by AnonYMous
“When your book is finished, and in stores, maybe you can come with me to London,” said William.
Oh stop. Please stop, Grace thought. I trusted you.
“I mean, what’s keeping you here in America? Your mom, I guess. Well, we could move her as well. Granted, the weather is not a draw in England. All right, it’s terrible. But as we’ve just experienced it’s not so great in Montreal either. We do have a decent health system. Even when it’s occasionally indecent it’s free. Maybe if we work together we could afford to put her in a better home than the one in Florida? If there’s a garden or a park nearby, all the better; on weekends we could take her for walks. You mentioned you wanted your mother to see Prague while she can still see a little: a flight from London, on one of the discount airlines—it’s nothing.”
Grace’s mouth had gone completely dry. She could not look at him.
“You could find a job at a newspaper, or just go freelance or write another book. We could stay in my place or pool our fortune and get something a wee bit better, with more reliable plumbing. Oh—English plumbing. You won’t like that!”
A tear ran down Grace’s cheek and she wiped it away and looked out her window so William would not see. It took all of her strength to stop herself from confronting him about the dossier and who he really was. How dare he!
The cabbie turned down the piano music and said something about the traffic on the Grand Central Parkway. He asked a question and Grace could not answer because she did not want William to hear the emotion in her voice.
“I’m sure that’s fine.” William dished Lilesa a thumbs-up. “We defer to your instincts and expertise, sir.”
This was surely not in the book of excellent spy craft, Grace told herself, hiding one’s teary eyes from the man pretending to be your almost-boyfriend.
“Is everything okay, Grace?”
“Fine, yes. Thank you. I’m just thinking about my mom.”
The cabbie was right about the traffic. A minivan had crashed into the back of a food truck which had a picture of the Taj Mahal on the side of it. Then, in the semi-darkness of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, William reached around and touched her face and kissed her. Grace let him. It is a long tunnel and the traffic was heavy and slow, so they kissed for a long time. Grace forgot where they were and what she knew about William; all she wanted was for the East River to go on forever. If they never arrived in Manhattan they could be lovers, drowning in the scents of charcoal and exhaust, in the hum and piano of Glenn Gould, until the end of time.
Eventually they passed through the tunnel, into the lights of the city. Under the Downtown-Crosstown-Uptown sign Grace couldn’t take it anymore. His breath, his nose, his long fingers, the sound of their glasses touching: all was treachery. She pushed him away with so much force he cracked the back of his head against the window.
He rubbed his head and looked at Grace, his eyes transforming from shock to understanding. “Wait. Grace…”
“Think before you speak, William, if that’s your real name.”
West Thirty-ninth Street was narrow and chaotic. They passed a cocktail lounge, where Grace wanted to get drunk alone tonight.
“Grace. You have to listen carefully.” William’s voice was high and panicked. “I’ll tell you everything.”
Just past the lounge a group of young men in T-shirts smoked cigarettes outside an Irish pub. The cabbie went wide around a man in a blue rain jacket with a silver cart under an umbrella selling hot dogs and they pulled up in front of the Holiday Inn. There was sidewalk construction and no easy way to get out of the taxi on the hotel side.
By now Glenn Gould was playing so quickly they could no longer hear his voice. William tried to pay and Grace reached past him with her credit card. “I booked you a room, thinking I would be strong enough to pretend I don’t care that you’re a spy. I thought I could figure you out and protect myself, take control in some way, even be with you somehow. But I do care that you’re a spy, that you only played at liking me. So you can go in and tell them you don’t need the room and go wherever it is you people go. The Russian embassy?”
The piano was soft enough now that Grace could hear Glenn Gould humming again. When she would not look at him William opened the door and stepped out. Cool wind blew into the car. The cabbie thanked her for the tip, hopped out, and tried to speak to William.
William ignored the cabbie and crouched. His face was white and his voice was urgent. “Grace, you’re correct. I’ve not been entirely honest, but I guarantee whatever you’re thinking is wrong. Once you hear me out, everything will be different.”
“Isn’t that what every betrayer says?” Grace backed deeper into the back seat of the taxi. “I believed you…liked me. I believed you were trying to help me. My God, you helped me bury my cat. How can you do this to people?”
“Let’s go inside. I’ll show you some things. A proposition.”
“You fell asleep on the plane, William. I already saw your things.”
William extended his hand, to help her out of the taxi. “You haven’t seen this.”
“Back off, Ivan. I’m not touching you.”
“You just finished kissing me.”
“I changed my mind.”
William sighed and took a step back. Grace stepped out of the taxi without taking anyone’s hand. The cabbie asked William why they had arrived in New York without luggage.
“It’s a strange trip,” said William, sadly.
Time seemed to slow. Grace thought at first it was lack of sleep, or food, that was playing with her ears. The sound started as a rumble below the piano music and grew as she stepped out into the street.
“Hey!” It was the hot dog man.
A black sedan had pulled out from the scaffolding behind the food cart and was roaring up the street. Grace thought at first it was an unmarked police car missing its siren, on its way to some distant emergency. But there was no siren and it was on its way toward them.
The cabbie shouted and scrambled onto the hood of his taxi. William said her name and put his arms around her. She tried to resist him but he was too strong. “Watch out!” he said, and Grace thought he was going to hurt her, and closed her eyes.
But he did not hurt her. Like a child, entirely powerless, she felt herself being picked up and swung around the rear bumper of the taxi and onto the pavement between two cars.
She fell back and her head hit the asphalt just as the sedan came alongside the taxi and sped into William.
39
NEW YORK, 2016
William was turning away from the car as it slammed into him. His head and shoulders crunched into the hood and windshield, and then he was thrown into the air, his body loose and uncoordinated, as the car sped away. He landed on the street with a terrible sound.
Grace was bleeding from her ear. Screaming his name, she crawled from between the taxi and the car behind it, toward William. There was blood on his face too and his eyes were closed. Grace took his hands in hers and told him he was going to be okay. It did not matter now who he was. One of his shoes had come off, she noticed, when the car hit him, and his socks were mismatched.
Behind her, people were shouting. 911. Ambulance. A doctor. License plate. Then there were legs everywhere, and voices, and Grace wanted them to shut up because she was feeling for William’s pulse. Then someone’s hands were on her, someone calling her sweetheart. “I’m a doctor,” said the woman.
Then another woman was kneeling on the other side of William. She seemed fine at first and then Grace realized they were everywhere.
“No,” she screamed. “Get away from him!”
Someone was holding her back now as she tried to stop the woman pretending to be a doctor from hurting William. No one understood what she was talking about, that they were all being followed, all being watched.
“Ma’am, you’re in shock,” a man said, his face too close to hers, so she shoved him away.
Now there were sirens, and she didn’t want an
ambulance because it meant he was not getting up.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor was saying.
Grace took William’s hand again and put her ear, the one that was not bleeding, on his chest. Shut up, everyone! She could hear nothing over the sirens.
By now, the police had arrived too, and when she tried to move past them to be sure the medics were real, a man shouted in her face to get the fuck back.
Lilesa, their cabbie, was holding her purse and William’s computer bag. He handed them to her and dabbed her ear with a tissue. “They were trying to hit you,” he said. “This car came when you got out, you.”
With the sidewalk construction crew, the ambulance and police, and people from the hotel the crowd was thick. Grace was sure the killer in the car was not alone. Some people were pointing at her now, and two police officers in uniform, a man and a woman, walked toward her.
They were both around thirty, both of them tall. “We understand you were with the gentleman,” said the woman, “when he was hit.”
Grace nodded. She tried to figure out if there was anything odd about them. The policewoman spoke with a convincing Brooklyn accent.
“We were working together.”
“What’s his name?”
Grace looked around, and there were two men in suits leaning against the front window of the Holiday Inn watching her. One of them wore a fedora. “William Kovály.”
“Can you spell that?” said the policeman.
Two other men squeezed through the crowd on the sidewalk and stood next to the police, one in jeans and a blazer and the other, with a trimmed goatee, in a blue suit that seemed too big for him. The man with the goatee flashed his badge at her and introduced himself. The other dismissed the uniformed police. Before he could say his name, Grace backed away and made her way through the crowd.
“Wait!” said the detective with the goatee.
Grace ran to the end of the block, crossed the street, and turned right on Sixth Avenue. As she did, the detective in the gray suit caught up to her. “Where are you going?”
She knew he was dangerous, another pursuer, so she hit him in the head with William’s computer bag and kept running up Sixth Avenue, weaving through the crowds and, on the cross-streets, ignoring the red pedestrian lights and shouting warnings at drivers who looked as though they would not stop. She could hear the sounds of footsteps behind her and shouts, though in the wind she could not make them out.
Grace ran into Bryant Park, where a massive crowd had gathered at the winter market. School had ended for the day, and children and their nannies had joined the young lovers at the skating rink. There was no obvious place to hide, as the leaves had fallen from the trees, so Grace bought a black beanie at a kiosk even though it was forty dollars. She pulled the knitted cap low and walked with the flow of tourists.
Turning back, she saw the apparent detective with the goatee and the uniformed policewoman walking through the winter market. Grace removed her jacket, tied it around her waist, and walked into the strangely lavish public restroom in the park. She locked herself in a cubicle and sat on top of the toilet. No real detective would chase her. There were plenty of witnesses to William’s death. Someone had called out a license plate number.
The Bryant Park restroom was a popular spot. Women and girls came in and out, laughed and complained, talked about boys and men.
Grace sat back, closed her eyes, and replayed William’s death. She thought of his one blue and one black sock, slightly pulled off. Where had his shoe flown? She thought of Katka and her father, and of Zip. If she had not been so selfish, if she had simply interviewed Elena about Christmas dinner etiquette and online shopping tips over a bottle of champagne on the road between Prague and Mladá Boleslav, everyone would still be alive. She started to cry, stopped herself and then she realized a public restroom in the middle of Manhattan is a perfectly legitimate place to cry so she let herself go.
For an hour she remained inside the Bryant Park restroom, crying, hating herself, hating Elena, worrying about her mother, her finances, her own inevitable murder. By the time she was ready to leave, she had found the address for the Midtown South police precinct. It was a fifteen-minute walk away. If the detectives were real, they would be there and she would have a perfectly reasonable excuse for them. She splashed some water on her red eyes and on her blood-caked ear and tucked her hair inside the beanie.
Perhaps the detectives would even offer suggestions for how to keep her mother safe. From her hotel room tonight she would expand her draft of the story as she understood it and in the morning she would take a taxi to One World Trade Center and sell it to The New Yorker.
It was over.
She opened the door into the darkness that had fallen while she was in the restroom. The cool air of the park hit her as her eyes adjusted. No one stood waiting for her, at the wrought-iron gate. Grace looked down at her phone, for directions to the precinct, and turned left.
Though he was in shadow, the man behind the stone arch seemed familiar. She abandoned the route to the precinct and walked deeper into Bryant Park along Forty-second Street, past the ping-pong tables and into the market kiosks. When she sped up, he sped up too. For an instant she turned and remembered where she had seen him: he was one of the men leaning against the front glass of the Holiday Inn.
Grace took deep breaths, the way her self-defense instructor had taught her. When we panic, we stop thinking. She wanted to choose the right moment to run. There was a group of tourists from China led by a guide with a small voice amplifier. She broke into a sprint and went around them, used them to interrupt the man’s route.
They had killed William in daylight, on a busy street, and if he had not thrown her out of the way they would have killed her too. She walked quickly through the crowd watching the skaters, crossing the park diagonally, and turned right again to confuse the man if he had seen her. On the south side of the skating pavilion the lights were dimmer. She approached the children’s carousel and scanned the park again for a place to hide, between the two gardens of plane trees, when she slammed into another man. Grace bounced off him and fell to the ground, her purse in one hand and William’s computer bag in the other. It was the second man who had leaned against the front window of the Holiday Inn. The man with the fedora.
Behind her, his partner arrived breathless.
The chairs of the park were empty. Leaves blew over the paving stones. Children and parents were either at the skating rink or the carousel. The man she had slammed into, with the fedora, lifted a gun. “You did well, Grace.”
“Wait. You can’t do this.” She threw her purse up at the man and he batted it away. William’s computer bag was so heavy that from a sitting position the best she could do was swing it at the assassins’ knees. It flew between them in the leaves. Grace slid backward on the pavement as both men positioned themselves in front of her. Both had guns and did not seem to care who saw them.
“We can do anything we like,” said the man in a fedora. He looked to his left and right and aimed his gun.
Grace closed her eyes and though she had never been to church for anything but weddings and funerals she said a prayer. There were two pops, not much louder than what she had heard at the ping-pong table, drowned by the children’s shouts of joy at the carousel and the distant rink. And they didn’t hurt, not at first anyway.
She opened her eyes to two thumps. Both of the men in suits were on the ground, and the fedora was rolling in a semi-circle. Roberta McKee stood over them. With a gloved hand she reached down for Grace’s purse and then William’s computer bag.
“Get up. Let’s go.”
40
SOCHI, RUSSIA, 2014
Elena watched the man wearing number 11, by far the slowest and smallest player on the ice. His teammates in red jerseys fed him the puck so he could shoot at the goalie. None of the defensemen on the white opposing team came anywhere near him when he had the puck, though they crushed anyone else who touched it. A ro
bot video camera followed number 11’s every move, whether he had the puck or not, and photographers from around the world bathed him in light whenever he shot on goal.
Aleksandr Mironov, the president of the Russian Federation, had prepared for the Sochi Olympics by dressing up and making himself the star of the fifty-billion-dollar show. Although it was less than a month before the Opening Ceremonies, the Bolshoy Ice Dome was one of the few buildings that felt truly finished. But that was irrelevant now. Inside the dome, which resembled a glittering Fabergé egg, Mironov was Russia and Russia was back: grand, rich, mysterious, powerful.
When one of the best hockey goalies in the world allowed Mironov to score, a small crowd of VIPs and Russian journalists cheered. High above the ice, in a catered luxury box, Elena also applauded politely.
“If Anthony had run for governor of New York, he would have lost.” Sergei Sorokin popped a chocolate in his mouth. Unlike his boss, he did not play hockey, hunt, or practice judo, and over the past ten years he had, in Elena’s opinion, grown into a walrus. “It would have humiliated him.”
“You’ve spent so much time in America but still you don’t understand it,” said Elena. “He can lose and win at once, by building his brand.”
“We built his brand for him, Elenka. And yours. He’d be bankrupt if it weren’t for us, even if he is only half aware of it. And I don’t think his brand is about losing.”
Elena sighed. She did not like to think about Mustela Capital, let alone talk about it. “Okay, Sergei.”
“Our Anthony may not be the greatest businessman in the world. But he is a brilliant marketer.” Sergei pointed down at Mironov, who accepted congratulations from his teammates and from his admirers in the stands. The game was over. “Like Aleksandr. Some men instinctively understand the desires of regular people.”
“But Craig used to be a luxury brand.”
Sergei laughed. “Oh please. Elenka, you’re a European. It was never a luxury brand.”