by Unknown
‘Sure,’ Jack said, dropping his napkin and rising to say goodbye. ‘What’s that?’
Orsetta smiled. ‘If you come to Rome to see us, then next time dinner is on me, and we stay away from the mind-games, yes?’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Jack. He gently took hold of her shoulders as she leant towards him and they kissed each other on both cheeks.
‘Ciao,’ she said, and left him with a smile that could light up New York, and a waft of peach perfume that could jump-start a dying heart. After she’d gone, he couldn’t help but put his hand to his cheek where her lips had been.
19
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York
Lu Zagalsky glances over at the frightened punter in the driver’s seat and wonders if she’s wasting her time. First off, the loser can’t get money out of the ATM machine, now he wants her to buckle up to travel less than a mile on a damned nearly deserted road in the middle of the goddamn night. Chances are that the sucker won’t even be able to get it up and will then refuse to pay. ‘Whatever,’ she says, deciding to give it a go and clunking the belt into place. She slides some gum into her mouth and chews noisily as he cruises east down Beach Avenue.
‘Vy goyoreeteh po rusky?’ she asks, keen to check if he knows any Russian before she starts hurling any serious insults his way.
‘I’m sorry. Say that again?’ the driver says politely, his hands never leaving the wheel, his eyes fixed safely on the road.
‘Just wanted to know if you spoke Russian,’ says Lu. ‘Lots of guys round here do, it’s pretty much a Russian neighbourhood, you know?’
‘Okay, I see,’ says the guy, checking his speedo, making sure he doesn’t break the thirty miles an hour barrier. Jeez, it’s been a while since Lu has seen anyone as strung up and hung up as this punter.
‘No, no, I don’t speak any Russian,’ he adds. ‘I’m an accountant, just working down here at the moment, that’s why I’m a bit lost.’
Suddenly the punter gets a whole lot more interesting. I mean, Lu tells herself, whoever heard of a poor accountant? Let him pull a ton of paper out of the ATM, get him somewhere he can take his pants off and then do a runner with the cash and maybe his wallet too? The plan sounds a good one. Hardly original, hookers have been working it for years. Nevertheless, it’s still surprisingly effective, especially on a dumb ass ebanat like this one.
‘Next left,’ says Lu, pointing through the windshield. ‘See the electronics store on the corner?’
‘Yes, yes, I see it,’ he says, leaning forward and squinting.
‘Left there, then the next ATM’s’bout a hundred yards down on the right.’
Ebanat! she says to herself as he indicates way too early, slows almost to a stop in order to round the corner and then takes an eternity to park at the kerb. She’s seen grandmas drive faster than this jerk.
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ he tells her, flapping the door shut as he heads to the cash machine.
Within seconds, Lu has the glove locker open and is scanning it for anything stealable. Shit, man, the guy doesn’t even have a CD worth taking! Just car documents and a squeegee for the windows. Lu clicks the compartment shut as she watches him turn around from the machine, put his wallet away in his jacket and return to the car. ‘Thank you,’ he says, politely. Very boringly, he puts his seat belt on again, checks the handbrake and starts the engine.
‘Okay, mister,’ says Lu, her patience about to snap. ‘Now you’re all cashed-up, let’s go some place and spend some of it on me. You got a hotel nearby?’
‘N-no,’ he says, his nerves showing again. ‘I’ve got a rental, off Fillmore, other side of the Marine Park. Maybe you c-could come back there?’
‘Maybe I c-could,’ she says cheekily. ‘You know the way?’ she adds, not certain this guy knows the route to his own shoelaces, let alone how to get home.
‘I th-think so,’ he stutters.
‘Good, then let’s get rollin’!’ she says, trying to whip up some urgency. ‘It’s not too late to give you a night you’ll never forget.’ She shoots him her sexiest smile, the one that melts even Oleg, but she doesn’t detect even a flicker of warmth on his face as he coldly clunks the column gear-shift into Drive and pulls away.
Lu stares out of the side window and neither of them speaks much as the bright lights of the Beach fade behind them. After about ten minutes she sees signs for Fillmore and Gerritsen and in the yellow headlight beams she spots houseboats tottering on stilts and dozens of shabby moorings in need of paint and varnish. Somewhere between Gerritsen and East 38th her last punter of the night turns the car into a rundown driveway cut through overgrown bushes and overhanging trees and comes to a stop.
‘We here?’ Lu says, surprised that he’s completed the task without any further checks, delays or complications.
‘Yes, please wait a minute,’ says the driver, pressing some automatic key fob that opens a big up-and-over metal door to a double garage. He slips the car into Drive again, nudges it slowly in and automatically lowers the door.
Lu’s out of her seat and out of the car before the garage door’s even come down. She wants to get this over with as quickly as possible and then catch a cab out of here. More than anything though, right now she wants the washroom. He flicks on a light and she blinks at the brightness.
‘I have a key, I just have to find it,’ he says, slowly inspecting several brass and steel keys on some kind of ring.
‘Here it is,’ he finally announces, then negotiates a route around the front of the car to a connecting door from the garage to the kitchen of the old house.
More lights come on and Lu looks around. Not much to the place: a tacky old kitchen dog-legs into a crummy living area with an old three-piece suite, a fireplace and dirty white rug but no TV. Lu has never been in a house that doesn’t have a TV; in fact, she didn’t think such places existed. ‘Hey, can I use your john?’ she shouts to him as he locks the back door linking to the garage.
‘By the front entrance, or there’s one upstairs,’ he says, nodding to the open wooden stairs that climb from the far corner of the lounge.
Lu goes for the downstairs john. While she’s in there, she tries to work out how much he’s good for. The house is a disappointment, there’s no sign of a wife around, and that means no jewellery. The guy had to stop for cash, so there’s probably nothing more than loose change on his bedside table; maybe, if she’s lucky, a watch or some gold ring or neck chain, though he didn’t look like the type to wear anything that expensive. She makes up her mind that the best bet is to sting him for a special ‘overnight’ rate, on account that she agreed to come back to his place. Five hundred bucks for the rest of the night, that’s what she is going to ask him for. Or at least that will be her starting price. She guesses that if he’s an accountant, then probably the only thing he’s good at is figures, and that means he may want to bargain her down a bit. Yep, start around five hundred dollars, Lu; if you’re smart, you might end up with two fifty to three hundred.
She finishes off, flushes the toilet and runs water in the sink. Staring into a mirror over a dirty glass shelf, she sees her eye-shadow and liner are smudged and the whites of her eyes are starting to look bloodshot. Hardly a picture of beauty, but what the fuck, this ain’t no Hollywood audition, and the weak-spined mudak out there with a hard on ain’t goin’ to be saying no to what she’s offering. Maybe, if all goes well here, then tomorrow she’ll give herself some time off, rest up a bit and cut Oleg a slice of tonight’s extra cash as though she’d been out on her early shift as usual.
Lu powders some shine off the bridge of her nose, kisses her newly lipsticked lips together and opens the door, ready to demand her five hundred bucks and put up with anything the useless little creep wants in return. ‘Okay, mister, it’s playtime!’ she shouts, heading back into the lounge.
From behind her, a rope noose is slipped over her head and jerked viciously back. Ludmila Zagalsky is swept from her feet and crashes head fi
rst to the ground, her fingers clawing as the rope bites and burns into her neck, choking off all air from her lungs.
‘Welcome to Spider’s web,’ says a cold and stutter-free voice from above her.
20
Florence, Tuscany
The railway station in Florence was a cauldron of heat, cooking a human minestrone of travellers from all over Europe. Tempers boiled as tourists bumped and banged into each other, searching for directions to their trains. Finally, streams of people surged, spilled and dribbled down their chosen platforms, squeezing into the baking-hot carriages.
Jack was fortunate enough to find an empty one at the far end of the Siena train but it was still unpleasantly hot and stank of a thousand strangers’ bodies. He chugged back half a bottle of lukewarm water he’d taken from the fridge at the Sofitel and shook his shirt from his sticky body.
He tried to open a window but it was jammed. As he sat back on the broken springs of the dusty seat, he could see that outside a couple of members of the transport police, the Polizia Stradale, were sharing a cigarette in the shade after making what had currently become a routine check for terrorist bombs. Above their heads robot CCTV cameras scanned the tracks. Jack recognized them as state-of-the-art IMAS cameras. Even here, in historic Florence, Bill Gates was present. The Microsoft-based Integrated Multimedia Archive System powered more than three thousand cameras on Italian tracks and had become the global standard-setter for video capture and information analysis.
On the sticky table in front of Jack was the still unopened envelope given to him by Orsetta, on behalf of Massimo Albonetti. He and Mass had become friends a long time ago, during an Interpol exchange held in Rome. A year later, Massimo had helped Jack crack a paedophile ring in Little Italy when New York’s Italian underworld had closed its doors to local cops and sought to settle the problem the traditional Mafia way using torture and murder. Albonetti was a no-nonsense cop, who, like Jack, had a degree in psychology and saw profiling merely as a powerful tool to help investigators focus on behavioural clues, not as a crystal ball that would magically produce the name of a killer.
Jack finished his bottled water and slit open the envelope with his finger. He pulled out a piece of expensive cream paper covered in Massimo’s handwriting.
Dear Jack,
I am pleased you are reading this. It means that the things I have heard about you retiring are simply not true and that a policeman’s heart and brain still beat vigorously inside of you. I am very glad that this is so!
I hope you will excuse me, old friend, but I was unable to get away from this awful Europol meeting in Brussels, so I sent Detective Portinari to visit you instead and persuade you to give us your expert assistance on a very disturbing homicide. Jack, if after reading the documentation you feel it is too difficult a case for you to be involved in, then I fully respect your right to decline.
Like many of your friends, I have been praying for you to make a full and fast recovery from your illness and if I didn’t think that only you could really help us with this particular case, then honestly, I would never have troubled you.
Inside this package are some brief confidential documents which will give you a quick insight into the investigation, and why I have been forced by events to ask for your help.
Perhaps when you have come to your decision you will call me, either on my office number or my cell phone?
I remain, your friend,
Massimo
Jack let out a slow sigh. He hadn’t heard from Massimo since his breakdown, but this was an entirely different note from the kind and supportive one his friend had sent back then. Did he really want to immerse himself in a case that had such a distinct echo of BRK about it? Was he ready for that kind of test? Could he honestly convince Nancy that him going back to police work was for the best? The questions flooded into his mind, but the answers stayed elusively out of reach.
Jack pulled the envelope open again and emptied out another sealed envelope, marked confidential, with his name on it. He’d received many such documents in the past, summaries that reduced to stark facts and figures the death of some innocent victim and the lifelong anguish of their family.
Down the platform, a long, shrill whistle cut through the stifling air. The train doors thudded shut and the metal snake slowly stirred itself, slithering lazily out of the shade of the engine shed and into the blistering brightness of the mid-day sunshine. Jack felt a wave of sadness hit him. It had been a long time since he’d journeyed into the lonely, stressful world of murder and deep down he wasn’t quite certain he was truly ready to go there again.
21
Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York
For a second, Ludmila Zagalsky thinks she is dead, then as soon as she opens her eyes, she wishes she was. Now, despite being totally disorientated, she instantly remembers the full severity of the dilemma she’s in. That useless mudak, that creep who was so boring that he wouldn’t even drive above the speed limit, had jumped her and nearly choked her to death with his own handmade hangman’s noose. Fuck, Lu, she thinks to herself, how many times have you told people never to trust anyone? Now you let this happen. Remember, girl, life is full of fucking surprises, and they always bite you on the ass.
Slowly, consciousness and awareness return to her traumatized mind. She’s flat out on her back, looking up at the ceiling, but, she realizes, she’s no longer in the lounge, she’s somewhere else.
Where?
There’s a light on, shining painfully into her eyes, but somehow the room looks black. Lu tries to move her head to one side to take in more information but she feels that the noose is still there, pulling across her windpipe.
A noose? What the fuck is happening here?
The pressure is from below her though, not from above. She realizes too that her wrists and ankles are cuffed with leather restraints. She tugs at them and alarm spreads through her body when she hears what sounds like the rustle of chains beneath her.
The pieces of the jigsaw slowly slot into place. She feels cold. Cold all over. She’s naked, spreadeagled on some kind of bondage table. The rope is tied underneath it, so that when she tries to raise her head she starts to choke. She would scream, scream for all she’s worth, except that she can barely breathe.
I’m choking! Oh my God, I’m choking!
Some form of cloth is jammed in her mouth and held in place by sticky parcel tape wound around her face.
Panic grips her. Her heart is racing dangerously and she knows that unless she calms down she will suffocate.
Come on girl, get your shit together. Get it together or you are one dead bitch.
She concentrates hard on breathing slowly through her nose and gradually manages to dip her pulse rate and control herself.
And then, as she lies there, staring at the strangely black ceiling, she sees him again. Leaning over her.
His face is so big and so close to her that she can see the pores on his skin. She can see the hairs in his nose and feel the heat of his breath.
Not so fucking harmless now, is he, girl?
‘Hello, my little Sugar,’ he says softly, smelling her skin, rubbing his face against hers like a pet dog sniffing out a new visitor. ‘Don’t worry, my little darling, Spider’s here. Spider’s right beside you.’
She isn’t as pretty as the other Sugars, Spider thinks to himself, but he can tell she is just the same as them. They all thought that they were strong and didn’t need anyone, could play the game by their rules, could come and go in people’s lives as and when they wished. Well, they were wrong. All wrong. No one leaves Spider. No one. Ever.
He pulls over a leather-topped, wooden stool so he can sit facing her. ‘How long you stay – alive – depends upon how well you listen,’ he says.
Spider has a stack of digitally printed photographs in his left hand.
‘Poor Sugar. I know you live in a world of lies,’ he says pityingly, ‘but don’t worry, I’m not going to deceive you. I think relationships shoul
d be based on honesty between couples, and I promise you now, right at the beginning of our relationship, that I will always be honest with you.’
He pauses for a moment and then almost tenderly brushes away some strands of black hair that are plastered to her sweating brow and streaked across her eyes. ‘I’m going to show you some photographs, some family snaps,’ he says, ‘so you know that everything I am about to say to you is the truth. Would you like that? Would you like to see my pictures?’
Lu thinks she’s going crazy. She’s naked and tied up and now some perverted wacko wants to show her his family album. Man, they get weirder by the fucking day.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says Spider sarcastically, laying the photographs face down on her chest. ‘I should loosen your noose; that rope must be really cutting into you.’
Lu hears him fumbling with the rope and feels the tension ease around her neck. Man, that feels good. She never realized that one of the sweetest feelings in life was that of simply not being choked to death by a rope.
‘Better?’ asks Spider.
Lu manages a small nod.
He lifts the photographs off her prostrate body and rearranges them in some kind of order, almost as though he’s just drawn a hand of cards. ‘The photographs that I’m about to show you are of other women, women who’ve been in the same position as you. If you read the newspapers, then you may well even recognize one or two of them.’
He leans closer to her. ‘Do you read the papers, Sugar? You sure don’t look like you do. Well, maybe the funnies, but I guess that’s about it.’
Lu visualizes spitting in his arrogant face, kicking him in the balls for being a mouthy swoloch, leaving him rolling in agony on the sidewalk to watch her cute Russian butt wiggle off in the distance.