by Tim Green
It is the white-haired priest who takes Rangle by the arm and slowly leads him toward the waiting limousine, following a few steps behind his wife, who is clutching Martin’s strong arm. I walk down the hill with the wind in my face, smelling the fresh loamy dirt. I walk around the grave and down the path of white fabric that leads toward the limo.
When I put my hand on the priest’s square trim shoulder, he starts and whips his head around. His pale blue eyes are wide when they see me, almost as if he’s afraid.
“I need to talk to him, Father,” I say, gently separating the older man from Rangle’s sagging frame. “Please. It’s all right. I’m an old friend.”
I support Rangle by one arm and he looks up at me without focusing. There are gray circles under the dark wet pits of his eyes and his nose drips and seems more pointed than ever. The dyed flap of hair hangs crooked across his bald head. The lines on his face are deep and craggy. The face of an old man. He takes a ragged breath, wiping the drip on his sleeve, and a moan escapes him.
I watch the priest walk toward his own waiting Town Car, his robes full of the breeze. When he turns back to look at us, I nod to him and smile. He continues his walk. On the gravel drive, I see Martin Debray’s face in the dark opening of the limousine. Rangle is still crying, although all his tears seem to have been spent.
“I have some more news for you,” I say in a tone that makes Rangle straighten and wipe his eyes.
“He was a royal,” he says, blubbering.
“Sometimes they’re worse,” I say. “I tried to call you this morning.”
“I was…” Rangle looks back at the grave and pulls his arm away from my grip. “You’re hurting me.”
“The Russian government announced that it’s investigating the Bank of Moscow for fraud.”
“What?” Rangle’s eyes widen and his mouth opens so that I can see his tongue. “When?”
“Midday,” I say, soaking up the expression on his face. “Moscow time.”
“After we bought?”
“After you bought,” I say. “Technically, we’re not even having this conversation. I’m just a client, remember? My lawyer advised me against talking to you. With your client list, and the amount of money lost, he expects an FBI probe. But I wanted to tell you in person…”
I can’t help a small smile. The sound that comes from him is exquisite, a strangled cry of rage and horror. His lip curls up under the thin mustache. He clenches his hands and his weak trembling turns into a violent shake.
“It could be worse,” I say. “Believe me when I say that.”
“You-” he says in a screech, raising his fist. “You’re sick.”
My heart is racing. I would love to smash his face and snap his neck with my bare hands, but that would be too easy. This is the man who destroyed my life, not for love or even money, but out of greed for power and adulation. He ruined Raymond White for a seat in the U.S. Congress, and for that, his suffering will be a long-drawn-out affair. So instead of hitting him, I turn and walk away, savoring what waits for him now.
61
RANGLE MADE A FEW discreet calls with his hand over his mouth and the phone and found out that everything Seth told him was true. He slumped in the corner of the limousine and said nothing else the entire way back to his apartment. When the car stopped, he didn’t bother with his wife and Debray, but he told the driver to wait for him. He slipped out of the car, hurried through the lobby, and into the elevator.
Bursting into his apartment, he dismissed the maid and headed directly into his bedroom. There he went right to his wife’s jewelry safe.
He filled one of her small handbags with everything valuable, then went into his own walk-in closet and took down a large Louis Vuitton suitcase from a shelf. He threw in the handbag and three of his best suits along with a tuxedo and two pair of shoes, then as much summer-wear as he could fit.
He heard Katie come in, mix a drink, and then ease herself down on the bed with a heavy sigh that ended in a long self-pitying groan. Rangle reached up under his sock drawer and sprung the latch on the wooden panel behind his suits. He pushed the clothes aside and spun the tumbler on his own safe. Inside was a black velvet bag that crunched softly when he lifted it. He opened the top, scooping up a handful of diamonds.
Twenty million dollars’ worth of investment-grade stones. Better than a Swiss bank account. Better than cash. He slipped the bag into a leather briefcase and slung the shoulder strap across his body. In his bathroom, next to the toilet, was a phone. He dialed information and got the number for the charter at Teterboro. Yes, there was a G-V available on short notice. He asked them to put together a flight plan for Grand Cayman and hung up.
With the suitcase in hand, he walked back out into the bedroom and stopped at the foot of the bed. Katie was propped up on a mountain of pillows with her arm up over her face. He set the suitcase down.
“I’m leaving, Katie,” he said, straightening his back and his hair at the same time, “and I’d like you to come with me.”
His wife’s body started to shake. First just slightly, then almost convulsively, she sucked in some air and let it out in small spurts. At first he thought she was hysterically crying, but when the sound started to come it was pitched with laughter.
She actually shrieked, then said, “Oh, Bob, what do you mean, leaving? You’re in mourning, remember?”
“You’re sick,” he said, spitting the word.
Her arm came down off her face and he saw the glitter in her eyes.
“I am sick,” she said. “Sick of you.”
“Katie, I don’t care about everything. I’ll take you with me,” Rangle said. “If you stay here, there’s not going to be anything. The money’s gone. All of it.”
“But you’re wrong, Bob,” she said, still grinning. “Martin and I have plenty of money.”
“What do you mean, Martin and you?” he said, choking.
“Doesn’t your French notion of marriage include business?”
“You have money together?”
“Of course,” she said, her lips tight. “Lots. He’s very good.”
Rangle felt his face twisting. He turned quickly and picked up the suitcase, stopping only to slam the bedroom door on her laughter.
When the limo stopped in front of the terminal at Teterboro, Rangle got out without a word to his driver. Inside, the girl behind the counter said that everything was ready and he snapped that it damned well better be. The driver delivered his suitcase and a handler scooped it up and said he’d put it into the jet. Rangle dismissed his driver and gave the girl his Platinum Card, enjoying the fact that since no one would be left to pay it, this ride was going to be for free.
The G-V was waiting just outside the hangar, its long white body shining in the sun, its massive engines looking almost too big for the rest of the plane. On board, he nodded to the pilots, who were checking their controls, and stepped through the galley into the main cabin.
One of the pilots came back and offered him a drink. Rangle settled into the leather recliner, fastened up his seat belt, and said, “Scotch and soda with ice. A double.”
The pilot nodded, and as he fixed the drink in the galley, he said, “I kept the shades down until we take off and get the air-conditioning going, Mr. Rangle, to keep you as cool as we can.”
Rangle took the drink from him and sipped the cool golden liquor, letting it dull his nerves.
“Can I take that briefcase for you?” the pilot asked.
“No,” Rangle said, clutching it to his chest. “I have some things in here that I need.”
“Okay, we’ll be taking off right away.”
Rangle nodded and looked at the shaded window. He lifted the shade a little and beyond the upward-bent wing saw a fuel truck drive away. He heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and felt the plane shake, then the sound of the stairs being retracted and the cabin door being secured.
Rangle loosened his tie and reclined the seat a little more. The engines scream
ed to life, and he angled the vent so that the cool air hit his face. The thought of Dani came on him suddenly and his chest convulsed. He swallowed some of his drink and held the briefcase tight as the plane swung around and headed up the runway.
He shut his eyes. After a brief pause, the plane accelerated, pushing him deep into the seat’s cushions. When they began to level off, he took another swig and pulled the shade all the way up. Sunlight streamed in. Below was the Hudson River littered with boats and the small white tails of their wakes.
Rangle sat up straight. He leaned across the cabin and opened the other shades. Mountains. He looked up the aisle. The cockpit door was closed. He sat back down and folded his arms across the briefcase, his mind spinning. He didn’t want to seem ridiculous. He looked out the window again. More river and more green hills. They were definitely going north.
He leaned into the aisle again and directed his voice toward the cockpit door.
“Hello?” he said.
Even when he raised his voice to a shout, nothing happened. Rangle got up and started through the galley. When he got halfway through, he realized one of the pilots was sitting in the front chair. A mountain of a man in a white shirt and dark slacks.
“I know this sounds crazy,” he said, putting on a foolish grin and reaching out to touch the pilot’s shoulder, “but aren’t we going the wrong way?”
When the man shifted his bulk around, Rangle clutched his briefcase and stepped back.
“What are you… you’re the Indian,” he said, his voice pitched.
Bert grinned up at him and pointed to the back of the plane with his thumb. “You better go sit down. We’re going right.”
“This is my charter,” Rangle said in a screech. “I’m going to the Caymans.”
“You’re going someplace a little chillier than that, old weasel,” Bert said, shifting around in his seat. “Now go sit down or I’ll make you sit down.”
“I can pay you,” Rangle said, raising his eyebrows and nodding his head, fumbling to open the briefcase. He loosened the neck of the velvet bag and took out a stone about the size of a half-karat. He held it up in the light so that the rays of its glitter dodged back and forth across Bert’s fat cheeks.
“That’s ten thousand dollars right there.”
Bert reached out and took the stone, then dropped it into his mouth and swallowed. Grinning he said, “You know what your stones mean to me? Shit. It’ll be a frozen shitsicle where we’re headed… I hope you packed warm.”
62
MY G-V ISN’T BACK for more than two days before I use it to head north across Canada, the Hudson Bay, the polar cap, and finally to Uelen on the Chukchi Peninsula in the farthest corner of northeast Russia. A couple hundred miles across the Bering Strait is Point Hope, Alaska, population 794. But for Bob Rangle, those 794 Americans may as well be on another planet.
I’m excited, but partway through the trip I take a pill, pull the shades on the unending sun, and sleep. When I wake up we’re in a place where the only person who speaks English is a hunting outfitter, Alexi Fedorovich. He meets us on the abandoned military runway twenty miles outside of town in an old Soviet helicopter. The runway itself is lined with the empty skeletons of the once-proud Soviet air force. Some are twin-prop babies from the Second World War and some are the sleek MiGs they pestered us with during the cold war.
Alexi is a thick-chested Russian with a full red beard and sharp green eyes. With his ship and his weapons he is a law unto himself in this region. The men who work for him are Chukchi natives, distant relatives to the Eskimos. They are here to take us to his northern base camp, the one they use to hunt polar bears, a hundred and fifty miles to the north. I shake his hand, then zip up my fur-lined parka. The sun is about to dip just below the horizon, so it’s colder than it will be in a couple hours, when the sun will reappear for the remainder of the long summer day. I tell my pilots to stay with the jet, and Alexi hands them a loaded Kalashnikov that he takes from one of his men.
“For wolf,” he says.
My pilots are both former navy fliers, so they do nothing more than shrug and accept the gun. I know wolves are a problem here, but also that the people in this forgotten corner of the former Soviet Union have become as desperate as the wolves themselves. We board the patchwork helicopter and strap in. Alexi flies the machine himself and soon we’re tilting away from the airfield to the deafening sound of the chopper blades. Alexi’s three men are grim-faced. They don’t smile and they don’t talk.
Even though the sun is down, its glow lets me clearly see the landscape below. The evergreens grow shorter and shorter until they give way to the low rocky brush and finally to the snow itself. After a time, a finger of jagged black rock appears up ahead, an island in the frozen plain. Just beyond it is the dark gray roiling Chukchi Sea. In the center of the windblown rock formation is a low cabin with smoke pouring up out of a galvanized pipe stack. We land in front of the rocks on a sheet of ice. The men hop out and make right away for the cabin. Alexi and I follow, in less of a hurry because we are outfitted in better gear.
The big Russian slaps his arm around me and hugs me to him as we walk.
“You make many people live good with this diamonds,” he says.
“Does he have any left?”
Alexi shakes his head no. He pats his coat and I hear the distinct crunching sound of a bag of small stones.
“When?”
He looks at the plastic watch on his wrist and says, “In morning. Five hours he no fire.”
“Alexi?” I say, grabbing his arm and looking up into his face.
“He no dead,” Alexi says, showing me a mouthful of yellow and gold teeth. “I tell my man, he no moving, you giving wood. When he coming here, one hour he no spending diamonds. Then, very very spending. He spending every diamond. Every food and every firewood we having. Big fire that day. Very stupid man.”
“Greedy,” I say to myself.
“Yes, very greedy like you say.”
“That’s what got him here.”
We reach the path that leads through the spiny rocks and the packed snow squeaks under our feet. The door to the cabin opens and I see Bert’s big round face in a halo of fur. His expression is as empty as those worn by Alexi’s men, and the only welcome he gives me is a grunt as he raises his heavy mitten. Alexi puts his hand on the door and offers me coffee.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you. I want to see him.”
Bert grunts again and starts down another path that goes around the back side of the cabin. I follow him. There is a snowdrift piled up in the lee of the towering rock protecting the cabin, but a narrow path has been cut through it. When we round the rock, the wind hits us in the face and we have to lean into it until we come to a switchback path that takes us down into a small bowl in the snow whose lip is a semicircle of squat black rocks. White powder snakes along the ground like fast-moving smoke. In the center of it all is the blackened pit of a burnt-out fire.
Bob Rangle is burrowed down into the ashes as far as he can go. Beside him is the open Louis Vuitton suitcase. Every article of clothing that was inside is either on or somehow wrapped around his body. He looks like a homeless man you might see under a frozen bridge.
Bert stops at the lip of the bowl and looks out over the frozen wasteland. The pale disk of the sun is resting on the horizon like a child’s flashlight being shone through a bedsheet.
“I know now what kind of animal I was in my last life,” Bert says, his eyes narrowed at the sun.
“A turkey?”
“A bird, anyway,” he says without cracking a smile. “Maybe a hawk. Something that flies high and brings death like a lightning bolt. I have no stomach for this.”
“I know,” I say, patting his back.
But Bert only turns and heads back up the path, saying, “I’ll leave you to your game.”
I grab the sleeve of Bert’s parka and pull him around.
“Let me tell you something,” I say, looking up at
him with clenched teeth. “That piece of shit down there put me in a place where men live like animals.”
“And this is what it taught you?”
“Yes,” I say. “Three rules, and the third was the most important. Without it, you were done. Exact revenge. Someone does you wrong, you exact revenge. You make it ten times worse for them. A hundred times. That’s what he taught me, Bert. He and his friends. And now that’s what he’s getting.”
I let him go and I tramp down the path into the bowl. Rangle can barely move, but when he hears his name, he rolls on his side, rattling the chain that is attached to a post Alexi has driven six feet down into the ice. Rangle looks up at me with empty eyes through a slit in the hat he has made out of six pairs of underwear and three pairs of tennis shorts. His mustache and eyebrows and lashes are white with crystals, and when I yank the clothes off his head I see that the end of his sharp nose, like most of his ears, is black and frosted with ice.
He makes a pitiful low groaning noise and tries to pick up his makeshift hat to replace it on his head. But when his hand appears from the folds of his clothes, I see that its long fingers are also frozen and black. A useless claw.
“Do you know why you’re here?” I ask him, checking the bile that has surged up into the middle of my throat.
He shakes his head.
“Do you know who I am?”
He shakes his head no again.
“Look at my eyes,” I say, kneeling down and moving close. “It’s me, Raymond. Raymond White.”
He groans and his eyes roll away.
“Look at me,” I say, grabbing his cheeks. “This is how my father died, you piece of shit. He froze to death. While you and Frank and Russo were toasting my life in jail, my father felt what you’re feeling now. Do you like it?”