The Hard Stuff

by David Gordon

  “Tell him it’s about some lost rocks.”

  He shrugged at her. “It’s about lost rocks, she says. Call me.” He hung up. “Now then. If you’re going to hold us, then I really should call a lawyer next.” He looked around at the restive crowd: the customers, the DJ and bartenders, the girls still onstage. “And maybe order pizza.”

  “Just make sure Joe gets my message,” Donna told him, following as Blaze led her prisoner away. “Good night, Mr. Caprisi.”

  “Good night,” he called after her. “And Agent Zamora?”

  She looked back from the door, where Gio’s two men had stood aside for her.

  “Next time you need something, just call,” he said. “You’ve got my number.”

  *

  When Powell decided to spend the evening sitting on Club Rendezvous, his expectations were modest. His snitches had told him that the spectacular diamond heist yesterday had been the work of local pros and that it all had something to do with the heroin that known terrorists, including a character known only as Felix, were smuggling into the United States. Powell thought that watching Gio’s club might turn up something interesting. He did not expect it to be his ex-wife.

  When Donna arrived, accompanied by a stout, short-haired woman he didn’t recognize but could instantly see was with law enforcement, his heart started pounding. But was it his spook sense twitching, telling him he was getting closer, or was it just his emotions, the mix of love, hate, desire, and frustration he felt every time he saw her or even thought of her? It was quite possible, after all, that they had some other legitimate reason to visit a known OC hang out.

  But when Gio himself, the boss, pulled up—with two obvious heavies in a separate car right behind him and they all hurried in—he knew. Somehow, the plot was thickening, and his ex-wife was in it up to her neck.

  30

  Fuck it. Leave him.

  That was Carol’s first thought. She’d made it through the concert, focusing on Billy Joel, using the music as a kind of cover, hiding her own overwhelming emotions, giving her a reason not to talk, not to move. At times her feelings were swallowed up in the larger waves that surged through the crowd, her mind silenced by thousands of people singing “Piano Man,” while at other moments the songs seemed to express just what she was feeling. After all, this was the soundtrack to her life, too: why not have “Honesty” or “She’s Always a Woman” playing for her internal, private drama? And then there were the times when she wanted to stand up and yell: Fuck this! Fuck this middle-class suburban bullshit! Shove this whole thing up your ass!

  At the hotel that night, she could barely look at him, but then, in the dark, her rage and pain and fear morphed into desire and they fucked like they hadn’t in years. She even wondered if she could have conceived again later, the feeling was so intense, that sense that something deep and profound and life changing had just happened. The next day she contacted a woman she knew, the ex of a hedge funder, who’d gotten out with her house—bigger than theirs but on a less choice piece of land—and her kids and asked, “for a friend” about her lawyer.

  Then, a couple days later she realized: Who was she kidding? She was a therapist, a psychologist, and all day she lectured people on healthy and unhealthy attachments, on what made relationships good or bad, but in the end she thought maybe she really knew nothing. Maybe no one did. Love was a mystery, a fever, a curse, and a blessing. It was a spell, good or bad, and it wasn’t up to you to break it or to choose whose you fell under. Maybe the ancient myths got it right in the first place: Why not fall in love with a tree or a donkey or a reflection in a pool? Why not become changed into a star out of loneliness, a flower out of passion, obey a yearning within that took the outer form of a beast? She had been fooling herself with that lawyer shit. She hated him, but she was not ready to let go.

  So then kill him. That’s what she thought next. He stayed out late again, claiming he had a business dinner at a Korean place. It was true that the next day his shirt smelled of barbeque smoke and cigarettes, but she also smelled cheap perfume and sweat and the combination sent her into a murderous rage. She doubted that she even came close to being capable of it, but the thought came to her as an actual idea, something she found herself considering from practical angles. She knew there were guns around. She knew he had enemies or at least people who might get blamed long before she—the innocent little wife who worked with kids and took yoga—ever would be. She had no doubt she could catch him off guard. That was one of the bitterest ironies: he trusted her completely in his way. He would never imagine her capable of harming him. She couldn’t really believe it herself, not even when she heard herself talking about it in her own head. She could see herself killing in self-defense, of course. Or killing the way a mother killed: protecting her children, guarding her family. But to point a gun at her husband and shoot him down, out of rage or pain or to solve her problems? No. That was deliberate, premeditated murder. The truth was she was simply not a killer. He was.

  So in the end she decided to do it her way, not his. The therapist’s way. She would confront him with the truth, stage the drama, expose the secrets, and see what happened next. That was why she went to the crap drawer in the kitchen where the rings of extra keys were, took the spare he had marked “office,” and added it to her ring. That night he’d left again, in a rush, muttering about an emergency at some club. Was he going to see her then, the smoky blonde with the cheap perfume? No, she doubted it. It did actually sound like Nero he was talking to on the phone and he did seem genuinely annoyed by whatever he heard. She would wait. She would watch. She would follow. She would choose her moment. And then she would catch him—and her, his mistress—in the act.

  *

  The last thing Donna expected to find when she got home was that her mom had a friend over. For one thing, her mom didn’t have friends over. She had friends, Donna supposed—the neighbors she chatted and sat with out front, other retired coworkers she met for lunch once a year, her group of old ladies who went to movie matinees or whatever in a van—but never once could Donna remember coming back to find her mom just chilling, having a drink, and eating fried rice with a pal.

  So when she walked in—already talking as she came through the door, explaining what a crazy night she had, following down a tip in Queens, and did Larissa get to sleep okay and was there any of that Chinese food she smelled left—she was pretty taken aback to step into the living room and see her mom laughing on the couch with an older white lady. And she was really shocked when the lady looked up and smiled and said, “Hi, Agent Zamora, we were just talking about you,” and she realized it was Gladys Brody, Joe’s grandmother.

  At first Donna said nothing. She just looked at the two smiling women with a blank expression, as though she had been woken from a strange dream.

  “Sit down, honey,” her mom said, reaching for a plate. “You look hungry. There’s plenty of food.”

  Gladys took a beer from the paper sack at her feet and cracked it open. “She looks thirsty, too. Here you go, hon. I bet you could use this.”

  “You know what,” Donna said. “You’re right. I could.” She took the beer from Gladys and the heaping plate from her mom, and she sat down.

  *

  “That’s the second one of your girlfriends to come in and start a fight,” Gio was saying as he drove with Joe beside him, heading from Queens to Bed-Stuy. When Joe checked his phone after leaving Frank’s place for home, there were messages from Gio and Juno, so Gio picked him up himself to tell him about Donna’s visit to the club. “I’d hate to have to eighty-six one of my own bouncers, but it’s bad for business if the customers at a strip club think the girls might kick their ass.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Neither is Yelena, actually.”

  “Good. I should hope even you aren’t crazy enough to start banging a Fed. But she was pissed, man, and in that special way, you know? Like personal. And what the fuck? What’s that shit about rocks? She’s letting us kn
ow she knows about the diamonds.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “But why?”

  “And how? I want to know who in my crew is sharing our private business. At least now we know for sure the snitch is ratting to the Feds. She knew and my guy in the police didn’t.”

  “We’ll see what Juno found out when we get there,” Joe said. “He says he’s ready to report.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “Just relax. You make him nervous.”

  “What’s he got to be nervous about? I’m the one who’s nervous.”

  “Just stay calm and try to be nice.”

  “I’m always calm and nice,” Gio pointed out as he moved the car swiftly into a spot on Juno’s block.

  “That’s true. You are,” Joe admitted. “I think that’s what scares the shit out of people.”

  *

  “Three.”

  “I see your three and raise you another three.”

  “I fold.”

  “Okay, I’ll pay to see what you’re holding.” Donna dropped three more pennies in the pot. They had raided Larissa’s piggy bank and replaced the coins with cash. Now, as her mom watched, Gladys turned up her cards. A flush.

  “Damn,” Donna said. “I was sure you were bluffing.”

  Yolanda laughed and sipped her beer. “You can’t out bluff her, honey. She’s a pro.”

  “Just watch and learn, kid,” Gladys said, sweeping the small pot of pennies into her growing pile. “These are the cheapest lessons you’ll ever get.”

  “Wait, are you cheating?” Donna asked, embarrassed even as she said it, for being such a cop.

  Gladys laughed. “Hustling, not cheating. There’s a difference. Cheating is a crime. Hustling is just playing the player along with the cards.” She ruffled the deck. “Not that I can’t do both,” she added with a wink, handing Donna the cards. “But I don’t have to cheat to beat you. Your deal.”

  Yolanda laughed louder and Donna felt herself blushing as she shuffled and dealt. “What’s your grandson up to tonight?” she asked, with an offhand air.

  Gladys shrugged. “I don’t ask. I learned a long time ago not to try and control him. Just leave a window open. He’ll come back when he’s hungry. That would be my advice.”

  “Advice?” Donna asked.

  “For anyone trying to catch him,” Gladys said and tossed a penny in the pot. “Ante up.”

  Donna and Yolanda both anted, and Yolanda, who was a little buzzed for maybe the first time since Donna’s wedding, slapped her daughter’s knee. “You better hope she’s not after him, Gladys. My daughter’s a special agent, FBI, and she is damn good at her job.”

  “So’s Joe,” Gladys said, from behind her cards. “Another thing you have in common.” She tossed some pennies in. “I bet a nickel.”

  *

  Juno tried to make his crib as much like an office as he could. It was his office, really, where he created beats, recorded rappers, and did the hacking and cracking that paid his bills, but it was also his bedroom and his mom’s basement. So receiving Gio Caprisi there made him a mite uneasy. He made the bed, hid the dirty clothes, closed the drapes that separated his area from the washer, dryer, and ironing board, and tried to lay out the various lists and reports he had printed like at a legit corporate conference, with copies for himself, Gio, and Joe, along with bottles of water, arranged on the coffee table between the broken-down couch he’d inherited when his mom redid the living room upstairs and the busted armchair he covered with a leopard-skin-printed bedsheet.

  He needn’t have bothered. Joe of course had been there before, and Gio didn’t even seem to register the surroundings, nor did he touch the papers or the water. He just sat down, looked Juno dead in the eye and said, “So? Who’s the rat?”

  “Okay, well, to answer that, let me show you what I did.” He pointed at the screens on his long desk and hit a few keys. “I created a program that searched through all the messages and calls from all the accounts and devices you gave me, then cross-referenced that with the dates and times of when that guy in Europe got busted or the diamond heist or when you say you heard there was talk. Looking for patterns and shit.”

  “And?” Gio asked, his eyes still on Juno and not the rows of numbers or graphs. “Is there a pattern?”

  “Yup. A triangular one. Three people, or three entities anyway. One inside the group you gave me, let’s call that A, and two outside, B and C. Back before the Europe guy gets got, A and B are talking back and forth, then C contacts A, then transmissions between A and B pretty much stop. But A and B are both talking to C all the time, and the traffic definitely spikes around your target times.”

  “Enough with the letters, Juno,” Joe put in, seeing Gio’s frown. “Let’s hear some names.”

  “Okay well, B, the first outside man, the account is anonymous but it traces back to a guy named Patrick White, if that means anything.”

  “Motherfucker,” Gio said. He was calm now and smiling. “I had a feeling about that.”

  “C was tougher. A lot tougher. Like bizarrely tough.”

  “What does that mean?” Gio asked him.

  “It’s standard to hide your identity, of course, with proxy servers and blind accounts or fake names, but this C’s security is heavy-duty. So heavy-duty that even I couldn’t crack it, and I can crack anything.”

  “So you don’t know who he is?”

  “No, but I know what he is. Only the government has encryption software this new and advanced. Way beyond even the best corporate. And not local cops either. This is big-time.”

  “FBI?” Gio asked.

  “Maybe …” Juno said, thoughtfully.

  “CIA,” Joe said.

  “Yeah,” Juno agreed. “That’s more like it. This is like top secret spook shit. CIA or NSA or whatever.”

  “Fine, then that’s the law,” Gio said. “So what about the rat inside my house? Who is A? Or is he hidden, too?”

  “A was clever. Multiple proxies. Dummy email accounts that self-destruct after the message is read. But he was not cleverer than moi.” He checked his papers. “One sec, sorry. There were so many names. Here it is. A comes up as one Paul Rogers.” Juno looked up with a grin. “Y’all know that dude?”

  Juno never saw it coming. Gio attacked, lunging across the room, knocking the coffee table over and scattering the papers and water bottles. Only youth and the survival instincts of a nerdy, skinny kid growing up in a rough world gave Juno the reflexes to leap up over the chair and, in a blink, scurry across the room and up the stairs. By then Joe had reacted, too, and was holding Gio back in a tight hug.

  “It’s not his fault, Gio,” Joe was murmuring into his ear. “He just did what you told him to.”

  Gio nodded, breathing hard, hands up and just as quickly as it came, the storm passed. “I know,” he said. “I know. I’m okay.”

  Joe released him carefully and called out to Juno. “It’s okay, Juno, don’t worry.”

  There was a beat before Juno’s head appeared, peeking down from upstairs.

  “It’s safe to come back down,” Joe said. “I promise.”

  “Sorry, kid. I didn’t mean it,” Gio said, as Juno tiptoed back down. “Look,” he added. “I’m sitting down.” He and Joe both sat back on the couch and Juno returned, stepping gingerly over the mess and perching on the edge of his chair.

  “Now,” Gio asked, in a very soft voice that Juno found creepy rather than comforting. “Are you absolutely fucking sure?”

  “Sure they talked? Yes. A … I mean Paul Rogers.” He paused cautiously for a second but when Gio nodded, went on: “He talked to White. Then after the bust in Europe, the G-man and Rogers connect. But that’s as sure as I can be without reading and hearing all the convos. I don’t know what they said.”

  Joe spoke: “Is there some way to check it? Like can you send them both, Paul and Pat, a fake message that seems to come from C? See how they react?”

  “Yeah. That could work,” Juno said, forgetting his
fear and getting excited. “I could create an alias, like a cloned account, the way spammers do when it seems like your dead grandpa is trying to sell you Viagra.”

  “Just do it,” Gio said, standing up abruptly. Juno flinched. “And remember, only you, me, and Joe know about any of this. Ever.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Gio. I mean—”

  “Let me know when you know. You need a ride?” he asked Joe.

  “No, Juno and I have more work to do.”

  “Right.” He pulled a fat roll of cash from his pocket and tossed it in Juno’s lap. “Good work, kid. And thanks,” he said as he went upstairs and out. He had recovered his equipoise. He seemed terrifyingly calm.

  *

  After Juno settled down, with many assurances from Joe that Gio would not kill the messenger, he showed Joe what he had come up with for the exchange and Joe gave him the diamonds to prepare. Then he checked on the other guys, who had taken care of the cars. Then he tried Yelena. Since he was in Brooklyn and they had to pick up weapons from her source in the morning, he thought maybe she’d want him to stay over with her. But she didn’t reply and, after a while, when he finished with Juno, he went home. To his surprise, his grandmother was out, too. He knew she had a new gig hustling cards at a club, but she was never out this late. He made a sandwich, ate it, and went to bed.

  31

  Yelena Noylaskya was born in a Russian prison—in other words, in hell. Her father was unknown and her mother, a career criminal—prostitute, madam, thief, and drug dealer—died behind bars, leaving little Yelena to be state raised. Born into crime, as the tattoo of a Madonna and child covering her back symbolically declared, she quickly adapted to life in her jungle and learned to be predator rather than prey. A prodigy at burglary, she also grew up to be lethal, with or without weapons, and the tattoos on her hips, a dollar sign and a skull, told this, too. Finally the stars she wore, tattooed on her upper chest beneath each shoulder bone, showed the high regard and position of honor she held in the Russian underworld. But, despite her success as a criminal, she had always been known to the authorities—they raised her, watched her grow, kept tabs on her—and eventually they pulled her back into their web, showed her a heap of evidence, some of it even true, and offered her a choice: She could return to prison and end her life where it began. Or she could be set free to hunt again, this time in America. If she agreed, she would be turned over to the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, successors to the KGB. They would provide assistance in the way of visas and so forth, along with additional training in spy craft. She would be their eyes and ears in New York, keeping them apprised of the doings of the Russian Mafia among other things. She was the one they reached for when they heard that the wanted terrorist, Adrian Kaan, was in New York and plotting an attack.