Mistress (29 page)

Professor Andrei Bogomolov doesn’t answer the door when I ring the bell. Instead, a nurse leads me back into his den, where Andrei is lying on a hospital bed positioned against a wall.

Andrei looks twenty times worse than the last time I saw him, only a week ago. The hideous disease that ails him is rapidly winning the fight. Wisps of hair atop his head stand in various directions. His eyes are black and vacant.

The hospital bed wasn’t here the last time I came. Or at least he didn’t let me see it. It tells me that the end is near for him, and that he wants to die at home, not in a hospital.

He tries to smile, but even that small feat seems to cause pain. I take his hand in mine and squeeze it gently.

“Hello, old friend,” I say.

“You are…a hero,” he manages.
You’ve done well, Grasshopper.

“All in a week’s work.” I’m trying to lighten the mood, but it falls flat.

I look out the window to the garden, recalling that barbecue only weeks after Mother died.
If you ever feel that you’re in danger,
Andrei had said to me,
you can
call me, Benjamin. I will help you.

“You have come here…for a reason,” he whispers.

“I came to see my good friend.” I smile at him.

Andrei winces, and then a coughing attack ensues. I pick up a washcloth at his bedside and wipe his mouth when it’s over.

“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say,” I tell him.

“Yes, I…do,” he manages. “It is…long past…time. A subject…I’ve debated…many times. Many…”

His eyes close. He drifts off to sleep. The pain medication from the IV drip, probably, or maybe just general weakness. After a few minutes, he snaps awake, his eyes unfocused, and he takes a moment to orient himself before he looks at me again.

“Why did my father kill my mother?” I ask.

The question and, probably, the memories it invokes cause him pain, and his mouth contorts briefly. “This is not…something…that we could confirm…at the time. But now…now we believe…we know…the answer.”

“Why did my father kill my mother, Andrei?”

Andrei takes a deep breath.

“He didn’t,” he says.

I draw back, as if zapped by electricity.

“His…employer did,” says Andrei. “Your father…tried to…prevent it.”

His
employer
. Father’s employer? He doesn’t mean American University.

“So there was a reason the CIA put you at American U,” I say. “You were spying on my father.”

Andrei closes his eyes and nods. “It is…true.”

“Who did Father spy for?” I ask. “The Russians?”

Andrei’s eyes open again. “China,” he says. “We believe…that your mother…discovered this…and they…the Chinese—”

“The Chinese killed my mother because they thought she was going to blow Father’s cover,” I say, everything crystallizing now.

“Just so,” he whispers. “Just so.”

I release his hand and back away from his bed. “And…why…
why
…why the hell…did Father frame me for—”

Out of nowhere, my throat closes up and I completely lose my composure. The tears almost jump from my eyes down my cheeks, and my chest starts to heave. I stay that way for God knows how long, whimpering like a child and crying like I don’t remember ever crying, struggling for oxygen and seizing up, trembling and screaming in choked wails, everything buried deep within me now pouring out—

Father was a spy? And that’s why Mother was so despondent all that time? She found out that her husband was a traitor. She didn’t know what to do.

When it’s over, when I’ve wiped my face and my nose and caught my breath again, I look over at Andrei. He opens a hand to me. I return to his bedside and hold it.

“My good…Benjamin,” he whispers. “If the…truth…came out…they said…they would kill…they would kill you next.”

“Father was
protecting
me?” I say the words as though they’re poison on my tongue.

“Your father came home…and found her dead. The Chinese told him…they could not…be implicated…nor could…he. You were…the only choice. Benjamin…your father…took every…step…to ensure your acquittal.”

No matter how my mind is spinning right now, no matter what avalanche of memories besieges me right now, even I would concede that point. I had the best lawyers and I did, after all, beat the charges.

“Is this why I never went to school? Is this why I had private tutors and hardly ever left home until college?”

Andrei nods. “He feared…for your…safety.”

Everything is upside down. Every belief I held about him—wrong.

“Years later,” says Andrei, “we finally…caught your father. It was…too embarrassing to publicly…reveal. He cooperated and…was placed…”

“Under house arrest,” I say. He was placed under house arrest at his cabin. That’s why he stayed there and never let me come, all those years, until he died. He didn’t want me to know.

“A traitor, yes,” says Andrei. “But a traitor who…loved his son.”

No. No. This is too much. Overload. System failure.

I hear myself speak but I don’t know what I said, and then I’m pacing around his den, and then the air outside is somehow cold, stinging my skin, up is down, down is up, someone else is inhabiting this body, it’s not me, I’m not Ben, and car horns are honking and tires are skidding and someone is cursing me, and then I’m running, I’m running as fast as I can and it feels good, it feels right, and I’m laughing and I’m crying, and it feels liberating, it feels
normal
—

Jimmy Carter is credited as the first president to routinely jog. He did it mostly for stress release. But since then almost every president has jogged except Reagan, who was probably too old to do it regularly, and George W. Bush, who had to give it up after knee pain. Reagan was a former lifeguard who preferred swimming, as did Kennedy to relieve back pain, and John Quincy Adams regularly started his days by swimming nude in the Potomac, funny story about that…

THREE THOUSAND MILES
east of balmy Serra Retreat, it was cold and raining along the still-dark shore of southwestern Connecticut. Downstairs, in his basement workout room, Michael Licata, recently appointed don of the Bonanno crime family, was covered in sweat and grunting like a Eurotrash tennis pro as he did his Tuesday kettlebell workout.

As he felt the burn, Licata thought it was sort of ironic that out of all the rooms in his new $8.8 million mansion on the water in moneyed Westport, he liked this unfinished basement the best. The exposed studs, the sweat stains on the concrete, his weights and beat-up, heavy bag. Pushing himself to the limit every morning in this unheated, raw room was his way of never forgetting who he was and always would be: the hardest, most ruthless son of a bitch who had ever clawed his way up from the gutter of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The short and stocky fifty year old dropped the forty-pound kettlebell to the concrete floor with a loud crack as he heard the intercom buzz on the basement phone. It was his wife, he knew from bitter experience. Not even six-thirty a.m. and already she was on his case, wanting some bullshit or other, probably for him to pick up their perpetually late housekeeper, Rita, from the train station again.

And he’d imagined that by working from home instead of from his Arthur Avenue social club in the Bronx, he could get more done.
Screw her,
he thought, lifting the bell back up. The man of the house wasn’t taking calls at the moment. He was freaking busy.

He was stretched out on the floor, about to do an ass-cracking exercise called the Turkish get-up, when he looked up and saw his wife. She wasn’t alone. Standing there in the doorway with her was his capo and personal bodyguard, Ray “The Psycho” Siconolfi.

Licata literally couldn’t believe his eyes. Because how could it be possible that his stupid wife would bring Ray here, into his sanctuary, to see him shirtless and sweating like a hairy pig in just his bicycle shorts?

“You’re kidding me, right?” Licata said, red-faced, glaring at his wife as he stood.

“It’s
my
fault?!” Karen shrieked back at him, like his very own silk-pajama-clad witch. “You don’t answer the frigging phone!”

That was it. Licata turned like a shot-putter and slung the kettle bell at her. Before she could move, the forty-pound hunk of iron sailed an inch past her ear and went right through the Sheetrock, into the finished part of the basement, popping a stud out of the frame on the way. She moved then, boy. Like a scalded squirrel.

“This better—” Licata said, staring death up into his six-foot five-inch bodyguard’s eyes, “and, Ray, I mean
better
—be fucking good.”

Ray, ever expressionless, held up a legal-sized yellow envelope.

“Somebody just left this on the gatehouse doorstep,” Ray said, handing it to him. “I heard a truck or something, but when I came out, it was gone.”

“What the—? Is it ticking?” Licata said, shaking his head at him.

“C’mon, boss. Like you pay me to be stupid?” Ray said, hurt. “I fluoroscoped, as usual. It looks like a laptop or something. Also, see, it’s addressed to you, and the return address says it’s from Michael Jr. I wouldn’t have bothered you except I called Mikey’s phone, and there’s no answer. Not on his cell. Not on his house phone.”

“Michael Jr.?” Licata said, turning the envelope in his large hand. His eldest son, Michael, lived in Cali now, where he ran the film unions for the family. Teamsters, cameramen, the whole nine. What the heck was this?

He tore open the envelope. Inside was, of all things, an iPad. It was already turned on, too. On the screen was a video, all set up and ready to go, the Play symbol arrow superimposed over a palm-tree-bookended house that was lit funny. There was a green tinge to it that Licata thought might have been from some kind of night-vision camera.

The green-tinged house was his son’s, he realized, when he peered at the terra cotta roof. It was Michael Jr.’s new mansion in Malibu.
Someone was surveilling Mikey’s house? The feds, maybe?
he thought.

“What is this shit?” Licata said, tapping the screen.

THE FILM BEGAN
with the shaky footage of a handheld camera. Someone wasn’t just filming Mikey’s house, either—they were actually past his gate, rushing over his front lawn! After a moment, sound kicked in, an oxygen-tank sound, as if the unseen cameraman might have been a scuba diver or Darth Vader.

Licata let out a gasp as the camera panned right and what looked like a team of ninjas in astronaut suits came around the infinity pool and went up the darkened front steps of Mikey’s house. One of the sons of bitches knelt at the lock, and then, in a flash, his son’s thick wood-and-iron mission-style door was swinging inward.

Licata’s free hand clapped over his gaping mouth as he noticed the guns they were carrying. It was some kind of hit! He was watching his worst nightmare come true. Someone was gunning for his son.

“Call Mikey! Call him again!” Licata cried at his bodyguard.

When he looked back down at the screen of the tablet, the unthinkable was happening. The double doors to his son’s upstairs master bedroom were opening. Licata felt his lungs lock as the camera entered the room. He seriously felt like he was going to vomit. He’d never felt so afraid and vulnerable in his entire life.

The camera swung around crazily for a second, and when it steadied, the scuba-masked hit team was holding Mikey Jr., who was struggling and yelling facedown on the mattress. Two of them had also grabbed Mikey’s hugely pregnant wife, Carla. She started screaming as they pinned her by her wrists and ankles to the four-poster bed.

There was a sharp popping sound, and then the screen showed a strange metal cylinder, a canister of some kind. Billowing clouds of white smoke began hissing out as it was tossed onto the bed between his son and daughter-in-law.

Tear gas?
Licata thought woodenly. They were teargassing them? He couldn’t put it together. It made zero sense. What the fuck was this? Some kind of home invasion!? He felt like he was in a dream. He wondered idly if he was going into shock.

Mikey Jr. started convulsing first. The astronaut-suited bastards let him go as he started shaking like he was being electrocuted. After a moment, he started puking violently, with a truly horrendous retching sound. Then Carla started the same horror-movie shit, shaking and shivering like bacon in a pan as snot and puke loudly geysered out of her like they do from the girl in
The Exorcist
. The whole time, the camera was panning in and out as a hand moved blankets and sheets out of the way to make sure to get up-close, meticulous footage.

Ten, maybe fifteen seconds into the truly bizarre and hellish spasming, they both stopped moving.

Licata stood there, staring at the screen, unable to speak, unable to think.

His son Michael, the pride of his life, had just been killed right before his eyes.

“Oh, shit, boss! Boss, boss! Look out!” Ray suddenly called.

Licata looked up from the screen.

And dropped the electronic tablet to the cement with a clatter.

The mobster didn’t think his eyes could go any wider, but he was wrong. Out of nowhere, two guys were suddenly standing in the doorway of his workout room, holding shotguns. They were Hispanic—one Doberman lean, the other one pimply and squat. They were wearing mechanic’s coveralls and Yankees ball caps, and had bandannas over their faces.

Without warning, without a nod or a word, the shorter guy with the acne shot Ray in the stomach. Licata closed his eyes and jumped back at the deafening sound of the blast. When he opened his eyes again, there was blood all over the small room—on the heavy bag, on the raw concrete walls, even on Licata’s bare chest. Incredibly, Ray, with his bloody belly full of buckshot, kept his feet for a moment. Then the big man walked over toward the weight bench like he was tired and needed to sit down.

He didn’t make it. He fell about a foot before the bench, facedown, cracking his forehead loudly on one of Licata’s dumbbells.

Licata slowly looked from his dead bodyguard to the two silent intruders.

“Why?” Licata said, licking his suddenly dry lips. “You killed my son. Now Ray. Why? Who are you? Why are you doing this? Who sent you?”

There was no response from either of them. They just stared back, their doll’s eyes as flat and dark as the bores of the shotguns trained on his face. They looked like immigrants. Mexicans or Central Americans. They didn’t speak English, Licata realized.

Suddenly, without warning, two sounds came in quick succession from upstairs: a woman’s piercing scream, followed quickly by the boom of a shotgun.

Karen!
Licata thought as he screamed himself, rushing forward. But the Doberman guy was waiting for him. With a practiced movement, he smashed the hardened plastic of the shotgun’s butt into Licata’s face, knocking him out as he simultaneously caved in his front teeth.