A Town Called Malice

by Adam Abramowitz

  “It’s real if people think it’s real and are willing to pay for it,” Tehran counters. “Wire transfers, direct deposits, bank cards, microchips. Fifteen years ago it wasn’t conceivable to the average citizen that they’d hardly ever see the money they earned, paper money, but that’s where we’re heading.”

  “It’s lunacy,” I say. “But okay. So this is Rambir’s latest scheme. I still don’t get how it ties in to him getting killed. Katanya and Namestnikov came into play through the poker games. And do we know for sure that Rambir was actually pulling off these ransoms, like getting paid?”

  “We do. You ready for this? When Wells’s techno-geeks cracked the files, they found one belonging to Newton-Wellesley Hospital. He hightailed it there and pressed them, played the murder investigation card, obstruction, until they admitted they’d paid to have their files unencrypted.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it, Zesty. Patient financial data, private medical information, even vital patient chart data, drug allergies, things like that, are all on computers. The hospital paid the ransom right away, I mean as soon as their IT people told them to. In a matter of hours.”

  “For how much?”

  “It was pretty cheap. Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “You mean cheap in comparison to the lawsuits if something went wrong with a patient because their charts were tied up.”

  “Exactly. There were other places, too, including some small suburban police departments. Hingham. Concord. They all paid. And kept their mouths shut out of embarrassment. It’s the perfect crime.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “You remember the package that was messenger delivered to me? The one with the false leads that had me and Wells chasing our own tails for a couple of days? Here’s where they screwed up. Whoever ‘they’ is, we still don’t have a clue about that. But I tracked down the messenger who’d made the drop at the Globe offices. Through his dispatch. And sure enough it was a street corner pickup.”

  Which wasn’t that unusual; sometimes people meet us on the run, picking up ball game or theater tickets on-site, or doing business out of a coffee shop or restaurant without faxes and copy machines, a live signature still required on some paperwork. The question is, where did the messenger make the pickup?

  “Innovation Row.” Tehran uses the name given to part of the new South Boston waterfront, where a large number of start-ups and tech companies have set up shop.

  Back in the day, the Southie waterfront was an industrial wasteland—storage facilities and truck depots—about as private a place as any to shoot somebody in the head and leave the body for the wharf rats to feast on.

  “Please don’t call it that,” I say. “It fuckin’ depresses me.”

  “Okay. You want to take a guess who just set up a new branch, has their headquarters right there around the corner?”

  “I don’t have to guess, I’m a messenger, remember?” I point toward tonight’s outfit, a black crew-neck Adidas sweatshirt with the white Trefoil logo, and black Lycra tights under black Adidas basketball shorts. Impossible to see at night on my bike. Less of a target for Boston drivers. “Kirilenko Labs,” I say.

  “The MIT internship capital. Where Sam Budoff and Rambir both worked.”

  “You think Kirilenko is tied into the Russian Mob? They’re, like, one of the biggest cyber-security firms in Boston. They probably even have government contracts. Nah, I don’t buy that.”

  “Okay,” Tehran concedes. “We don’t know how deep this goes, but what we do know is that Newton-Wellesley Hospital and all the police departments had contracts with Kirilenko Labs to secure and prevent things like ransomware from happening to them. Another firm that had a contract with Kirilenko, the one that had the Monopoly names, belongs to Visners & Miraglia, a title holding company and real estate escrow firm who also have their offices in South Boston.”

  “Slow down for me, we’re back in your boyfriend tax bracket again,” I say. “What’s a title company do?”

  Tehran ignores my boyfriend comment and explains, “What we think is that when Rambir wasn’t playing online poker or falling asleep at his terminal, he was trolling contracts that Kirilenko had. Newton-Wellesley and the police departments were all clients. Visners & Miraglia. Rambir essentially downgraded their defenses and inserted the malware, then brought them back up to speed. If anybody noted the disruption, it was only temporary and nothing was disturbed or stolen. He waited a bit and then struck, pretty much testing his methods.”

  “And they worked,” I say.

  “Perfectly.”

  “And at this point he’s no longer hacking personal accounts for his ATM scam that MIT and the FBI were covering up, or at least not prosecuting.”

  “Not prosecuting yet.” Anitra buying Lee’s claim that the FBI was holding off because they were trolling for bigger fish.

  “So where did he screw up enough to get himself killed?”

  “Well, let’s get back to the title company. Basically, what a title company does is act as a middleman between a property buyer and seller when there’s a formal purchase agreement. They’re involved in the transfer of titles and help the buyers take possession of titles, and they play a large role in the formal sales closing.”

  “I don’t get it. This all sounds like traditional paperwork.”

  “I’m not done. The title company also maintains escrow accounts for both the buyer and the seller. If it’s a big company with a large client base, those accounts could be in the tens of millions.”

  “So Rambir hit the title company and got those millions?”

  “No.” Tehran shakes her head. “He didn’t get a chance to. Because somebody killed him before he made the demand.”

  “And you know who that is?”

  “No. But I think I know they killed him because they wanted those files back.”

  Only Rambir didn’t have them anymore, they were in Wells’s hands now. And the title holding company was the missing link to all those shell companies Tehran had initially reported on. The only real questions remaining were who owned Visners & Miraglia and were they worried enough about being exposed to do something more about it?

  THIRTY-SIX

  I open my Hong Kong set with a joke about marriage and death, which gets a pretty good laugh. It goes a little something like this: Half of all marriages end in divorce. The other half, it means, end in death. So if I was a divorce attorney, my tag line would be: Hire me, I’m the only way you get out of this deal alive.

  It’s all downhill from there. And as I head back to the South End it only gets worse, a black town car with midnight windows revving behind me as I cruise down Bow Street and then scraping me into the row of parked cars. I take out four sideview mirrors like an alpine skier, the impact crumpling the front wheel of my bike and bouncing me hard to the pavement. I’m not really hurt, only a bit stunned, as the town car screeches to a stop; maybe all the poker winnings and hard-earned cash in my bag cushioned the blow.

  It doesn’t do anything to cushion the straight punch to my face from the driver who’d gotten out of the car and follows up with “Zdravstvuj, asshole” before throwing me into the back of the limo and shutting the door.

  It takes me a second to realize I’m not alone, my eyes watering uncontrollably from the punch, tears mixing with the blood gushing from my nose onto the front of my sweatshirt.

  “Hello, Zesty Meyers.” Antti Voracek’s accent is heavy with the guttural roll of the Soviet Bloc, the verbal equivalent of the car’s garish interior: upholstered blue velvet ceiling with corded maroon piping, the windows heavily tinted and curtained, the view to the outside shaded almost to black. But I can see the smudge of the driver tossing my bike against a fire hydrant and get a little bit of karmic retribution moments later as something thumps from the front with a bilingual curse, the driver maybe hitting his head as he gets back in. There’s a highly polished thick wooden partition between the front seat and the back, for maximum
privacy. It smells like cigarettes and boiled cabbage.

  Voracek is one of those rare people who looks the same in person as he does in photographs; in his case, like a gorilla haphazardly stuffed into a suit cut from silver shadows, a black toupee malingering on a granite-block head. He doesn’t have a gun or any weapon that I can tell, but the door locks had engaged loudly when the driver returned and I’d been too dazed to make a break for it. I should have taken back Charlie’s gun when I had the chance. Too late now.

  Voracek studies me for a moment and shakes his head like he’s already come to the conclusion that this endeavor will be a waste of his time. I’ve seen this expression before, usually on blind dates.

  “Here’s how this is going to go, Zesty,” he says. “The first question I’m going to ask you requires an answer I can verify and if you hesitate, Nikita there in the front seat is going to chop off your thumb with a gardener’s clip. He’s good with tools, yes? It comes from practice. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Yes, what?”

  “I understand,” I say, using the sweatshirt to sop the blood from my nose.

  “Good.” Voracek knocks angrily on the separating panel, beyond which I hear Nikita the Gardener rummaging loudly in the glove box. “Where are my files?”

  “Fuck you,” I answer. “And by ‘fuck you’ I mean it’s too late. Other people have them. Boston Police.”

  “That’s a shame.” Voracek sighs heavily.

  Again he knocks a heavy simian knuckle on the wood partition, which slides down to reveal Nikita brandishing his garden tool, a small sharp snipper with green rubber grips, and a resplendent Wells leaning over him, his fedora crushed low on his head, almost shading his eyes. Wells has his pistol screwed so far into Nikita’s ear it looks like he’d cut the barrel off at the base.

  “Let me tell you how this is going to go.” Wells, with his free hand, pops the automatic locks on the doors while continuing to apply pressure into Nikita’s ear, forcing him to lean his head all the way to the black window glass. Nikita drops the snipper. There’s blood on his blond hair. Wells’s eyes are feverish.

  “Zesty here is going to get out of this car with all his fingers attached and you, Mr. Voracek, are going to go to your bosses and tell them that their troubles are over, Sam Budoff, no Sam Budoff, it doesn’t matter. Your files from Visners & Miraglia, where you’re a silent partner. It ends here. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Bosses?” Voracek chuckles, his small eyes black as coals. “I have no bosses. Only clients.”

  Wells is sweating under the hat, the band darkening with moisture. I’ve never seen Wells sweat before. He doesn’t seem used to it, his eyes twitching wildly. His fine cologne smells like it’s soured on his body. Like it’s expired. He says, “You know you’re going to have to shoot him, Zesty.”

  “Nyet.” Nikita grunts and says something to Voracek in Russian as Wells leans harder into his ear, almost sitting on top of him.

  “What?” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not shooting anybody. What are you talking about?” There’s something in Wells’s eyes I’ve never seen before, emotion without calculation. Something messy.

  Wells shoves the hand not holding his gun inside Nikita’s suit jacket and comes out with another gun before putting it down beside him and rummaging through his own suit jacket. It only takes him a second to find what he’s looking for, a handkerchief, which he deftly wraps around the grip, his face across the partition dividing line just inches from mine as he offers it to me.

  “Do you hear me? Take it.” Wells’s eyes are hard, but his voice is pleading.

  “You are out of your jurisdiction, I believe, Detective Wells.” Voracek shrugs dismissively, missing what I’m seeing.

  “Shut up!” Wells screams at him.

  “Even if my clients were assured Anitra Tehran would not report the true owners of the buildings, the source of their money, they would not be comfortable. I have to keep my clients happy, you see. Namestnikov, Katanya, they were too noisy. They stirred up too much trouble. And over what? Peanuts. I think it’s time you made a call, Detective. Who would you like to come pick us up? McGowan and Powers, perhaps?”

  “There’s no other way,” Wells says to me.

  “This is beyond amusing.” Voracek smiles.

  “Don’t.” I’m not sure who I’m addressing, Voracek or Wells, but all the oxygen seems to have been sucked out of the car and I feel like I’m about to throw up or hyperventilate. Nikita feels it, too. Probably because he’s seen it from the other side. When he chopped off Oleg Katanya’s dick. Maybe when he shot Rambir Roshan.

  “No,” I choke, but Wells’s eyes are on full tilt now, exploding cherry bombs of slot machine jackpots.

  Voracek laughs and casually lights a cigarette. “Ah, what theater!” he says. “Bravo!”

  “Take it!” Wells shoves the gun into my chest. “Wrap that into the trigger guard. Yes, like that. Point it at his head.”

  “Wells,” I say.

  “Do it!” he screams.

  I do it, but Voracek’s smile only grows. “You are out of your jurisdiction, Detective. Out of your league.” He blows smoke in my face. “A stupid cow reporter and this idiot. How do you see this ending for you, Detective? Not well, I imagine.”

  “Shut up, Voracek!”

  “Or you’ll arrest me? Yes, let’s do that. Your legal system is second to none. Let us engage.”

  “No. I can’t arrest you,” Wells says in a calm and soothing voice that doesn’t calm me at all. “You want to know why that is, Antti?”

  Voracek’s face goes hard and ugly at the use of his first name, Wells having just found the Russian Mob boss’s tell.

  “Because I’m still home, Antti.” Wells, recognizing the change, too, uses the name again. “Ordered a movie online and tucked myself into bed. And the lobby cameras in my building will confirm it.”

  “So?” Voracek says, but something moves in his throat, something new in his eyes that I recognize as the look of someone who realizes that his hand might not hold up, that the cards he’d thought would carry the day, have always carried the day, have betrayed him. Fear is what it is. Straight-up piss-inducing fear. But Voracek isn’t looking at Wells, he’s looking at me. What could he possibly be seeing?

  “The problem is, you people never listen,” Wells says, his words coming in cold but not cooling anything. “You’ll kill Anitra Tehran and Sam Budoff when he shows up, and Zesty. And maybe even me and Brill eventually because you know we won’t let it stand, we’ll keep coming after you.”

  “Of course.” Voracek shrugs like there’s no other alternative but his eyes keep growing wider, staring at my face. What does he see?

  “Even though I’ve told you that you’re in no danger from these files, that we’ll take this no further than Rambir.”

  “Rambir is nothing. And had we been the ones to find him it would not have been so quick. But it’s just your word, Detective, you must see that. And there’s too much money involved. Your assurances are worthless. Perhaps if it was only you…” Voracek turns his face from me to Wells. “You don’t look so well, Detective. But let’s be reasonable. This is only a business deal. You and your partner will survive this and grow rich. Of that, you have my word. The others, no. We warned the reporter. She chose to ignore it. So go back to your Boston home, Detective, across the river to your movie, to the comfort and assurances of your life. We’ll find Budoff on our own. You know we will. And after we do, Nikita will visit the reporter and rape—”

  The roar of our guns begin without words between us, without warning, without thought. Twin flashes of spark lightning illuminating a menagerie of haunted house images, blood splatter and brains painted on the windows and ceiling, the cramped interior exploding with as deafening a sound as I’ve ever heard, until our guns click on empty, the cordite and gunpowder sting our eyes, and the only sound that remains is me and Wells screaming our rage into a bottomless midnight
abyss.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Rabbi answers the door at my father’s home, takes one look at the blood all over my sweatshirt and shorts, and ushers me past my father, who sits at the poker table listening to Karl Klaussen singing on Mass’s only album, no telling how many times the record has been replayed behind my father’s empty eyes.

  I strip and step into the shower and stay there a long time, scrubbing myself raw under the scalding water, before stepping out and parting the curtain to watch the Rabbi methodically burning my clothes in the backyard barbecue pit, stirring it every once in a while with a stick to make sure everything is destroyed, including my sneakers, melted down to slag; the smell of burning rubber reaches all the way up through the window.

  I half expect the Brookline Police to show, solve a double homicide on the spot, due to a complaint about the foul odor of burning rubber, gold detective shields handed out all around, a lifetime of prison bars in front of my eyes. I find a change of clothes that I always keep in case of unexpected overnights, get dressed, and come downstairs to sit with my father at the poker table after turning the record over to side two, Klaussen belting out:

  When the door shuts

  It shuts forever

  When the moon is out

  It’s black as leather

  My father doesn’t reach for the cards in front of him. He doesn’t hold the chips stacked in his well. Doesn’t mouth the lyrics to the song that he once knew so well, doesn’t recognize me when he turns his head, finally acknowledging my presence. But something new registers in his eyes.

  My father, I realize, knows. Somehow that gift, that curse, is still alive in there. The Rabbi can burn the evidence and I can scrub my skin and put on the poker face that he taught me so diligently during my lifetime, but from him, I can’t hide what I’ve done. Those were your cards, my father’s eyes tell me. Too deep to fold, only one way to play them.