Levon's Night (8 page)

“Hey, I need a confirmation signature,” the messenger said. He pulled a tablet from the pocket of his parka.

“Ride away,” the man said in a foreign accent that sounded like it came from the bottom of grave.

“Okay then,” the messenger said and pedaled away in the opposite direction.

Koning tore the package open as he exited the park onto Fifth Avenue. A cellphone slid into his hand. No note or message. The phone was fully charged. He pocketed it. He dropped the envelope into a trashcan.

It was later that night when the phone came alive with an insect buzz. Koning was in the piano bar of his hotel. A rather talented woman, still attractive in her late forties, played standards in a soothing and assured manner. Koning hated being in the United States in general and New York City in particular. The city was vulgar and commercial. It had no personality. The black spots of chewing gum spat from a million mouths to form nasty constellations on the sidewalks repulsed him. The piano bar was as far as he cared to go from his room.

He dropped a twenty on the bar and walked out into the lobby and out onto 71st Street before tabbing the phone and lifting it to his ear.

“Koning?”

He said nothing.

“The line is secure, Koning. This phone is a virgin. We may speak openly.” The voice spoke Dutch clearly but with a filthy accent. Javanese, perhaps.

“I do not know your name,” Koning said. He stood in the nave of an office doorway. The street was quiet at this hour. A freezing rain kept Manhattanites indoors. The muted sound of thumping pop music could be heard from behind the garish neon façade of an Irish bar across the street.

“You know my money. In fact, you are quite free with it.”

“And I will need more.”

“This is becoming an expensive enterprise.”

“Risk and reward. You are a businessman after all. You understood the odds. You know the prize is worth the investment,” Koning said.

“Investment. How proper. I understand the concept of venture capital. I only remind you that I expect results,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

“This next target seems most likely. It was the most carefully hidden. That tells us something.”

“Your people are with you? They are ready?”

“They are near the target.” Koning’s crew had arrived on the continent the day before. They were divided between Montreal and Toronto. The only exception was his advance element sent well ahead to gather the intelligence needed.

“And you need funds.”

“There is special equipment we require.”

“You cannot steal it?”

“Risk arrest for petty theft in pursuit of Aladdin’s cave?”

“How much?” There was a chuckle in the voice.

“A million. Dollars. Part of that covers our exit.”

“The getaway,” the voice said in English, amused.

Koning said nothing.

When can I expect good news?” the voice said with growing impatience on the edges.

“Watch CNN. They will tell you when it is over.”

“Good hunting, Koning.”

The line went dead.

He opened the phone to remove the battery and SIM card. These he disposed of in two different dumpsters on his way back to the hotel. The body of the phone went down between steel grates in the sidewalk.

Koning shrugged off his raincoat and draped it over the back of his chair at the hotel bar. He gestured to the bartender for another gimlet of Stoli. The woman played the opening of “Easy To Love” in an easy tempo that came off the keys like treacle.

18

“Where’s Nate?” he asked, pulling up a seat at the table where the kids were already digging into a steaming basket of rolls.

“The artist couple called. Something about their hot water heater,” Danielle said and lowered a huge ceramic bowl of pasta onto the table.

“Artists? What kind of artists?” Merry asked.

“I’m not sure. Painters I think. Your father met them when they were moving in,” Danni said around the oven mitt between her teeth.

“What did dad say they were like?” Giselle asked as she toured around the table grinding fresh parmesan on everyone’s pile of pasta.

“He said they were hippies,” Danni said, taking a seat opposite Levon.

“Hippies!” Giselle declared with a guffaw.

“Well, to your father anyone who doesn’t earn a paycheck is a hippie.” Danni shrugged.

They passed around a milk pitcher that was doing duty tonight as a sauce tureen. This was followed by a platter of Danni’s famous venison meatballs.

“The secret is I grind the meat with just a little pork,” she said as she encouraged Levon to spear a third meatball the size of a baseball.

“Then it’s not really a secret,” Levon said without a trace of a smile.

“I guess it’s not. Now that I told you I guess I’ll have to kill you, Mitch,” she said with an open smile.

Everyone laughed at that but Levon. He made the best smile he could and bent to his plate.

“Daddy calls them ‘deer balls’,” Carl shared with a broad grin.

“Carl!” Danni cried.

The kids surrendered to a snuffling of barely suppressed giggles. Danni turned red and covered her mouth with a napkin to hide her smile.

After dinner Levon made for a quiet departure. “Let you kids have fun,” he said as he pulled on his coat at the door.

Merry burst across the room, leaping the board game they had laid out on the floor; world conquest in process. She hugged him about the waist, drawing him as tight as she could.

“What will you do without me?” she said into the rough canvas of his coat.

“I thought I’d read some of that Civil War book you gave me until I fall asleep,” he said and touched her hair.

“Will you come have breakfast with us?”

“I might still be too full from Mrs. Fenton’s meatballs. Besides, you’ll probably sleep in.”

“Okay,” she said and released him.

“Love you, honey” he said.

“Love you back,” she said.

Levon took the long walk to the truck, gunned it to life and headed away out the drive before the cabin and onto Mohawk Road. He hooked a right. The distance back to his place was equal either way he went around the lake. He’d go around the east shore tonight, taking it slow over the mounting snow. A full scale blizzard was in effect. A thirty mile wind was blowing the white flakes against the truck like millions of tiny missiles. He drove with the fog lamps on and the fully lit rack of LEDs he’d installed on a bar above the cab.

He hadn’t told Merry the whole truth. There was no way he was going to get any sleep with her out of the house. He decided to make a big old thermos of coffee and spend the night completing the plumbing to the Hoffert’s new kitchen. By morning he hoped to have the soil pipe connected and the PVC for the garbage disposal, dishwasher and ice maker in place for when he installed the appliances still crated in the Hoffert’s garage. The Civil War book Merry bought him was a very thoughtful gift but proved slow going for him as he stopped to think on the errors made by both sides. By the Union at the beginning of the war and by the Confederacy toward the end. Too many parallels. He’d see it through to the end, though, only because Merry gave it to him.

Levon decided that he would have rather fought under Lee than the Union. It wasn’t just his Alabama heritage. Lee was the more talented commander and Levon had an affinity for lost causes.

He crawled by the bungalow behind the Christopher residence. The main house was a sprawling Cape Cod on a grand scale seated by the lake shore. The bungalow set across the road was a simple A-frame. The lights were on inside. Nate’s snow machine sat at the foot of the drive. The toolbox sled he rigged up was hitched to the rear of it. Nate would be working on the water heater in the utility room down in the daylight basement. Levon thought about stopping to ask if he needed help but drove on. He was about talked out of the evening even though all he did was mostly listen at the Fenton’s dinner table.

The Christophers were a late middle-aged couple. He was legal counsel for an entertainment company in New York. She did something in news for a television network. Neither of them seemed like the artsy type. Maybe the hippies, as Nate referred to them, were family friends.

Levon rolled on toward the Hoffert house, his mind moving to the problem of properly angling the soil lines in the constricted space left to him by the cabinet design the Hofferts had chosen.

19

“What’s wrong with Florida?” Nick said.

“
Everybody
goes to Florida when it gets cold,” Jessie said.

“You know there’s a good reason for that,” Nick said.

Here they were in deepest Maine, snowed in until Good Friday probably. Plenty of food in the freezers. Nothing for him to do but read, watch movies and, when Jessie wasn’t watching, lose money playing on-line poker.

“What are you in the mood for?” Nick said. He was standing at the shelf system packed with DVDs.

“Whatever you’d like to watch,” Jessie said, wrapped in a down quilt by the fire he’d built for them in the river stone hearth. The sweet smell of apple wood filled the room. Nick prided himself on the fires he could build.

“We have the last season of that show with the high school teacher cooking drugs on the side.” He’d long ago stopped using titles for movies and shows since Jessie could never remember them. Instead he had to give her one-sentence plot summaries.

“Oh, that show’s awful.” She winced.

He sighed.

“Pick something else,” she said.

“We haven’t watched that one with Pierce Brosnan in a while.”

“Is he James Bond in it?” She made a face.

“It’s the one you like where he’s not James Bond. He steals a famous painting. You liked the actress’s purse.”

“A Hermès bag! Okay, we’ll watch that if you want to.” She beamed.

He’d watch anything as long as he could snuggle up to the hot toddy steaming in a mug on the coffee table.

They were forty minutes in. Jessie was enjoying the movie. Pierce Brosnan was enjoying Rene Russo. Nick was enjoying his second hot toddy, a warm buzz enveloping him just like the quilt his wife was wearing like a womb.

Lights flashed across the walls of the room. Nick muted the TV. Headlights came through the windows at the front of the house. Someone pulling up the drive. A burring sound rose to overpower the voices from the television speakers.

“Who the hell’s out in this?” Nick said.

“You’d better go see,” Jessie said, taking the remote from his hand as he rose from the sofa.

A pair of snow mobiles were pulled up on the drive. Their engines rumbled and popped as they idled. Two men in black snowsuits and helmets. One dismounted and was crunching toward the front door.

“Can I help you guys?” Nick said from the open front door, eyes squinted against the pelting snow.

The dismounted man strode up the walk raising his arm, raising something in it to point at Nick Esposito.

A blinding flash wiped away the world. Nick was on the ground. He didn’t remember falling. It was getting hard to breath. He tried to speak. Something warm and thick bubbled in his mouth.

The man in the black snow suit stepped over him to walk in through the open door.

Nick tried to call out to Jessie. No sound came out. He was drowning in his own blood.

20

“Coffee would be great,” Nate said. He was down on his knees working in the hatch at the bottom of the fat water heater tank.

“Decaf or regular?” Lily said.

“Regular black. Between this beast and the sleepover at home I’m not getting any sleep tonight anyway.” He smiled and stood.

“Sleepover?” Lily said tilting her head. She had an accent. German, maybe?

“It’s like a party,” Nate said.

She nodded, pulling her head back and closing the door behind her.

Lily and Sascha. No last name. Funny couple. They were artists. Or at least they said they were. They never offered to show their work. Nate never saw any evidence of paints or sculpture anywhere in the house either tonight or when he was here back in the fall to introduce himself. That’s when he arrived at his snap opinion that the pair were hippies. Sascha had a pony tail and a hipster goatee. Lily’s kinky red hair always looked like she just got out of a wind tunnel. They both wore sandals with thick socks no matter what the weather was. They dressed in layers of ‘natural’ clothing. As the temps dropped they looked like they were wearing every stitch they owned. Hippies through and through. No evidence of what kind of art they worked on though. He asked just to be polite. They told him they didn’t like talking about their ‘process.’ Fine with Nate. He didn’t really want to hear about it anyway.

Nate pulled the heating elements from the floor of the tank. As he’d suspected, one of them was shot. A crack in the glass tube enclosing the corkscrew filament. Lucky for the hippies he had spares in the tool sled. A lot of the homes and guest houses were built by the same contractor. Tillottson Brothers down in Bangor. So most of the places had the same water heater. Nate kept plenty of spare parts on hand. Winters were hard on everything. The lifespan of a water heater up here was cut in half by six months of Maine’s dry cold. A new element would hold them till spring and then the tank would need to be replaced.