The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  But the people involved—her family and the criminals around them—can see what binds them all together. Most of them can’t see very far. The cords disappear into the darkness, and they don’t know where they go. But a few people can see everything. The sinews from Cleveland to Connecticut to Eastern Europe, stretching across the world and the years. And Sylvie, the White Lady, is about to take them in her hand all at once, pull them, and cut them. Cut them and then hope that the ones that matter, the bonds between her and her family, can heal themselves. She knows she can’t fix everything. That it’s not just the Wolf she’s up against, the Ukrainian crime lord who wants her nephews dead. It’s not just the police either, or the feds, or Feodor and Kosookyy, the new and old criminals who had a hand in making her what she is. She’s dealing with the market for violence, with the almighty dollar and the things people will do for it, and she can’t change that. But she thinks she can get everyone she loves out. Which is why, after she talks to Feodor, she calls the cops.

  FBI agents George Guarino and Anne Easton are sitting in their car, in front of the big house in Bratenahl, under the shady trees. Guarino’s scanning the house, amazed that there are no security cameras, no bodyguards he can see.

  “She’s been that good,” he says. “Staying under the radar, making alliances, paying off who needs to be paid off. She’s never been in any real danger, never put her head out. It’s always just been about the money.”

  “Looks like,” Easton says.

  “Makes her more like the new criminals than she’d probably want to admit.”

  “She’s not stupid, George,” Easton says. “I think she knows.”

  They get out of their car and are walking toward the house when Sylvie opens the door. “Come on in,” she says.

  “You have a beautiful garden,” Easton says.

  “Why, thank you, Agent Easton.”

  “You can call me Anne if you’d like.”

  “I’d rather call you Agent Easton, if that’s okay.”

  “And what should we call you?”

  “Anything you like,” Sylvie says.

  The agents know who her father was; the legitimate side of the story is just enough to explain how the house came to be, how Sylvie came to be living in it. It’s not that Sylvie’s never come under any scrutiny. She’s been audited three times over the years, accountants questioning just how she can hang on to the house without ever seeming to leave it. Each time she’s managed to satisfy them with cooked numbers about investments, and so the bigger investigation never happens—the one that might connect tax authorities with the police and federal agents who have been looking for the White Lady for years. It rankles Guarino and Easton, sitting in Sylvie’s parlor, that she’s been here in Bratenahl for so long, an arrest as easy as a knock on the door. They’re suspicious about having been called now. Wondering what the White Lady might be using them for.

  Sylvie comes in with a tray, a French press, cups and saucers. “You seem like coffee drinkers,” she says. So unhurried. As if they’re just chatting.

  “Before we start,” Easton says, “I want to tell you how pleased we are that you’ve decided to talk to us, and also assure you of the protection you’ll soon feel as part of the Witness Security Program. Not everyone in it is as important a figure as you are, Miss, um, Hightower—”

  “Rizzi,” Sylvie says. “I took my husband’s name.”

  “Rizzi,” Easton says, and writes it down. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s no problem,” Sylvie says. “Please go on.”

  “Not everyone is as important as you are, Ms. Rizzi. But almost no one has kept as discreet a public profile as you, either. That, combined with the various levels of protection that the program offers, should ensure your safety.”

  “And where will that program place me?”

  “Usually out of state.” Easton regrets it as soon as she says it. It’s a routine thing to say, but she’s forgotten who she’s talking to: someone who, to the best of her knowledge, has spent almost all of her life in Cleveland, much of it right in the house where she’s sitting. The agent tries not to give herself away, but Sylvie notices it—just a slight wince—and decides, what the heck, to exploit it.

  “I see,” she says. Lets it hang without a tag for four long seconds. “Well, it will have to do.”

  It’s a good way for Sylvie to throw them off, to buy herself some latitude in being cagey. She knows the agents know she’s planning something, that she has some ulterior motive. But she still wants the agents to believe that the trade they’re making is safety for information; she wants them to think that when she withholds knowledge from them, it’s because they haven’t convinced her that the protection they’re selling her is worth it. She can’t let them know what she’s really up to, and it’ll be hard to hide that she’s keeping things from them when she knows almost everything. But she only needs to hold it together for a few days. After that, it won’t matter what they know.

  She doesn’t want to end crime in Eastern Europe, or bring down an organization. She can’t, because she knows better than the FBI agents do that the organization never ends, the money never ends. She just wants an escape, for her and the rest of her family. The crime syndicates to her are a thicket of thorns; everyone on them gets hurt, and if she cuts them down, they just grow back. But she can burn a hole through them, big and wide enough for her and everyone she loves to pass through. By the time the thicket’s grown back, they’ll be long gone. She just needs to lay down some tinder. The FBI agents sitting in front of her are the match that starts the flames.

  “There are quite a few international crime syndicates now working in America,” she says, “from New York to Florida to California. And here. How could there not be?”

  Agent Guarino lets himself smile. He reminds himself that he’s sitting across from maybe the hardest criminal he’s ever seen. But another part of him kind of likes her.

  “If you’re willing to draw some arbitrary lines to separate them,” Sylvie says, “I’ve invested in maybe seven of them. And I think some real damage can be done to all of them, but only if we do this in the proper order. I can give you the names, addresses, phone numbers, of operating criminals from Los Angeles to Mumbai. But you have to give me some time to straighten a few things out before I do that.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions first?” Agent Easton says.

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll forgive me if this comes across as a suspicious question, Mrs. Rizzi, but you’ve been involved in organized crime for thirty years, it seems, almost without leaving your house. Why are you coming to us now?”

  Sylvie’s done the math already, knows what to say.

  “One of my nephews is in real trouble,” she says.

  “Peter Henry Hightower,” Agent Guarino says.

  “Yes, my sister Muriel’s boy.”

  “We’ve had our eye on him for a little while.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Sylvie says.

  “No. Not today we don’t.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Sylvie says. “I want to do everything I can to make sure he’s safe. For my sister’s sake. She has no idea the kind of trouble her son is in.”

  “Does she know about you?” Agent Easton says.

  “Nobody in my family knows about me,” she says. And thinks: Henry’s more than good enough a liar to make that stick. And they’ll never meet Rufus. He’ll see to that.

  The agents are there for another two hours. There’s so much to talk about, a lot of information to go over. But once they’re outside the house, they don’t say anything to each other until they’re in the car, at the end of her driveway, turning onto Lake Shore Boulevard, and the high wall is out of sight.

  “She’s using us,” Agent Easton says then.

  “Yup,” Agent Guarino says. “But how?”


  “I don’t know.”

  They reach the highway back to the city of Cleveland. They’re both thinking the same thing. Agent Guarino says it first.

  “We could just arrest her, couldn’t we?”

  “Bring in the White Lady,” Agent Easton says.

  “Right.”

  They’re almost back to the city.

  “But here’s the thing about that,” Agent Easton says. “I’m scared. It’s like she’s keeping a lid on something, something that’ll explode on us if we just take her out.”

  “I think it’s going to explode anyway,” Agent Guarino says.

  “How many people do we hurt if we intervene now?”

  “How many more get hurt if we wait?”

  In Negostina, on the border of Ukraine, Claudiu—Madalina’s father—is closing up the house for the night. Madalina’s mother, Georgina, is already asleep; Claudiu can hear her snoring in the next room. They live in an old house with thick plaster walls, low ceilings, small windows. The kind of house that knows how precious warmth in the winter is, coolness in the summer, even if it means it’s always dark inside. They compensate by making the house as bright as possible inside: the walls are lime green, pale turquoise, bright salmon, throwing the light from the smallest lamp around. Then there are the pictures on the walls, of grandparents, of a scene from the Carpathians. A picture of a tropical place that Georgina cut from a magazine; the location changes every time a guest asks her where it is. Fiji, she says once. Then the next week: the Bahamas. She’ll never go, though she’s always going in her mind, and, Claudiu thinks, in her dreams. It’s where Madalina must have gotten it from, Claudiu thinks, the restlessness, the need to move, to see so much of the world. Nights like these, after her mother has gone to bed, Claudiu always, always thinks of her. Where she is, what she must be doing. He’s never seen her apartment in Kiev and never will. In his mind, it looks like a typical apartment in the housing blocks in Botosani, where a friend of his moved when he got a job as a pharmacist there. The thirty-year-old design just full of the old Communist mind-set: All families will require and should be happy with space like this. A square living room. A small kitchen with the tile on the walls reaching to the ceiling. A small rectangular sunporch, the glass fogged over. But Madalina, in Claudiu’s mind, has made the space her own. She’s hung bright fabric on the walls because they won’t let her paint them, draped her modular furniture with woven cloth; she sleeps under a bright blanket of twenty different colors that the fluorescence from the streetlights outside can’t bleach out. When her father imagines her at night, she’s always sleeping, a sleep so deep that the only movement is from her chest, rising and falling under the sheets. It’s the consolation he gives himself, that everything she did has worked out so well for her, that every night she rests better than she ever did in the town she was raised. So it’s best that she left Negostina behind and will never come back. Even though he misses her so much.

  The knock on the door startles him; he’s pretty sure no one has ever come by this late, so he knows before he gets to the door that something’s wrong.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Alexandru. Open up, Claudiu.”

  Alexandru is standing there in a light coat over what must be pajamas; Claudiu’s never seen him look like that outside, not near the open space in the center of Negostina near the bus stop, not heading into the store in Siret for crackers. He looks exhausted. There’s a young man with him who looks like he’s close to homeless, and maybe sick. There’s dirt on his face, his hands, his clothes. A hole in his pants just below his left knee. This young man has come a long way. He’s taken days to get here, hitched four rides from Kiev across the Ukrainian steppe to the Romanian border, in a blind panic, sure that he’s being followed, until the ride’s ended and he’s found himself in a village he’s never heard of, and he’s collapsed from exhaustion in a hotel he can’t read the name of. He’s walked, run, and stumbled six miles out of his way to cross the border where no one’s looking, because he’s sure someone’s waiting for him there. And he’s knocked on three doors in the middle of the night in Negostina, trying to find out where Madalina’s family is, but because no one can understand his Ukrainian, they’ve given him to Alexandru—who speaks a little English—instead.

  “This boy says his name is Petey,” Alexandru says, “and he knows your daughter. He’s in a lot of trouble.”

  Petey. Yes, Petey. The boy he’s never met, the one his daughter loved. There’s no way, just no way, that he’s here to give good news. Claudiu feels a hot prickling along his skin, like someone’s doused him in oil and is about to set him on fire. Now it’s in his head. A bomb has gone off in his brain and put a crack in his skull from his forehead to his crowd and down to his neck. Madalina, my Madalina. He knows the answer, the only answer that matters, before he asks the question: Where is my daughter? He says it twice, in Romanian and Ukrainian, and his jaw drops when Petey can’t answer. The American starts shaking his head, asks Alexandru something in English, in a very small voice. Alexandru’s been studying from books, movies, and tapes. He practices in his yard sometimes, speeches from Shakespeare and gangster movies. Lots of time spent rolling the words around in his mouth, though it must come out all wrong. He says the four words that Claudiu thinks must make up the question as if there’s a question mark at the end of every one. It’s obvious that Alexandru’s not sure he’s saying it right. But Petey seems to understand, because that’s when he shakes his head even more. He looks at Claudiu and his face twists with sadness, sadness and guilt and terror. He says something in English over and over, until he’s sobbing too much to speak. A rope of spit hangs from his open lips until he’s covered his face with his hands, his fingers so tense that Claudiu thinks, just for a second, that it’s as if he’s trying to rip the skin off. So that nobody would recognize him, and he could be someone else.

  “Alexandru,” Claudiu says. “What did he say?”

  Alexandru gives him a good long look. Holds out his hand.

  “He says he’s sorry.”

  Chapter 17

  By now, dear reader, I bet you want to know where Peter is. You know, Rufus’s son. Maybe you think of him as the good Peter, your first friend way back at the beginning, at Sylvie’s wedding on the lawn of the house, and in Granada, when he was forced to start running. That Peter is still running. If this were a different kind of story, that Peter would do everything. He would travel the world himself, uncover the criminal enterprise, tip off the authorities, and help bring the whole thing into the light, family and syndicate and all. Maybe he’d kill the Wolf himself, put a bullet in the man’s head. Or no, wait: Maybe there’d be some standoff with his cousin Petey, his evil twin, in which the bare fact that they haven’t seen each other in years is ignored so that Petey can get down on his knees before the cousin he’s wronged and atone for his sins. Then maybe Petey would sacrifice himself for the cause, go on a suicide mission that lays waste to his body but redeems his immortal soul, as the organization can’t be brought down without it. That would leave the good Peter standing on top of the wreckage he’s made and wondering what on earth he’s going to do next, until Sylvie somehow appears to give him more money than he could spend in his life. A fresh start. An earthly reward for the work he’s done serving a higher justice.

  But all that would be telling a lie, a bigger lie than the ones that fiction allows. It would be giving you false hope, that one person could do all that. I’m not saying that no one person can ever right a tremendous wrong. God knows it’s been done, and maybe it’s the only thing, in the end, that keeps the rest of us going, or just alive. But the problem here—of what happens when the laws get weak, the market takes over, and people get hurt—isn’t something one person can fix. Only decide how much to be involved, and how hard to push back. Or how much to steer clear, because nobody ever thanks the guy who stands in the way of other people making money.
Peter doesn’t steer clear, because it’s his family under threat, the family he’s always wished he was closer to, wished things were different with, and he loves them, even though he hardly knows them; even though he knows, now, so much they’ve done.

  So Peter’s running, by which I mean that he’s flying, back to Africa, to warn his father. He flies back to New York from Cleveland, then has to wait six and a half hours for the connecting flight to Johannesburg. After that is another flight to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe—this is before Zimbabwe takes its serious nosedive—which puts Peter within spitting distance of his father, who’s put himself down in Livingstone, Zambia. A lot of thoughts cross his mind in the almost two days he spends on airplanes and in airports. By the time the plane’s stopped for refueling in Cape Verde, he’s taken his own life apart and put it back together in his head three times. Because what Sylvie told him—and she told him almost everything, more than she’ll ever tell the FBI—is driving him a little crazy.