In for a Ruble (23 page)

I held up the smack. “You make a single sound before I’m through here, this goes down the drain. You hit Cindy again, I will find you, wherever you are, just like I found you today, and pound you until there is nothing left to pound. You understand?”

He didn’t move. I stomped on his ankle. He yelped in pain.

“Do you understand?”

“Y … yes.”

“Don’t come out of here until I’m finished.”

My threats were meaningless, except to flush his heroin, which he’d realize as soon as I left, but they made me feel like at least I tried. I returned to Cindy, wide-eyed on the bed, still naked. I found some jeans and a shirt on the floor, which I handed over.

“Put these on.”

I turned my back, ever gallant Galahad, while she dressed.

“Okay.” She was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“If I gave you enough money for a bus or a train, is there somewhere you could go, get yourself cleaned up, start over?”

“You mean … leave Les?”

I nodded.

She thought about it but not long enough. She shook her head. “He’s all I have.”

“He’s scum, Cindy. Look at this dump. Is this what you want? He get you hooked?”

“He … He’s all I have.” She started to cry.

I’d tried. Breaking her away from Les would take more than one attempt by one leather-coated Galahad on a cold January morning.

“Tell me about the boy.”

She looked away.

I held out the foil packet, making the shift from chivalry to shit. “Tell me about the boy, or I’ll throw this into the wind.”

“No! Please…”

“You saw him. When? Saturday?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know. About nine, I guess. Maybe later. We were going out, get something to eat. He and a girl were a couple doors down. They were yelling, that’s how come I noticed.”

“A girl?”

“That’s right.”

“What did they say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Angry yelling?”

“I think so.”

“Angry about what? Please try to remember.”

She closed her eyes and scrunched up the hollow face. She was trying or putting on a good act. I waited.

“I know! I remember!” Her eyes popped open, and she smiled, pleased with her accomplishment.

“That’s great,” I said, clapping my hands in encouragement, feeling like a fool.

“He kept shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ She kept saying, ‘How should I know? This was your stupid plan, remember?’”

She looked doubtful for a moment, then her face brightened again.

“At least I think that’s how it went. Yes, that’s it. I remember the part about ‘stupid plan’ because she was really angry about that, like he’d done something without telling her, and she was pissed, just like I would have been.”

I wondered how often Les left her out of the plan. That was probably unfair, if only because Les didn’t seem the type ever to have a plan—beyond securing the next fix.

“Did they say anything else? Anything about this guy they were expecting?”

“No. You don’t have it right.
They
weren’t expecting anybody, only
him,
he was. And she was pissed because he hadn’t told her.”

“That’s right. I’m sorry.” Having remembered her story, she was sticking to it. “What did the girl look like?”

“Tall, blond hair, I think. I didn’t get a really good look at her. She was wearing, like, a ski parka. And a wool hat pulled down over her head.”

“How old?”

“Same age. As the boy, I mean. Young, twenty, maybe less. I don’t know.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. I mean, they shouted back and forth three or four times, I think. The same thing about where is he, how should I know, then they went inside. We left.”

“And when you came back?”

“Didn’t see them again.”

“Were they still here, you think?”

She shrugged.

“What time did you come back?”

“I don’t know. Ten thirty, eleven, maybe.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see them again?”

“No.”

She looked up at me with her sunken eyes. “Can I have my fix now, please. I need it.”

I looked over at the bathroom door and made one more stab.

“You sure you don’t want to get out of here? I’ll take you. You just tell me where.”

Her eyes followed mine, stopped on the bathroom door for not long enough, then swung back to me.

“I need it. Please.”

CHAPTER
21

The motel manager didn’t add much to Cindy’s story. He didn’t want to add anything until I placed a used syringe on the counter and told him my next stop was the Newburgh police if he didn’t rearrange his attitude.

A man had rented the room by phone, one night, under the name Brian Murphy, from New York City. The kid had collected the key and paid the bill in cash. The manager didn’t see the girl, or if he did, he wasn’t saying.

“We get a lot of folks through here, bud. None of them want to be remembered. We do ’em that favor.”

If it wasn’t the truth, it was a damned good lie.

I returned to the Potemkin’s heater and thought about how far I wanted to take this. I’d been hired for one job, and I had the answer to that—at least the pieces. Nosferatu had placed the bug. Coryell was his agent. No doubt in my mind he was the man the cleaners had described. Nosferatu worked for Konychev. Konychev knew Leitz. Leitz wanted a name. That was enough to secure my fee and the Malevich. But I didn’t have the connections. What was Nosferatu after? What did he have on Coryell? Why had Coryell sold out his brother-in-law? What did Thomas have on Coryell? And what was Leitz’s multimillionaire son up to? The last question was none of my affair, but I’ve always found it hard to walk away from anomalies like that.

What the hell? Nothing to lose, except maybe my client, and I was all but done with him anyway. I dialed the number of Andras Leitz’s cell phone.

“This is Andras.” A pleasant-sounding voice, slightly high in pitch, counterbalanced by low volume.

“My name’s Turbo. I work with Foos. I’m doing a job for your dad and I have a question for you.”

I waited while he processed that. “Dad didn’t say anything about you calling.”

“I didn’t tell him I planned to.”

I waited some more.

“What’s the name of Foos’s parakeet?” he asked.

“Always good to be sure,” I said. “It’s a parrot, as you know. Pig Pen. He calls me Russky. He flunked charm school, which you also know if you’ve met him.”

He laughed, relaxed. “That’s for sure. He calls me Whiz Kid.”

“At least that’s complimentary.”

“It’s embarrassing. Especially around Foos. You said you have a question. Sorry to rush. I’ve got class in a few minutes.”

“I’ll be quick. The job I’m working on has to do with your dad’s office security. I don’t know that much about computers, your father’s in meetings all day, and Foos isn’t around, or I’d ask him. Is your home networked through the Leitz Ahead system?”

“That’s right.”

“So if someone’s online at your house, they’re inside the network, inside the firewall.”

“Sure. Why?”

“Foos thought he spotted traces of unusual activity. I was trying to think about where it could have originated.”

I expected a few moments of silence then a feeble lie. That’s what I got.

“I do all my work here at Gibbet, on the school’s network.”

“Sure.” Except during vacations and breaks. I was willing to bet he got straight As in math.

“Tell me one more thing, and I’ll let you go.” I think I heard him sigh with relief. “When was the last time you talked to your uncle Walter?”

Relief morphed to apprehension, maybe fear. “Why?”

“Nobody’s heard from him. You’ve been trying to reach him.”

“How do you know that?” Definitely fear now.

I kept my voice pleasantly conversational and nonthreatening. “I know a lot of things, more than I want to, actually. You were at the Black Horse Motor Inn in Newburgh Saturday night. You tried calling your uncle three times. Was he supposed to meet you there?”

He took a long time before he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My class…” He tried to keep his voice calm and level, but I could feel the stress through the atmosphere.

“Uncle Thomas says you’re all good at sweeping stuff under the rug, and I think each of you has stuff you don’t want anyone else to know about. You seem to.”

Another silence. I let him simmer.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, maybe Irina does. She was there too, right, at the Black Horse?”

When the odds are four to one in your favor, it’s no surprise that you win the bet.

“NO!”

“Hey, don’t get excited. I was just going to give her a call. She could’ve heard from your uncle.”

“STAY AWAY FROM HER! YOU HEAR ME? STAY AWAY! THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER.”

He broke the connection.

I dialed Irina’s cell phone. He got there first, or she just didn’t answer. I was sent to voicemail. I didn’t bother with a message. She’d see I called, discuss it with him (or maybe not), and decide whether to answer when I called again.

The heater blew warm air, too warm. I got out and walked around the windy parking lot. I’d accomplished what I knew I would. Drawing myself in deeper. But I was no closer to the link I was looking for—Andras-Irina-Coryell to Nosferatu. I got back in the Potemkin and pointed the bow south toward the city.

I tried Irina from the Bronx and was mildly surprised when she answered.

“Andras tell you about me?” I asked without introduction.

“You’re Russian.”

She’d done some homework, quickly. “That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Moscow mainly, but I’ve lived all over. New York now.”

“Cheka?”

Definitely doing some checking. She had the means and connections.

“That’s right, First Chief Directorate, if you’re interested.”

“Chekists are pigs.”

“That what you tell your stepfather?”

She didn’t pause—or bite. “I only wanted to hear your voice, so I can avoid it if I hear it again. I have nothing to say.”

She had plenty of presence for her age, no question about that, even over the phone.

“Hold on. I don’t want anything to do with you or Andras. Your bank accounts are your business.”

I meant to freeze her and I did. I could hear soft breathing, the breaths were shorter than a minute ago.

“I only want to know about Andras’s uncle Walter. What happened at the Black Horse?”

“What do you know about that?”

The question came fast, accusation wrapped in nerves. I’d pricked the tough-girl veneer. But only slightly, she asked
what
not
how
?

Maintain the ascendancy. They teach you that in Cheka Interrogation 101. They didn’t train you specifically to interrogate seventeen-year-olds, but anyone, of any age, could be in the chair. My mother found that out. What had she been asked? What had she answered? Beria chuckled in the background.

“You and Andras were supposed to meet Uncle Walter at the Black Horse. He didn’t show. What happened?”

She laughed. “You’re not as clever as you think you are. I don’t know anything about any Black Horse. Any more questions, Cheka pig?”

She understood ascendancy as well as I did.

“Let’s talk about those bank accounts.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Lot of money for a couple of teenagers.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Twenty-two million is a lot of money to make up. But like I said, I’m really interested in Uncle Walter.”

“Be careful, Chekist pig. You know what happens to Chekists who make mistakes.”

She cut me off. The girl was tough and smart—and experienced, much more so than she should have been. Jenny Leitz had picked up on it, but she hadn’t grasped the full degree. Irina had played our short interrogation like an expert. Not that surprising, perhaps, her father and stepfather were top oligarchs. She’d been learning at the feet of experts since she was a baby. She and Andras were doubtless comparing notes. I still couldn’t see what any of this had to do with the bugging of Leitz’s computers.

Not that it mattered. I fully expected to be fired by the time I got back to Manhattan.

CHAPTER
22

Suspicion confirmed.

Leitz was waiting at my office. He and Foos were bent over a laptop in the open area, comparing notes on something. Leitz had switched to blue cashmere today. Same corduroys, from the looks of it, same shoes.

“Don’t you believe in progress reports?” Leitz said, looking up, trying to be confrontational, but not able to manage it. His eyes were red with bags underneath. He was tired, and for him, decidedly subdued. Looked like Jenny had told him of her diagnosis.

“Didn’t see the need. You had your man in the tan coat for that.”

He started to say something, stopped and shook his head. “He figured you spotted him—on Houston Street.”

“Before that—outside Marianna’s.”

“How’d you figure he was working for me?”

“Process of elimination. Who else would have someone following me around?”

He nodded. “Serves me right. Foos said I could trust you, but…”

“I’m told you like to control things.”

He nodded again. “Guilty.”

“You want your report now?”

He shrugged. “If you think it’s necessary. I actually came down here … I want to ask you to stop. The computers, whoever it was, it just doesn’t matter that much anymore.”

He looked down at the coffee table.

“I’m finished anyway,” I said. “I can tell you who and what if you want. But it’s likely to cause more pain.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

It took a minute before he raised his head. Tears in his eyes. “You … you know?”

“She told me. Only when I asked, although I already knew about the doctors and the tests.”

“Jesus.” He started a lunge for the laptop. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl it across the room. Foos thought the same thing and was ready to grab it first. But halfway there, Leitz just collapsed and fell back on the sofa. Sorrow overwhelmed temper. Foos was unconvinced. He closed the lid and moved the computer out of range.