The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  Behind Honey Li, a step or two back, the chalk-white figure of Senator Matilda Bolt, Harry Nash’s political muscle and running mate.

  Nash left the crowd and came striding across the white expanse and put his arm around his wife’s waist and swept her into the theater.

  “About the church,” I said when they were gone. “Lime might have detected surveillance we had on him. That’s why the operation was moved up.”

  “Sadly,” he said, “I think I may be a little ahead of you on that.”

  A look of weariness had crept into his eyes.

  “I think we found your girl.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Ah, come on, Alex,” DeLucca shook his head. He swept his eyes around the plaza, checking the disposition of his officers, then turned back to me. “You had a kid out at the beach snooping around in the Russian bars. Then one day she’s not snooping anymore. We picked up some chatter that you couldn’t find her. Well, I think we found her.”

  * * *

  Of course I had to leave. Annie took it well. Maybe not that hard a choice: night at the ballet with dad, or night at the ballet with twenty-one-year-old guy in dress uniform. The deal was the cop would take her home after the ballet. Looking back on it now, I don’t blame the cop for what happened. In a place teeming with glittering, powerful people and swarming with protective services, you’d have to expect that maybe for a second, a rookie could be distracted. Bad night all around.

  5

  Amy Curtain was in Prospect Park, by the boat rental. The stale smell of the lagoon oozed through the dark foliage. Bats flicked through the outer glow of the crime-scene lights. At the war memorial beside the shore, a bronze angel folded her wings around a soldier whose eyes were fixed on his own death. There’d been no one to comfort Amy Curtain.

  She’d been concentrating her efforts at Brighton Beach. If that’s where they grabbed her, it was only a fifteen-minute drive away. A long fifteen minutes, although the real butchery took place in Prospect Park. According to the medical examiner, the extent of the blood-soaked ground meant she’d been alive when they got there.

  In the methodical activity of the crime scene, with the click of cameras and the flash of strobes, the ugly details took on an antiseptic look as the remains of a young woman were transformed into a series of exhibits.

  Her fingers lay severed in her lap. Her red hair was matted to the right side of her head. The death blow was a slash to the abdomen. The knife had sliced through her shirt and opened her stomach.

  “How much did this kid even know?” DeLucca said as crime scene techs in white suits drifted in and out of the shadows, collecting body parts. “Was she read in at a high level?”

  “No,” I said. I was going through her pockets.

  “Does this look like an interrogation to you? How old was she?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Right. Twenty-two.”

  I could hear the anger in his voice. We’d both seen people who’d been violently killed. Not like this.

  “They cut off a finger,” DeLucca continued. “Maybe she tells them what she knows, maybe not. Whatever, they cut off another finger. By that time, she for sure spills what she knows, which according to you isn’t much.”

  “Alright if I open the jacket?” I said to the medical examiner. I wanted to check the lining. He nodded.

  “These guys know she’s not a real pro,” DeLucca persisted. He was getting on my nerves. “So why do they keep cutting?” he said. “There’s only one answer. It’s not her they’re working on. It’s you.”

  DeLucca studied the scene for a moment.

  “This is some serious psycho shit, Alex.”

  “I fucking get it, OK?” I snapped.

  It was obvious from the moment we’d stepped into the lights and seen what the killers had left for us. It wouldn’t have taken them very long to get out of Amy everything she had. It wasn’t much. She could tell them who she worked for. That’s about it. Chuck hadn’t briefed her on the background. He’d given her a simple assignment: nose around Brighton Beach, eavesdrop in bars, see if you can pick up anything about diamonds.

  I’d just opened the lining of Amy’s jacket when I heard DeLucca’s phone. He stepped away to answer it, listened for a moment, then said, “What do you mean, not in her seat?” And so help me God, my heart stopped beating.

  “Could she have got through the perimeter?” He listened, then said in a voice taut with anger, “So she’s inside. Get the backup from the buses. Find her.”

  “It’s your kid,” he said. I just stood there gaping at him until he grabbed me and we ran from the park.

  “Lincoln Center!” he shouted at the driver when we got to the street.

  As we raced through Brooklyn I could hear the orders crackling on the radio. They’d already sealed the complex off for Nash. Now they were deploying more cops to the perimeter to stop anyone from leaving.

  I called Tommy and told him that unknown operatives had kidnapped Annie at Lincoln Center. I told him to get our Homeland Security contacts to order an airport alert. I didn’t realize I was shouting into the phone until DeLucca put his hand on my arm.

  By the time we reached the Battery Tunnel, the cops at Lincoln Center had questioned not only the guy assigned to her but all the people in the surrounding seats. So we knew how they worked the snatch.

  At the intermission, someone in an NYPD uniform relieved the young cop assigned to Annie, telling him to report to the command trailer. The new cop offered to take Annie backstage. Sure. Get her away from witnesses. It wouldn’t have been hard to fool her. She was agog at her surroundings. And the cop she’d been entrusted to in front of her dad was handing her over to another uniformed policeman.

  An escort met us as we raced from the tunnel into Manhattan. We were going up the FDR at ninety, a stream of wailing sirens and flashing lights tearing along the East River in the night.

  “Whoever took her has to have her somewhere inside the complex,” DeLucca said. He still had the phone to his ear. “The officer assigned to her went directly to his sergeant. They knew right away it couldn’t have been a cop relieving him. They clamped a lid on the whole site. That took three minutes. We’re onto the outside cameras now, running all the tape, and we haven’t seen her. She’s inside, Alex.”

  We were coming through the park at Sixty-Sixth when the cops found Annie in a basement room.

  She looked more confused than frightened when I got there. One look at me changed that. She must have read the fear in my eyes, because her face just crumbled and she started to shake out big, hard sobs.

  The door opened and a woman officer came in. She glared around at the roomful of jostling men.

  “Sir,” she said to DeLucca, “maybe you could give us girls a sec?” She put her arm around Annie and led her to a quiet corner.

  * * *

  They’d gone through her purse and taken her phone and asked about me. What was I doing there? Had I said anything about Nash? About the diamond? Later, when we put our heads together, DeLucca and I had the same suspicion. The Secret Service.

  The agency guarded not only the president but the man planning to replace him. That gave them close access to Nash, while at the same time being under the direct control of the president.

  But Amy Curtain’s murder—that didn’t fit the Secret Service. Slaughtering a young woman to send a message. Just too dark. They don’t train that kind of killer.

  In the back seat of the cruiser on the way home, Annie took my hand and turned it over and drew an X on the palm with her finger, just as I used to do for her when she was little and afraid of monsters lurking under the bed. It was our secret sign. No monster could harm someone protected by it.

  Tell it to the monsters.

  Two of DeLucca’s detectives went through my apartment when we got there. “I’m putting some guys at the corner,” he said when they were done. We both knew there wasn’t much point in that. Whoever had grabbed Ann
ie had done what they wanted to. Shown me they could.

  As he left, DeLucca stopped in the doorway. “You’re going to need protection on her,” he said. “At least until we see where this is going. I can handle that.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got some guys,” I said.

  “Freelancers? Alex, think about it.”

  “They know what they’re doing.”

  “You’d better be sure.”

  Anger was the worst emotion I could have. It breathed hot mist on the lens I needed to keep clear. Fear fed the rage that welled up inside me, a toxic fog of images, of Amy’s body in the park and of my daughter alone and terrified.

  “Anthony,” I said, as evenly as I could manage, “I’m on it.”

  He nodded as he watched me. “Your call.”

  * * *

  “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,” I said to Annie when we were alone, “how was the play?”

  The Mrs. Lincoln shtick was our standard post-disaster line, usually spoken when Annie’s team, and particularly Annie, got hammered at lacrosse.

  She winced as she lay back on the sofa and placed her feet on the coffee table. She’d toppled out of the stiletto heels when the phony cop hustled her into the basement room. Dried blood showed where she’d stubbed her toes.

  “I think I can save those feet.”

  I went into the bathroom and put my forehead against the mirror and iced down my rage until I was a reasonable facsimile of an adult male in control of his emotions. I got a bottle of antiseptic and poured some water into a glass bowl. In another rite from Annie’s childhood, I added the antiseptic to the water, turning the liquid milky and stirring it with my finger. I rummaged around for a selection of Band-Aids and laid them out on the coffee table on a sheet of paper towel. I sat beside her and put her ankle across my knee.

  I swabbed the scrapes with a cotton ball dipped in the solution. As she leaned back to let me take care of her, she scanned my face and forced a smile.

  “Are we a pair?”

  “Unfortunately for you.”

  She watched in silence as I put on the last Band-Aid.

  “Where did you have to go?” she said when I was done.

  “I’m sorry, baby. It was an emergency.”

  “Was it, like, a gunfight?”

  “Just me and the Brooklyn mob.”

  “Stop it, Dad,” she gave me a shove. “You’re always joking. It’s your way of avoiding a meaningful conversation.”

  She had a speech all ready. It came out smoothly, like a script she’d rehearsed until she got it right. So I guess it had been on the agenda.

  “I think you should confide in me more,” she said solemnly. “I’m your only child. I’m fifteen, and this is the time in our life when we have to build our adult relationship. It doesn’t matter that we have a broken home. We need to foster a genuine dialogue.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She gave me a pitying look.

  “You never talk about what’s really happening to you, Dad. You keep your thoughts bottled up inside.”

  I had a pretty good idea who’d helped Annie with the phrasing. My ex had used the same words to me. More than once. But I wasn’t going to blame Pierrette. Annie was a serious kid. With no siblings, she’d spent a lot of time in adult company. She’d become an astute observer. Her parents’ breakup had dropped a bomb into the middle of her life. Not surprising she was looking for reasons.

  And she was right. Keeping things bottled up inside is part of my professional equipment. I was keeping them bottled up right then. Where else would I keep my thoughts, given what they were. I sat there trying to be a dad while my mind churned with the scene in Prospect Park and a deep and murderous desire for revenge hardened inside me.

  Amy Curtain’s mutilated body. That was war. But against who? And why?

  The entry buzzer sounded. I opened the window and looked down at the street. Double parked as usual. I went to the intercom and pressed the button.

  “Come on up, Tommy,” I said, and buzzed him in.

  “Uncle Tommy!” Annie shrieked. She ran down the hall and out to the elevator, and a minute later came back, her arm draped over Tommy’s huge shoulders and her head against his chest. Her eyes were very bright. She was trying hard not to cry.

  Tommy shot me a questioning look as Annie curled on the sofa and tried to stifle her tears. He towered beside her with his hands in his pockets, surveying the room. Pale rectangles showed where paintings had hung before they’d disappeared with Pierrette. The décor that remained—maybe a little rudimentary.

  It had never really been Pierrette’s home. A two-bedroom in the mid-nineties on the Upper West Side. No doorman. “If you must have a pied-à-terre, Alex, let’s at least be on the right side of the park.” I’d refused to give it up. Furious, she’d come banging in the door one day with some art and a few good lamps. The lamps were gone now too.

  On the weekends Annie spent with me she didn’t seem to mind. She treated my apartment like that of a big brother who couldn’t quite take care of himself. But I wasn’t her brother, I was her dad, and at that moment we didn’t look like a family that had it all together.

  Tommy sat down beside Annie and raked her over against him with a massive paw. She burst like a failed dam and out it came. What had happened. Her sudden discovery that the men who had taken her were not there to protect her. Her fear and humiliation. Tommy didn’t say much, just sat there like a big blotter and soaked up all the tears. When Annie had recovered enough to start telling Tommy about the Lilac Fairy, I left them in front of the TV with a bowl of microwave popcorn.

  “It has like zero calories,” she explained to Tommy.

  I went into the bedroom, shut the door, and called my ex. I delivered a short account of what had happened that consisted of me talking and Pierrette contributing frosty silences. At that time of night it wouldn’t take her much more than an hour to come down from the country and get Annie.

  Next, I called Chuck, and told him about Amy Curtain. I knew he wouldn’t go to the morgue himself, or even call her next of kin. I suggested it anyway.

  “Really, Alex. I’m not very good at consoling the bereaved. This is an operational unit. We have a protocol for these eventualities.” He said it as if he were running US Central Command and I’d interrupted him in the middle of the invasion of Iraq.

  Last, I called Tabitha. That was the longest conversation. The arrangements I wanted her to make for Annie’s security were not illegal. On the other hand, they weren’t what anybody would call by the book.

  “Make sure it’s the twins,” I said.

  “Hector and Luis. Got it.”

  “And right away.”

  “I understand, Alex. They’ll start tonight.”

  “Tell them I’ll settle with them later.”

  “No,” she said. “This is operational. You were working. This is on the department. But we can keep it low profile. I’ll put it through as an intelligence provisional. That way it comes out of a special budget. It won’t go into the dailies. It goes into a folder with a limited circulation.”

  “Limited to who?”

  “Me,” she said.

  * * *

  When Tabitha and I were finished, I sat on the bed and went through what had happened, looking for connections. I included everything. Grabbing Annie. The failed operation at Brighton Beach. Amy Curtain’s death. Where were the links? Brighton Beach was a center of Russian gang activity. Lime had Russian criminal help running illegal diamonds. Now he was switching to rare pinks. Harry Nash bought a pink, possibly from Russia. If you drew a line from each of these, there was one point where they all met.

  Me.

  The air seemed heavy with a sense of failure as I sat there in the bedroom, as if my ruined marriage lived on here, its pain rooted in the place where Pierrette and I had shared our deepest intimacy. I was still sitting there ticking through my sins when the buzzer sounded.

  “My God, Alex,” Pierrette
said when I opened the door. “Even for you, this is bad.”

  She stepped past me into the hall and waited for me to shut the door. You could rescue Pierrette from a treehouse in the middle of a typhoon and she’d look exactly as she looked at that moment—her lipstick perfectly applied and her ice-cold eyes peeling off my skin in strips. Her face was bathed in a golden haze from her lamé bomber jacket. She’d tossed it on over one of the boat-neck T-shirts that she liked: a hundred bucks at Saks and worth every penny. The cut showed off her beautiful throat and left plenty of room for the silver choker with the single square-cut emerald.

  “Can this go on, Alex?” she said in an urgent undertone, holding me by the arm to keep me in the hall. “The life you lead—that’s your business. It’s already wrecked our marriage. I’m not going to stand by while you let it wreck our daughter too.”

  “Pierrette,” I began, but she shook her head.

  “I know how you feel,” she said coldly, “so don’t try to explain. You feel guilty. That’s how you always feel.” She let go of my arm and stepped back and looked intently at my face.

  “You think you have to drag the problems of the world around, that somehow it’s Alex Turner’s job in life to solve them. It’s not, and it never was. You were not responsible for your mother’s death, and you have to find that little boy and let him know that, or you will never be free of this obsessive, self-destructive life.”

  Pierrette didn’t have to rehearse a speech like that. She had an instinct for the killing cut. She knew that my mother’s death when I was twelve haunted me. She knew, and she’d gone straight for it, finding the old wound and making sure she opened it again.

  She had sublime self-confidence. That’s partly what I’d fallen for. I found it powerfully attractive. It starts with a beautiful young woman seated beside you at a dinner party, putting her lips against your ear and murmuring, “Angel, the fish fork is the little one with the three tines,” and it ends sixteen years later with your childhood grief draped like an albatross across your whole life.