Her voice falls quiet and she takes a sip of her coffee, not raising her eyes. She doesn’t have to blow on it this time.
I give her a moment to play it out, check to see if she’s going to say more, and I have to give her an ounce of respect. She doesn’t try to conjure up a tear or manage a sob.
I lean back and wait. Everything I do, every interaction hinges on the principle of dominance. Dominance can be physical, like cracking a man in the knee to drop him in front of you so he knows you’re better than he is. Or it can be mental: a game of wits, a look, a gesture, a word—anything to gain an advantage over an adversary. Sometimes dominance can simply mean waiting.
After a couple of silent minutes, she looks up, eyes dry. There’s resentment in her eyes, resentment for making her draw this out. Finally, when I have her broken, I speak up.
“You know he’s not dead.”
“You want me to say it?”
“Why pretend?”
She moves the coffee cup back and forth in front of her, grimacing. “He didn’t have to do it for me. He could’ve just walked.”
“Didn’t have to hire the guys, you mean.”
“Yeah. Plan the whole thing out. Tack it on to the end of the other job, you know?” She stops looking at me, at the inside of the diner, at anything. “It was actually . . . well, it was the sweetest thing he did for me the whole time we were married.”
I nod, but this is not good. Not good at all.
“Can I get out of here now? I’m done with this.”
She’s drained now, played out, bitter. If I squeeze her any more, she’ll pop.
I nod and she hauls herself up, then hovers over me for a second as her shadow falls across half my face. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done, making me say it.” I don’t look at her. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done.” When I feel the shadow move away, I know she’s gone.
We meet in a pre-determined spot, a bench in Battery Park. It’s quiet here this time of day. A patch of green. The water. An old man sits at a table by himself, moving chess pieces around while his lips move. Risina is already sitting when I arrive. For a moment, we don’t speak. Anyone passing would think us two office drones meeting for a quiet date; the guy in sales with the girl from accounting.
“You let her leave.”
“Yeah. She was used up.”
I put my arm around Risina, and she leans into me. For just a few short breaths, we’re back in that fishing village halfway around the world. Maybe this is all we’ll have for a while.
“I thought the idea was to kidnap someone he loves . . .”
“It is. But he doesn’t love her.”
“He didn’t have to set it up for her like that. He could’ve run off.”
“That’s true.”
“So that means something.”
“He loves the process, not her. He loves the mousetrap. He loves setting up all the pieces and knocking them down. He cooked up the dummy fall at the same time as he plotted out the actual kill. Brought her in on the tandem and made the whole thing one piece, you see? First the kill, then the fall . . . two parts of the same job. In his mind, they were always one. He doesn’t care about her . . . he gets off on the complication.”
Risina frowns. “But he thought to do it that way. It has to be a sign of . . . well, at least affection if not love.”
“Maybe. But it’s not enough for what we need.”
She starts to speak, but I get there first. “When I first understood which way this was breaking, I thought maybe I could enlist Carla to help us find Spilatro and hurt him. The way he treated her, faking his death, bringing this world into her life and then walking away? He left her holding the bag. I thought maybe she was bitter and we could use that bitterness. But she’s not. And she’s not the opposite either. She’s not accepting. She’s just . . . finished.”
Risina nods. The old man stands and collects his pieces. His lips move, but his words are lost in the wind.
“So we still have nothing. After all this?”
“I didn’t say that. She gave us a great deal more than we had before we found her. We know Spilatro was married, we know he was in the army, we know he worked in software sales, at least for a while. We have ways to find him.”
“And we know how he thinks.”
I smile. Risina’s intuition continues to surprise me. “That’s right. Now we know how he thinks.”
We’re going to get to him through his friend, the army buddy who brought him into the game. I notice I’m thinking in plural pronouns again, “we” instead of “I,” and I like the way it sounds in my head. The tandem didn’t work for Doug and Carla, but they’re not us, not even close to us, and Carla served only as a convenience to him. He was using her for cover, that’s it. That was her utility for him.
We’re not like them at all. Carla said she saw a future for them in the moments before that future was wiped away, but he was the one who caused that plan to fail. It’s different for Risina and me. We can pull jobs together, back each other’s play, watch each other’s back. I fell in love with Risina because of the animal inside her, just below the surface. She has more sand than I imagined back in Rome. She demonstrates it over and over. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, even though she’s not wearing any. We’re not like them. We. Not I. We.
A tiny piece of information can be like a keyword to unravel a code. Based on Carla’s story, I know approximately how old Spilatro is, and I know his army buddy’s name, Decker, and I can guess a pretty accurate timeline of when they must have been in the service together. From there, it’s a reasonable amount of digging to cross-reference the two names, and if the names are false, as I’m sure they will be, then it’s a bit more cumbersome but not unconquerable to find similar names who served in the same unit. Most hit men aren’t too creative in coming up with their aliases.
This is fence work, but most of the fences I know seem to be missing or dead. About that, K-bomb was right. I do have bad luck with fences.
Still, there is one I know who can be of service and is alive and free: the one in Belgium who has a new appreciation for handing out favors.
Doriot meets us two days later in a barbershop in the basement of the St. Regis. A pair of brothers own the joint, having taken over from their father, good guys, and when I reached out to them to use their place for an after-hours meeting, alone, they didn’t hesitate to give me a key. A thousand-dollar tip on a shave and a trim didn’t hurt to solidify the deal.
“I told you providence would smile on me for treating you respectfully, Columbus, and here I am in New York City, the Big Apple, so what can I do for you and how much can I be expected to earn? Not that I am only in it for the money since I like you so much, but business is business as I’m sure you understand.”
“I need a file on a guy.”
“Twenty thousand,” he says immediately.
“Give me a fucking break. Twenty thousand . . .”
“I have a ten percent relationship with my hitters, Columbus. This is what I make . . .”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, fifteen . . .”
I could press him to twelve but I don’t want to hurt his feelings before he goes to work for me. I’d rather cough up a few extra grand than have to worry about his effort.
“Fifteen’s a deal but I don’t want to decide on a play from your file and then find out the information is lacking.”
He shakes his head vigorously, feigning offense. “I do this right for you, you maybe come back to me for more work. I see how this goes. You’ll have a file so filled with truth you can lay it on top of the Bible.”
“All right then.”
“So who must I find for you?”
I give him everything I know about Decker and Spilatro as I regurgitate my conversation with Carla.
“How much time do I have?” he asks when I’m done.
“Three weeks enough?”
He frowns as though he’s thinking about it. “Are you sure you can’t come up to eighteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just asking the question. I’ll start right away. You’ll see. You have never worked with a fence like me. This file will be like Brussels chocolate.” He does that chef thing of kissing the tips of his fingers.
“I need one other thing.”
He pauses at the door, then surveys the barber implements surrounding us. “If you tell me you need me to trim your hair, then I’m afraid you will have to come up with the twenty thousand after all.” He produces a short laugh that sounds more like a smoker’s cough.
“I need to rent a house upstate until your file is ready. Somewhere in the country, somewhere back from a road, somewhere no one’s gonna visit, even a mailman. Leave a key and an address for Jack Walker at reception tomorrow and you can have your twenty.”
He smacks his lips and raises his eyebrows.
“You sure you don’t want a haircut too?”
“Just the keys.”
He smiles and heads out the door.
I want to see her kill something.
The house is a good find, a fifteen-minute drive inside the property line from a dirt road only marked by an unassuming gate. I walked the fence line on our first few days and it’s over five miles from front to back and side to side. Doriot suspended mail service while we’re renting the place, and I have yet to hear a car engine anywhere in the vicinity.
The woods surrounding the house are as thick as a blanket and teem with life. Deer, badgers, squirrels, woodchucks, robins, sparrows and quail go about their days foraging and fighting. I need to see her kill something. I don’t care about the hunt or her ability to keep silent or her ability to hold the gun steady or her nerve in pulling the trigger. It’s the
after
I’m worried about, the
after
I need to see. How she reacts to blood spilled by her own hand. Will she be like Spilatro and shy away from the mess? Or will she be like me and seek out another opportunity? And which do I really want?
“Why do you carry a Glock?”
“It’s a good, lightweight semi-automatic that’ll hold seventeen bullets in the clip and one in the chamber. It’s made of polymer so it doesn’t warp in bad weather and it takes just a second to slam in another clip if you’re in a spot.”
She smirks and racks a round into the chamber. Her eyes narrow in a mock display of gravity, like she’s playing a character in an action film, and then she laughs.
“You still think this is fun and games?”
“I think you need to break the tension sometimes or this would all be overwhelming.”
“Sometimes you have to rely on that tension, use it to heighten your senses.”
“Or break it to relax.”
“Who is teaching whom here?”
“Oh, come on. Don’t look at me like that. You want me to say I’m scared, I’ll say it without shame. I’ve been scared since the moment you came back from the bookstore with that look on your face. I haven’t stopped being scared. If I paused to think about it, I’d probably start screaming and I don’t know that I’d be able to stop. But I’ve always been good at learning and I’ve learned by watching you. I keep the fear inside and I make jokes and I laugh and I talk back and I try to look cool and all of that is to keep the fear choked down. So let me do this my way, please. I don’t ask much of you and I pay attention, but you have to let me do this my way.”
I move in and pull her into me and we stand in the forest as the world falls silent. I’m not sure if I’m holding her or she’s holding me, and when we break, her eyes are wet.
“Can you at least make the jokes better?”
She starts to react, then realizes I’m having fun with her. “You shouldn’t do that when I have a pistol in my hand.”
“You haven’t even taken the safety off.”
She looks down at the grip and when she does I snatch the gun from her hand.
“Oldest trick in the book.”
She starts laughing, hard. The woods come to life again.
A squirrel darts into the path in front of us. It’s a bit wary and cocks its head to the side to give us a once-over. It sniffs the air, hops twice more across the path, and rears on its hind legs again to gauge whether or not we present a threat.
Risina stops, levels her gun, and before I can say anything, she pulls the trigger, once, twice, three times, missing the first two shots low before she corrects and sends the creature pinwheeling backward, tumbling end over end like a bowling pin, its hide a mess of blood and fur.
“Anything else you want me to kill?” she asks, unsmiling.
I study her face, and she breaks eye contact to saunter off. I’m starting to think I don’t need to worry about the after. Maybe, instead, I should be worrying about what I’ve created.
He’s waiting for us in the cabin.
That fucking bastard Doriot must’ve sold us out, and I never saw it coming. Didn’t even have an inkling it was coming. I’ve grown too fucking seat-of-the-pants on this whole mission . . . except it’s not really a mission, is it? Christ, I should be shot in the head. Ever since I brought Risina into this and I didn’t have a fence and I thought I could call in favors and I thought the name Columbus still meant something, it has been one thing after another and I still haven’t learned. And that’s the rubber meeting the road right there. Columbus. The name carries no weight. Not anymore.
When I was incarcerated in Waxham, I learned a term called “chin-checking.” Roughly translated, it describes a gang leader who returns to his neighborhood after time in the joint. While he was gone, some young buck stepped in to fill his shoes in the power vacuum. The ex-con has to reassert his authority by walking up and punching the new kid right in the fucking mouth. Chin-checking. Hello, I’m back. I thought stepping back into this life would be like I never left, except I did leave, and memories are short. Doriot used to be afraid of me, but he’s not anymore. If I get through this, Doriot’s gonna learn a new term.
I open the cabin door and a cell phone is standing up on the table like a scar. Risina senses something is wrong the way animals perk up whenever a predator roams nearby. The phone rings before I can say anything to comfort her.
If he wanted to kill us, he could’ve shot us when we walked inside the door. If he wanted to plant a bomb in the phone, then we’re already dead. But in my experience, people call when they want to talk.