In for a Ruble (17 page)

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Is this really important?”

“Why didn’t you attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you and your husband attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What’s that have to do with this?”

“Just a question.”

“I have work to do.” She grabbed her computer mouse and shoved it across the desk. The phone rang.

“That’s your conference call,” Sheila said through the door.

Julia Leitz reached for the phone and stopped and looked at me. I waited while it rang.

“I have to take this call.”

“Saved by the bell.”

“What the hell does that mean? I have to take this call.”

I stood. “I’m sure the whole damned deal depends on it.”

*   *   *

Third Avenue was quieter now. The cold air felt good. I was annoyed with myself. Julia Leitz got under my skin. The whole family pissed me off. I felt sympathy for Jonathan Stern, not necessarily a sympathetic guy. How did levelheaded, smiling Jenny Leitz put up with this lot? How would she manage when her illness really took hold? I would have locked them all in a single Lubyanka cell and thrown away the key.

I looked around for Tan Coat, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he hadn’t guessed my destination—or was learning better technique. I flipped a mental coin. Heads—find a quiet tavern. Tails—skip the tavern, go home, eat a Spartan dinner, and go to bed. Plenty to look into in the morning. In my mind’s eye, the coin landed on the sidewalk, rolled along a crease in the concrete and disappeared into a sewer drain. On par with the rest of the day.

Bar and dinner could wait. I walked to Grand Central, rode the Lexington Avenue Express between Fourteenth and Fifty-ninth Streets a few times to give Tan Coat a chance to show himself. When he didn’t, I switched at Fifty-ninth to the N to Queens. The first stop across the river put me at Queensboro Plaza. I walked a few minutes to the block of Twenty-second Street between Fortieth and Forty-first avenues, the headquarters of YouGoHere.com, Walter Coryell’s company.

CHAPTER
15

An empty commercial block in an empty commercial neighborhood. Five-story brick and concrete buildings on one side held warehouses, electricians, cabinet makers, a lighting manufacturer, and more than a few empty spaces for rent. The single- and double-height structures opposite were home to an auto repair shop, a refrigeration company, a metal fabricator, and one small apartment conversion, if the satellite TV dishes outside three of six windows were any indication. No delis, restaurants, or bars, unless you counted the “gentlemen’s club” near the subway offering the opportunity of meet one of Tiger Woods’s mistresses up close and personal. Hardly a service industry neighborhood. Definitely not a successful dot-com neighborhood.

Number 40-28 stood midblock and won the contest for most peeling paint and
FOR RENT
signs. Roman numerals on the concrete cornice broadcast the date of construction as
MDCCCVII
—a few years after the classical era. The door was steel with a small, reinforced glass window. Empty tiled vestibule behind. An intercom by the door had a dozen buzzers with yellowed signs. The only one ending in “.com” was
YOUGOHERE
. I pushed it and got no response. I pushed again with the same result. The elevator at the far end of the vestibule opened, and a middle-aged black guy with a graying mustache pushed open the front door.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m looking for the guy at YouGoHere, supposed to meet him at seven thirty.” I guessed at the time.

“Good luck to you, man. Ain’t never seen that dude. Go on up and take a look, that’s what you want.”

I thanked him as he walked into the night.

A slow elevator with a worn-out cab deposited me on the third floor at the head of a short cinderblock corridor with four steel doors. Three had signs. None said YouGoHere. The unlabeled door was sandwiched between the elevator and a space labeled
GROARK CUSTOM FRAMERS
. I knocked. No answer. I tried the other three with the same result. My watch said 7:55. The hell with it.

Back downstairs, I crossed the street to see if there were lights in any of the windows. None. A wasted trip, but hadn’t I expected that?

I remembered a first-rate Italian restaurant, another old-style New York institution, a half-dozen blocks away. I’d been taken there a few years before and thought more than once about returning. The tug of a vodka martini and a good Bolognese sauce was setting up another mental coin toss when headlights turned into the block. Instinct pushed me into a dark doorway. The lights swept the parked cars, and motion caught my eye—a head ducking, a moment too late, behind the windshield of a Chevy sedan. Could have been a trick of the lights, but I stepped farther back into the darkness. No way Tan Coat could have followed me here—and certainly not in a car. A black Cadillac Escalade rolled to a stop outside number 12. The driver kept the engine running. Nobody got out. I didn’t move.

Five minutes passed. Then another five.

My muscles started to ache mildly, but waiting is an acquired skill, one I’d learned, along with every other Russian, as a kid. No more movement from the car down the block.

A flash of fire in the SUV as the driver struck a match. The flame illuminated a blood-drained face as it lit a cigarette held by misshapen teeth.

The spectral driver drawing on the smoke was Nosferatu.

*   *   *

The music was coming from my apartment. Only two to the floor, one at each end of the hall, the elevator in the middle. My door was ajar. Loretta Lynn, I was pretty sure, backed by steel guitar, bass and drums, floated in my direction. She was singing about being true to her man while he’s gone—if he doesn’t overdo it. I like Loretta—but I don’t own any of her records. No question, though, she was on my stereo. My first thought was that I’d been followed, but Loretta didn’t seem Nosferatu’s style.

Almost ten o’clock. Nosferatu had smoked his cigarette, then two more. He’d made two calls on his cell phone. I didn’t move a muscle the entire time. No one else came down the block, vehicle or pedestrian. The guy in the other car, if there was a guy in the other car, stayed out of sight. After the third smoke, Nosferatu climbed out and went into the building using a key to open the front door. I watched the windows on the third floor. No light came on. Coryell could have drawn curtains or shades. Nosferatu could be doing his work in the dark. He could be visiting someone else altogether. Still no movement at the car down the block. Ever so slowly, I got out my phone and tapped Coryell’s number, not sure what I’d say if anyone answered. No one did. After a handful of rings I got a recording.

Nosferatu was inside exactly twenty-four minutes. When he came out, he walked up and down the block, ten yards in each direction. He stopped about five short of the car where I’d seen movement. Once again, I didn’t move a millimeter. Neither did the guy in the Chevy. If he saw either of us, there was nowhere to run. After two minutes that stretched through half the night, Nosferatu got back in his SUV. He smoked another cigarette, made another call, started his engine and drove off. I waited another fifteen minutes before I started breathing normally.

I took a chance and walked to the other end of the block before turning left and back to Queensboro Plaza. A calculated gamble—I had little to lose. If there was a guy in the car, he’d already spotted me going in and out of Coryell’s building. If he was Nosferatu’s man, I wouldn’t be walking around. If it was Tan Coat, he already knew what I looked like. Sure enough, a man in a Chevy Malibu tried hard to look invisible as I strolled past. Definitely not Tan Coat—this guy wore a suit and had a full head of hair. Lots of people appeared to be interested in YouGoHere and Walter Coryell. Forty minutes later, as I got off my elevator, I was still thinking about that. But my immediate concern was who was in my apartment. Nosferatu hadn’t spotted me, I was almost certain of that. But what was this?

A pause on the CD and a new song started, Loretta singing about a honky-tonk girl crying out her lonely heart. My heart did a back flip and landed in my throat. I got my breathing under control for the second time in an hour, walked down the hall, and pushed open the door.

Victoria sat on my couch, glass in hand, looking drop-dead gorgeous and staring straight at me.

“Goddamned Russians. It’s about time you got home. I’ve been here since seven, and I’m hot and hungry—or I was when I arrived. When the hell are you going to learn to keep some wine in the house?”

CHAPTER
16

We didn’t get any dinner. Not much sleep either. But when I awoke at my usual 6:00
A.M.
, her head on my chest, my arm around her shoulders, her leg across mine, all was right with the world.

I had a thousand questions, of course. She hadn’t let me ask one. We went straight to bed and rediscovered each other slowly until heat and passion took over, and we thrashed across the sheets like two teenagers who have just figured it all out. When we came up for air, she still wouldn’t let me say a word. The second time was slow, contained passion until the very end, when we both exploded and collapsed in a single mass of sweat and flesh. Just like the first time—even better. Before I fell asleep I told myself this time I’d resort to padlocks and handcuffs before I let her leave again.

She seemed to read my mind.

“Don’t worry. I’m not making the same mistake twice,” were her only other words that night.

*   *   *

I believed her, but I also thought it would be just my Russian luck to go for my morning run and come back to an empty apartment. I couldn’t move without waking her, which I didn’t want to do—truth be told, I didn’t want to move at all—so I lay there, dozing, thinking about what had brought her back and trying not to let the ghostly image of Nosferatu, smoking his cigarettes, intrude on an otherwise perfect morning.

“Don’t you go running or jumping or pumping at an ungodly hour of the morning?” she said, smiling at me, her eyes as big and green and deep as the Nile.

“Pumping perhaps. And I’m not leaving,” I said.

“Jesus. I’d almost forgotten the humor. You don’t need to worry. I told you that last night.”

“You are a woman of your word.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it says. You told me you’d leave before, without so much as a kiss good-bye, and that’s exactly what you did. I’m staying put.”

She laughed. “You’re right. I did. But not this time.”

“What changed?”

“Not you, I’m willing to bet.”

“Guilty. But I can try.”

“Uh-huh. We both know how good you are at that. We can discuss it. We can discuss lots of things, which I’m looking forward to, but first, I’m ravenous. I never did get dinner. I couldn’t find anything worth eating in your fridge last night, and believe me, I looked. Get out there and hunt or forage or whatever men do, besides pump. I want a real breakfast. Bacon, eggs with Tabasco, remember? Move it!”

She rolled out of my grasp with a playful slap and skipped to the bathroom. She flicked her beautiful behind for my benefit before she closed the door.

I lay there another minute holding on to the image of a present-day Aphrodite frolicking across my bedroom. Victoria de Millenuits, Victoria of a Thousand Nights, was ten years younger and two inches shorter than I am. She had a figure that would make Sophia Loren take a second look and turn green when she did. Long, thick black hair, those Nile-deep green eyes, a big laugh, and a Bardot pout when she was unhappy. She had brains to match her looks and a temper that trumped both. She also had that highly successful legal career, most recently occupying perhaps the top prosecutorial position in the entire country. And a firearm permit. The first time I met her she threatened to have me deported.

What she hadn’t had was luck with men, a run I perpetuated when I came close to breaking her heart—after promising twice that I wouldn’t put myself, or her, in that position. Compounding matters, I couldn’t even provide a good explanation of what had happened without putting Aleksei’s life at risk, and I couldn’t explain that either. That’s when she left.

Something had brought her back, she’d tell me the story in her own time, but it sure looked like love. I was going to keep my promise this time, I told myself again, knowing as I did so, I was being untrue to her and to me. Fate has a way of letting you know when you’re making commitments you can’t keep.

The hell with fate. Love was stronger than that. I’d fucked up once. I wasn’t going to do it again.

She’d just come out of the shower—Aphrodite, like Sophia, would have been green too—when I joined her in the bathroom.

“Yikes,” she said when she saw my bruises. “I didn’t notice those last night. You look worse than last summer. What happened this time?”

“Someone wanted to send a message, and he selected me as the messenger. They look worse than they feel—now.”

“You go looking for trouble or does it just find you?”

“I wasn’t looking to get beat up.”

“But I’ll bet you did something that attracted the beater’s attention.”

“Indirectly.”

“See what I mean? What was it this time?”

“It’s Foos’s fault. He asked me to help out a friend.” I reached for her towel, but she slapped away my hand.

“And the friend beat you up?”

“Nosferatu beat me up. He’s a six-foot-seven Belarusian with buckteeth, named after a German vampire. The friend tried to crush my legs under his granite conference table.”

“You’re teasing me, and you’d better stop.” Her temper was still in place—the Bayou twang, I’d learned, was its early warning system. I held up my hands, palms facing her.

“All true. I swear.”

“Christ. You need someone to take care of you.”

“I’m taking applications.” I made another try for the towel. She slapped me away, with a smile.

“Breakfast, remember?”

“There are all kinds of hunger.”