She was shouting but the finger stayed in place. I pressed on.

“Your cousin—Tamara Konycheva. She’s been seen a lot with Uncle Efim. Even I know that.”

I was looking for a button, and I’d pressed it. She closed her eyes. I got ready to lunge for the gun. She opened here eyes again. Even in the dark, they were filled with fire.

“How long has he been sleeping with her?” I asked.

“NO! NOTHING YOU SAY IS TRUE!”

The denial came fast and angry.

“Was he still sleeping with you when he started screwing her? Is that why you decided to go after the BEC?”

She switched to Russian. “You fucking son of a whore and a diseased dog…”

I went with Russian too. I wouldn’t get another chance at this interrogation. I put my best Cheka steel in my voice.

“Here’s what I think happened. If I’m wrong on anything, say so. I think your uncle dumped you for your cousin. Last summer sometime. You were too old, used up. He decided to move on to prettier hunting grounds.”

“Fuck your mother, you rotten bastard…”

“You were pissed. You’re used to getting your own way. You and Andras and the other kids had been running the playhouse for a year or two. You knew about his computer skills. You also knew he had a crush on you. You were already bent on revenge when he told you about ConnectPay. So much the better. Frankyfun had been all over you since last spring. Did you know he was his uncle Walter or did that come later?”

She’d leaned forward, pushing the gun in my direction at the start, but she backed off, resuming the impassive state, finger relaxed on the trigger guard, off-kilter grin on her face. She didn’t react to my question. The answer wasn’t important—to her or to me.

I went back to English. “You strung Andras along while he worked his way through ConnectPay’s system and into the BEC. You got him to steal the three million in August. Had him make it look like Uncle Efim was cheating his partners, right?”

The off-kilter grin widened.

“You waited to see what happened. Nothing did. So you hit them again for five mil at Thanksgiving. Still nothing. You were frustrated. You were setting your uncle, dad, and stepdad against each other, but they weren’t biting, or so you thought. You were impatient. Plenty was happening, behind the scenes, you just couldn’t see it. Your uncle traced the hack—to Andras’s dad. They started digging into his company, his family. Karp came over to New York. He already knew Uncle Walter, of course, and he got him to put a bug on the computers at the Leitz office.

“Something else you didn’t know—your father was running his own scam. He’d figured a way to rip off BEC clients, starting with ConnectPay, in a way they wouldn’t notice—and couldn’t do much if they did. Only he wasn’t cutting in his partners. He was going solo. Uncle Efim discovered that scam when he was looking for your thievery. I’ll ask again—when was the last time you talked to your father?”

She shook her head.

“You can’t hide, Irina. A week ago, two? At Christmas? You were in Moscow at Christmas. You must have seen him.”

She nodded hesitantly. I had her attention now

“I hope you said an affectionate good-bye. They pulled his body from under Moscova ice three days ago. He had a fireplace poker through his chest.”

“NO! YOU LIE! CHEKA PIG!” She flipped onto her knees, leaning forward, pushing the barrel toward me. No more than six feet away.

CRACK!

She jumped.

I dove.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Two handguns, two shotguns. More shots. Then silence.

I looked up from the floor. Irina knelt in the chair, swinging the twelve-gauge wildly, her finger on the trigger, wrapped tight. She fought the urge to go the window. I kept my mouth shut and body still, hoping she’d forget all about me.

Quiet outside, except for the whistling wind. A minute passed, then three, then five. Irina was fixated on the front door. I thought again about making a lunge for the gun, but I wouldn’t get halfway there.

Another five minutes passed. She unbent her knees and flopped back into her chair. The shotgun stayed steady. When she got settled, I worked myself ever so slowly back up to the ottoman. She watched me from the corner of her eye. When I got seated, she swung the gun over to let me know not to move again.

Voices outside, stamping feet. The front door swung open and Efim Konychev walked in. He flicked a switch, and I blinked in the light. He was wearing an overcoat and carried a large automatic in his right hand. His left shoulder was soaked in blood, but he wasn’t showing any pain. Irina swung the shotgun halfway between us.

“Hello, Irina,” he said. “Not a very welcoming reception. Those men are dead, by the way. What’s the matter? You don’t love me anymore?”

Behind Konychev stood Karp, holding a shotgun of his own. He closed the door as his eyes swept the room, taking in the layout, the girl, the gun, and coming to rest on me.

He grinned.

CHAPTER 52

Konychev did his own survey of the room.

“I’ve seen you before.” He spoke Russian.

No benefit in bringing up where.

“I remember,” he said. “Tverskaya. You were passing by. You have a talent for being in the wrong place.”

“A lying, fucking zek,” Karp said. “I told you about him.”

“He’s that one?”

Karp nodded.

“You’ll take care of it,” Konychev said.

“He’s dead.” Another grin.

Foos listens to a bluegrass song about dealing cards with death—the joker’s wild, the ace is high. Irina was the joker in this game, maybe my ace in the hole and my one hope for coming out alive, if I played her right.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Konychev asked.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

I felt a twinge for Andras.

“Think I give a shit? Where is he?”

“Ask him.”

He stayed with her. “Call him.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“You and he have caused a great deal of trouble with your stupid games.”

“You had it coming.”

Most kids would have sounded petulant, not to mention terrified. She didn’t. She sounded vengeful—and mean.

“Get her phone,” Konychev said to Karp.

Irina raised the twelve gauge. “Don’t.”

Karp and his boss stayed where they were.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Kid doesn’t have a phone. Have a good trip to Jersey, Fish Face?”

Karp glared. Konychev contemplated. I think Irina almost smiled. She didn’t like Karp any more than I did.

Konychev took another look around the room. “Where are the servers?”

Irina shrugged. “Not anywhere you’ll find them.”

“They’re no use to you,” he said.

“You want them, I have them.”

“Irina, what are you so angry about? What have I done?” His voice was all saccharine now. Irina wasn’t buying any of it.

“I WILL NOT BE TREATED LIKE A STUPID GIRL!”

“Irina…”

“I know exactly what you’ve been doing. And with whom!”

The joker was taking the shape of a jealous queen.

“Enough! Where are the servers?” Konychev said.

“She doesn’t have them,” I said. “You fucked that up too, Fish Face. Stupid pizda.”

Karp’s eyes told me I didn’t have long to live.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Konychev said.

“What I said. You need better help.”

“You have them?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know your game, but you’re bluffing.”

“No bluff. I’m going to reach very slowly into my jacket for some papers.”

Karp raised his shotgun until it was pointed squarely at my head. Hope filled his face.

I pulled my jacket open in slow motion while I extracted the Kinko printout. I tossed the folded pages across the room. They landed at Konychev’s feet. Shotgun steady, Karp knelt and picked them up.

Konychev grabbed them. His face darkened.

“What do you want?”

“Take Fish Face and beat it. I’ll be in touch.”

“I don’t think so. I credit your industriousness. But you’re compromised like everyone else. You tell me where to find the servers. I make sure no harm comes to your lady friend.”

“Lady friend?”

“The charming U.S. attorney who has been my hostess these last few weeks. You can’t protect her. Not if you’re dead. Karp will take care of her as soon as he’s done with you.”

No time now to think about how he came to have that information. I could only hope there would be later. Or that it wouldn’t be necessary.

“Maybe he’d like to watch,” Karp said.

“Maybe he would,” Konychev said.

“Suppose she already has them?” I said.

“That would be unfortunate.”

I sat on my hand.

“We seem to have arrived at a temporary stalemate,” he said. “But we have two guns, she has one, you have none. You have no friends here. Any way this plays out you lose.”

I did have that joker. Time to put it into play.

“Let’s go back to Sunday. Batkin’s house. Who were your men shooting at?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. So does Irina. You weren’t trying to kill him, were you?”

He caught it. So did she. She straightened in her chair.

“You wouldn’t murder Batkin, however much you might want to. He told me the same about you. The Kremlin won’t allow it. You two have a deal—Kremlin enforced. You’re not dumb enough—or angry enough—to buck that. Your men were shooting at Irina. You’re on tape cursing them for missing her. Fuck that up too, Karp? You’re building quite a track record.”

I glared at him to make the point. He glared back with an intensity that told me I was on the right track.

“I heard the tape, just this afternoon. You don’t mince words, Efim Ilyich. ‘We won’t get another shot at that used-up cunt. I should have finished her when I did her old man. She’s just an old whore anyway. I’ve had more fun in a brothel.’”

Irina said, “Efim?” Her voice was barely audible. Beneath the word was a tone of steel.

Konychev said quickly, “Irina, you have no idea… Don’t listen to him. He’s only…”

“STOP!”

“Has Uncle Efim told you about what happened that night on Tverskaya?” I asked.

“What?”

“The girl in the car. Tamara Konycheva, your cousin. I was there, like he said. I saw her. Three bullet holes in her back.” I looked at Konychev. “You were having a good time in the back of that Mercedes. She get you off before she bought it?”

“He’s lying, Irina! He doesn’t know anything.”

The shotgun swung in his direction.

“She was dressed for a night on the town, Irina. Dress, makeup, plenty of cleavage. How old was she, Konychev? Fourteen? Thirteen? What’s too old for you, by the way?”

“You bastard… You told me…”

“Nothing’s too young for Uncle Efim,” I pressed. “You know that, Irina. This isn’t the first time he’s cheated on you? He keeps saying you’re the only one, but he keeps sticking it in younger girls, doesn’t he? How many times has he lied to you?

“You bastard. You fucking bastard.”

She said it to me, but she meant it for him. I kept my eye on her trigger finger.

“Irina don’t listen. He’s manipulating you. You know I love you.”

“SHUT UP!”

The shotgun wavered. Karp moved.

“DON’T!” I yelled.

The gun steadied—on Karp. “Back off, fucker,” she said.

Karp took a step back.

“Is… Is it true?” she said. “Was Tamara in the car?”

“Irina, he’s only trying…”

“IS IT TRUE?”

“It’s on Ibansk.com,” I said. “You follow that, don’t you, Irina? Posted yesterday. Ivanov says Tamara was the girl in the car.”

“IS IT TRUE, YOU BASTARD?”

“Irina, listen, I can explain. That’s not what this is about.”

“Tell me she wasn’t there.”

“Irina…”

“NO! Tell me she wasn’t there. TELL ME!”

“She wasn’t there.”

He wasn’t convincing. She wasn’t buying.

“Bastard! Lying bastard!”

“If you don’t want to talk about Tamara, how about her father?” I said.

Two heads swung toward me. Karp didn’t budge. He was looking for an opening.

“I told Irina how his body was pulled from the Moscova three days ago. Fireplace poker through the chest. By the time that happened, he was happy to die. He’d been tortured, Irina, until he begged for it to end. Uncle Efim pulled your dad’s fingernails out one by one. No more of those, he went on to his teeth. He enjoyed it, your uncle did. So did Karp here. He did the dirty work. By the time they finally ran him through, there wasn’t much of a man left.”

“Irina…,” Konychev said.

“Is it true?”

“I said, don’t listen.”

“BULLSHIT!”

I’d finally broken her shell. She wasn’t just angry anymore. Horror, real horror, terror mixed with fear, twisted her pretty face. The tough-girl façade fell away for good, leaving a broken, terrified teenager in its place.

I pressed on.

“You were there, weren’t you, Irina? There was some kind of fight. You got swiped with that poker. Hurt like hell, didn’t it? You were trying to protect your father, and Uncle Efim didn’t care who he hurt. You were already an over-the-hill, trash-heap tart to him anyway.”

“You said… You said it would be okay. You said nothing would happen. You said you needed to talk to him, business to clear up. YOU SAID YOU WEREN’T ANGRY ANYMORE!”

“Right before he pushed you out the door and started in on the fingers,” I said.

“Irina, he’s lying. He wasn’t there. He doesn’t know. He’s making it all up. He wants to use you against me.”

“IS IT TRUE?”

It’s hard to watch anyone’s world collapse in on itself, harder still if the person crushed is still in her teens. I shoved those thoughts aside and detonated another explosion.

“You shot your credibility on Tamara,” I said to Konychev. “She was probably waiting for you back at your place.”

“IS IT TRUE, GODDAMMIT?”

The shotgun slipped. Karp moved. Konychev too. Not fast enough. The gun came back up. The blast caught him square in the chest.

I lunged for Karp. I heard the pump and a second boom. My shoulder exploded in fiery pain.

Konychev fell against me and we went to the floor. Karp was on me in an instant. I tried to roll away, but he had me pinned. No chance against his strength. He pulled my lame arm. I flipped on my back. Pain clawed everywhere. I reached for the knife at my waist. Karp, sensing something, pulled in the other direction. I couldn’t quite get there. Another crack of the pump, another boom. Karp’s grasp loosened. I thought she’d shot him, but grabbed the knife anyway. He yanked my bad arm again as I got hold of the handle.

My shoulder popped. I fought the wave of pain, rolled and swung wildly. The knife buried itself in something. Karp howled and let go. I got my head up. Irina, fumbling with the box of shells in her lap, tried to reload. Karp was standing, knife shaft deep in his thigh. But he had his shotgun. I was looking into the barrel of eternity.

Joker’s wild, ace high. He held the twelve-gauge ace.

“Die, zek.”

In that instant they say you have, I saw Aleksei and Victoria and my own dangerous arrogance and the inevitability of the game. I’d been lucky before, but…

BOOM! BOOM!

Two more blasts. The first—half of Karp’s chest exploded over me. He was still standing, still holding the shotgun, still grinning. The second blew out his remaining guts. The body weaved, blood spewing, until it keeled over, dead eyes filled with hatred.

I rolled left, out from under. Pain burned everywhere. Irina fumbled with her gun. I had to get to her… A cold wind blew through the room.

“NOBODY MOVE!” a voice shouted.

I wondered who he was yelling at and kept crawling.

“STOP!” the voice yelled.

“TURBO, STOP!”

A different voice. Victoria’s. What was she doing here?

I kept crawling.

Irina rotated the shotgun, barrel up. Beria appeared behind her.

“No!” I tried to croak.

“TURBO!” Victoria called.

Irina worked the barrel around.

“Irina! No!” I cried. It came out a whisper.

She had the stock on the floor, between her feet, the barrel under her chin.

I pulled myself up. It seemed to take an hour. I used everything I had and lunged.

“TURBO, STOP!”

I grabbed at the gun stock as the room exploded. Beria vanished, along with Irina. I fell where her feet had been, thinking in one more blind instant whether it was worth it to still be in the game.

CHAPTER 53

“You gonna open that package or not?”

Victoria’s temperature was rising. Foos shook his head and moved a bishop.

Victoria turned back at the board. Foos grinned.

“Dammit! I should’ve seen… You are making it impossible. He’s going to beat me, and it’s your fault!”

The three of us sat around the chessboard in the open area of the office. Pig Pen’s radio played quietly in the background. Foos and Victoria were settling into a pattern of Saturday afternoon matches, best three out of five. So far as I could tell, neither had yet to beat the other outright. Victoria was still figuring out offense, but she was an instinctive defensive player, and she regularly thwarted his attacks. I had the feeling she’d made a serious blunder, which as she said, was all my fault.

I stood and went to look again at the Malevich, still resting in its open shipping crate, outside Pig Pen’s office. My shoulder tugged, but the pain was almost nothing now, two weeks later. My arm was in a sling, which made certain activities somewhere between awkward and difficult, to Victoria’s alternating amusement and frustration. My injuries—dislocated shoulder and thirteen twelve-gauge pellets from Irina’s shotgun, also my fault, of course—had delayed her reclaiming her apartment, so they were serving a purpose. I was rehabbing the dislocation, and the therapist said I was a quick healer. The wounds from the shotgun were healing according to their own schedule.

“It’s a goddamned good thing we came by helicopter,” Victoria had said as we flew south to a hospital. I hadn’t counted on that, but the snow had moved out southwest to northeast. They’d found two Russians dead by the garage before her men dispatched Karp to an eternal fiery Gulag. I was grateful for their timely arrival but pissed, however irrationally, that they’d cheated me of the privilege. I kept that thought to myself.

I’d spent a tortured twenty-four hours, drugged to the gills, visited by a headless Irina, chestless Karp and Konychev, a paler-than-death Leitz, and a smiling Jenny Leitz who kept trying to tell me it was all okay. I found out later that the smiling woman was actually Victoria, who’d spent the entire time at my bedside trying to calm me as I twisted and screamed. Taras Batkin even put in a cameo, wearing Beria’s rimless spectacles. We know everything, he said. How could you ever doubt that?

Sanity returned as the painkillers receded, but the images themselves were hard to shake. Especially Irina’s, at that last moment when everything exploded.

“What about the package?” Victoria again.

The second delivery of the afternoon. A gray plastic shipping bag, Moscow return address—“Foreign Ministry, Russian Federation.”

I opened the plastic to find a nine by twelve envelope inside. Addressed to me with a note.

“From Taras Batkin,” I said.

“What’s that bastard want?” she asked.

Batkin had flown the coop the day after the Millbrook Massacre, as the tabloids were calling it. I’d tried phoning him. I’d gone up to East Ninety-second Street once I was able to move again. The town house was shuttered. Ivanov reported, tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he’d been recalled by the Kremlin over a trade dispute.

“He’s sending what he owed me,” I said.

“He’s lucky he got out of town,” Victoria said. “What is it?”

“Answer to a question. I’m not sure I’m interested anymore, though.”

She shook her head and went back to the game.

Leitz lived. Foos brought Andras into town where he stayed with his father in the hospital until the old man was released. Victoria said the authorities were undecided as to prosecuting either of them. They didn’t have all the pieces—she blamed that on me as well—but she didn’t push it. Everyone involved had suffered, and no one—including her—had much stomach for causing more pain. Her case against Batkin and BEC was dead, but the BEC was crippled and the ConnectPay database gave her two hundred thousand pedophiles to chase. She wasn’t happy, but it was like chess with Foos. She didn’t win, but she could declare some sort of moral victory and move on.

Batkin’s envelope sat on the coffee table next to the chessboard. Inside was the answer to my parentage. Beria or not. Batkin’s note suggested it was, in fact, Comrade Lavrenty Pavlovich, but he could be toying with me, one zek to another. I walked around the office thinking about whether and how much it mattered.

Malevich’s luminous Suprematist rectangles, floating impossibly on their sea of incandescent white, erased the memory of Irina and Karp and Konychev, at least for the time being. The packing case had taken twice as long as the Repin’s to get into. One useful arm didn’t speed the process. Victoria arrived for her chess game shortly after Foos and I got it open.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Malevich. Remember?”

“Son of a bitch. That’s eighty million dollars?”

“On the day Leitz bought it, yes.”

“It’s rectangles.”

“That’s right.”

“You Russians are all fucking crazy.”

“Eldo,” Pig Pen said, watching from his office.

“Pig Pen’s not Russian,” I said.

“Last time I checked, Pig Pen was a parrot. What does he know?”

“Bayou Babe. Eldo,” he said. He sounded as though his feelings were hurt.

“You going to argue?”

“I can’t win. What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe hang it. Maybe send it back.”

“Send it back?! You earned it. It’s part of your fee.”

“Leitz and I made a bet, although he doesn’t like the word. He lost. But I’m not sure I won.”

“You paid a hell of a price, however you account for it,” she said and went to play her chess match.

I thought about losing and price. I hadn’t lost, I told myself, and I more or less believed it. I hadn’t been forced to fold my hand, even at the very end. My price seemed benign compared with those paid by others. Especially Jenny. And benign compared with the price yet to come—in Batkin’s envelope on the coffee table.

Did I want to know the truth? And what would I do once I did?

The Leitzes kept sweeping truth under the rug—until there was no more time and no more room. If I left the envelope sealed, wasn’t I committing the same sin?

If I was, I asked myself, wasn’t I the only victim? What Aleksei didn’t know at this point certainly wasn’t going to hurt him.

Or was that just more Turbostian rationalization?

I finished unwrapping the Malevich with my good arm and carried it carefully to my office along with Batkin’s envelope. I found some hooks and a hammer in the utility drawer in the kitchen. I sank two hooks at one end of the wall next to my desk and hung the painting. I sank another hook near the opposite corner, punched a hole in the envelope and hung it too. I could sense Beria trying to push his way into the room, he couldn’t quite manage. Maybe he’d met his match in Malevich.

Victoria appeared at my side.

“Another draw?” I asked.

“Yes, one more.” She looked from the painting to the envelope and back again. “What are you up to now?”

“Bookends.”

“Bookends?”

She took my hand.

“Life bookends. For purposes of contemplation.”

She snuggled under my good arm, hers around my waist.

“Where do I fit in?”

“We’re working on that.”

She smiled and I gave her a squeeze as I made another promise. This time, I swore I would keep it. On the day her picture went up—not too far in the future, I hoped—I’d take the envelope down and open it and confront the specter, real or imagined, of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria.