by Tim Green
“It would mean a lot to me,” Jake said. “A lot to my son.”
Dorothy Cakebread reached down into her purse and took out a pen and an envelope that she tore in half. On the paper, she wrote down the address of a self-storage facility and the combination to a lock. She folded it in half and handed it to Jake.
“Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know you won’t,” she said.
The address wasn’t far from the hospital. Jake pulled inside the chain-link fence and right up to the unit. His hands shook as he spun the dial on the lock and it took him three tries before he heard it click. Without even bothering to look around, he jangled the lock free, threw open the overhead door, and stepped inside.
28
THE SPACE WAS NEARLY EMPTY. A spare tire rested against one of the side walls and in the back three old wooden file cabinets stood in a row. Dust on the floor was thick enough to show Jake’s footprints, and the smell of damp concrete and musty paper filled his nostrils. He stepped slowly, his feet chafing the concrete floor. The first drawer he opened held files full of junk, business filings and receipts, but in the bottom he found a small handgun with a faded box of bullets.
Jake took the gun and turned it over in his hands, letting his fingers caress the dimpled surface of the grip. It was a Colt .25 automatic, small, but otherwise not too dissimilar from the Navy sidearm his father had taught him to use as a kid. He put it back and closed the drawer.
The rest of the drawers were stuffed with paperwork. Jake looked at his watch and started to dig. The files weren’t alphabetical and had no apparent order. Time ticked away. It was in the bottom drawer of the second cabinet that Jake found a folder that had a five-pointed star with a circle around it drawn with a ballpoint pen on the outside. When he opened it, he saw Sam’s name.
His heart raced, but as he leafed through it, he didn’t see anything revealing. Most of it looked like papers he already had. They deserved a closer look, but his watch said it was time to go or he’d be crossways with Muldoon again. He started for the door, then went back and opened the first drawer, scooping up the Colt .25 and the box of shells and stuffing them into the pockets of his suit. After he closed up the unit he tossed the file onto the passenger seat and took off for the police station in the town of Dewitt and their shoot with the cop who had first discovered the bunker.
Twice during the interview, Muldoon stopped tape and whispered into Jake’s ear, asking him why he was so jumpy and to please settle down. Even the cop’s descriptions of the darkness and the sobs of the women didn’t fill Jake’s eyes with moisture the way they normally would have. His mind was on the file.
When it was finally over, Muldoon told Jake he planned to shoot a couple of dramatizations on Sunday, women being abducted, the bunker man coming for them with a rope, and him burying the bodies of the ones who died. Then he’d begin to write. He told Jake that he wouldn’t need him until Monday morning at nine.
“They want to do a toss from Nancy to you and I’ll have some voice-over work for you by then,” Muldoon said. “This thing is going to be our lead story for the entire week. Meantime, you can grab a day with your kid.”
“You sound enthusiastic,” Jake said.
“I’m not a kid person.”
“See you Monday morning.”
Jake drove until he came to a Kmart shopping center. He pulled into the lot and parked and began to go through the file again, this time more carefully. There were copies of things Jake already had, the letter Cakebread had sent them, the declaration of abandonment and order of adoption from Albania, the paperwork from the family court in Syracuse. Jake read through the papers, word by word, grinding each one down into all its different possibilities.
After an hour, he threw down the last papers on top of the folder and slammed his palms against the steering wheel before firing up the engine. When he came to a stop at the first traffic light, he glanced down in disgust. That’s when he saw something written in pen on the back of a court document. A car horn sounded behind him, and Jake looked up at the green light. He crossed the intersection, then pulled over to the side of the road. The written name clicked into place, opening a stream of images.
Niko, no last name, just Niko. Jake remembered the burly old lawyer in the rumpled suit who had appeared with them in family court. He had barely looked at them, and when he spoke, it was with a thick eastern European accent. When the judge ruled for the adoption and rapped his gavel, the lawyer gave Jake’s hand a brief shake and marched straight out of the court, leaving Jake and Karen to gush over Sam, whom she held bundled in a blanket.
“Car-wall-cow-sick,” Jake said aloud, drawing from his memory. “Can’t be many of those.”
29
BAD THINGS HAPPENED IN THREES. Niko Karwalkowszc knew this. The first thing had happened earlier in the day. Riding back from the golf course across the street in his personal cart, he saw the bloody skid mark and the mass of fur in the gutter. His dog, run over by a car.
He buried the dog in the garden and had a dinner of toast and peanut butter washed down with Absolut vodka. Now he stared out the bay window at the spot, absently withdrew the plastic inhaler from the pocket of his robe, and took a deep blast. Tears ran down his face. Something he had stopped trying to control when he was a small boy and saw the American GIs outside the fences at Mauthausen, staring in with their mouths agape.
Niko peeled himself away from the window and took a hot bath. He dried off and had begun combing the thin gray strands over the dome of his skull when the phone rang. He stared for a moment into the pocked glass, wondering if the heavy sagging flesh of his face looked that way because of what was really inside of him, or if those dark cunning eyes still retained the affability of youth and were simply prisoners in his aging bulk. He wiped the steam from his glasses and put them on.
The phone continued to ring and he crossed the wooden floor in the hall, scooping it up in his bedroom with a grunt.
“Your office. Now.”
The phone went dead. The heavily accented words echoed through his mind, sobering him like a blunt instrument. Through the window he could see the towering border of pines on the first fairway of the Bellevue Country Club. Except for the orange glow of the set sun in the west and the blue glow of the streetlights, everything was dark with shadows. Niko heaved a sigh and took a fresh shirt from his closet, buttoning it up, but not bothering with a tie. He always wore a tie with clients, unless it was after hours and then he knew the kinds of things he was expected to do didn’t call for a tie. To wear one would seem almost offensive.
As he backed out of the driveway in his burgundy Buick, he averted his eyes from the stain on the road, knowing of course that in his office at the bottom of the hill he was sure to find the second bad thing.
As he drove downward, the homes grew smaller. Once he crossed Grand they began to crowd one another and fade until he reached Charles Avenue, where they were truly decrepit. Warped wood. Cracked, colorless paint. Rusted mailboxes. It had taken him fifty years to get up that hill, and it was the Albanians who took him the last half of the way.
It came at a price. Late-night calls like this one. Shady deals. Blood. Bodies. Lies. The American way.
After the war, he put himself through college, learning English at the same time. He went to law school at night while he worked at the bus station in Albany. His first clients were his own people, the Poles. Then came the Italians and the Irish working class who were too poor to pay for a will or a divorce from an attorney who spoke without the heavy accent. It was a living, but not a country-club living.
Then came the Albanians, flooding into Charles Avenue from the decay of Yugoslavia. They trusted no one, but needed him. It was the first time in his career that his broken English helped him get clients. He believed they were somehow comforted by a lawyer who knew how harsh it was to be marked as different in this country. And, during the past fifteen years, it was his work for them that had elevated him
to the brick house he now lived in across from the Bellevue Country Club. He even had a membership.
There was no shortage of work with the Albanians. Niko had never seen or heard of a criminal group as creative or flexible as Murat Lukaj and his men. Any opportunity that fell their way, they took advantage of. Something as small as a truck of baby formula they might hijack to sell. Or something as big as a shipment of weapons stolen from the nearby Army base they might sneak onto a container ship bound for the Middle East. Nothing seemed too small and nothing seemed too big. They were the consummate opportunists.
In the parking lot of the small corner building that held his office, Murat’s long blue BMW was parked at a haphazard angle beneath the street lamp. Next to it was a silver Audi coupe whose side was punctuated with half a dozen bullet holes. Niko shook his head and got out, scanning the empty street. The BMW eased out into the street as if to get its bearings before it roared away up Genesee Street.
Niko frowned, because if Murat wasn’t sticking around, it must be bad. He turned to the building and saw a smear across the smoked glass of his office door. When he examined his palm inside the landing he saw that the door handle had also been stained with blood. Niko muttered a curse and heaved himself up the long narrow stairway, one hand on his sloppy gut, the other on the rail, wheezing by the time he reached the landing.
The office door was flung open. Two young men in dark quilted jackets and jeans sat slumped in chairs, hands in their pockets, legs stretched out, staring sullenly up at Niko like hunting dogs in a kennel. The taller one was Shaban, Murat’s first cousin and the only Albanian he’d ever seen with long wavy blond hair and a brown Fu Manchu. Niko knew that under the coat would be a sleeveless shirt that exposed Shaban’s long lean biceps with their barbed-wire tattoos.
The other was Tajik, baby-faced despite the dark eyes and shadow of a beard, big around the middle, but very powerful. Niko peered into the back room where the slumped figure of a man with curly red hair sat tied to a chair. He’d seen this kind of thing before. Murat had been enamored of the attorney-client privilege ever since one of his people got off on a murder charge in Brooklyn after the gun was ruled inadmissible because it came from the lawyer’s office.
Niko clenched his hands and put them in the air.
“He better not be dead,” he said, glaring.
30
NIKO WENT TO THE CLOSET in the hall and took out a bucket that he filled from a spigot in the small tiled bathroom. He dumped in some liquid cleaner, wincing at the ammonia smell and handing the mop to one of the thugs in the chair. He pointed toward the spatter marks on the wooden floor surrounding the unconscious redhead.
“Clean,” Niko said, jabbing his finger at the back room and making mopping motions. “You clean it. Get the door, too. There’s blood on the handle.”
Shaban glanced up and gave him an annoyed look, but nodded his head. He nudged Tajik and, together, they went to work in the thorough way that Niko knew would leave the floor spotless. Niko saw the red light on his answering machine blinking, but before he could cross the room to play the message, the phone on the desk jangled, startling him.
He picked it up.
“I paid your bill,” Murat said. “On your desk. You see it?”
Niko picked up the paper bag he hadn’t noticed and looked at the banded bills inside. Twenty thousand. It was just the way they did business. Niko got paid for the last job whenever a new job came along, Murat’s way of cheating him without saying so.
“Very good. Let’s talk about the other package,” Niko said, eyeing the form in the back room. “Is it past expiration date?”
“No,” Murat said. “Still fresh.”
“Because it’s very messy,” Niko said, closing his eyes briefly and shaking his head like a tired schoolteacher.
“It’s your mess right now,” Murat said. “But we can get rid of it. You tell Shaban, yes or no.”
“My mess?”
“Aren’t you the one who places the orders with Canada? Shaban. You talk to him.”
The phone went dead. Niko eyed the tall blond thug, the mop of his hair swaying in rhythm with the mop on the floor.
He called Shaban’s name and motioned him over. The man in the chair groaned. Shaban took a big automatic from his waistband and bopped him on the head before coming out into the office.
Niko closed his eyes again and pushed the glasses up higher on his nose and asked, “Can you tell me what happened? Murat said you would tell me what happened. Sit.”
Niko put his coat on the back of the chair and sat down behind the desk. He took a bottle of Absolut out of the drawer along with two glasses, which he filled. He pushed one across the desk to Shaban, who looked at it disinterestedly.
Niko sipped his vodka while Shaban told him the story of how the man bleeding all over his office had come to be there, how he’d pulled his truck over, gone into the can, raped one of the girls, and gotten rough enough to kill her. How the New York City Albanians expected the driver’s head, but how Murat wanted him to decide if the union would tolerate losing a man, since Niko was the one who dealt with the union. Without the Toronto union, there could be no deals with New York or anyone else. Niko considered the situation with the detachment of a brain surgeon who has already removed the dome of the skull.
Finally, Niko said, “They understand reputation, and an eye for an eye. They will have to.”
Shaban smiled at him and slapped his palm on the desktop with a firm nod. He got up and walked into the other room.
“Nothing here,” Niko said, his voice rising.
Niko winced at the sound of the body thumping on the floor. Shaban marched past him, dragging the man by his ankles while his partner followed, mopping up the tracks. Niko clutched his chest, dug the inhaler out of his pants pocket, and took three puffs.
When Shaban returned, Niko muttered for him to make sure they took the ropes off the chair. While he struggled into his coat, the two thugs emptied the bucket and began rinsing out the mop. While he waited, Niko could feel the draft coming up the stairway. It made him shiver but he resisted the temptation to take another drink. When he forced his eyes away from the bottle on the desk, they instead clung to the blinking red light on the answering machine.
Niko pursed his lips. He fished for the inhaler and when he had a good hold on it, he pushed the playback button, just to get it over with. It had to be bad news, number three.
“This message is for Nicholas Karwalkowszc. You helped me and my wife with an adoption about thirteen years ago through the International Children’s Adoption Agency of Central New York and I want to talk to you about it. Please give me a call at 917-555-6601. My name is Jake Carlson. My son’s name is Sam.”
The voice took hold of him and Niko closed his eyes. He heard the thump of the bucket being put away, then the low laughter, and the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. The plastic shell of the inhaler snapped in his hand.
31
WHEN JAKE WOKE UP SUNDAY MORNING, he snatched his cell phone off the night table without looking at the number coming in.
“Sam?” he said.
There was silence and the sound of the phone being adjusted before a man’s voice replied, “This is Nicholas Karwalkowszc. I believe you called my office last night.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Karwalkowszc,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you remember, but you helped with the adoption of my son.”
The lawyer chuckled and said he was sorry, but he’d done hundreds of adoptions.
“But you have records,” Jake said.
“No, you would have to go to your agency for that.”
It was silent for a minute before the lawyer said, “Mr. Carlson, are you there?”
“The director of the agency died seven years ago,” Jake said. “And I already have his records. That’s how I got your name. I thought you might have something more. I thought you might remember. I thought I could show you what I’ve got and maybe you’ll remember som
ething. I’ll pay you for your time. Your hourly rate.”
“You have agency records?” the lawyer said. “Cakebread’s?”
“You remember Cakebread?”
“Somewhat.”
“How did you know it was him?”
He stuttered, then said, “You said thirteen years ago. Most of them back then were for Cakebread, so I assumed.”
“Can I meet you? Today would be great.”
“I have some plans already. Let me call you back. I’ll see what I can do.”
Jake hung up and looked at his phone for a moment before starting to move. He went to his briefcase and took out the little Colt as well as the box of shells. He loaded the gun and slipped it into his pocket. He wanted to check the building where the agency had been again, and also his original hotel room, places he didn’t want to be without a gun.
32
ON TIOGA STREET, Murat sometimes held court in his social club, a corner building in a rundown residential neighborhood. Tall, narrow city homes that needed new paint and shingles. Broken sidewalks that fought back gutters lined with grit and garbage pounded flat from a winter of snow. The club, once a bar, had a glass front window and bricks old enough to have struggled free from their rigid lines. Inside the small front room, a beautiful young woman, black-haired and big-breasted, cleaned her beer glasses behind the bar without looking up. She was the only one.
Niko passed through the narrow hallway into the back where the strong smell of coffee overwhelmed its competition, stale beer and burnt incense from the previous night and even the fresh smoke of the morning. From the walls of the room hung rich red tapestries, glowing in the yellow light of candles and a chandelier of tarnished bronze. White linen cloths shrouded each and every table. In a place of honor on the back wall hung the Albanian national flag with its black double-headed eagle.