Dark Eyes

by William Richter

  “And my mother … do you have a picture of her?”

  The question seemed to catch Dr. Rainer off balance. Strange, thought Wally, since it seemed like a simple yes-or-no.

  “I’m sorry, no,” Dr. Rainer finally said.

  “But you still know Yalena. She’s here.”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Do I know her?” Wally had a lump in her throat now, her voice cracking a little; she hated being in the grip of something so beyond her control. “Do I know her, Doctor?”

  Dr. Rainer shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I have questions too, Wally.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Wally protested. “I have to find her. Who is she, Doctor?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Wallis,” Dr. Rainer said. “I made that promise. And it wouldn’t be safe. If you had that knowledge, there are those who would do anything to make you tell, you see?”

  It was obvious that Dr. Rainer would not compromise on this point, and Wally couldn’t afford to lose her as an ally.

  “Okay,” Wally said, trying to hide her impatience. “Then what can you tell me about her?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well …” Wally had too many questions. Where to begin? The beginning. “What was my mother like? Back then, in Russia.”

  Dr. Rainer thought back. “Smart. Pretty.” Dr. Rainer looked up and set an appraising look on Wally, obviously making a comparison. “A lot like you, Wallis. Lovely, but … more conventional. She had a worldly education; her own mother worked on the staff of the Emerson School, so Yalena practically grew up there, among the Americans. She was athletic. She played the piano well. She was a reasonably good student. Boys liked her, but she was … reserved. By nature.”

  “How did things go wrong for her?” For the past week, Wally had been weaving imaginary narratives in her mind, trying to imagine the sequence of events that had resulted in Yalena Mayakova giving up her own child, her own flesh and blood.

  “She had been raised by a single mother,” Dr. Rainer said. “And Yalena craved a strong male presence in her life. She was drawn to men, not boys.”

  “She found someone,” Wally said.

  Dr. Rainer gave a dreadful sigh. “Someone found her.”

  “And there was trouble.”

  “Not at first, but yes. Bad trouble.”

  “What was the man’s name?”

  Wally watched as Dr. Rainer wrestled with this question. Did she have to right to reveal the name to Wally? Did she have the right not to?

  “Klesko.” Dr. Rainer spoke the name with reluctance, as if it were a dark spell that she feared might conjure the man himself. “Alexei Klesko.”

  “Klesko.” Wally repeated the name out loud, feeling it. She paused, then asked, “And Klesko is my—”

  “Please don’t ask me, Wally,” the doctor said, insistent. “I’m sorry, but it’s not my place.”

  “It’s not your place to keep it from me, either …” Wally said, fighting to keep control of her frustration. At that moment she had another thought. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the photo from the Brighton Beach file, the grainy black-and-white surveillance photo of the man she had encountered in the Hatches’ house. She held the picture up for Dr. Rainer to see, and the woman went pale.

  “Is this Klesko?” Wally demanded. “Is this my father?”

  “My God …” Dr. Rainer was terrified by the image. “Where was that picture taken? When was it taken?”

  “Tell me, Dr. Rainer. Is this my father?”

  “Yes, Wally,” Dr. Rainer relented. “That is Klesko. That is your father.”

  Wally absorbed this news. She held the photograph before her and looked on it with new eyes. The man whose path she had crossed in Shelter Island—the man who had virtually radiated a sense of menace and violence—was her own flesh and blood. For some reason, the shock of this realization was not as overwhelming as it might have been, and now Wally realized that from the moment she had seen the man’s photograph in the Brighton Beach file, there was the smallest voice, deep inside her, that had already told her this truth. The revelation, however frightening, was something Wally was ready to embrace. She welcomed knowledge—even painful knowledge—over the ignorance she had endured for most of her life.

  “What happened between Klesko and my mother?”

  “Yalena was with Klesko for seven years. In the beginning their relationship was … workable. But over time Klesko changed. Something emerged from inside of him, something dark. It became clear over time that his family’s business was with the Vory—the Russian criminal network—and the deeper he dove into that world, the more brutal he became. Yalena tried to leave him, of course, but he never allowed her to escape. By the time she became pregnant with you, she was resolved that she would raise you alone, that Klesko would never be part of your life. This is where Benjamin Hatch became involved. Ben had some business connections that he used to help Yalena get out of the country. The cost turned out to be terrible.”

  “What?”

  “It was supposed to be cash. Benjamin’s business had gone to hell; all he had was debt. He agreed to get Yalena out of the country, but for a price. To pay, she had to use Klesko’s money, and the only way to get away with that was to get him out of the way. Yalena was privy to details of a deal Klesko and his associates had put together—some sort of smuggling operation—and she betrayed Klesko to the authorities. She brought Benjamin with her when she went to where Klesko kept his reserves—there was a cache hidden on the grounds near his dacha—which was a mistake. Once Benjamin saw what Klesko had there—”

  “Alexandrite …” Wally blurted her guess. It had occurred to her suddenly, a single critical item that might tie every aspect of the story together: the gem she’d received from her mother in the Brighton Beach file. Where had it come from? Had there been more?

  “Yes,” Dr. Rainer confirmed. “Once Benjamin saw Klesko’s cache of stones, he wouldn’t settle for anything less. Your mother had no choice. She was desperate.”

  “But Benjamin got the stones, right?” Wally said, trying to piece it all together. “He was paid, and Klesko was out of the way? Then why did she leave me behind?”

  “Things went terribly wrong.” Dr. Rainer sighed grimly. “Klesko’s associates came after Yalena. In their minds, Klesko’s money was their money. They tracked her down; they would never stop. Yalena was faced with an impossible choice—”

  Dr. Rainer was interrupted at that moment by a woman’s voice, calling out loudly from the direction of the building’s atrium. Her exact words were not clear from behind Dr. Rainer’s heavy office door. Dr. Rainer rose from her desk and made her way out of the office, onto the balcony hallway. Wally followed. As they reached the balcony, the woman’s call sounded again, and this time they could hear.

  “Hello?” came the woman’s voice. “Who’s there?”

  Dr. Rainer and Wally stepped to the balcony and looked up two floors to find a Middle Eastern woman, in her mid-thirties and wearing a business suit, leaning out over the railing. She spotted Dr. Rainer and Wally.

  “I hate when they do that,” the woman said.

  “Do what?” Dr. Rainer asked.

  “Some guy rang my line from down at the front door,” the woman said. “He said who he was, but I couldn’t understand his accent. I shouldn’t have buzzed him in, but I figured it was a delivery or something. None of those guys speak English anymore.”

  Now Dr. Rainer and Wally peered down toward the floor of the atrium, looking for whoever it was who lied his way into the building. The place was quiet and empty.

  “Hello?” Dr. Rainer called down toward the ground floor, her voice echoing in the high atrium space. No response. She was anxious now, and Wally was too.

  “I’ve been saying for years that we should have a doorman.” The Middle Eastern woman spoke down toward them, sounding put out but not actually worried.

  “Call the police right now,�
�� Dr. Rainer insisted.

  “Oh,” the woman said, taken aback by the urgency in Dr. Rainer’s words. “You think so? Okay, I—” The woman turned slightly away from the balcony, ready to walk back toward her office, but never made it any farther than that. A thunderous gunshot echoed through the atrium and a bullet tore through the woman’s chest, splattering blood on the railing as her lifeless body dropped out of view.

  Wally and Dr. Rainer gasped and screamed in horror at the sudden, breathless cruelty of a life being taken before their eyes.

  “Oh my God …” Wally could barely choke out the words.

  “It’s him,” Dr. Rainer said, her face gone white in terror. She grabbed Wally and pulled her back through her tiny waiting room and into her office, slamming and locking both doors behind them. Within moments they heard someone kicking away at the outside door, trying to get in.

  Wally imagined the man from the Hatches’ house—a man who radiated terror—and struggled to process the reality of her situation: he was her father, and he was a killer. Was he here for her? For Dr. Rainer? It didn’t matter. He was coming in, now.

  “The fire escape,” Wally said. She rushed to the office window and unlocked it, heaving it up on its tracks. There was an iron security grate attached outside the window, but she couldn’t get it open until she figured out that there was a release lever inside the office. Wally pulled the lever and the iron grate swung up and away from the window, clearing a path for escape, but … she immediately heard the sound of footsteps coming up the metal stairs of the fire escape. Wally looked down to see someone charging up the steps toward her, his long black hair whipping through the air—it was the younger man from the Hatches’ house.

  “Shit!” Wally said. Now she tried to close the iron grate, but it had swung completely away from the window and she couldn’t quite reach it. When she turned back around, she was surprised to see Dr. Rainer pulling a 9mm handgun from the bottom drawer in her desk.

  “For this day,” Dr. Rainer said, answering Wally’s look.

  The doctor reached out the open window and, looking like someone who had practiced on a firing range but never actually shot the handgun in the real world, fired three quick shots downward. The sound of footsteps climbing up from below stopped, at least temporarily, but from the direction of Dr. Rainer’s waiting room came a crashing sound—someone bursting through the outside door—and now the second person was in the waiting room area, kicking hard at the door to the inner office, where Wally and Dr. Rainer were now trapped.

  “These offices connect …” Dr. Rainer whisper-yelled to Wally, and stepped to a closed door on the side wall of her office. She pointed her gun at the lock on the side door, grimacing with both hands on the grip as she squeezed the heavy trigger and blasted the lock with two deafening shots. The side door swung open, revealing a lawyer’s office next door.

  Dr. Rainer charged into the lawyer’s office space and Wally followed her. Wally shut the door behind them and with Dr. Rainer’s help tipped a big metal file cabinet down to block it, and just in time. They heard footsteps in Dr. Rainer’s office and angry words being exchanged in Russian. Suddenly the door they had just passed through began to shudder as both men heaved against it, each effort shoving the file cabinet back an inch farther. Within seconds they would break their way into the lawyer’s office.

  “The balcony,” Dr. Rainer whispered. She and Wally rushed through the lawyer’s waiting room and headed toward the front door that would deliver them back on the atrium balcony, but just as Dr. Rainer’s hand reached out and gripped the doorknob, footsteps sounded out on the balcony, arriving outside the lawyer’s door, inches from where Wally and Dr. Rainer were standing. This pursuer started kicking at the door from the outside. The two women were blocked in again, this time trapped in the lawyer’s office.

  Dr. Rainer took a step back and fired two blind shots at the door—some curses in Russian sounded from outside, curses of anger not pain—and soon the kicking at that door began again. By now the first pursuer had shoved the file cabinet a foot back and was just inches from having it open far enough to squeeze through. He grunted like an enraged beast with each monumental effort.

  Until that moment Dr. Rainer had held herself together—had been strong on the outside, anyway—but now she began to tremble, and tears flowed out of her eyes.

  “Oh God …” she said. “He’ll make me tell. He’ll do anything. …”

  “There’s another connecting office,” Wally said, seeing that the office had a side door similar to the one in the lawyer’s office.

  Dr. Rainer seemed incapacitated by fear at that moment, so Wally grabbed the gun from her hand and stepped to the side door, firing two more shots into the door lock. The door swung open, this time revealing the working studio of some sort of craftsman—a builder of architectural models, which were arranged everywhere in the small space—plus a worktable covered with materials for modeling, including paints and solvents.

  The women ran into this next space, where the only piece of furniture big enough to block the door behind them was a huge, metal blueprint locker, too heavy for them to move. Wally looked around and discovered a softball trophy atop the blueprint locker. Wally grabbed the trophy and jammed the narrow top end—the figure of a softball player crouched in a batting posture—in between the door and the floor, like a doorstop.

  Wally turned back toward Dr. Rainer, who had flung the craftsman’s window up and was now trying to pull the latch under the window that would release the security grate. It was jammed shut. Wally joined in the effort, but the lever would not budge. The fire escape was blocked to them.

  There was no second side door to this office, only a front door—where one of the men was already trying to break through—and the door back to the lawyer’s office, jammed shut by the softball trophy, but now that door was under assault also, the second man kicking and heaving himself against it, the sharp edge of the trophy digging into the floor but slowly inching backward, giving in to the pressure.

  Wally and Dr. Rainer were cornered here, with no way out. In the midst of this storm of violence—the two Russians throwing themselves relentlessly at each door, ready to break through—Wally felt a strange calm come over her. What was that about? Part of her felt that there would be some sort of relief to surrender, that she would give anything for all the fear and doubt she had been living with to simply end, even if that happened through violence and pain. She felt an urge to open the door to the beasts outside and accept her fate. She turned to Dr. Rainer, who was still nearly paralyzed by fear.

  “Tell me now,” Wally said to the terrified doctor. “I know now who my father is. Who is my mother, Dr. Rainer?”

  Dr. Rainer looked at Wally and seemed to understand; whatever fate awaited her, Wally could face it bravely if only she knew the answer to that simple question. The doctor smiled a little, sadly, and opened her mouth to speak.

  “Oh, Wally,” she said, “you already—”

  But those were Dr. Rainer’s last words. Four rapid gunshots sounded from outside the office’s front door, the bullets ripping through the lock—an attempt to blow it open. The lock held strong, miraculously, but one of the shots deflected off the metal with a strange, high-pitched ping like a sound effect from a Saturday morning cartoon, and Dr. Rainer’s voice went silent. Wally looked and saw a bullet hole open up in the doctor’s throat, arterial blood spurting out as Charlene Rainer dropped lifeless to the floor.

  “No!” Wally howled, and fell to her knees, pulling her scarf off and holding it to the doctor’s throat in a desperate effort to staunch the bleeding, but it was a futile gesture: the woman was dead. In a rage now, Wally stood and fired Dr. Rainer’s gun into the wood of the front door, with no way to know if the barrage had done any damage. The gun’s magazine clicked empty after only four shots.

  “Shit!” Wally growled as she tossed the useless weapon aside.

  The man out front began heaving himself against the door again
, grunting loudly with each effort. The lock and hinges of the door creaked and groaned, ready to give out at any moment, and the same continued from the side door.

  Wally looked around desperately for any option, and her eyes fell on the model builder’s worktable, where the cans of paint and solvent sat. The label on the solvent can warned that the liquid was severely toxic and flammable. Wally grabbed the solvent and popped the top off. She stepped to the front door and crouched low, setting the solvent can at the bottom of the door so that the nozzle was stuck underneath, facing outward. Wally stood, pulled a lighter from her pocket, and then, with her left foot, stomped hard down onto the can. The solvent sprayed under the door, and at that moment Wally jumped backward a few steps, lit the lighter, and threw it toward the can.

  A flash of light flared from the other side of the door, followed by loud curses from Alexei Klesko. Wally immediately unlocked the door and rushed out, sprinting past Klesko, whose pant legs were now on fire. The enraged man whipped off his leather jacket and started using it to snuff the flames as Wally raced onto the indoor balcony, only to find herself staring straight down the muzzle of a gun held by the other Russian, the young one with the long hair.

  “It is over now …” the young man said calmly.

  In this fleeting moment, Wally’s eyes met the younger man’s, and between them there was a moment of … what? Confusion?

  No. Recognition.

  At this moment Klesko stomped out of the model builder’s office, his pant legs blackened but the flames all gone. He raised his gun, and now there were two barrels aimed directly at Wally.

  “Fucking bitch …” he barked. “You tell me where—”

  But suddenly two gunshots exploded from behind them, ripping into the balcony ceiling. Wally and the two Russians looked to discover Atley Greer stalking down the hallway toward them, his service weapon raised in their direction.

  “POLICE! NOBODY MOVES!” Atley shouted, but Klesko and the younger man immediately disobeyed, ducking low and using Wally for cover as they turned back down along the balcony and charged in through the door of Dr. Rainer’s office, firing wildly back toward Atley as they went. Wally dropped to the floor as the shots filled the air.