What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Slava, his ugly face as serious as I had ever seen it, shook his head at Lagunov.

  Lagunov looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Only a fool sticks his head in a hungry lion’s mouth.”

  “If it’s the fool’s only real option, he would be a fool not to do it.”

  “But, Gus Murphy, what can you possibly accomplish by this?”

  “For one, it’ll save your life. And I think it might save ours as well.”

  “I repeat to you, you are a very brave man, a loyal man. But why risk so much for a man like this one?” He pointed at Slava.

  “That’s my business, but if for nothing else, he saved my life. As you, too, have twice saved mine, though for very different reasons. Look, Lagunov, we don’t have much time. This is the deal. Both Slava and I will meet with your employer wherever he wishes. We will both be unarmed and I give you my word there will be no tricks. The only precondition is that he promises to listen fully to what I have to say.”

  “But what if he listens and decides that it is still in his interests to have your friend over there eliminated?”

  Slava answered. “Then I am saying goodbye to my friend Gus Murphy and watching him leave. I will stay to be staring in the face what is coming for all men.”

  I pushed. “Can you make it happen?”

  “I will have to if I wish to walk out of this building,” Lagunov said. “You are not the only resourceful man in this room.”

  “You will take your men off Maggie immediately?”

  “As soon as I leave the building.”

  “And Slava can come back to work and live his life until the meeting?”

  “Agreed.”

  “I have your word?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Slava, let him go.”

  Slava hesitated for a second, then, backing up into the hallway, he let Lagunov pass, carrying our fates with him as he went.

  65

  (SATURDAY MORNING, ONE WEEK LATER)

  We had returned to our post-shift Saturday breakfast ritual, but Slava was not attacking his breakfast with his usual vacuum-cleaner gusto. Never before had I seen him leave a single potato, sliver of egg, or crust of toast on his plate. Christ, he hadn’t even touched his sausages. Slava was a big man with big appetites. Not today. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t very hungry, either. Besides the stitches along my chin and bruised jaw, I had been living in a kind of purgatory since the events at Gyron had unfolded. Slava, too. We had things hanging over our heads that were so completely out of the realm of our control that we couldn’t even pretend to influence the outcome. It was at times like these that I understood the function of prayer. I understood it, though I knew better than to try it. Fool me once . . .

  The cops knew nothing about Slava’s part in what had happened at Gyron, but there was a chance, a slim one, that the Suffolk County DA’s Office might charge Spears and me or go to a grand jury to get indictments against the both of us for our shoot-’em-up cowboy antics. Although we had broken up a major criminal conspiracy in the process, what we had done wasn’t strictly legal and we had left a lot of dead bodies to clean up in our wake. Though neither Micah Spears nor I were responsible for any of those bodies, sometimes politics and the public’s mood have a lot more to do with what a DA does than the truth. Asher Wilkes told me to sit tight while the DA held his wet finger to the political winds. Asher said we’d know soon enough. Soon enough for whom, exactly?

  Spears, because of the severity of his injuries and his concussion, had been worthless to the cops. That left me as the only credible witness to the Gyron bloodbath. What civilians didn’t understand about police work was that it wasn’t always a search for the truth. More often than not, it was a search for a narrative that fit the facts and evidence of the crime. And that’s exactly what I’d given the SCPD detectives. I didn’t stray far from the truth until it was necessary. Lies that were as close to the truth as possible, as I was discovering, were best. For most of my life I had been a bad liar because I hadn’t had a whole lot of experience at it. The last several months had changed all that.

  Anyway, I told the truth, such as it was, about why Spears and I had done what we did. I told them the truth about what we had planned to do, what we did, and what went impossibly sideways. I told them the truth right up until the part where Lagunov entered the utility room and blew the back off Carl Ryan’s head all over us. That’s the point at which the truth train went straight off the rails.

  “Listen, Detective, I don’t know who those guys were in the masks, but my guess is they were MS-Thirteen or the Latin Kings. For all I know, they might’ve been Bloods or Crips or some other fucking rival gang. All I know is I was happy to see them. They came busting through the utility room door and put a hole in Ryan’s head. The shooter took one look at me and Spears, saw we were in bad shape, and split. I mean, look at me. Look at Spears. Ryan and his guys fucked us up pretty good. Spears is half dead and I think my jaw is broken. I can only tell you what I saw.”

  I wasn’t sure they even half believed me, but the facts fit the narrative and the narrative fit the facts. Of course it helped that my chin was still bleeding pretty badly and that the left side of my face was swollen up like a beach ball. And it was a good thing Slava had thought to take Lagunov’s weapons with him when he left. Those would have been difficult if not impossible for me to explain away. If I was charged, Asher said he could beat the charges with any jury the DA could put me up in front of. Slava’s limbo was worse.

  Lagunov had been good to his word, calling me later that Saturday evening to promise he had taken his men off Maggie and that she was in no danger from him. He actually offered an apology for threatening her at all. I let that pass. He also said that Slava could return to his old life, at least temporarily.

  “The meeting?” I asked.

  He laughed, then clicked off before answering.

  So I understood Slava’s lack of appetite. The longer a man spends in limbo, the more it feels like hell. Waiting, even for the most patient of men, breeds a kind of self-torment.

  “Gus,” Slava said, noticing me looking at his plate, “come, we are going now.”

  I paid the bill. He left the tip.

  In the vestibule I asked, as I always did, “Do you want a ride?”

  He answered as he always answered. “Slava is walking home. I needing air to think.”

  But when we stepped outside, the sun now risen up, the air smelling both of spring and jet fumes, it was clear to us that the waiting was at end.

  “Please, gentlemen,” Lagunov said, “get into the van.”

  66

  (SATURDAY MORNING)

  We weren’t alone with Lagunov. There were two bruisers in the van with us. They were both bigger than either Slava or me, and both were armed. We didn’t get much of a look at them since the minute the doors closed, bags were placed over our heads.

  “Relax, gentlemen. This is only a precaution for us all,” Lagunov explained in his cool monotone. “We will be in the van for some time together. If you need water, please ask. Unfortunately, there will be no rest stops. So maybe it will be better to be thirsty.”

  Slava grunted. I didn’t even do that much. I was too busy concentrating. Because I knew the roads in the area so well, I could figure out part of our route. A lot of it was along the LIE. No other road on the island was so long, flat, and straight. I could tell we were heading west toward the city. Even on a quiet Saturday morning there were certain exits—43 for Syosset, 37 for Roslyn, 31 for the Cross Island Parkway—where traffic always slowed. After that it became a guessing game. Were we going to the Bronx? Westchester? To Manhattan? Brooklyn? It didn’t matter, anyway. After a while I stopped trying to figure out our route, focusing instead on what I might say to Lagunov’s master in order to keep Slava alive.

  About thirty minutes after where I figure we’d
crossed into Queens, the van came to a stop. When the doors opened I was hit with the powerful salt scent of the sea. That really wasn’t much of a clue, since New York City was pretty much surrounded by water, much of it the Atlantic Ocean. We were led out of the van, my running shoes crunching gravel beneath them and then slipping slightly as I was led onto the wet boards of a pier. We were lowered into a boat and not a very big one. It was rocking pretty good under my feet. Someone shoved me down onto an uncushioned plank.

  “Now would not be the time for you to get seasick,” Lagunov said. “The bags will stay on no matter. Do you understand?”

  I answered yes. Again Slava grunted. I could only imagine what was going through his mind. For all he knew, he was only a few minutes away from his death. The only thing standing between him and his execution was me. It had seemed like a good idea at the start. We’d gotten pretty far, but it seemed less and less of a good idea as time passed. A motor started up and we were moving. I don’t think we were moving very quickly, but, with my senses distorted by the bag and adrenaline, it felt like we were traveling at the speed of sound. Each of the bow’s confrontations with the light chop was jarring. The smell of the sea mixed with the fumes from the engine. I could also smell that someone was smoking a cigarette. The motor cut back. We turned gently. Our little boat banged into something and we stopped. Our motor was silenced.

  Lagunov said, “We are going to help you onto a ladder that you must climb yourselves. There will be someone behind each of you if you slip, but do not slip. Especially you, Slava. My motivation to save you is very limited.”

  There was no grunt from Slava this time. No one slipped.

  Once on board, I was led down some steps, along a short hallway, and through a doorway. A door closed behind me and the bag was removed from my head. The cabin was well lit, but subtly so. I was sure we were on a yacht, a big one, maybe the one Maggie had worked on, maybe not. Even so, the cabin might have been the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company. There were eight seats upholstered in camel-colored leather around a beautiful green glass table. A map of the world was etched into the center of the table, and vases of bright orange, red, and yellow flowers stood on either side of the etching. The floor was covered in thick beige carpeting and the walls were lined in a tight-grained exotic striped wood the likes of which I had never seen before. And on the walls were paintings, some that looked vaguely familiar. Work by famous artists, but not paintings that I knew. What I knew about art couldn’t fill a paper cup.

  “You have an eye for art, Mr. Murphy?” said a short, bald man with a glint in his doe-brown eyes and a smile on his face. He rose out of his chair and waddled over to me.

  I was surprised to see I was alone in the room with the short man. No Slava, no Lagunov, no helper monkeys. The little man was dressed in a blue blazer, a powder-blue polo shirt, khaki slacks, and rope-colored deck shoes. It all looked like expensive stuff and the blazer was definitely tailored, but he had the type of bowling-pin body that no amount of tailoring or fancy clothing could make attractive. But men with money never have to worry about their looks, or so I’ve heard.

  “That painting behind you there is a Vermeer. This one,” he said, taking me by the elbow and walking me to my right, “is a Christina Rossetti. I adore the Pre-Raphaelites. Here is an early Pollock. I’m not a fan, but my guests are impressed by it. That is a Warhol. I despise Warhol. He was a phony. He took other people’s labors, did a bit of slap and tickle, and called it his own. And this, this,” he practically squealed, “is my favorite. A very late Basquiat. So sparse. So vivid.”

  To me it looked like a skull drawn by an angry second-grader who wanted to use all sixty-four crayons in his box. But like I said, I didn’t know art. I didn’t even know who Vermeer or Rossetti were. I knew Warhol because it was impossible not to. And the only reason I knew the others was because I had once helped Krissy study for an art history test. The little man spoke with a funky accent. His English was Russian accented, but it was a more cultured one than Slava’s or Lagunov’s. And it sounded as if he had learned his English in the UK or Australia.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Murphy. I have been a rude host. Can I get you something to drink? Something to eat. Ask for anything and we’ll more than likely have it.”

  “Just some water. Thank you, Mr. . . .”

  “My name is unimportant, Mr. Murphy,” he said, walking over to a wet bar and pulling out a bottle of Fuji water from a small refrigerator. He twisted open the cap and handed the rectangular bottle to me. “May I call you Gus?”

  “Sure.”

  “Please, Gus, sit.”

  He gestured at a seat close to the head of the table. It sounded like a polite invitation, but I recognized an order when I heard one. After I sat, he sat at the head of the table where he had been seated when the bag was removed from my head.

  The little man leaned toward me, “Listen carefully to me, Gus. I have given you the courtesy of this meeting because Lagunov tells me you are a resourceful man, a man deserving of respect. He does not say things of this nature about many people. That you are here at all and that you do this thing out of loyalty to a friend proves to me Lagunov’s judgments of you are correct. I could use a man like you. I could trust a man like you not because I paid you, but because it is in your nature to be trustworthy. Yet I must warn you that your prospects of saving your friend’s life are not very good.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I am told you are fully aware of what the man you know as Slava has done in the past.”

  I nodded that I was.

  “We will not debate the morality of his acts here. I am no one to judge him. But it surprises me that a man, even such a loyal man as yourself, should risk your life for a man who has murdered so many people.” He dismissively waved his pudgy little hand at me. “Yes, yes, he saved your life. I am aware. Still, I wonder.”

  “Slava feels he has to live to atone and suffer.”

  “Very Russian of him. I commend him, but you must understand my position. He is a problem, an inconvenience to my friends and business associates. These friends and associates, they are powerful people who have asked me to remove this splinter before it festers. This Slava, he can be a very troubling embarrassment to my friends.”

  “Lagunov trusts me. You seem to trust me. I give you my word that Slava will never divulge any information about what happened in Russia all those years ago. He never told me, and I am the only friend he has in the world. I had to figure it out for myself.”

  He smiled sadly at me. “Gus, you have just made the argument against yourself. If you could figure it out, then so can others. And these others might find a certain advantage in using Slava’s knowledge against my friends.”

  “But he can’t prove any of it. He has no documents. No recordings. Nothing.”

  “In Russia, there are records of him, of what has happened. Please, understand these are very high stakes. I am afraid even if I were to trust you and trust him to never speak of his role in those unfortunate incidents, it is safer if he is gone. Men can be forced to break their promises. If Lagunov had put just a little more pressure on you with your lovely Magdalena, you would have given up Slava, no? What guarantees would I have that Slava would not do the same with his secrets if you or a loved one were threatened? No, Gus, you must see my position.”

  I was getting that sick feeling in my belly as I felt Slava’s life slipping out of my fingers.

  “You said you would like to have a man like me work for you,” I said. “Okay, I’m yours. I’ll work for you. All you need do is spare Slava’s life. Ask Lagunov, he’ll tell you, I am a resourceful person.”

  The little man rubbed his chin. “It is a tempting offer. Believe me, it is. Lagunov is loyal, but I pay for his loyalty. A man like me cannot trust many people on their face and I would trust you. I do trust you, but you would be too small a cog in the machinery. These fri
ends and associates of mine, they are worth more money to me than you can possibly imagine. So, Gus Murphy, I am sorry. You have been valiant and shrewd, but not shrewd enough, I am afraid. I will call Lagunov to come fetch you. Would you like to say goodbye to your friend? Maybe this would be too hard for you.”

  My mind was racing so fast I was dizzy and the knot in my stomach was about ready to squeeze the desperation up into my throat so I could choke on it.

  “My father was a nasty drunk,” I heard myself say, my voice distant and muted. “And I don’t think he said five wise things to me in his whole fucking lifetime. But he once said something I think you should listen to.”

  The little man’s eyes got wide and he tilted his head in concentration. “And what words of advice from your drunk father should I heed?”

  “Your friends now may not be your friends tomorrow.” My voice was back and strong. “It was easy to understand how he had lost his friends. But you don’t have to be a nasty prick to lose friends. I had a best friend, a fellow cop, a pallbearer at my son’s funeral, who fucked my wife only a few months after my boy died. I have lost many friends. Some you shed as you age. Some fade away. Some you piss off. Some piss you off. Is it the same for you?”

  He was rubbing his chin again. “Yes, it is the way of life. Continue, I am listening.”

  “These friends and business associates of yours, can you guarantee that they will always be there as friends?” I asked, the knot loosening its grip on my intestines. “Okay, so you kill Slava and remove the splinter for them. Tomorrow, when they no longer need you or they need someone else more or it is in their self-interest to call you a splinter, what leverage will you have? But if you keep Slava alive, his knowledge becomes your leverage. Keep Slava alive and the splinter becomes a club, one to keep in reserve as insurance against the day they would put your head on the plate.”