The Pandora Key

by Lynne Heitman

  “Shit. It’s not here. It’s not here.”

  Dan was standing at his post near the feet. “Breast pocket,” was all he said.

  Like an experienced necro-pickpocket, I lifted his jacket, reached in with just the tips of my thumb and index finger, and extracted a long, flat leather wallet. I took it over to where I’d dumped the other stuff. I whipped off the other big glove and started rifling. There was money. I pulled it out. It was a stack of hundreds. Driver’s license. No credit cards. Some kind of identification card written in Russian and what looked like a stack of food stamps, probably stolen. Here was a man who stole millions, maybe billions, and he felt a need to steal food stamps.

  That was it. There was nothing else. There was no card or case or token. Nothing. I rocked back and sat on the ground.

  “Maybe it’s one of these keys,” Dan said, poking at the key chain.

  “It’s not a key. Not a real key. It’s a card the size of a credit card. I was sure it would have been in his wallet.” Dan went back to Vladi. Without hesitating, he reached down and patted down the entire body, starting at the shoulders. He found it in one of the pant legs, the one that still had a foot attached. He pulled out his knife, cut open the pants, and came out with a sleek carrying case, like a business card holder, only slightly bigger. He tossed it over.

  “Oh, my God.” I couldn’t believe it. “This is it. This has to be it.”

  “Must have been strapped to his leg.”

  The case looked as if it might have been brass. I looked for the mechanism to open it but couldn’t find it. No buttons or slots or hinges. There must have been a trick. While I was looking, Dan was busy trying to roll up Vladi.

  “A little help here?”

  I gathered all the stuff we’d collected and dropped it into a plastic bag. I put the bag into my backpack. I pulled on my fisherman’s gloves and went back to work. The body made a soft thud when it landed in the bottom of the grave. We grabbed our shovels. Compared with digging him up, it took hardly any time to bury him. Still, it was almost five in the morning when we’d finished. The last of the glow sticks had gone out, but the sky was brightening when I turned to take one last look at Vladi’s final resting place.

  31

  THE SUN WAS COMING UP AS WE DROVE INTO BOSTON. Dan had to get home and get cleaned up for work. I dropped him off at his place. Then I drove over to Felix’s house of electronics, figuring to head off any Kraft requests before he even made them. Felix used his digital camera to take photos of the token. The one I liked best showed it lying on the front page of the Boston Globe right next to the date. Then he used his scanner to scan it in and his computer to send it to an e-mail address Kraft had provided. In the process of doing all that, I learned how to open the damned case.

  When I got back to Harvey’s, I was covered in mud and sweat and smelled as if I’d marinated in a swamp. Not surprisingly, Rachel was the first to greet me.

  “Did you get it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Oh, my God. Where is it? Let me see it.”

  I opened my backpack, pulled out the plastic bag with the token in it, and held it up. She reached for it, but I snatched it back.

  “No one touches this but Felix.”

  Harvey was in his office. The empty popcorn bowl was still on the coffee table.

  “Harvey, are you okay?”

  “Did you have success?”

  “We did.” I found myself feeling good, for a change, that I had actually accomplished something I’d set out to do, something important. “I beeped Kraft. We should hear from him soon.”

  “She won’t let me see it.” Rachel had followed me in. I took out the second bag, the one with Vladi’s personal items—the pinkie ring, the wallet, and the chain from around his neck—and tossed it to her. She held it for a matter of seconds before she figured out what it was and dropped it onto a side table. She glared at me, and I couldn’t help but enjoy it a little. For someone as tough as she was, she seemed awfully delicate sometimes.

  “I’m going upstairs, babe, to finish packing.”

  I needed to get showered, too, but it was pretty clear Harvey was upset, probably about the packing. I decided to sit with him for a few minutes. I was about to collapse into the wingback before remembering my encrusted condition. I sat on the floor and leaned against the couch. I dropped my head back and closed my eyes and enjoyed for a few moments not having Rachel sitting between us. There were few of those moments left to enjoy anymore.

  “There is not much left of us,” Harvey said, “after we are gone.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. He had found his way over to the side table and was holding the bag that Rachel had dropped. He studied each item carefully through the plastic as a blind man might—with the tips of his fingers.

  “There was more of Vladi left than I would have preferred.”

  “I am not speaking in terms of the material things or the biological matter we leave behind.”

  I put my head back again. “I suppose what you do with your life is more important than how much stuff you leave behind, even if it is a lot of stuff. Vladi Tishchenko left a billion dollars behind, yet he’s in a grave where no one will ever visit because of the life he lived and the things he did.”

  I heard him pushing his chair closer. The wheels still needed oil. I knew I should have gotten up and done it right then—I would never remember to do it when I actually had the time—but I was too exhausted.

  “Did you know that I was drafted to go to Vietnam?”

  That woke me up. Harvey hardly ever told me anything personal about himself, and he never reminisced. I lifted my head to look at him. “You were drafted?”

  “In 1968, I was eighteen years old.”

  I did know that, but not in the way you really know things. I knew how old Harvey was, but I had never considered him to be anything but the middle-aged guy who wore glasses and drank tea.

  He smiled a little. “The answer to your question is no, I did not serve. I requested and received a deferment, and then I enrolled in college.” He shrugged and looked down at me. “Accounting.”

  It was odd being the one looking up at him. “Sounds like a good decision. You’re lucky you had a choice.”

  “It was an exciting time to be young and away from home for the first time. Everyone had an opinion on absolutely everything, as you might well imagine. It was an age of debate and discussion. I listened and read and tried to inform myself, and I began to develop my own opinions.” His voice had taken on a warmth and verve that made him sound like a much younger man. “I cannot express to you what a wondrous thing it was to have an opinion of my own. One of the things I was drawn to was the peace movement.”

  “Really? You were a peacenik?”

  “Not the violent antiwar radicals but those making reasoned arguments against U.S. involvement in a region of the world that neither wanted nor needed our help. The arguments of those who wanted peace seemed more compelling to me than the logic of those defending the war.” He put his elbow on his armrest and rested his chin in his hand, as if thinking it through all over again. “I also could not see a way to win, which meant men…boys were dying for nothing. And so I became an activist for peace.”

  Had I given it any thought, I would have had him hanging out at the library, working as a proctor, afraid to talk to girls. I almost smiled as I pictured him with long hair, granny glasses, and a bong. “Did you march?”

  “I did everything that was asked of me that was not violent in any way. I was not a leader but a follower, a fact that my father was gracious enough to point out on more than one occasion.”

  “You father didn’t approve?”

  “He was desperately disappointed in me, in the things I believed in, the things that I did. He accused me of intellectualizing my fear, of making up an argument to justify a decision that came from cowardice. He called it postdated conviction.” His voice had developed a sharp edge, and the warmth was gone. />
  “He wanted you to go to Vietnam and get mowed down in the jungle? Or addicted to heroin? Or so damaged by your experiences you could never be a fully functioning member of society again?”

  “My great-grandfather came from Poland to settle here. Several members of the extended family, particularly on my mother’s side, came over before and after World War II. Other family members—aunts and uncles, older cousins—were lost in the camps. Another uncle died in the Warsaw uprising. He is a hero to them…to us, as he should be. My father believed we should give back because this country had given us so much.”

  “And he was willing to offer up your life to pay the family debt? Screw that.”

  He didn’t respond. He didn’t even seem to hear me. I was participating in a conversation he was having with himself, maybe had been having for years.

  “Postdated conviction,” he said. “I have never forgotten that term. All my life, I have never truly known if he was right.”

  “No, Harvey, you are not a coward, and fuck your father.”

  He looked at me. “What did you say?”

  “It takes a lot of courage to stand up to your father for the things you believe. There’s nothing you need to do to prove yourself to me or your father or…or Rachel or anyone else.”

  Dust and dried mud rained down from my jeans as I unwound myself and got up from the floor. It took me a good thirty seconds to straighten up with my lower back so stiff, but I had to get up and pace around, because Harvey couldn’t, and his father had pissed me off.

  “Fuck all fathers. Mine, too. Mine especially. Kids are sitting ducks to bad fathers. They believe everything Daddy tells them because they don’t know any better. It doesn’t make it true. It makes them cowards.”

  He fiddled with the loose pad on the armrest, something else I should have fixed. “She has decided to leave. That is what would be safest for her, would it not? To leave Boston?”

  He looked up at me with this futile hope in his eyes, and I realized he meant for me to disagree. I couldn’t.

  “Yes, it would be safest for her to get out of Boston. At least for now. Maybe later, she can—”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I really needed to get cleaned up, but I didn’t want to leave him alone this way. For the first time—maybe the first time ever—I wished Rachel were there. I pulled my watch from my pocket, and he noticed. “Go and do whatever it is you must do. I will be fine.”

  “I’ll just be upstairs in the shower. Call me if you need anything.”

  He had made his way over to his desk and his computer. He pulled up a game of Minesweeper. Rachel wasn’t even gone, and the old Harvey was back.

  32

  WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE SHOWER, THE DIRTY JEANS I’D left on the floor had been replaced by a clean pair, laid out on the bed. If I hadn’t already known they were Rachel’s, I would have guessed when I lifted them up and saw they were the style that came only to mid-calf. I was a few inches taller than she, so when I put them on, I was relieved to see they made it that far. The long-sleeved cotton shirt she’d left buttoned down the front. The fit was a little tight for me. Baggy worked better for someone trying to conceal a waist holster and a weapon.

  Rachel came in just as I was buttoning up and laid a blow-dryer on the bed. “I thought you might want to use mine. Harvey doesn’t have any around the house. I also put your clothes in the wash.”

  “Thank you.” She was being nice, which meant there had to be something in it for her. “Did you talk to Harvey before you came up here?”

  “Why?”

  “He seems…”

  “Sad?”

  “Deeply sad,” I said. “Sadder than I’ve ever seen him.”

  “That’s because he thinks he’s about to die.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She shrugged casually. “I think that’s what he means. He keeps saying he feels a darkness.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. In the past few days.”

  “Here I thought he was sad because you dumped him once and he’s about to lose you again.” When I sat up to face the mirror, she was there, too, standing with her arms crossed, her face pulled into a sulk, and one foot thrust forward in case she felt the urge to start tapping.

  “I resent the implications.”

  “This from a woman who ran around on a man with a critical illness. Pardon me for being skeptical.”

  “Is that what you think? You would think that.”

  “Tell me you weren’t running around on him before you dumped him.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  I stared at her in the mirror. She blinked first, coming out of her fighting stance to drop down onto the bed. The pills on the worn chenille bedspread suddenly held great fascination for her. I went back to my grooming task. Getting the knots out of my hair was easier than getting the truth out of her, and I had some serious knots.

  “I wasn’t out looking, is what I’m saying, but by the time I met Gary, I already knew it wasn’t going to happen between Harvey and me, so what was I supposed to do? Pass on Gary and end up with neither one? Nuh-uh.”

  “How do people like you get to be people like you?”

  “You mean someone who takes care of herself?”

  “That would be one way to look at it, I suppose.” I leaned forward to check out my face more closely. My skin was stressed and dry. The circles under my eyes had grown a darker shade of dark, and the hints of wrinkles around my mouth were turning to fact. A long weekend at a spa would have helped a lot.

  “I worked my ass off to get where I am. How many people in my family do you think graduated from college? None. Not until me. No one in my family had ever even lived outside of Brooklyn. I went to college. I graduated. I earned every penny of my own tuition. I didn’t get any help from anyone.”

  “Earned it how?”

  “I did the books for my pop’s construction company. I managed the office. I did a little estimating. Whatever he had time to teach me I learned, because that was the real world, and he taught me more than any professor ever did. Do you know how you work construction in New York and New Jersey?”

  She was into it now, leaning forward on the bed, schooling me in the catechism of Rachel Ruffielo.

  “You make deals. You talk to this guy. You talk to that guy. Another guy comes to see you. Down there, union is just another word for mob, and everyone has their hand out—the local city councilman, the cops, the feds, the zoning commissioner, the building inspectors. If you don’t play, someone comes and burns down your building.” Her voice had grown strong and robust and the New York accent more overt. She was demonstrating the parts she could, holding out her hand for a bribe. “That’s what I learned from my pop. You’re paying one way or the other; it’s a cost of doing business, so just pick your poison and close your eyes.”

  I swung around on my bench to face her directly. My hair was just going to have to dry itself. “Everyone makes compromises in life. That’s survival. It doesn’t explain why you have to treat someone who loved you as much as Harvey did—and inexplicably still does—the way you did.”

  She looked at me with genuine surprise. “What did I do to him that was so bad?”

  “You dumped him. You got tired of him and walked out and married a younger man.”

  “Are you so sure that was such a bad thing?”

  “I think he would tell you it was a watershed moment in his life, and not in a good way.”

  She blinked a few times and looked stricken, but she got over it. She stood and walked over to a framed photo on the wall, a black-and-white of Harvey’s grandfather from a long time ago. Her arms were crossed again, but more in contemplation than defense.

  “The first time I ever met Harvey, he looked at me with those big cow eyes. I didn’t want anything to do with him. But then there was this one time when my whole department went out to a little club
down the street from the office where we liked to go sometimes. Here comes Harvey, out of the blue, dressed in a gray suit and a low-key tie, looking like some kind of undertaker at a wedding.”

  Her head tipped ever so slightly to go with the tinge of wistfulness that had crept into her voice. If I could have seen her face, I probably would have seen a smile. But when she turned to slouch against the wall, all she showed me was her poker face.

  “He asked me to dance. I couldn’t believe it. This schleppy guy with toner on his fingers and a suit that didn’t fit had the balls to come up and ask me to dance. I was hot, too, back then.” She put her shoulders back and thrust out her chest. “I mean, what’s he doing there in the first place? It’s not like anyone asked him to come. I sure as hell didn’t ask him. So, I decided I was going to teach him a lesson. Take him out on the dance floor and show him up so he would never come near me again.”

  She was talking to me now as if we were old pals sharing the warm and funny stories from our past. I hated her for it. I understood how hard it must have been for Harvey to follow her to that bar. I hated her for wanting to punish and humiliate him for it. I hated her more for expecting me to laugh about it with her.

  “Anyway, we went out on that dance floor, and he just…he blew me away. Have you ever seen Harvey dance?”

  I had barely ever seen him walk.

  “Harvey has moves. When he was coming up, they had sock hops and school dances and stuff like that, and he really took to it. So, here we were out on the floor doing twirls and dips, and I was having fun with this mope if I just kept my eyes shut. And then he asked me out on a date.”

  That might have been even harder to fathom than Harvey dancing.

  “He caught me in a moment of weakness. I said, ‘Yeah, what the hell,’ figuring we’d go dancing again and I wouldn’t have to talk to him. Do you know what he did?”

  In spite of myself, I leaned forward, waiting for the next verse.

  “He showed up at my house with this big bouquet of flowers. He was wearing one of his dopey suits, but he walked me to his car and opened the door for me. He bought me dinner and poured my wine. Then he took me to this little jazz club I had mentioned I always wanted to go to. They had a trio playing there. We danced for hours. Then he took me home and gave me a sweet little peck on the cheek.”