The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark

CHAPTER 31

Bobby closed his eyes and willed the stinky man with the baritone voice to go away. It was a silly thought, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He was physically and emotionally exhausted. He couldn’t handle any more problems. He wanted to be left alone.

But the man kept kicking the leg of his chair, pushing Bobby toward the window, inch by inch. The man had been sitting at a long table with eleven other Russians. Bobby had heard them toast the Japanese carmakers so he suspected they were the car dealers. This man was one of them.

Two possibilities dawned on Bobby. First, the man was mistaken. Second, he knew Bobby’s true identity, and they’d met in Ukraine. If the latter was the case, there was only one place where they could have met. Used car dealers were scavengers, like the ones who had once foraged the vehicle graveyards of Chornobyl for spare parts. Either way he wasn’t going to get away pretending to be asleep.

The car dealer booted his chair again. The force of the kick vibrated through Bobby’s body.

“Turn around and answer me, boy,” he said. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

Bobby rose to his feet, pretended to cower against the wall, and faced the car dealer. Bobby’s hat covered his shorn ears. His comfort mask hid his nose and lips. He recognized the car dealer as soon as he saw him. Three years had passed since he’d last sold him some engine parts from an ambulance buried deep in Chornobyl’s mechanical graveyard. He hadn’t aged well. He’d lost ten pounds of muscle mass and gained twice that amount around his waist. His sunken cheeks suggested his drinking and smoking were quickly sucking all the life out of him.

The car dealer was the scavenger of scavengers. He relied on others to do the dirty work and profited by knowing the end buyers. Getting rid of him would require some effort and guile, otherwise Bobby would be exposed as a runaway from Ukraine living under an assumed identity. With that realization, a rush of adrenaline stiffened Bobby’s nerves. For the first time in over twenty-four hours, he was awake and alert.

“Why are you kicking me?” he said in English. “Who are you and what do you want from me?”

The car dealer reeked of nicotine and body odor. He narrowed his eyes as though he couldn’t believe whom he was seeing. A flicker of recognition flashed in his face.

“Take that mask off.” Still speaking Russian.

“Leave me alone.”

“Take it off.”

“What are you saying? I don’t speak Russian. English. Only English.”

The car dealer reached out to grab the mask.

Bobby stepped back to the window. “Leave me alone or I’ll scream for help. I will.”

“Take that mask off or I’m going to rip that hat off your head.”

Bobby enunciated slowly as though he were exasperated with their supposed language barrier. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m going to rip that hat off your head so your disgusting half-ears are there for everyone to see. And then everyone will see you for the human scum that you are, and whatever con you have going will be over before you can collect.”

Bobby tried to look nervous, as though the car dealer’s threat was resonating.

The car dealer wiped his nose with his shirtsleeve. “No? Suit yourself. I would have liked to have been your partner on whatever it is you have cooking here, but I like a good freak show just as much.” He lunged for Bobby’s hat.

Bobby sidestepped him and deflected his arm with the outside of his own hand. The car dealer slammed into the wall. He retained his balance, swore under his breath, and turned toward Bobby.

“What was born in the Zone should stay in the Zone,” he said. “Next best option? Throw it overboard.” He lowered his head and started toward Bobby.

Bobby raised one hand, pulled his mask off with the other. “No. Stop,” he said in Russian.

He kept his voice low, as the car dealer had, and quickly looked around the restaurant to make sure they hadn’t attracted attention. Some of the men at the car dealer’s table were watching, but as soon as Bobby removed his mask and the dealer stopped charging they laughed and returned to their card game. The other forty or so people in the cafeteria were engaged in their own conversations. They weren’t paying attention to what was happening in the corner.

The car dealer’s eyes lit up. “It is you. Adam Tesla,” he said, using Bobby’s old name from Ukraine, the one he’d been born with. “Deformed, derelict, and deranged. Still playing hockey?”

“Hockey?” Bobby tried to sound sarcastic, like a kid who was trying to hide his fear. “Sure. There’s a nice rink in Vladivostok. I’m headed there now for a pickup game.”

“Sure you are. And I’m Yul Brynner’s long-lost son. I’m going to his birthplace in Vladivostok to claim the family inheritance. Now do you want to stop bullshitting me, or do you want me to jump up on a table and tell everyone who’ll listen that they’re on a ship with a piece of radioactive scum?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Finally you say something that makes sense.”

“So we’re done here, right? Nice to see you again, can I go back to my nap?” Bobby reached for his chair.

“That’s funny. You were always good for a laugh. Not because you were funny. How could you be? You barely said ten words over the course of how many transactions? More than ten. How many pieces did you sell me from the Zone? Was it closer to twenty?”

Bobby shrugged. He’d sold him twenty-four different vehicle parts, from starter engines to full sets of wheels. Each time he’d been petrified he was getting infected with radiation again. Each time he’d prayed it was the last. To the best of his knowledge he hadn’t been infected again, and he executed his last theft with Eva five days before she died.

“Doesn’t matter now,” the car dealer said. His face took on a sunny disposition. “The important thing is we’re friends.”

“We are?”

“Of course we are.”

The car dealer was changing tactics. He must have realized that if he hoped to profit from whatever he imagined Bobby was scheming, bullying wouldn’t help him achieve his goal on a ferry. His mistake was that he hadn’t thought of that from the start. Not that Bobby wouldn’t have seen through him immediately. He would have had more respect for him, though.

The car dealer slapped him on the shoulder. “We’re good old friends. No, wait. That’s not true. We’re not just good old friends. We’re the best of friends.” He pulled Bobby’s chair back to one of the tables. “Come, my friend. Come sit down with me and tell me a tale.”

He wiped the smile off his face to make sure Bobby knew he had no choice. As soon as Bobby stepped toward him he resumed beaming. He grinned at Bobby as though it were his turn to speak, but Bobby knew better than to open up so quickly. He had to make sure the car dealer believed he was coercing him into revealing why he’d been in Japan and why he was on the ferry.

“Are you hungry? Have you been eating? You’re looking a little peaked, my boy. In fact, that was my first thought when I set eyes on you and thought I knew who you were. That looks like my old friend Adam Tesla and he doesn’t look well. I wonder if I can help him.”

“Lucky for me I ran into you.”

“Lucky. Yes indeed. You’ve had bad luck most of your life, haven’t you, Adam? But now your luck has changed. Something to eat?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Something to drink, perhaps. Coca-Cola?”

Bobby raised the bottle of water he kept by his duffel bag.

The car dealer looked around to make sure no one was listening. Then he pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned into Adam. “So tell me, what’s the deal?”

Bobby frowned. “What do you mean?”

The car dealer rolled his eyes. “Takaoka. Vladivostok. This ferry. You’re working an angle. It’s money. I can smell it off you the way I could smell you’re from the Zone even if I didn’t know you.” He tapped his nose with his finger. “A middleman can smell the money. It’s his gift.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Me, I don’t have any gifts.”

The car dealer turned serious. “You used to have two gifts, far as I can remember.”

Bobby raised his eyebrows. Two gifts. For the first time, he didn’t know what the car dealer was talking about.

The car dealer stared beyond Bobby. “You could skate, my boy.” Nostalgia peppered the car dealer’s voice.

His sincerity prompted Bobby to forget they were adversaries. At least for the moment.

“I used to watch you during the games on the cooling ponds. My God, could you fly. And handle the puck. No one ever saw a kid handle the puck the way you did.”

Bobby was reminded of his year at Fordham Prep and all the practice he was missing. The stakes notwithstanding, a melancholy washed over him.

“That was your first gift,” the car dealer said.

“I didn’t know I had a second.”

A sympathetic look flashed on the car dealer’s face. Once again Bobby was left at a loss. The car dealer was clearly being sincere. Bobby actually felt a genuine connection with the man. They’d both done business in the Zone. They’d both seen the hideous effects from radiation sickness handed down through generations. And they’d both profited from the wasteland the disaster had produced.

“Your second gift was your biggest one,” he said.

Bobby shook his head, modestly disturbed that he wasn’t able to keep one step ahead of the car dealer.

“The girl. The beauty who tried not to be one. The one with the legs that went from Kyiv to Minsk. What was her name again?”

“Eva.”

“The first time I met the two of you — tractor transmission, I think it was — she acted more like your sister. Last time you both did business with me? A month before she died. Last time I saw the two of you together? I could tell that she loved you.”

Bobby lost his breath. “How?”

“The two of you stepped out of her father’s car. You walked up to me with the goods. A wind was blowing. You both started shivering. You offered her your coat and she looked at you as though you’d insulted her.”

“I remember that.” Bobby could picture her glare, offended that he dare suggest she couldn’t handle the weather as easily as a man.

“She gave you a look, the kind a strong woman gives to a man. But you walked behind her and draped the coat over her shoulders anyways. And when you stepped forward to hand me the box with the goods, she looked at you again.”

“She did?”

The car dealer nodded. “I saw her. I saw her look at you. I saw the look on her face, and I knew right then.”

“What?”

“That she loved you.”

Bobby let the words echo in his ears a few times, then reminded himself that the car dealer had an agenda. He was trying to soften him up. Still, Bobby was certain the man wasn’t creative enough to have made up the story. It was much easier for him to summon a memory, and for that reason, Bobby had no doubt he was telling the truth.

“I heard she passed away,” the car dealer said. “Sympathies.”

Bobby nodded. If only he knew what was really going on.

The car dealer cleared his throat. “But that is the past, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s look to the future. Tell me. What are you doing so far away from home? You can’t possibly be on your own, can you? What’s the score?”

The car dealer knew that Bobby’s deceased father had been a notorious thief with connections all over the former Soviet Union, especially Siberia.

“Electronics,” Bobby said. “It’s big. When my father died, some friends of his gave me a job. I moved to Vladivostok. They sent me to Japan to meet with a guy. They didn’t want to take the risk of leaving the country themselves. You know, with their pasts and all that.”

“So much responsibility. You need an advisor. Lucky you ran into me. Do you keep your money at home or in the bank?”

It was blackmail. Plain and simple. The car dealer wanted to get paid for not revealing Bobby’s true identity.

“At home,” Bobby said. “My father taught me the safest place to keep my money was in a sack with dirty underwear. Most thieves are men, and most men don’t like digging through another man’s stinky skivvies.”

“Your father was the wisest of the wise men. He taught his son well. We will stay close to each other the rest of the trip. That way we can learn from each other.”

“Great idea,” Bobby said.

He needed another great idea soon, one that would let him escape from the car dealer and follow Eva and the driver when they arrived at Vladivostok.