The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

30

DAN’S SHOVEL RIPPED INTO THE SHALLOW HOLE WE’D managed to scoop out over the course of three long hours. He dug up a dead body the same way he did everything else, with ferocious impatience.

“It goes without saying, Shanahan, that this is the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever done.”

“Digging up a four-year-old corpse in the woods would probably make most people’s top ten.”

We had waited until it was dark before striking out on our morbid mission, when the night was cool and the air thick as velvet with the smell of moss and fungus and decay. Harvey had buried Vladi in the forests overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir, thirty miles outside Boston, where it was very dark and very quiet.

I tried not to think too much about what we were doing. There was the whole physical aspect of having to handle the remains of a man long dead and buried. Then there were the spiritual implications. Was it not ignoble enough that Vladi had been dispatched with violence and disposed of with such indifference? Now he had to be disturbed for the purpose of retrieving the key to a fortune. They say you can’t take it with you, but Vladi had, and now we were digging him up to wrench it back.

Dan stopped and dragged the back of his hand across his forehead. It wasn’t that hot, but the work was arduous. “Are you sure this is the spot?”

“This is where Harvey’s map said. We won’t be sure until we hit something.”

“Leave it to fucking Harvey to save the map to where he buried a dead man.”

I stabbed the ground again with my shovel. The work was serving as a good anger management tool for me. I thought about Rachel with every rip and slice.

“And you’re telling me this kryptonite thing will work after being buried for four years.”

“It’s a cryptographic token, and I can only go by what Felix told me. He says if it’s in its protective case, it should be fine. It’s fireproof and waterproof and every other kind of proof. According to him, you could run over it with a Humvee, and it would be fine, because if something happens to it, you’re kind of screwed.”

“Yeah.” He leaned over to start shoveling again. “Instead of like we are now.”

Two and a half backbreaking, arm-wearying hours later, my shovel cracked against something hard. Hard like a bone in the cod. Hard like an eggshell in the custard. I dropped my shovel and scrambled out of the pit, because I knew I was standing on the body of Vladislav Tishchenko.

I tried to walk it off, pacing among the trees, but every time I tried to get back in that hole, I wanted to vomit. Then I did. I leaned against a tree and puked my guts out. All this just at the thought of pulling the remains out of that hole. I hadn’t seen anything yet. Oh, for a glass of cool water to splash in my face and rinse the taste of death from my mouth. I straightened up and looked to the sky. It was clear. There were stars in the universe, twinkling down on us as we dug a man from his grave. Some things just shouldn’t be.

“Are you coming back? Or do I have to do this sick fucking thing by myself?”

Dan, who had not stopped to vomit, had apparently uncovered the body. He climbed out and popped another chemical light stick. I went to my bag of supplies and pulled out a set of gloves. They were heavy-duty fisherman’s gloves that came up to my elbows. I tossed a pair to Dan. Then I pulled out two pairs of surgical gloves and a couple of surgical face masks. Having been wrapped in plastic bags before he was planted, Vladi could be a skeleton or a still-rotting puddle of putrid tissue, but I figured one way or the other, there would be something bad to smell. We put on our masks, and I joined him at the side of the pit.

What Dan had dug out looked like a giant, mud-encrusted cocoon. “Do you think we have to pull him all the way out?”

He snapped on his first set of gloves. “What else would we do?”

“Slice open the plastic and dig around until we find his wallet. That way, we don’t have to see that much.”

“Right. We just have to stick our hands into it. Come on, Shanahan. How bad can it be?” He pulled on the heavier gloves and dropped down into the hole. “You didn’t happen to bring any rope, did you?”

“Uh, no.”

He shrugged. “I’ll push from down here. You pull from up there.”

He grabbed the feet end and yanked hard, dislodging the body from where it had been embedded for four years. Loose soil fell from around the roll of plastic. When he had it mostly worked out, he paused for a moment, perhaps to see if any ghosts came forth. If they had, they had arrived in silence. I crouched down. When he put the feet into my hands, only one thing came to mind. Vladi wasn’t a skeleton yet.

I started to pull. Dan moved along the body toward the head, pushing as he went. The fact that neither of us wanted to touch the thing was problematic.

“Grab him,” he said, huffing through his nose. “Grab him. Don’t let him roll the fuck back on me.”

“I’m trying. I can’t get a good…grip.”

The body wasn’t heavy as much as awkward and hard to hold. We teetered at one point with the mass hanging half in and half out, until I found a better way to grasp it. Unfortunately, the better way required me to put my arm around it. Dan gave one last shove and pushed the shoulders ashore. I rolled the mass away from the ledge and sat back on my butt. Dan climbed out and sank down next to me. The two of us sat there, sweating, breathing fast, eyes fixed on the task in front of us.

“We should get on with it,” I said after a few shallow breaths.

“Yeah.”

“Before someone comes and finds us.”

“I know.”

“This would be hard to explain.”

“No doubt.”

Neither of us moved. I could smell his exertion. I’m sure he could smell me. It was hard, dirty, tedious work, this grave robbing.

I stood up, reached down, and offered a hand. He grabbed it and pulled himself up. Then he surveyed the cigar-shaped package at our feet.

“I’ll take the head,” he said.

“No. You’re doing this as a favor to me.”

“For Harvey, Shanahan. I’m doing this for Harvey.”

“Whatever. I’ll take the head.”

I didn’t have to tell him twice. We took our positions and crouched. I found the place where the edge separated from the roll and nodded to him. The plastic was wrapped tightly around the corpse but not fastened in any way. As we started to unroll it, I had the absurd image of a crescent roll. The plastic was thick and dried out. It cracked and complained as we unwound Vladi’s shroud.

“We need to anchor the end,” I said. “Or it will just wrap itself again.”

Dan looked around and found a couple of heavy rocks. We used them as weights and kept unrolling. We went slowly, inch by inch, both of us drawing away as far as we could without losing contact. Nine-foot arms would have been useful.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Dan was staring at the first thing to fall out at his end. It was a foot. Actually, it was a leather O. J. Simpson loafer with a foot in it. The shoe was stuck to the plastic, as if it had gum on the bottom, which meant it stopped as the rest of the body had rolled forward.

I sped up. Better to just take it in all at once and not piece by gruesome piece. One last roll, and there he was. Displayed on the ground in front of us were the earthly remains of Vladislav Tishchenko.

I had hoped for skeletonized. No such luck. The plastic, much like a large freezer bag, must have preserved him. He looked like Beetlejuice. His skull was partially covered with skin and random tufts of hair. There were no eyeballs, only sockets staring up at me. His suit was mostly still there. It was a double-breasted affair, probably brown, but it was being worn by only half a body or less. He had been wearing a gold chain, which was now draped around his spine.

“Shanahan.”

“What?”

“Get the wallet. Let’s plant this guy and get the fuck out of here.”

I moved around to where his waist was…had been. My outer gloves were too bulky to rifle through his pockets, so I took one off, leaving only the surgical glove. I started to reach and recoiled. It was instinctive. I had to concentrate really hard to reach down and lift his suit jacket. But once I had broken the barrier, once I had touched him, I couldn’t move fast enough. I turned him slightly to reach into his back pants pocket. I tried not to notice how the corpse moved under my hands. Parts of it around the waist felt somewhat solid but spongy. Other parts felt like what they were: a bag of bones. I tried his side pocket. Loose change and some keys. I pulled everything out and dumped it in the dirt behind me. No wallet.

I stepped across him to stand on the plastic and try the other side. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I forced every ounce of concentration I had into the few square inches where my hand was searching. His cell phone was in his other side pocket. I took it. There was nothing in the back pocket.

“Shit. It’s not here. It’s not here.”

Dan was standing at his post near the feet. “Breast pocket,” was all he said.

Like an experienced necro-pickpocket, I lifted his jacket, reached in with just the tips of my thumb and index finger, and extracted a long, flat leather wallet. I took it over to where I’d dumped the other stuff. I whipped off the other big glove and started rifling. There was money. I pulled it out. It was a stack of hundreds. Driver’s license. No credit cards. Some kind of identification card written in Russian and what looked like a stack of food stamps, probably stolen. Here was a man who stole millions, maybe billions, and he felt a need to steal food stamps.

That was it. There was nothing else. There was no card or case or token. Nothing. I rocked back and sat on the ground.

“Maybe it’s one of these keys,” Dan said, poking at the key chain.

“It’s not a key. Not a real key. It’s a card the size of a credit card. I was sure it would have been in his wallet.” Dan went back to Vladi. Without hesitating, he reached down and patted down the entire body, starting at the shoulders. He found it in one of the pant legs, the one that still had a foot attached. He pulled out his knife, cut open the pants, and came out with a sleek carrying case, like a business card holder, only slightly bigger. He tossed it over.

“Oh, my God.” I couldn’t believe it. “This is it. This has to be it.”

“Must have been strapped to his leg.”

The case looked as if it might have been brass. I looked for the mechanism to open it but couldn’t find it. No buttons or slots or hinges. There must have been a trick. While I was looking, Dan was busy trying to roll up Vladi.

“A little help here?”

I gathered all the stuff we’d collected and dropped it into a plastic bag. I put the bag into my backpack. I pulled on my fisherman’s gloves and went back to work. The body made a soft thud when it landed in the bottom of the grave. We grabbed our shovels. Compared with digging him up, it took hardly any time to bury him. Still, it was almost five in the morning when we’d finished. The last of the glow sticks had gone out, but the sky was brightening when I turned to take one last look at Vladi’s final resting place.