The Betrayer

by Daniel Judson

  Cat looked at the photo for a moment, at the woman she barely resembled, then continued her search. She found, however, nothing of significance — no computer, no hard line phone so she could check the caller ID or press redial, and no cell phone. She saw a few books, noticed that among them was a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. She picked it up and looked at it, instantly recognized the well-worn copy as Johnny’s, given to him by their father. She opened it and read the inscription, then closed the book and returned it to where she had found it.

  She wondered how Jeremy had come to possess it. Had he found it when they emptied out the house in Ossining prior to selling it? She wondered, too, why hadn’t Johnny taken it. But then she understood.

  It carried a memory he could not bear.

  She checked the closet next, saw only clothes — Jeremy’s clothes, another good sign — then checked the toilet tank, found no drugs in a Ziploc bag stashed there.

  She checked every drawer, every possible hiding place in the tiny apartment, and found no drug paraphernalia whatsoever, not even common household items that could be used as paraphernalia. She was relieved to know that there was nothing for Morris to find, but more than that, she was heartened by the fact that there was actually a possibility that Jeremy had gotten himself clean.

  Of the three us, she thought, who would have ever believed it would be poor Jeremy who turned himself around?

  If this was all that she came away with, then it had been worth the risk of coming here — and worth enduring the memories this place churned up, memories of the father she had loved so much and lost too soon.

  She was about to give up and get out of there when she noticed a notepad on the kitchen table. The top sheet was blank, but there was something about the way the notepad had been placed in the exact middle of the table. She thought about this for a moment, then retrieved a pencil from a nearby kitchen drawer and began to draw back and forth across the paper with the side of the pencil tip.

  A game from their childhood, a way for she and Jeremy to leave secret notes for each other after their mother had passed.

  A suddenly lonely and heartbroken boy turning to the only woman left in his life.

  What had been written on the page that was torn off had left an impression on the page below. And it was beginning to emerge.

  A ten-digit number.

  A phone number, she quickly realized. The area code was 917. A New York area code.

  She continued darkening in the rest of the page, and something else emerged.

  An eight-digit number.

  Some kind of code, perhaps?

  And then one more thing showed itself.

  The final thing.

  She looked at the page — white hollow letters on a field of scribbled gray.

  She had often helped her brother with his homework when he was a boy. School was difficult for him; it wasn’t that he didn’t have the smarts — he did, clearly — it was simply that kids were cruel and he was an emotional child, sensitive, not tough enough. Not his father’s son, nor his brother’s brother.

  Jeremy had always belonged to their mother, and then, after her death, he had belonged to Cat. For a while, anyway.

  Having helped him with his penmanship, Cat could easily recognize his handwriting. His thoughts had been too fast for his hand back then, and were, clearly, still too fast now.

  Hamilton Park, north of Delancey, midnight.

  All in a familiar manic scrawl.

  Cat knew for certain now that her kid brother was living here. She knew, too, that he was the unknown male being shot at this morning on Delancey. Shot at by a professional. Her gut tightened once more.

  She tore off the page, pocketed it, then thought about it and grabbed and pocketed the entire notepad as well. The indentation left by her brother could have easily gone down a number of sheets. And so, too, the scribbles she’d made.

  It would be better if no one knew, or even suspected, that she had been here.

  Nearing the door, she smelled the strangely familiar perfume again. She paused to try to identify it. It took a moment for her to realize that it was Chloé, or something very close to it.

  The perfume their mother had worn.

  Cat waited till she had driven out of the West Village and was heading up Eighth Avenue before reaching for her cell phone and calling Fiermonte.

  “I’m bringing you something,” she said when he answered. She was reminded suddenly of her girlish need to please her father, how that had been both the defining and driving force of her childhood. It was the reason for everything, from why she had run track in high school (which her father had done when he was at school) to why she had entered the FBI.

  “We’d better not meet at my office,” Fiermonte said.

  The flatness of his voice sent a tiny wave of disappointment through her. What, really, had she been expecting?

  “There’s a diner on the corner of Fifth and Twenty-Third,” he continued. “Give me a half hour.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Listen, Cat, I just talked to Morris. He got a look at the surveillance video.”

  “That was fast.”

  “It’s a preschool. They open early.”

  “Does it show anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  As he had done earlier, Fiermonte was leaving her hanging, though she understood the reason why: cell phones could too easily be eavesdropped upon. Not that there was reason to suspect that anyone would be listening to them on purpose, but there was no point in risking it.

  She had to remind herself that no matter what the security camera had captured, Jeremy had obviously survived it, was alive when he dropped his motorcycle outside the Delancey and then took off on foot.

  Suddenly the idea of her kid brother being dead filled her with a deep, draining dread, just as it should. There was no hint of relief at all now. Her recent visit to her father’s apartment had been the reason for this change, there was no doubt about that. The memories of their shared childhood, the photograph of their long-deceased mother, not to mention the smell of something similar to her perfume — how could these not have rekindled familial feelings and instincts that had been lost long ago?

  How could she not care now about the boy she had tried, so unsuccessfully, to mother once?

  Cat was expecting the call to end there, but it didn’t. What Fiermonte said next caught her off guard, more so even than his foolish confession in that downtown bar a week ago.

  “You don’t by any chance know where Johnny is these days?” he said. There was something in his voice now. Urgency, Cat thought. Whatever the preschool camera had recorded, it was clearly a game changer.

  “No. I know he’s back in the country, but I have no idea where he’s living or what he’s doing. Why?”

  “I think we need to find him. I think we’re going to need his help on this.”

  “Jesus, Donnie.” This was all she could think to say.

  “Is there any chance at all that Jeremy might have gone to Johnny recently? Or maybe went to him this morning, after he got into trouble?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You sound pretty certain.”

  “They haven’t spoken to each other in years.” She paused, then: “You know how Johnny is.”

  Of the three children, Johnny was the one who most saw the world in black and white. He was also the most independent, and the harder of the brothers for Cat to reach when they were young.

  His father’s son, and clear favorite.

  It had always made sense to her that she lost track of him now that they were adults.

  “Any idea where we might start looking for him?” Fiermonte asked.

  Cat didn’t answer. Her silence rang for several seconds.

  “What?” Fiermonte pressed.

  “You won’t
like my answer, Donnie.”

  “Shit.”

  She knew by this that Fiermonte understood who it was they would need to contact first if they wanted to find Johnny. And, like she, Fiermonte didn’t dare say the man’s name over the phone.

  “They were close,” Cat explained. “I think he always saw the…potential in Johnny, if you know what I mean. He used to send Johnny gifts on his birthday, then checks while he was in college. I think this blinded Johnny a little, at least for a while.”

  “Can you contact him?”

  “I know how, yeah.”

  “If he knows where Johnny is, you should set something up.”

  “It would take some…arranging.”

  “We don’t have much choice here. And we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  In a matter of a few hours, Fiermonte had led her step-by-step across a number of lines. First she had been called to a crime scene involving a loved one. Then she had been sent to that loved one’s apartment, from which she removed evidence. And now she was being asked to make contact with a man from whom she had always distanced herself.

  Her father’s oldest friend. The man he had grown up with, and who had, through his underworld connections, provided her father with everything he needed to build and maintain his various cover stories.

  And protect his family.

  He was also the last person to have spoken with her father on the night he was taken.

  Dickey McVicker.

  She knew now that she’d probably be crossing a few more lines before this was done.

  The connection was beginning to fail. Fiermonte’s voice disappeared for a moment, then returned.

  Cat heard him say through a field of static, “You’d better call him now. The sooner we set this up, the better.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, but the line had already gone dead.

  She closed the phone and dropped it onto the passenger seat.

  A few minutes later, she was turning her Mustang onto Twenty-Third Street and heading east toward Fifth.

  She passed the Chelsea Hotel, an eight-story fortress of brick and tall windows and wrought iron railings, without even looking at it.

  Chapter Seven

  Vitali was standing before the bathroom mirror and cleaning the small cut over his right eye. He felt foolish, would never have sustained such an injury had he not been ordered by his employer to hold back. He would never have missed had he not been told to follow his orders no matter what. In fact, it had taken real concentration for him to overcome his training and not hit his target. He thought he may have fucked up when he saw the bike suddenly go down, but by the way the Coyle kid had gotten up and took off on foot, Vitali knew he hadn’t been hit.

  A strange thing to be pleased about.

  When the wound was closed — it was minor, more damaging to his ego than anything else — he stripped down, showered, and redressed. He’d bought a pack of something called American Spirits during his supply run yesterday and began smoking. Each brand he tried was worse than the one before it, and these things — weak and all but tasteless — were no exception.

  He roamed the States, in the employ of his benefactor, for one reason only: so he would be readily available for his shot at vengeance. His benefactor had promised him that his time would come, sooner or later. He had also promised that he would do his best to give Vitali enough work to support himself in the meantime. He had kept that promise, had kept Vitali busy enough, and paid him a decent-enough wage, but Vitali knew that he could earn so much more as a free agent on the international market, in Europe and Asia. He also knew of a man — a wealthy associate of his uncle’s — who would pay Vitali to kill neo-Nazis in Russia. That would be work he’d very much enjoy and could be proud of, that would, in his mind anyway, count as service to his country, the land of his father and his father’s father, who had survived cold and starvation and Nazis only to be thrown into one of Stalin’s prisons a year later and simply disappear.

  Now that Vitali’s chance at vengeance was here, he wanted to get it over with. He wanted to kill the one responsible for his father’s death, so that his father could finally rest in peace. And once that was done, he would say good-bye to the States, exit as secretly as he had entered, and begin his own life, earn the kind of money he should be earning, maybe even make a lasting mark — his mark — on his beloved homeland.

  Yes, he would miss the freedom of travel that America offered, and he would miss the women he encountered here, who were so easily preyed upon, so filled with a sense of entitlement that they refused to see danger even when it was staring them in the face, even as it told them what they wanted to hear, got them to undress, fucked them with a violence they mistook for abandon or passion.

  He would miss all that, but he would not miss these shitty cigarettes.

  He finished tending to his injury, then stood by his window and looked down on Twenty-Third Street. To overcome his bruised ego, he attempted to recall the high he’d felt up in Portsmouth, hoped to tap into the memory of it, but all he could remember was having been high, not the feeling of being high. It was the same for the high he had felt in Boston as well. Long gone, and like a dream that way — so vivid as it unfolded, so rich in sensations, but it could never last much past consciousness.

  He had stalked the Coyle kid, had felt the thrill of that, but he had not made the kill, so the process he loved so much had not been completed. He’d found this deeply frustrating, and he didn’t deal with frustration well. His entire existence was designed around the balancing of rising tension and the eventual release of that tension. It was like a musical note, his father had always said. Each and every note has three components: attack, sustain, and release. Attack determines how the note is struck — softly or hard, or anywhere in between. Sustain determines how long it is allowed to ring, and if it gets louder or softer as it rings. And release determines the nature of its end.

  Vitali’s life — his inner life, anyway — was a musical note. When his tension began, it began quietly — he never actually heard the striking of the note, just realized suddenly that it was there, ringing steadily. And it was as much a physical sensation — a vibration in his heart — as it was an actual sound in his ears. He could feel the note build over the hours, and then the days, feel the rising crescendo. And he knew when enough was enough, when to finally seek relief by killing, and at last ceasing the ringing altogether, emptying his ears and heart of it.

  All other needs — hunger, thirst, rest — were secondary to this.

  After his third cigarette, he decided he’d sleep for a bit. When he awoke a few hours later, he was thinking of working out, or maybe going for a run. He wasn’t far from the West Side Highway, could run along the walkway that followed the eastern bank of the Hudson River. He could watch women there — not just fellow runners but tourists as well. And the relief that came with a hard run should be enough to keep his mind balanced for now.

  He needed to keep in balance, keep the compulsion in check. Otherwise, mistakes could be made.

  He was still in bed, though, when his cell phone chirped. He answered without looking at the caller ID, and did so with a simple “Yeah.” Only one person knew the number to his prepaid cell phone.

  “I’m sending you some help,” the male voice said.

  Vitali had expected to hear anything but this, and a surge of frustration immediately rushed through him. He kept his cool, though, didn’t allow his emotion to show in his voice. “Why?”

  “I think you might need it.”

  Vitali didn’t know whether or not to be insulted by this. Could his benefactor, the man his father had served loyally for years, be angry that he missed — when he’d been instructed to miss?

  Scare him, he’d been told. I need him scared, very scared. And Vitali had done just that. Nothing more, nothing less.

  But before Vitali could protest, the man said, “This is no reflection on you. Things have just gotten a little more…complicated
, that’s all. We need a face on all this, someone we can afford to let people see. You can understand that, right? And no offense, but we need a face that can open certain doors.”

  Vitali closed his eyes, knew where this was going.

  “She’ll be there only as support,” the man said. “She works for you, and she knows this. She won’t give you any shit.”

  Vitali cringed at the feminine pronoun but said nothing.

  “Sorry, but it has to be this way,” the man said. “We can’t take any chances at this point. She’ll be arriving at your hotel in an hour. She has the room directly below yours. I trust you’ll show her every professional courtesy. It might be nice if you took her out to breakfast and talked a little.”

  Vitali said nothing.

  “I need you to say something here, son.”

  Vitali hated when the man addressed him that way. He didn’t care about this man’s connection to his father, how close they may have been, or the complete loyalty his father had felt toward him. He didn’t care that this man had been there for him since his father’s death — had called Vitali just moments after, had assured Vitali that he’d be taken care of, that his day would come. Trust me, the man had said. What other choice did Vitali, nineteen and suddenly all alone in a strange country, have?

  Still, Vitali knew not to bite the hand that fed him. At least not while it was still feeding him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I will show her every professional courtesy.”

  “Good.” His benefactor sounded truly pleased. “Let her do what she does. She’s very good at that.”

  Vitali said nothing.