by David Gordon
28
Joe was exhausted. He’d been trained to go long periods without rest or food, and also to snatch what sleep he could, in trucks or transport planes or holes in the dirt. But he wasn’t accustomed to this lifestyle anymore, and the tension and bad dreams kept him from really getting much rest at all. They left the stolen car, engine running, by a video arcade in East New York where Yelena knew kids hung out, taggers and stoners who would take it for a joyride or sell it for a quick buck. Then they took a gypsy cab to Neptune Avenue, rifles wrapped in a picnic blanket they’d found in the car. Now they were in Russian territory. Yelena led him down a few more streets, to the boardwalk, which was still bustling on this warm summer night. Families sat around platters of smoked sturgeon and herring, and men in shorts and flip-flops drank vodka and played cards. Kids were kicking a soccer ball around and riding their bikes and scooters, wheels thumping rhythmically over the planks in the boardwalk. Beyond the lights, the beach glowed in the moonlight, and beyond that, the ocean, invisible and eternal, swept darkly in and out. They entered the vestibule of a building. Yelena buzzed and was immediately let in; she’d called ahead.
The apartment was a comfortable mess: an open kitchen as you entered, then a dining and living room with sliding glass doors that opened onto the terrace, beyond which you could hear the waves. The shades were drawn. Bedrooms to each side. The place was crammed with upholstered armchairs, leather couches, a wooden dining table covered in a woven white tablecloth and heaped, like every other surface, with books, Cyrillic newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, and empty teacups. A large samovar sat on a sideboard. A chessboard between two club chairs held a half-fought game. Shelves groaned with books and more stacks of paper. In the midst of it all stood an old Russian man with a fringe of white hair, in linen trousers, a crumpled white shirt, and slippers. A cigarette burned in his mouth.
The man kissed Yelena on the cheeks three times, then shook hands with Joe, saying, “Welcome,” then immediately launched into a long Russian dialogue with her, at the end of which, with a flurry of nods and smiles, he led them into a bedroom, furnished in the same heavy style, with a big bed, a headboard, a mirror-topped chest of drawers, a dressing table, chairs, end tables, rugs. He gestured to Yelena, and she stood straight-shouldered before a rare patch of empty white wall. He adjusted a lamp, then pulled a small digital camera from his pocket and snapped.
“Now you,” Yelena told Joe, and he stood in the same spot. The man took the picture and, muttering in Russian, went out. He returned seconds later with a bottle of vodka on a tray with two shot glasses. Yelena said something and he looked at Joe, laughed heartily, and went out again, shutting the door behind him.
Joe looked at her quizzically. She shrugged. “I told him you don’t drink. He thought I was joking.” She slid the lock shut and leaned a chair against the door, so that it would fall loudly if the door was opened.
“I thought you said you trusted this guy?” Joe asked her.
“I said he would never call the cops. He barely speaks English anyway, and in Russia no sane person calls the police.” She pulled a Beretta from her ankle holster, checked it, and slid it under a pillow. “We are reasonably safe here,” she told him. Then she grabbed the bottle and took a slug.
“Give me that,” Joe said, and took the bottle from her. She watched while he took a deep drink. He grimaced. It burned like hell going down, but he needed to sleep. Almost immediately, he felt the burn become liquid warmth in his belly, then spread through his tensed body and eventually, he hoped, to his brain. He drank again and handed it back to her. She smiled.
“Bravo. Now you are like Russian.” She went into the bathroom and turned the shower on full blast, then came out as the steam began to gather. “Next thing any Russian would do,” she told him, “is get in some hot steam and water.”
With the same quick, feline movements she had used to break the safe and leap from the roof, she peeled her clothes off and left them in a pile. As she reached back to unsnap her bra, Joe noticed something he hadn’t seen before, when she was naked, or seemingly naked, in the club: tattoos. There were two eight-pointed stars, inked in black, on her upper chest, one in each of the shallows under her clavicle. As he stared in surprise, she grabbed the bottle, toasted him, took another slug, and carried it into the bathroom, leaving the door open. And when she turned, Joe glimpsed more ink: a large Madonna and child down the center of her back, finely lined and shaded in black, and a skull and a dollar sign each riding a hip as she wriggled out of her briefs and stepped into the scalding hot shower.
Smiling thoughtfully, he sat down and quickly took off his sneakers, then pulled off his T-shirt and jeans. Now in his boxers and socks, he stretched, then leaned over to peel his socks off, groaning as a sharp pain stabbed his back where he’d landed on the broken awning. Thanks to the vodka, his sore head was a bit better, as long as he moved slowly, but still, he thought he’d stretch his back for just a second before he joined Yelena.
By the time Yelena got out of the shower and came back wrapped in a towel, he was laid out, snoring away.
“Sweet dreams, Joe,” she said, and taking the bottle with her, she slid under the sheets and rested her head on the pillow, under which she felt the reassuring shape of her gun.
29
Adrian was definitely not pleased, but it was Heather whom Clarence was really afraid of. At least right now. Adrian—tall, thin, with those icy eyes—was a stone cold killer, some kind of psychopath probably, but he was under control. That was his thing. When Clarence called and told him something had gone wrong, he didn’t even raise his voice, just asked him to please come over. And when Clarence told him what happened, he barely blinked, just frowned slightly as if his soup was cold. Of course, Clarence knew very well that Adrian would just as soon cut his heart out as talk to him, and would do so with the same easy smile, or cold-soup frown. But he’d at least think it over first, hear him out. Heather, the blond pixie, who looked like a girl from a shampoo commercial, might just pull a gun out and fill him with bullets before he even sat down. Luckily, she just glared.
Adrian pointed to a chair. Clarence sat down, feeling a bit relieved. He was also reassured by the fine view of the High Line from the apartment that Heather had rented, via the Internet, through one of her many fake IDs and accounts. The keys had been FedExed to their last fake address, and in the large, crowded building, with shopping, food, and parking on the lower floors, they came and went unnoticed—just another rich, handsome couple in a rich, handsome neighborhood. No way would they murder him in front of a wide-open window, in full view of the other rich people and a thousand tourists traipsing back and forth over the High Line, the onetime abandoned highway and train track transformed into a long riverside park that passed right beneath them. Exhibitionists sometimes fucked in the windows of the nearby hotel on purpose—or, as the more cynical said, they were hired to pretend by the management—so that the folks down there could see. Whatever their twists, Heather and Adrian were not exhibitionists: if they were going to slaughter Clarence, they’d close the blinds. Clarence took a breath and told them what happened.
“Everything went perfect. The plan was solid. We would have gotten away clean, but they pulled a double-cross.”
“Who?” Adrian asked.
“That limey merc, Don; and the kid, Juno.”
“You’re sure?”
“Don didn’t pass me, so he escaped a different way, most likely out the front gate. The guards were all tied up, the cameras were down. Then someone turned the security system back on behind him. That had to be Juno.”
“And the other two?” Heather asked, eyes glittering fatally at him. “The Russian and your pal, the one who saved you from your last fuckup?”
“Busted, probably. I took off when the police showed. Though if anyone could slip through, I guess they could.”
“You took off and left them,” Heather sneered.
“Was that wise?” Adrian asked. “
We could have learned a lot from them.”
“I had to,” Clarence pleaded. “If I got caught, then what? The whole operation is down. I’m the only link with them, remember? Like you wanted.” Clarence took out his phone and showed it to them. “Now, whoever has it, they will call me. How else are they going to get paid?”
There was a pause. Heather sniffed, but she crossed her legs and sat back, seemingly no longer about to spring at him. Adrian looked thoughtfully at the phone. Clarence stood.
“You mind?” he asked, gesturing at the kitchen. “I could use a drink.”
Adrian nodded. “And they still have no idea what they really stole?” he asked Clarence’s back as Clarence got the vodka from the freezer and filled a short glass with rocks.
“None. How could they?” Clarence explained as he poured. “And anyway, these are pros. You think if they knew thousands of people were going to die, they ever would have taken the job?”
Adrian considered that. “Not for that price, I imagine.”
“No,” Clarence said, thinking he should be getting a hell of a lot more himself, but not saying it. “Stealing some kind of deadly Frankenvirus would definitely cost you more than a bottle of perfume. Don maybe would’ve gone for it. The Russian girl, I don’t know. She’s hard to figure. But that guy Joe? I know his type. He would have left me dead on the highway if he thought for a second I was getting him mixed up in shit like this.” He took a big sip. “Don’t worry, one way you can know for sure that they don’t know is I’m still alive.”
Adrian laughed. “Then you have nothing to worry about, either.”
Heather waved her nail file at him. “As long as they don’t get curious and decide to open the vial and take a sniff.”
“Right,” Adrian said. “Then the whole neighborhood dies.”
Heather and Adrian met at Stanford, got engaged during junior year, and just after they graduated—he magna cum laude with a 3.9 GPA, she summa cum laude with a 4.0—they married on a warm spring day. They were both pretty, both brilliant, and both orphans, of a sort: his parents had died when he was a young child; her father had had a heart attack while having sex with his mistress, and her mother had been back and forth between rehabs and psych wards since Heather was born. He’d been sent to school on a fellowship; she’d merely dipped into her inexhaustible trust fund.
But despite all the obvious parallels, losses, and gifts that made them seem like the perfect pair to outsiders, it was an even deeper element that fused them together: commitment. Heather had always known there was something different about her, something “wrong” she supposed, or would suppose if she had any sense of right and wrong. She was diagnosed early with possible antisocial personality disorder, the new, softer term for sociopathy, but with a family lawyer assuming guardianship whenever her mother was declared incompetent, and a nanny and doctor overseeing her education and care—in other words, employees—she was pretty much free to grow up wild, a kind of deluxe feral child, and with her intelligence, athleticism, and pretty smile, she moved easily on to girls’ boarding school, the perfect training ground for a young sadist.
But she lacked self-knowledge, and, alternately indulging and repressing her own dark urges, she remained a victim of herself, until she met Adrian. Despite their utterly incongruous backgrounds, he was exactly like her. Exactly. Except for one thing. He had a cause around which to focus his energy: the destabilization, corrosion, and eventual destruction of American liberal democracy.
A big goal. But part of the discipline that Adrian had taught her was that people like him, like them—warriors in the service of a cause—thought not in terms of weeks or years or election cycles, but in centuries, in epochs. They were creating a future. And really, when you looked at the state of things here in the United States, that big goal was a lot more realistic, and a lot closer, than even the most optimistic fanatic could wish. Given the chance, America would destroy itself. All they were doing was helping.
30
When Joe woke up, Yelena was holding his hand tight in both of hers. “Joe,” she was saying softly to him. “Joe, wake up.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting up abruptly and looking around. It was dark in the room. The moon had come out and was there in the window, and he could hear the surf. His body, he realized, was slick with sweat.
“Nothing,” Yelena said, her voice different from before. She spoke softly and soothingly, in a whisper. “You were screaming in your sleep.”
“Oh …” He sat back. His breathing slowed. She brushed his forehead, smoothing his hair back.
“Do you remember what was the dream?” she whispered.
“No,” Joe lied.
Her fingers traced the scars on his side and the long one that ran down his thigh.
“It’s okay,” she said, shifting so that her arm was around him, holding him against her. He felt her soft skin against his skin; he felt her slow breath rising and falling. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want.”
He said nothing, and after a little while, they fell back to sleep like that.
31
Donna wasn’t sure how she was going to spend her free Sunday morning, while Larissa was at her dad’s place. Maybe go for a run. Maybe read the paper for once. Maybe just sleep. She definitely hadn’t planned on waking up at seven and rushing to work.
Saturday night had been a dull dinner with an awkward guy, a tax attorney she’d met on a dating site. He was fine—smart, nice looking, polite—but there was no real spark, and they both seemed to know it. He invited her back to his place for a drink but seemed almost relieved when she declined. That was the problem—guys in law enforcement were too much work and she’d sworn off them after the divorce. Regular guys either bored her or, even if she liked them, seemed never to really relax around her. Maybe men were intimidated knowing she could kick their asses. Maybe it was the gun strapped to her side, which one dude had accidentally touched when trying to get to second base. “Sorry!” he’d cried, as though afraid she’d shoot him. That was that. He didn’t try again.
So she was most definitely alone, in bed and in the apartment, when her phone went off at 7:02 and she answered in a voice thick with sleep. It was an emergency, all hands on deck. Last night, in Westchester, someone had broken into a top secret government facility and stolen some top secret shit.
The next time Joe woke, the sun was out and Yelena was gone from the bed. He got up and looked out the window. A few people were swimming already, chopping their way through the waves. Others ran on the beach. The old Russians sat on the boardwalk benches. Someone was flying a kite.
Joe could smell coffee, and though the bedroom door was shut, the lock was off and the chair was set to the side, so he pulled his clothes on and went out to find Yelena curled up on the couch, sipping coffee, while the old man sat beside her in a chair, smoking.
“Good morning,” he said in his thick accent, and poured Joe some coffee.
“Thanks,” Joe said, waving off the offer of sugar or cream. He sat in an armchair and sipped.
“Look, he’s done already,” Yelena said. “I told you he was the best.”
The night before, in the car, after she’d called to arrange this lodging, she’d also had Joe make up a couple of fake names, which she’d texted over. Now she proudly displayed the results: a fake driver’s license in one of the names and a passport in the other, along with credit cards for both. Yelena had her own matching set. “I told him we’d pay later, after we get our money. He knows I will come back.”
Joe inspected the work. He smiled at the old man. “These are excellent. As good as I’ve ever seen.”
She translated, and the old man, clearly pleased, laughed it off. He said something in Russian, then lit another smoke. Yelena translated: “He says that he apologizes. These fakes were the best he could do right now. If he had a week, he could get you the real thing.”
32
Gio’s people hit Uncle Chen back on Sunday mornin
g. Gio didn’t really have a choice. War with the Triads was the last thing he wanted, but he couldn’t let anyone take what was his and go unpunished. Still, much like angry nations that began with gestures, such as firing rockets over ships, then moved on to sanctions and trade wars, his response to the truck was nonviolent, mostly.
On Canal Street, hidden behind a storefront selling tourist junk, was a large, brightly lit white room where customers, almost all female, eagerly paid cash for expert copies of high-end designer bags, wallets, belts, and other leather goods by Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci, Kate Spade, and others. The merch was heaped on folding tables where salespeople, mainly Chinese women of any age, from teenagers sipping bubble tea to grandmas in slippers, hawked it to a roaring crowd of ladies of every race and background, from businesswomen, lawyers, and executives to moms and daughters shopping for gifts to gangs of girlfriends who came in from Brooklyn or Long Island or Jersey, all drawn by the dazzle of a bargain. In the rear, past the long line waiting for the two washrooms (one was marked MEN, but not today), a stairway led to the basement. African men, mostly from Nigeria and Ghana, were packing up huge piles of goods and wrapping them in colorful blankets that they would unfold to sell on street corners and in train stations, bus depots, and parks, then refold in a flash when the cops appeared and melt into the crowd.
A couple of older Chinese men walked the floor like pit bosses, overseeing the flow of cash, and some young toughs stood by the door, mostly on the lookout for cops and to make sure no one tried to jump any of their customers, although that was unlikely: this was Triad territory, and while other groups might fight among themselves like alley cats and wild dogs, the Asian gangs were known for running a tight, smooth operation and keeping the mess off the streets.
But not this Sunday. Around eleven, right at the height of the pre-brunch sales swarm, Gio’s guys moved in. Muscle-wise it was no big deal. A van backed into the alley beside the store, while a couple of cars full of bruisers double-parked outside, effectively controlling the exits. Two guys went in quickly and tackled the doormen. Then a platoon of masked dudes stormed through, yelling and waving bats, kicking over tables. One guy fired a gun into the roof. Panic erupted. The crowd rushed for the door, though an impressive number of these square ladies held armloads of swag as they ran. It was a free-for-all. Meanwhile, Gio’s team opened the side door and started loading the van, in recompense for what he lost in the hijack. In fact, some of it appeared to be the same stuff.