In for a Ruble (46 page)

“No!” I tried to croak.

“TURBO!” Victoria called.

Irina worked the barrel around.

“Irina! No!” I cried. It came out a whisper.

She had the stock on the floor, between her feet, the barrel under her chin.

I pulled myself up. It seemed to take an hour. I used everything I had and lunged.

“TURBO, STOP!”

I grabbed at the gun stock as the room exploded. Beria vanished, along with Irina. I fell where her feet had been, thinking in one more blind instant whether it was worth it to still be in the game.

CHAPTER
53

“You gonna open that package or not?”

Victoria’s temperature was rising. Foos shook his head and moved a bishop.

Victoria turned back at the board. Foos grinned.

“Dammit! I should’ve seen … You are making it impossible. He’s going to beat me, and it’s your fault!”

The three of us sat around the chessboard in the open area of the office. Pig Pen’s radio played quietly in the background. Foos and Victoria were settling into a pattern of Saturday afternoon matches, best three out of five. So far as I could tell, neither had yet to beat the other outright. Victoria was still figuring out offense, but she was an instinctive defensive player, and she regularly thwarted his attacks. I had the feeling she’d made a serious blunder, which as she said, was all my fault.

I stood and went to look again at the Malevich, still resting in its open shipping crate, outside Pig Pen’s office. My shoulder tugged, but the pain was almost nothing now, two weeks later. My arm was in a sling, which made certain activities somewhere between awkward and difficult, to Victoria’s alternating amusement and frustration. My injuries—dislocated shoulder and thirteen twelve-gauge pellets from Irina’s shotgun, also my fault, of course—had delayed her reclaiming her apartment, so they were serving a purpose. I was rehabbing the dislocation, and the therapist said I was a quick healer. The wounds from the shotgun were healing according to their own schedule.

“It’s a goddamned good thing we came by helicopter,” Victoria had said as we flew south to a hospital. I hadn’t counted on that, but the snow had moved out southwest to northeast. They’d found two Russians dead by the garage before her men dispatched Karp to an eternal fiery Gulag. I was grateful for their timely arrival but pissed, however irrationally, that they’d cheated me of the privilege. I kept that thought to myself.

I’d spent a tortured twenty-four hours, drugged to the gills, visited by a headless Irina, chestless Karp and Konychev, a paler-than-death Leitz, and a smiling Jenny Leitz who kept trying to tell me it was all okay. I found out later that the smiling woman was actually Victoria, who’d spent the entire time at my bedside trying to calm me as I twisted and screamed. Taras Batkin even put in a cameo, wearing Beria’s rimless spectacles.
We know everything,
he said.
How could you ever doubt that?

Sanity returned as the painkillers receded, but the images themselves were hard to shake. Especially Irina’s, at that last moment when everything exploded.

“What about the package?” Victoria again.

The second delivery of the afternoon. A gray plastic shipping bag, Moscow return address—“Foreign Ministry, Russian Federation.”

I opened the plastic to find a nine by twelve envelope inside. Addressed to me with a note.

In future, should you live so long, you might want to be careful what you ask for. TB.

“From Taras Batkin,” I said.

“What’s that bastard want?” she asked.

Batkin had flown the coop the day after the Millbrook Massacre, as the tabloids were calling it. I’d tried phoning him. I’d gone up to East Ninety-second Street once I was able to move again. The town house was shuttered. Ivanov reported, tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he’d been recalled by the Kremlin over a trade dispute.

“He’s sending what he owed me,” I said.

“He’s lucky he got out of town,” Victoria said. “What is it?”

“Answer to a question. I’m not sure I’m interested anymore, though.”

She shook her head and went back to the game.

Leitz lived. Foos brought Andras into town where he stayed with his father in the hospital until the old man was released. Victoria said the authorities were undecided as to prosecuting either of them. They didn’t have all the pieces—she blamed that on me as well—but she didn’t push it. Everyone involved had suffered, and no one—including her—had much stomach for causing more pain. Her case against Batkin and BEC was dead, but the BEC was crippled and the ConnectPay database gave her two hundred thousand pedophiles to chase. She wasn’t happy, but it was like chess with Foos. She didn’t win, but she could declare some sort of moral victory and move on.

Batkin’s envelope sat on the coffee table next to the chessboard. Inside was the answer to my parentage. Beria or not. Batkin’s note suggested it was, in fact, Comrade Lavrenty Pavlovich, but he could be toying with me, one
zek
to another. I walked around the office thinking about whether and how much it mattered.

Malevich’s luminous Suprematist rectangles, floating impossibly on their sea of incandescent white, erased the memory of Irina and Karp and Konychev, at least for the time being. The packing case had taken twice as long as the Repin’s to get into. One useful arm didn’t speed the process. Victoria arrived for her chess game shortly after Foos and I got it open.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Malevich. Remember?”

“Son of a bitch.
That’s
eighty million dollars?”

“On the day Leitz bought it, yes.”

“It’s rectangles.”

“That’s right.”

“You Russians are all fucking crazy.”

“Eldo,” Pig Pen said, watching from his office.

“Pig Pen’s not Russian,” I said.

“Last time I checked, Pig Pen was a parrot. What does he know?”

“Bayou Babe. Eldo,” he said. He sounded as though his feelings were hurt.

“You going to argue?”

“I can’t win. What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe hang it. Maybe send it back.”

“Send it back?! You earned it. It’s part of your fee.”

“Leitz and I made a bet, although he doesn’t like the word. He lost. But I’m not sure I won.”

“You paid a hell of a price, however you account for it,” she said and went to play her chess match.

I thought about losing and price. I hadn’t lost, I told myself, and I more or less believed it. I hadn’t been forced to fold my hand, even at the very end. My price seemed benign compared with those paid by others. Especially Jenny. And benign compared with the price yet to come—in Batkin’s envelope on the coffee table.

Did I want to know the truth? And what would I do once I did?

The Leitzes kept sweeping truth under the rug—until there was no more time and no more room. If I left the envelope sealed, wasn’t I committing the same sin?

If I was, I asked myself, wasn’t I the only victim? What Aleksei didn’t know at this point certainly wasn’t going to hurt him.

Or was that just more Turbostian rationalization?

I finished unwrapping the Malevich with my good arm and carried it carefully to my office along with Batkin’s envelope. I found some hooks and a hammer in the utility drawer in the kitchen. I sank two hooks at one end of the wall next to my desk and hung the painting. I sank another hook near the opposite corner, punched a hole in the envelope and hung it too. I could sense Beria trying to push his way into the room, he couldn’t quite manage. Maybe he’d met his match in Malevich.

Victoria appeared at my side.

“Another draw?” I asked.

“Yes, one more.” She looked from the painting to the envelope and back again. “What are you up to now?”

“Bookends.”

“Bookends?”

She took my hand.

“Life bookends. For purposes of contemplation.”

She snuggled under my good arm, hers around my waist.

“Where do I fit in?”

“We’re working on that.”

She smiled and I gave her a squeeze as I made another promise. This time, I swore I would keep it. On the day her picture went up—not too far in the future, I hoped—I’d take the envelope down and open it and confront the specter, real or imagined, of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Brendan Deneen, my editor at Thomas Dunne Books, as well as to Joan Higgins. I am grateful to Gwendolyn Bounds, Michael Bounds, Steve Heymann, and Bill Hicks, who read an early draft of this story, pointed out problems and suggested needed improvements.

Special thanks to Peggy Healy, Jonathan Rinehart, and Beverley Zabriskie for their generosity and hospitality. Thanks to my sister, Priscilla, and to Gerri Bowman and Katherine Page, two more generous individuals.

Once again, my love and gratitude to my wife, Marcelline, who so cheerfully puts up with me.

ALSO BY DAVID DUFFY

Last to Fold

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Duffy spent twenty-five years in the corporate and financial public relations business, based in New York and London. This experience turned out to be good practice for writing fiction. Along the way, he helped bring the
Antiques Roadshow
to PBS and income tax to Poland. This is his second Turbo Vlost novel. He and his wife live in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

IN FOR A RUBLE.
Copyright © 2012 by David Duffy. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photographs: man by Mark Owen/Arcangel Images; city scene by shutterstock

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

ISBN 978-0-312-62191-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781250012449 (e-book)

First Edition: July 2012