The Boy From Reactor 4 (4 page)

Nadia opened her mouth to fight, to argue with the fat bastard, but what was she going to say? Her head started to fall, but she caught it. Raised her chin, looked Hyland in the eye, and stood up.

“Thank you so much for your time, Detective,” Nadia said.

She started to leave. What if Brad Specter was waiting for her outside? She’d told him to take her here. He could be planning to kidnap her right now. She turned back. She didn’t mind pushing her luck.

“Excuse me, Detective Hyland? Would it be possible for an officer to drive me home?”

He looked at her like the principal who’d just shelled out detention instead of expulsion to the school sociopath.

“How about the subway station at Astor Place?” Nadia said. “It’s a five-minute drive, at most. Please.”

He waddled up to her and stuck his chins in her face. “I think you’ve wasted enough taxpayer money tonight, don’t you, Miz Tesla? And if you pull a stunt like this again, you’re going in. Do we understand each other? Have a nice evening.”

When Nadia stepped outside, rain was pouring from the sky. Pedestrians scattered for cover. Head on a swivel, she sloshed her way to Third Avenue. All the taxis were occupied. The subway was the only way home.

She hugged the curb to stay out of the shadows in case someone was waiting to kidnap her. Cars plowed through puddles. Water thrashed her shoes, clothes, and face. She soldiered on, wishing it were all a practical joke, uncertain if she would make it home alive.

CHAPTER 6

T
HE COURIER WORE
an elegant black business suit a size too big for her wiry body. Her platinum-blonde crew cut shone in the dimly lit room. She could have been a former lingerie model or a ravenous zombie from a postapocalyptic world. For a Slavic woman trying to keep her figure past her thirties, it depended on the lighting. It didn’t matter. At his age, Victor wouldn’t turn either one away.

A sealed bottle of vodka, two empty shot glasses, and a manila folder rested on Victor’s desk. The courier stood before him, a slim, rectangular object in her hand. It looked like a book or picture frame wrapped in simple brown paper. String hung loosely around it, and the paper had been dislodged when Stefan searched her for weapons.

She placed the package on the table and pulled an index card from an inside jacket pocket. She read from the card in Russian, not Ukrainian:

The mind withers in the wind.

A thief grows old.

Time to retire and reflect,

And rob and steal.

“
S Dniom Rozdenija
,” she said, wishing him happy birthday. “From Ilya Milanovich and the
Bratsky Krug
.”

The Circle of Brothers. The twenty most senior former Soviet bloc criminals in the world. Most of them were Russian, while he was Ukrainian, so they would always be extra wary of each other. Still, it was a classy move on their part. Victor closed his eyes and let her words hang in the air for a few seconds, nodding with appreciation.

“Thank you. It is good to be remembered by old friends, especially when they are oceans away.” He pointed toward the vodka. “Let’s have a drink. But first, tell me a little bit about yourself.”

The courier put her left hand on her hip and thrust it to one side. Victor felt a slight stirring in his groin he hadn’t experienced for months. Victor knew she wasn’t part of his birthday gift, but he was certainly willing to play along. She circled around and sat on the desk facing him, legs spread wide. Victor caught a whiff of orange blossoms, violet, and tobacco.

She nudged her right shoe off with her left one. It thumped to the floor. Her toes were snuggled in panty hose. She slid them onto his crotch and extended her right hand toward him, palm down. Tattoos. The kind earned in a Russian or Ukrainian prison. And in the outside world as a reward for criminal achievements and loyalty. They told a person’s life story in pictures.

Victor put on his reading glasses and studied the tattoos in the center of her hand in a clockwise fashion.

A circle with a bull’s-eye in the middle. “You grew up an orphan. You spent time in the Round Stone, an educational labor colony.” Her toes massaged him. “They taught you well.”

A sickle with a stake driven through it. “You began stealing out of hunger during your Soviet life.”

Five bold dots: four watchtowers and a convict. Prison. “You’ve been through the Crosses.”

A little girl clinging to a goose flying through the air. “You are a single mother.” She pressed harder with her toes. “You know when to put your foot down.”

The word
OMYT
in bold letters. Russian for “whirlpool.” “It’s hard for a man to get away from you once he’s in your clutches.” Victor closed his eyes for a moment and savored the pleasure. “Why would he want to?”

He shifted his attention to her knuckles. If she was known in the criminal world by a certain name, this is where it would be spelled out. He read the letters on four fingers just above the nail.

“Puma,” he said.

She pulled her foot back and dropped it to the floor.

“No. Don’t stop—”

Puma hissed and flashed two more tattoos on the back of her
other
hand.

A leopard grinned with its mouth open, gun in its left paw and knife in its right. “Death to bitches and traitors,” Victor said, breathless.

Puma snarled. “When you’re a woman, men search your breasts real careful…”

An X beside three skulls and crossbones: An executioner. A hit man.

“But no one ever pats down the forearms,” she said.

She snapped her arms out and made a cross with her body. Small black revolvers sprang into her palms from under her jacket.

“Your cousin, Kirilo, sends you birthday greetings from Kyiv. He says to tell you your father was a bitch.” Puma turned her guns on Victor. “Death to bitches and their sons.”

“Anya,” Victor said, barely managing to get the name out in time.

She froze.

Victor tapped the manila folder. “I have pictures of Anya.”

Puma’s lips parted with astonishment, flashing the promise of yellow-and-black teeth.

“Would you like to see some pictures of your beautiful daughter? Playing an hour ago in Shevchenko Park?”

CHAPTER 7

W
HEN
N
ADIA GOT
home to her apartment on East Eighty-Second Street at 11:55 p.m., she bolted the door and called the doorman to make sure he remembered: “No visitors under any circumstances.”

Water dripped from her clothes and pooled at her feet. She went straight to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of Mount Eden chardonnay. Crystal trembling in her hand, she downed a glass of the buttery anesthetic in two takes. She poured another one and took it with her into a hot, steaming bath.

After a forty-five-minute soak, Nadia showered, washed her hair, and wrapped it in a towel. She lay down in bed to rest her eyes for fifteen minutes and woke up two hours later. She dried her hair, slipped into her favorite pajamas (the ones with the pink gorillas), and ordered a succotash of green beans and corn from Gracie’s Diner.

While waiting for her dinner to arrive, Nadia studied Internet search results for Andrew Steen. Google had 2.4 million hits for such a spelling. Another 815,000 if she spelled it “Stene.” That was over 3.2 million matches for the two most likely spellings alone.

Find Damian…Find Andrew Steen
.

As Nadia’s mind drifted, her eyes scanned the amethyst sticky notes taped to the border of her iMac:
call Marko, mail COBRA payment, call Mama
(that one was so old the color had faded to lavender),
schedule lunch with Johnny Tanner, Milan’s phone number
—

Nadia grabbed her cell phone and tapped the digits into the keypad.

“The number you have dialed is out of service.”

She sank back in her chair. It was probably a prepaid phone.

When her godfather was murdered a year ago, Nadia returned home to Connecticut for his funeral. She grew up in an insular Ukrainian community. Her parents were immigrants. Although she was born in Hartford, Nadia went to kindergarten speaking only Ukrainian. She went to Uke school twice a week for seventeen years and even served as an altar girl at the Ukrainian Catholic Church. In fact, that was her nickname in the community. The “Altar Girl.” Her parents put enormous pressure on her to be a good Ukrainian American and a superior student in both schools. Once she left for college at Colgate, she never came back until the funeral.

The deeper she dug into her godfather’s killing, the more she realized she never really knew the Ukrainian American people she had grown up with. Among them was her father, the scowling and screaming family man who seemed to hate every minute of his life. He died when Nadia was thirteen, before she ever had a chance to ask him about the source of his perpetual discontent.

Her investigation put her life in jeopardy. Nadia uncovered a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring for priceless icons and relics from Ukraine and solved her godfather’s murder. The FBI shut down the ring and arrested the killer, a childhood friend of Nadia’s. The event was reported in local papers. People in the Uke community knew who she was now. Milan must have heard about her exploits. He must have assumed she was a
proven troubleshooter of some kind, and now he was probably dead.

Millions of dollars
. Those were Milan’s words. His shooting and abduction off the street implied they might be true. Nadia’s savings were running out. It didn’t matter if Milan was referring to a pot of cash or an object of value.

She had to find out more, and she knew who had the answers.

CHAPTER 8

P
UMA SAT SOBBING
quietly in a chair. Her twin revolvers lay unloaded beside the pictures of her daughter on the desk. Victor rubbed her shoulder as he circled around her like a nurse comforting a terminal patient.

“There, there,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I had my suspicions when an old friend from the
Bratsky Krug
called to tell me they were sending you with a special package. I thought you might be working for my cousin. But I wasn’t sure until the guns appeared in your hands.” Victor pointed to the package she’d brought. “Is that for me?”

She nodded.

“May I?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer before removing the paper. In the framed photograph, Victor stood posing beside two members of the
Krug
in front of a three-story cinder block building. The grim looks on their emaciated faces told their story.

“
Brygidki
,” Victor said, holding the picture for her to see. “It used to be a nunnery in Lviv until the NKVD—the secret police under Stalin—took over. I did seven years for stealing a shipment of grain. One day, the NKVD took a local priest and crucified him for giving a sermon in the underground church before
Christmas. They nailed him to a wall. Cut a hole in his stomach while he was still alive and put a dead fetus in it.”

Puma looked away, fresh tears flowing.

Victor scowled. “Why are you crying?”