The Family Hightower (26 page)

 

Part 3

1995

 

 

Chapter 16

O
ur
family is destroyed,
Muriel thinks,
and I'll never see my son again.

It's August
1995
. Muriel doesn't sleep at all after she drops Peter off at Sylvie's, and the way he and Sylvie are acting when she picks him up the next day scares her.
Muriel, honey. We're already ruined,
Sylvie says, and Muriel's too upset to ask her what she means. She and Peter don't say more than a couple words on the ride out to the airport, because Peter looks shell-shocked, and Muriel thinks she knows why. Or maybe it's better to say it this way:
thinks
she does. All of Peter Henry Hightower's children know their father was a criminal. They all know he had a man killed. But after he dies, for Muriel, it's as if there are rings around their family secrets, rings of knowledge and power, and she and Jackie are on the outermost edge, knowing the least. She's aware that Henry knows more, and Rufus must, and that Sylvie knows the most. In the past, before their falling-out, she might have worked up the courage to complain to Henry about it.
You're always keeping me in the dark.
Except that she thinks of it the other way around: At the center of the ring, it's pitch-dark, so dark that she can't see her older sister, who's standing inside the shadow, and she can only just make out the faces of her brothers. She has seesawed for years between hating them for leaving her out and being grateful to them for letting her live in the light, to meet Petey's father and then marry Terry, to live her life of relative normalcy on Edgewater Drive, without having to answer for the rest of her family, succumbing to it like Sylvie did, or running away like Rufus did, or struggling with it like Henry always will. She knows she doesn't have the stomach for any of what they did, and her gratitude swells in her whenever she thinks of Andrew and Julia, who she thinks are so safe. But now and again she's wanted to call up Henry or Sylvie and talk to them, really talk.
I know more than you think I do,
she wants to say.
I see more than you give me credit for.
She doesn't do it, though, because she's afraid. Not of what she might learn—she can handle it, she knows she can—but of what it might do to her family. It has all seemed so precarious to her, like since their father died, they've all been held together by spiderwebs, and a push from the smallest breeze would send them all floating far away from each other. She can't see how strong the connections still are, the tendons between them all, of commerce and history, loyalty and regret, and it's the great tragedy of her life. Because if she knew the family could take it, she would have pushed harder, and maybe her oldest son would have been saved.

But the people involved—her family and the criminals around them—can see what binds them all together. Most of them can't see very far. The cords disappear into the darkness, and they don't know where they go. But a few people can see everything. The sinews from Cleveland to Connecticut to Eastern Europe, stretching across the world and the years. And Sylvie, the White Lady, is about to take them in her hand all at once, pull them, and cut them. Cut them and then hope that the ones that matter, the bonds between her and her family, can heal themselves. She knows she can't fix everything. That it's not just the Wolf she's up against, the Ukrainian crime lord who wants her nephews dead. It's not just the police either, or the feds, or Feodor and Kosookyy, the new and old criminals who had a hand in making her what she is. She's dealing with the market for violence, with the almighty dollar and the things people will do for it, and she can't change that. But she thinks she can get everyone she loves out. Which is why, after she talks to Feodor, she calls the cops.

FBI agents George Guarino and Anne Easton are sitting in their car, in front of the big house in Bratenahl, under the shady trees. Guarino's scanning the house, amazed that there are no security cameras, no bodyguards he can see.

“She's been that good,” he says. “Staying under the radar, making alliances, paying off who needs to be paid off. She's never been in any real danger, never put her head out. It's always just been about the money.”

“Looks like,” Easton says.

“Makes her more like the new criminals than she'd probably want to admit.”

“She's not stupid, George,” Easton says. “I think she knows.”

They get out of their car and are walking toward the house when Sylvie opens the door. “Come on in,” she says.

“You have a beautiful garden,” Easton says.

“Why, thank you, Agent Easton.”

“You can call me Anne if you'd like.”

“I'd rather call you Agent Easton, if that's okay.”

“And what should we call you?”

“Anything you like,” Sylvie says.

The agents know who her father was; the legitimate side of the story is just enough to explain how the house came to be, how Sylvie came to be living in it. It's not that Sylvie's never come under any scrutiny. She's been audited three times over the years, accountants questioning just how she can hang on to the house without ever seeming to leave it. Each time she's managed to satisfy them with cooked numbers about investments, and so the bigger investigation never happens—the one that might connect tax authorities with the police and federal agents who have been looking for the White Lady for years. It rankles Guarino and Easton, sitting in Sylvie's parlor, that she's been here in Bratenahl for so long, an arrest as easy as a knock on the door. They're suspicious about having been called now. Wondering what the White Lady might be using them for.

Sylvie comes in with a tray, a French press, cups and saucers. “You seem like coffee drinkers,” she says. So unhurried. As if they're just chatting.

“Before we start,” Easton says, “I want to tell you how pleased we are that you've decided to talk to us, and also assure you of the protection you'll soon feel as part of the Witness Security Program. Not everyone in it is as important a figure as you are, Miss, um, Hightower—”

“Rizzi,” Sylvie says. “I took my husband's name.”

“Rizzi,” Easton says, and writes it down. “I'm sorry.”

“It's no problem,” Sylvie says. “Please go on.”

“Not everyone is as important as you are, Ms. Rizzi. But almost no one has kept as discreet a public profile as you, either. That, combined with the various levels of protection that the program offers, should ensure your safety.”

“And where will that program place me?”

“Usually out of state.” Easton regrets it as soon as she says it. It's a routine thing to say, but she's forgotten who she's talking to: someone who, to the best of her knowledge, has spent almost all of her life in Cleveland, much of it right in the house where she's sitting. The agent tries not to give herself away, but Sylvie notices it—just a slight wince—and decides, what the heck, to exploit it.

“I see,” she says. Lets it hang without a tag for four long seconds. “Well, it will have to do.”

It's a good way for Sylvie to throw them off, to buy herself some latitude in being cagey. She knows the agents know she's planning something, that she has some ulterior motive. But she still wants the agents to believe that the trade they're making is safety for information; she wants them to think that when she withholds knowledge from them, it's because they haven't convinced her that the protection they're selling her is worth it. She can't let them know what she's really up to, and it'll be hard to hide that she's keeping things from them when she knows almost everything. But she only needs to hold it together for a few days. After that, it won't matter what they know.

She doesn't want to end crime in Eastern Europe, or bring down an organization. She can't, because she knows better than the FBI agents do that the organization never ends, the money never ends. She just wants an escape, for her and the rest of her family. The crime syndicates to her are a thicket of thorns; everyone on them gets hurt, and if she cuts them down, they just grow back. But she can burn a hole through them, big and wide enough for her and everyone she loves to pass through. By the time the thicket's grown back, they'll be long gone. She just needs to lay down some tinder. The FBI agents sitting in front of her are the match that starts the flames.

“There are quite a few international crime syndicates now working in America,” she says, “from New York to Florida to California. And here. How could there not be?”

Agent Guarino lets himself smile. He reminds himself that he's sitting across from maybe the hardest criminal he's ever seen. But another part of him kind of likes her.

“If you're willing to draw some arbitrary lines to separate them,” Sylvie says, “I've invested in maybe seven of them. And I think some real damage can be done to all of them, but only if we do this in the proper order. I can give you the names, addresses, phone numbers, of operating criminals from Los Angeles to Mumbai. But you have to give me some time to straighten a few things out before I do that.”

“Can I ask you a few questions first?” Agent Easton says.

“Of course.”

“You'll forgive me if this comes across as a suspicious question, Mrs. Rizzi, but you've been involved in organized crime for thirty years, it seems, almost without leaving your house. Why are you coming to us now?”

Sylvie's done the math already, knows what to say.

“One of my nephews is in real trouble,” she says.

“Peter Henry Hightower,” Agent Guarino says.

“Yes, my sister Muriel's boy.”

“We've had our eye on him for a little while.”

“Do you know where he is?” Sylvie says.

“No. Not today we don't.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” Sylvie says. “I want to do everything I can to make sure he's safe. For my sister's sake. She has no idea the kind of trouble her son is in.”

“Does she know about you?” Agent Easton says.

“Nobody in my family knows about me,” she says. And thinks:
Henry's more than good enough a liar to make that stick. And they'll never meet Rufus. He'll see to that.

The agents are there for another two hours. There's so much to talk about, a lot of information to go over.
But once they're outside the house, they don't say anything to each other until they're in the car, at the end of her driveway, turning onto Lake Shore Boulevard, and the high wall is out of sight.

“She's using us,” Agent Easton says then.

“Yup,” Agent Guarino says. “But how?”

“I don't know.”

They reach the highway back to the city of Cleveland. They're both thinking the same thing. Agent Guarino says it first.

“We could just arrest her, couldn't we?”

“Bring in the White Lady,” Agent Easton says.

“Right.”

They're almost back to the city.

“But here's the thing about that,” Agent Easton says. “I'm scared. It's like she's keeping a lid on something, something that'll explode on us if we just take her out.”

“I think it's going to explode anyway,” Agent Guarino says.

“How many people do we hurt if we intervene now?”

“How many more get hurt if we wait?”

In Negostina, on the border of Ukraine, Claudiu—Madalina's father—is closing up the house for the night. Madalina's mother, Georgina, is already asleep; Claudiu can hear her snoring in the next room. They live in an old house with thick plaster walls, low ceilings, small windows. The kind of house that knows how precious warmth in the winter is, coolness in the summer, even if it means it's always dark inside. They compensate by making the house as bright as possible inside: the walls are lime green, pale turquoise, bright salmon, throwing the light from the smallest lamp around. Then there are the pictures on the walls, of grandparents, of a scene from the Carpathians. A picture of a tropical place that Georgina cut from a magazine; the location changes every time a guest asks her where it is.
Fiji,
she says once. Then the next week:
the Bahamas.
She'll never go, though she's always going in her mind, and, Claudiu thinks, in her dreams. It's where Madalina must have gotten it from, Claudiu thinks, the restlessness, the need to move, to see so much of the world. Nights like these, after her mother has gone to bed, Claudiu always, always thinks of her. Where she is, what she must be doing. He's never seen her apartment in Kiev and never will. In his mind, it looks like a typical apartment in the housing blocks in Botosani, where a friend of his moved when he got a job as a pharmacist there. The thirty-year-old design just full of the old Communist mind-set:
All families will require and should be happy with space like this.
A square living room. A small kitchen with the tile on the walls reaching to the ceiling. A small rectangular sunporch, the glass fogged over. But Madalina, in Claudiu's mind, has made the space her own. She's hung bright fabric on the walls because they won't let her paint them, draped her modular furniture with woven cloth; she sleeps under a bright blanket of twenty different colors that the fluorescence from the streetlights outside can't bleach out. When her father imagines her at night, she's always sleeping, a sleep so deep that the only movement is from her chest, rising and falling under the sheets. It's the consolation he gives himself, that everything she did has worked out so well for her, that every night she rests better than she ever did in the town she was raised. So it's best that she left Negostina behind and will never come back. Even though he misses her so much.

The knock on the door startles him; he's pretty sure no one has ever come by this late, so he knows before he gets to the door that something's wrong.