No Way Back

by Matthew Klein

  The veranda on which I stand is tiny – just space enough for two sun loungers and a small glass table. Twenty feet below are flagstones and the pool. No escape.

  ‘Over here,’ one of the Russians says, and I see him on the other side of the glass, pointing calmly at me, as if he’s talking to a colleague about a Manila folder he misplaced on his desk.

  The Russians start towards me. They’re both large, muscular, bursting out of wet jeans and T-shirts. The bigger one slides the patio door open three inches, puts his fingers through the opening, and wraps them around the edge of the door.

  ‘Mr Thane—’ he starts.

  With all my strength, I grab the door and wrench it shut. The heavy frame slams on his fingers, and I hear a sickening wet crunch, and he screams.

  I scramble up onto the balustrade, my shoes scuffing wet cement – slippery from rain – and I stand straight, precariously balancing on the edge, twenty inches above the patio behind me, and twenty feet above the flagstones in front. Rain falls from the sky, and the water blurs my vision, and I can barely see what I am about to do. Which is probably for the best.

  I dive.

  A long, graceful dive, arms extended, feet rising above my head – beautiful, probably.

  A splash, and chlorine floods my nose, burning; and my fingers scrape concrete, and I jam my knuckles into the pool floor so hard that maybe I’ve broken my hand, but then I come up for air, and stand up straight, quite alive and not crippled.

  I bound along the pool floor, my clothes weighing me down like armour, and I vault over the edge of the pool and onto the patio.

  ‘He’s down there,’ a voice above me shouts. I look up to see a Russian leaning over the balustrade, daintily. He’s muscular, and wily, and physically fit – a natural predator. But he’s not suicidal. He merely bends over the railing, looking down. ‘Alexi!’ he calls out – probably to the velociraptor, still somewhere on the ground floor nearby – ‘He’s in the back, near the pool!’

  I scamper through the gate, to the side of the house, and towards Libby’s Mercedes, its convertible roof open, welcoming the rain.

  ‘I see him!’ a voice shouts behind me. I hear footsteps clomping on wet gravel, and heavy breathing, and grunts.

  I run. My wet clothes and saturated shoes slow me down, and my ribs hurt, and it feels as if I’m running through molasses. It’s like something from a nightmare – running as hard as I can, but slowly nevertheless – and behind me, I hear ragged breathing and heavy footsteps, getting closer. Closer.

  I expect to feel a hand on my shoulder, someone grabbing my wet shirt, whipping me down to the ground. I wrench the Mercedes door open, heave my body into the seat, shove the key into the ignition, and turn it.

  I have never loved Germans so much as I do at this moment. All that unpleasantness between 1914 and 1945? – I am willing to overlook that now. No nation is perfect, and, damn, can they build a car. It starts with a purr, despite the fact that the seats, and dashboard, and carpets are soaked, and despite the fact that the floor sits beneath an inch of water, like some exotic aquarium in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel.

  The engine roars to life, and I press the gas, and the tyres spin, and the car shoots back down the driveway just as the Russian reaches for my car door. I look down to see the velociraptor’s big hand resting on the door frame, mere inches from my shoulder. It’s a moment of strange frozen intimacy – that instant before he lifts his hand and I speed away. But during this moment, I look down at his fingers, and see something odd – that he is missing the last joint of his pinky. It’s a red stub, just like mine.

  The Russian lifts his palm, and he raises his hand and shouts after me, ‘Wait, wait, Mr Thane! Please come here!’ – ludicrously, as if I might stop the car, and turn around, and say, ‘Oh, did you want to talk to me about something?’

  A second Russian runs towards the first, and stops short beside him. There the two of them stand, next to each other, staring after me. My car bangs down into the street, metal scraping asphalt. I wrench the wheel, put it into drive, and floor it. The tyres spin, and I ease off, and then the rubber catches, and the car speeds down the road.

  Even though no one follows, I keep going, merging from one rain-slicked suburban road to another, and then onto the highway. I refuse to slow down. I refuse to stop. I just keep going, convinced that motion, any motion, is safer than standing still.

  CHAPTER 39

  Something is wrong.

  It takes ten minutes for the adrenaline buzz to fade. Then another five to understand what bothers me.

  No one is following. No one even tried.

  They just watched me careen out of the driveway, and I saw them in the rearview mirror, two big Russians standing in the rain, very still, next to each other, staring after my tail lights – like a married couple watching their youngest son drive off to college for the first time.

  Now, with time and distance between us, I understand why that image of two Russians standing motionless and merely watching me go feels so wrong.

  These are men who bugged my house, who inserted listening devices into my office, who spied on my phone calls, who put cameras in my bedroom. Would they allow me to drive away without bothering to pursue?

  No. They do not follow me because they do not need to. They have no fear of losing track of me. They know exactly where I am. Even now, they watch me. Perhaps I am a green dot flashing on a computer map, or a phosphorescent arrow blinking on a GPS.

  They’ll watch me go, and when I stop moving, they’ll come and retrieve me.

  I dig my cellphone out of my pants pocket. Steering with my left hand, I press the power with my right. The phone stays dark; it died when I jumped in the pool. But that doesn’t mean the thing they put inside is dead too.

  I toss the phone over my shoulder, and watch in the rearview mirror as it skitters across pavement, cartwheeling and breaking into pieces.

  Now, for the car itself.

  I can’t just park it. They’ll see little blinking Jimmy Thane has stopped moving. They’ll come and get me then.

  What I have to do: I have to ditch the car, but somehow make sure that it keeps moving. Visions come to me now – preposterous visions, born of a million implausible movies: a brick carefully placed on the accelerator, me jumping from the moving car, the Mercedes continuing its driverless progress, through the streets of downtown Fort Myers.

  But no. Of course not.

  I’m on Cleveland Avenue now, heading north. I see a sign for the Greyhound terminus. Which gives me a better idea.

  The rain is tapering now, changing from apocalyptic to drizzle. I head downtown, following the signs to the Greyhound. Some of the hardier drunks have ventured back to the street. Two watch me drive by from below the awning of a liquor store. Only weeks ago, I would have looked at them, standing there in the rain, with pity. Now they stare at me, curious, the roof of my convertible open in a rainstorm, my hair dripping. Who’s pitying whom?

  The Greyhound terminus is like every other bus station I’ve ever seen. It’s in the wrong part of town: the part that no one wants to come to, the part that no one can afford to leave. The building is large, probably empty, with an angular cantilevered roof protruding over a warehouse-like interior. Three Hispanic men sit out front, crowding under the overhang to keep dry. I stop the Mercedes in front of them, in the passenger drop-off circle.

  ‘Hey, chico,’ I shout.

  The three of them look up at me. The one who’s probably their leader – head shaved like Mr Clean, tats running down his arms like inky cobwebs, a mesh shirt revealing muscled guns – tilts his head and cracks his neck. He pauses, insect-like, as he evaluates whether I’m predator or prey. I feel sympathy for him, because surely it can’t be easy to know: a white guy, out of shape, in an Oxford button-down shirt and chinos, driving a car worth more than all the crack he’s ever smoked; but then again, my convertible top is down during a thunderstorm, and my clothes are soaked, and here I am in the mid
dle of downtown, probably at the tail end of a binge that didn’t start very well, and likely won’t end any better.

  ‘Yeah, you,’ I call. ‘Come here.’

  Maybe he’s not used to being spoken to in this way. He exchanges a can-you-believe-this-guy look with his two buddies, then slowly gets up from the ground. He sidles over to my car, his body turned in profile, maybe to present a smaller target, should I whip out a gun and prove to be as insane as I look.

  ‘Yeah?’ he says, suspiciously. He keeps a three-foot distance.

  ‘When’s the next bus out of here?’

  ‘What do I look like, asshole, a fucking schedule? How the fuck should I know?’

  ‘I need to get to a very important meeting,’ I say. I stick the car into park. ‘I’ll be gone for a few hours. Do me a favour. Park my car, and keep an eye on it for me. I’ll give you a hundred bucks for your time.’

  I pop my door and get out. I toss him the keys. He catches them with a surprised swipe. He looks down at his hand, can’t believe what he’s holding.

  ‘I can trust you,’ I say, ‘right?’

  In my wallet, I find five twenties, water-logged, but serviceable, and hold them out, across the car.

  He takes them. He glances back at his friends, who smile at him and nod. He says to me, ‘Yeah, sure, homey. You can trust me.’

  ‘You have an honest face,’ I explain. ‘Just find a safe spot to park it. I hear this isn’t the best neighbourhood.’

  ‘No, man, it’s OK,’ he says, suddenly sounding like a real-estate agent. ‘It has good and bad, like every place else.’

  ‘Right on, hermano,’ I say. ‘I’ll be a few hours. You’ll be here when I get back, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Sure I will.’

  Sitting by the entrance, his friends laugh.

  ‘Hasta la vista,’ I say.

  For the first time since I arrived in this godforsaken state, luck is with me, because a taxi pulls up in the drop-off circle, just yards away. I hold open the door of the cab for a young European-looking man, too pale to be native, clutching a metal-framed backpack, and a Lonely Planet: Florida guidebook in his hand. ‘When is train next to Fort Lauderdale?’ he asks me in an almost impenetrable accent.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ I say. ‘Right now. But you better hurry.’

  He hands the driver crumpled cash and scurries off without bothering with change.

  I slide into the taxi he just vacated and pull the door shut.

  The Haitian driver, glistening with sweat and wafting Technicolor BO, turns to me. ‘Where to, mister?’

  I realize I have no idea where to. My house is bugged. My wife has been kidnapped. Russian gangsters chase me.

  Probably I should go to the police. But not yet. Not until I figure out what’s going on, and what to do next.

  ‘Where to, mister?’ the Haitian asks again, with growing impatience.

  ‘You know Fort Myers Beach?’ I ask.

  When he snarls yes, of course he does, but do I have money for the trip, I show him a wad of wet twenties and direct him to Amanda’s apartment.

  CHAPTER 40

  When I arrive, Amanda is not home.

  In the covered walkway of her apartment building, I lie down on her doorstep, exhausted and cold. I fall asleep. I wake to the sound of footsteps scuffing up the stairs, and then tinkling keys, and Amanda is standing over me, looking not particularly surprised to see me – as if it’s perfectly reasonable to arrive home to find your boss curled in a foetal position at your door.

  ‘Jim,’ she says, ‘why are you lying on the ground?’

  ‘No couch.’

  She kneels down and takes my hand. Her voice is gentle. ‘Come inside.’ She helps me to my feet. She unlocks the door and shoves it with her shoulder. Inside, the room is freezing, the way she likes it, the air conditioner churning in the window.

  She deposits me onto the couch, where I collapse into the cushions. ‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ I mutter.

  ‘I’ll turn it off.’

  She goes to the air conditioner and turns it off. The room is suddenly quiet and still.

  ‘Lock the door,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she says, in that agreeable tone one reserves for the agitated or the mentally ill. She goes to the door, secures the lock, and returns to me on the couch. She touches my shoulder. ‘Why are you so wet, Jim?’

  ‘I need a place to stay, Amanda.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Something happened to Libby.’

  ‘Libby?’ Then she remembers. ‘Ah, your wife. What happened?’

  ‘She was kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped?’ I see the first glimmer of doubt in her eyes. ‘Jim, I don’t understand. Who… kidnapped your wife?’ She stumbles over the word kidnapped, as if she can’t bring herself to say it.

  I take her hand. ‘Listen. There’s something I need to tell you.’

  She lets me hold her fingers, but they stay limp. Uncommitted.

  ‘Tao Software is a front,’ I say. ‘It’s being used by a mobster. He’s laundering drug money. He’s taking cash from one place, and then he’s… ’

  Here I stop. Now that I try to explain it, I realize I have no idea what I’m talking about. What exactly are the Russians trying to do? I can’t construct any conceivable narrative – financial, legal, logistical – which makes any sense, which explains what the Russians are doing at Tao. Laundering money? Selling drugs? Neither is true, so far as I can see. So then what are they doing? Why is the Russian named Ghol Gedrosian involved in my company? What does he want?

  After a long silence, I conclude lamely, ‘Well, the point is, Libby is working for them. She’s working for gangsters.’

  ‘I see,’ Amanda says. But she doesn’t see. She sounds nervous. Her eyes dart to the door, measuring the distance to escape. I realize, too late, that she wonders if I harmed Libby. She wonders if I killed her.

  ‘Amanda,’ I say, letting go of her hand. ‘I didn’t hurt my wife, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s a man. A criminal. He’s a Russian. He killed Charles Adams, and he killed Dom Vanderbeek. He’s framing me. He’s making it look like I’ve done these things. I’m not sure why. His name is Ghol Gedrosian. I don’t know why he’s —’

  But I stop. Amanda has become very white.

  ‘You know that name,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers.

  ‘How?’

  ‘He was the one.’

  ‘The one?’ But even as I say it, I know. He was the man who took Amanda when she was a child. The man who imprisoned her, who brought her to this country. The man who did unspeakable things to her.

  ‘He was the one,’ she says again.

  She looks at my hand. She takes it in hers, and stares. ‘Look.’

  She places her hand on top of mine.

  She has only nine fingers. Her pinky is missing. What remains is a grotesque red stub, scarred and mutilated, just like my own.

  CHAPTER 41

  She has made hot tea for me, and I cup the ceramic mug in my palms, and I notice that my hands still shake.

  She sits beside me on the couch. She has changed clothes. Gone is her daytime attire, replaced with a soft linen shirt and pair of worn jeans. The barrette that kept her hair in a severe bun has disappeared, and her long copper tresses sit loose on her shoulders. Her make-up is gone, too, and her face is scrubbed. She looks older now. But somehow prettier.

  ‘I will tell you what I know,’ she says. ‘Some people say he is ex-KGB. Others say that he was a colonel in the army – the unit that interrogated prisoners in Chechnya. I’ve heard other stories too, very strange stories.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That he’s religious. That he thinks he’s god. Or maybe he’s insane.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘I never saw him. No one does. The men who took me – they never saw him. They worked for someone else, who worked for someone else, who worked for someon
e else still.’

  She holds up the stub of her pinky. ‘This is how he marks property. Anyone who works for him, or who owes him money, or who receives a favour – he takes their finger. He keeps it somewhere. It’s like marking cattle.’

  She touches my mutilated finger. I pull it away. ‘No,’ I say. ‘This is not the same. Mine was done by a bookie. I owed money to a guy. His name was Hector. It happened years ago.’

  I stare at my missing finger. Now that I think about it, I’m not so sure. I don’t actually remember what happened that night. Libby told me a story about coming home with a bloody dish towel wrapped around my hand, and insisting that she drive me to Jack in the Box for a hamburger. But I don’t remember it. Did it really happen like that?

  ‘You don’t remember,’ Amanda says.

  ‘No.’

  She nudges closer to me. ‘You’re shivering, Jim. Come here.’ She leads me from the couch, into the bathroom. The sink and counter are filled with feminine bottles – shampoos and rinses and facial scrubs. ‘I will tell you what to do. You need a hot shower,’ she says. ‘You smell very bad. You’ll feel better.’ She leans into the shower, turns the knobs, adjusts the temperature, still holding my hand lightly, so that I can’t escape. ‘There,’ she says, satisfied with the temperature. She slides the sanded glass door. ‘Go in. I’ll find some dry clothes for you.’

  She disappears from the bathroom, closing the door softly behind her.

  I undress and step into the shower. I let the warm water pelt my back, my neck, my bruised ribs, my scalp. I close my eyes. I think about what to do next. I’ll call the police. I’ll talk to Agent Mitchell. I’ll find Libby. I’ll accept the consequences, whatever they are, and fight whatever crime they accuse me of. I’m innocent, of everything, except stupidity.

  The shower door slides open, and Amanda steps inside, naked. She presses up behind me, and her arms reach around my chest. She pulls me tightly. It hurts. I feel her breasts on my back, her rough pubic hair, her toes pressing against the edge of my feet.