by Blake Banner
“That’s bizarre. Poor guy. And you have no news of Emily?”
He shook his head. “Went to her house looking for her, found Jerry Fines instead.”
“How was he killed?”
“Stabbed through the heart, after being tortured.”
He was still watching me closely, trying to read my reactions. I squinted at him and repeated, “Tortured? What in the world for?”
His eyes now said he was losing interest. “If I knew that, I’d probably know who done it. Have you got any information for me, Mr. Walker?”
“I wish I had. I mean, unless…” I frowned. “Where did he work?”
“He’s been out of work since the factory closed.”
“Factory?”
“QPS.”
“Oh, yes. But he wasn’t self employed, or have his own private business…”
“No. Why?”
I shook my head again and sighed. “No, nothing, Sheriff. I’m afraid I have nothing for you. Have you informed the Colonel?”
“Uh-uh, not yet.”
I walked back to my car with his eyes burning holes in the back of my head. I drove slowly back to Pier 32, had a burger and a beer and then made my way to Gregor’s casino. I arrived at ten minutes to two, parked by the grotesque statue and climbed the stairs. This time there was no reception committee and the girl at the desk told me to go right on up.
My knock was answered with a “Come!” and I pushed in.
He was sitting behind his desk. Zoltan or Peter, whichever the one with the ponytail was, was standing behind his right shoulder, silhouetted against the big window. Gregor had a large, white linen napkin stuffed into his collar and he was spooning something I assumed to be caviar onto crackers and stuffing it in his mouth, between his teeth. He also had a bottle of vodka on his desk, and a shot glass. I stood a moment looking at him chewing, and he looking back at me. I said, “Is that compulsory?”
He jerked his head, which I took to mean, ‘what?’
“Eating caviar and drinking vodka if you’re a pakhan in the Russian mob?”
He shrugged without looking at me and said, “I like. Sit.”
I sat.
“You want?”
“I prefer my eggs fried.”
“Drink?”
“Irish whiskey.”
He mumbled something without looking up from his plate that sounded like “Peter, Poluchit yemu Irlandskiy viski.”
Peter scowled at me and went to get me a glass of ‘Iraldskiy viski’. While he was doing that, I said, “The CIA tells me the little black box is worth a damned sight more than twenty million bucks.”
“You don’t know what is.”
He stuffed caviar in his mouth, chewed, and looked at me with dead, amber eyes. Then he knocked back a shot and refilled his glass. Peter put a cut crystal tumbler half full of Bushmills in front of me. I sipped. It was superb.
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, either way it’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the American government tells me I have a legal and moral duty to give it to them.”
“You are talk a lot of…” He sighed and scratched the inside of his ear, then looked up at Peter who had returned to his position behind him. He said, “Der’mo…?”
“Shit.”
He nodded, “Da, spasibo, shit. You talking a lot of shit. CIA will take box from you and pay nothing. Maybe they lie, promise much, but give you only big fuck in end. English SIS, European INTCEN, do the same. They take from you, but give nothing.”
I laughed. “You telling me the only people I can trust are the Russian mafia? Boy! Then I really am screwed!”
He nodded. “Is irony, I know.” He said it without smiling. “But is true. If we are in Russia, is no true. But we are here. Options are limited. We do not want many complications. Easier is give you lot of money in cash, take you in boat to Belize, you put money in bank, everybody happy.” He shook his head. “CIA, MI6, INTCEN, Mossad… They offer more, but kill you, never give you money.”
I took another swig and sighed. “For that matter, Gregor, what guarantee have I that you won’t kill me?”
He shrugged and pulled down the corners of his mouth. “For what? If you knew what is this box, you would not ask stupid question. You can be easily hero in Russia for this box. We happy to give you money. Is not a lot of money, twenty millions. We happy to make you hero of Russian people too. Is easier this way.”
“You want to tell me what this box is?”
He smiled for the first time and rumbled like a Harley. The smile faded and he shook his head. “No.”
“You said it’s not a lot of money. How about you double it?”
“No. I tell you what we will do. Thirty millions, and you can have Emily.”
So there it was. He had her.
“Is she still alive?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Did you hurt her?”
He squinted at his wrist and made pinching motions at it with his fingers. “Little bruises, from taking her…” He looked up at Peter and they exchanged a few words and shrugs in Russian. Then he looked back at me, still squinting. “Just little bruises on wrist and arm. Nothing serious.”
“Why did you kill Jerry?”
He frowned at me like I was talking word salad at him. “He has to die. He has seen Peter and boys. They have put…” He jabbed the fingers of his right hand at the fingers of his left. “…sticks, in his nails. He cannot live after this. Is liability.”
I nodded. “Sure, that’s very reasonable. I understand.” I took a deep breath and drained my glass. “I need to meditate on this, Gregor. I am going to go home—to what is left of my home after your visit last night…”
He shook his head. “Again this. We do not visit last night, Mr. Walker.” He approached a second smile, but gave up before he got there. “What for? I know box is not in your house. You have hidden, or maybe you don’t have at all. If you have, only you can get box. So we have you, instead. You don’t go home. You stay here. In the end, only we will have box, Mr. Walker. I explain to Emily already, there is no auction. Box is for us.”
I eyed Peter. I had taken him once before and I knew I could take him again. What worried me was that they knew that too. He gave an unpleasant smile. I looked at Gregor and shook my head. “Sorry, Gregor. I’m going home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I went to stand, but as I did so, the floor moved and tilted up toward me. It slammed me hard in the face and I struggled to push myself up with my hands. The room tilted again and I felt a foot on my shoulder, shoving me over on my back. I fell and looked up at the ceiling. Everything began to spin and then I saw Peter’s bearded face leering down at me, only a few inches away. The next thing I saw was his fist. I felt a powerful pain in my head and everything went black.
* * *
Consciousness began to seep back into my mind. First, I was aware of the small jostles. Then I was aware of the sound, a deep humming. Next it was the smell of mustiness and oil. I opened my eyes. It didn’t help. I still couldn’t see anything, and I wondered for a moment if they had blinded me. I tried to rub my eyes and realized my hands were tied behind my back, and my ankles too were bound. Then it all began to make sense. I was in the trunk of a car.
There is not a lot you can do if you are tied up in the trunk of a car. With what little mobility I had, I felt around for a tool of some sort. There wasn’t one. I drew my knees up to my chest and tried to loop my arms over my ass, to feel for my knife in my boot, but the trunk was too confining, and in any case I was pretty sure they would have found and removed the knife, along with my Sig.
I had no idea how long I had been in there, but the drive seemed to go on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Then the sound of the engine changed and we slowed, grinding and thudding over uneven ground. I bumped around for a bit and banged my head a few times until we finally came to a halt and the engine died. Next there was a short volley as four doors were slammed closed, and a moment later the trunk opened. I was s
urprised to be looking up into a night sky. It meant I had been out for at least four or five hours.
Peter was leering down at me again through his straggly beard, a dark, unpleasant form against the stars. He reached down, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me out of the trunk. Then he let me drop onto the sand. Pain stabbed through my shoulder joints and I rolled on my back. There were four of them towering over me. I recognized Gregor as well as Peter. The other two I didn’t know. I wondered if they were going to give me a kicking, but instead they closed the trunk and one of them hunkered down to cut the bonds on my ankles. Gregor said:
“Stand.”
I got to my feet. Now I could see we were on a long stretch of beach. There were lights in the distance, and a headland, but it was hard to make out exactly where we were. Small waves lapped at the shore and faint, silver starlight touched the surface of the water, mixing rich blue with inky black. About a mile out, I could see the glow of four or five lamps on the sea. Looking more closely, I began to make out a schooner, maybe white or cream, riding at anchor. Closer, on the wet sand, where the small waves were breaking, there was a wooden speedboat with a guy standing beside it. Peter shoved me toward the dinghy and said, “Walk.”
I walked, pushing through the sand, wondering what the hell was coming next. I said to Gregor, “You know if you kill me, you never get the box, right? You understand that.”
He grunted and climbed in the front passenger seat of the boat. I was shoved in the back and Peter got in beside me. The other three grabbed the prow and heaved us backward into the water. One jumped in the front behind the wheel, and the other two clambered in the back. The engine roared, we banked right and accelerated toward the yacht. Obviously dialogue was not the big thing with the Russian mob.
We slapped over the waves for a minute or two, then rounded the stern of the schooner and slowed to pull up beside what looked like a retractable staircase. Peter held the boat steady and Gregor climbed up the steps to the deck. Over his shoulder, he said to me, “You come.”
Peter showed me my knife. He said, “You are two kilometer from shore. There are sharks here, and twelve men with guns. Don’t do nothing stupid.”
He cut the bonds on my wrists and I followed Gregor up the stairs. The others came up behind me, with their weapons drawn.
She was about a hundred feet long, with two masts and a raised cabin amidships, with narrow walkways on either side. Warm light was spilling from the cabin and I could hear voices inside, laughter and music. Gregor was standing at the door, with the light making shiny patches on his face and his bald head. He was watching me.
“Peter will settle you in. I will come in a while to talk with you.”
He went inside the cabin. There were noisy greetings and Peter shoved me toward the bow. One of the others went ahead and opened a hatch in the foredeck. I peered down and saw an iron ladder leading eight or nine feet into a dimly lit space with a rough, wooden floor. Peter said, “Go down.”
There were four of them, they were armed and they were all watching me with interest. I thought about taking them, but the risk was too high, and I still believed the black box was a trump card. I moved toward the ladder.
Peter kicked me in the back of the knee, I fell forward and crashed through the hatch, clutching the rungs of the ladder as I went down. I jarred my shoulder and fell in a heap on the floor. Peter came down after me, smiling, and behind him the other three. I looked around me. It seemed to be some kind of cargo hold with a dozen crates piled against the walls. Behind me a pipe, maybe six inches across, rose through a hole in the floor and disappeared through the ceiling. Light was from a single, bare bulb.
Peter jerked his head at me. “Get up.”
I got to my feet and he pulled a pair of cuffs from his back pocket. Again he jerked his head. “Stand by pipe.”
I stood with my back to the pipe. He pulled my arms around behind it and cuffed my wrists. There is a myth that if you tense your thumb you can add half an inch to the diameter of your wrist, and if you do that when you’re being cuffed, you can then slip the cuffs off by relaxing your hand. It is true that you can add half an inch to the diameter of your wrist. It isn’t true you can then slip off the cuffs, you need more than half an inch for that. The fact was, unless I pulled the pipe out of the floor, I was not going anywhere.
After he’d cuffed me, Peter came back around and said something in Russian to the other guys and they climbed the ladder onto the deck and left. He turned to me and smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. I knew what was coming, and all I could do was roll with the punches, and try not to focus on the pain.
He worked on me for a good five minutes. Five minutes is a long time when you’re being beaten. He was good, experienced. He hit me hard enough to hurt and to weaken me, but not so hard as to knock me unconscious. He started with a few backhanders to my head that left my ears ringing and my head spinning, and then he started pounding my belly and my floating ribs with his fists, until I felt nauseous and light-headed. Eventually, I slid down the pipe into a sitting position. Then he sneered at me and said, “You prefer to be kicked? Stay there, I will kick.”
I looked up at him. “Un-cuff me, then kick me.”
I pushed myself back to my feet and he went to work on my face again, with an open hand. The taste of blood in my mouth was strong, and I could feel my left eye swelling. My lip felt like I’d just had an anesthetic from the dentist. He was strong, and his open-handed blows were making me dizzy.
Finally, he stopped, out of breath, and went to sit on a crate. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. They were called Apollo-Soyuz, and I wondered for a moment if I was delirious from the blows. He lit one and sat smoking and staring at me. I laid it on. Slid to the floor again and groaned, but I didn’t have to lay it real thick. I was bad. My body hurt all over, I was dizzy and weak.
Then there was the rumble of a big diesel engine firing up, and the yacht began to tremble and shake. After a moment, footsteps overhead told me somebody was approaching. The hatch opened and Gregor’s huge, bald form lumbered awkwardly down the steps. Once he was down, he turned to look at me. He seemed to fill the whole space. I squinted up at him. The bare bulb reflected of his shiny head.
I said: “Have you gone completely out of your mind? What the hell do you think you’re doing, Gregor?”
“Now,” he said, “We go sailing, and you tell me where is box.”
Ten
I pushed myself back to my feet with difficulty, wincing at the pain, and stared at him.
“Exactly how stupid do think I am? If I tell you where the box is, my life isn’t worth a damn. You think I don’t know that?”
He sat on one of the crates, watching me with amber, reptilian eyes. “Of course, but by time we have finish with you, death will seem like nice idea. Anyway.” He shrugged and pulled his lipless mouth down at the corners. “I think maybe you have not box. I think maybe Emily has box.”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Emily hasn’t box, Gregor. And for that matter, neither have I.”
“Where is box?”
“There is only one way, Gregor, that you will get that box, and that is by handing over thirty million bucks and Emily. That was the deal, that’s how it works. Continue on this path, and by nine A.M. tomorrow morning, the box will be safely in the hands of the CIA.”
He gave a single nod and looked at Peter. Peter walked over and drove his fist into my belly. I retched and sagged, and gasped for breath.
“I ask again. Where is box?”
When I had gotten my breath back, I raised my head to look at him. “Ask yourself, Gregor. What would you have done in my position? Let me explain something to you. Let me explain something to you, so that you fully understand this situation.”
Peter moved to hit me again, but Gregor raised a hand and muttered something in Russian. I went on.
“Emily told me you were blackmailing her.”
“I? Blackmail her? How?”
<
br /> “She told me you used to employ her as a whore. She said you had pictures and films, and you were demanding a hundred grand for the return of the material.”
“This is lie.”
“Of course it is. I know it’s a lie, Gregor. I saw it was a lie when she gave me a package that was clearly not money, and your boys handed over two sports bags that were obviously full of money. Now, let me ask you, what would you have done at that point?”
He was listening carefully, but he didn’t answer.
“Let me tell you what I did, because this is something you need to know. I looked in the box and I saw something I did not understand. Here was an object—I had no idea what it was, but clearly it was worth a lot of money—so I sent it immediately to my attorneys in New York, with instructions to dispose of it in such a way that only I can recover it. Now, ask yourself, Gregor, is that not what you would have done? Isn’t it what any intelligent person would have done?”
He nodded a few times, then turned to Peter. Peter went to work on me again, methodically pounding my belly and my chest, and then my face, while Gregor smoked and watched. This time Peter used his fists. They were big and hard, and they made a mess. Still, he was careful to make it painful, but not so damaging that I would no longer be of any use to them, or that I would become numb and stop suffering.
By the time Gregor had finished his cigarette, Peter was out of breath and his boss told him to stop.
“I think, Mr. Walker, that you are under impression that Russians are all stupid. We are not stupid. You ask me to believe that woman who has never met you before, ask you to deliver money for blackmail, and you agree to do this. Why? Is most stupid story I ever hear.”
I swallowed the blood in my mouth and fantasized for a moment about killing first Peter and then Gregor. Finally, I spoke through swollen lips.
“My father and the Colonel, Harry Burgess, were friends when I was a kid. She has convinced him that she is his daughter. Maybe she is. He was stationed in New Jersey just before she was born. He introduced us, hoping we would become friends.”