The Family Hightower (29 page)

 

 

Chapter 19

Sylvie's
fire starts—at last, at last—in three different places. The tinder's driest in the parts of the Wolf's organization where the money's the biggest and the regard for life the least. The organ harvesters, the ones who do the cutting, are a crew of borderline psychopaths; if they didn't start out that way, the job has done it to them. It's a hell of a thing, that the work is so brutal, so inhuman, and the pay is so high. When some of them walk around Chisinau now, they find out that they can't turn it off. The woman in the green dress standing on the corner, her arm in the air, waving at a friend across the street. The man smiling behind the counter at the pharmacy. The children balancing on the edges of the steps in the central park. For the organ harvesters that the work has changed forever, all those people have prices floating over their heads, dotted lines drawn on their bodies where the incisions would be. Some of them then play the entire scenario in their heads. The screaming, the hasty operation. The disposal of the body. They wonder how big that kid's heart is, how much it would weigh in their hands. The ones who enjoy the work wonder how the rape before the operation would be. They're told not to do it—
don't damage the merchandise,
their commander tells them—but some of them can't seem to resist.
I don't damage the parts they want,
they think to themselves. It's maybe their final, hideous self-justification, the last one put on a pile of flawed rationales and moral dodges that led them deeper and deeper into the work.
My family needs the money. There's no hope for these people anyway. Someone else might do the same to me. It's a rough world.
If any of them had the chance to survive it, to get out of the trade, some of them would end up in mental institutions. Some of them would commit suicide. Most of them would just drift away, become feral people. Then they'd get what's coming to them. They'd starve to death, or be hit by a car, or get shot trying to do something they shouldn't be doing. How could they ever return to society after breaking every trust, almost every taboo? Why would anyone want them?

So when Sylvie's message trickles through the Wolf's organization, the organ harvesters don't need to see the police. The suspicion—some of it kindled by corrupt policemen who get the message through official channels and tip off the criminals, just like Sylvie hoped—is enough. It spreads from the bottom up. On one branch of the organization, there are two kidnappers. One of them gets Sylvie's note about his colleague and contacts his boss, a doctor who can harvest organs, offering him a quarter of the ransom money, though he tells the doctor it's half. He then suggests that he and the doctor split the proceeds from the partner's parts. The doctor agrees and tells him where he and the other kidnapper should meet him. They cook up an excuse about needing to meet to work out some financial details, and the kidnapper's satisfied, goes and picks up his partner. But the doctor, having also gotten one of Sylvie's messages, has already ratted on the kidnapper and tells his boss to meet in the same place so they can harvest both the kidnappers' organs and sell them.
I don't like to do the actual killing,
the doctor says.
I'm not very good at it.
The doctor can almost hear his boss shrug over the phone.
Leave that to me.
So the kidnappers, the doctor, and the doctor's boss all meet in a cinderblock building that used to be an auto garage at the edge of a tiny town near Orhei. Everyone's smiling. They all think they're going to make some easy money.

It happens fast. The first kidnapper strangles the second one as soon as they walk in the door and the doctor gives the nod. The doctor and the kidnapper put the corpse on the table while the boss gets a set of coolers from the back of his car. The doctor's a quick worker; the organs are on ice fast. Then the boss walks over to the kidnapper who's still alive and, without any warning at all, shoots him in the side of the head. The boss is a real professional: The bullet goes in one ear and out the other, without touching those valuable eyes. Then the boss helps the doctor get the second body onto the table and goes to get another set of coolers from his car. The doctor's about halfway done when he gets back. The boss stands behind him, looks him up and down.
It's too bad I don't know how to do the operations,
the boss thinks.
Then I could make some real money off this whole thing.
As soon as the doctor has all the organs in the second cooler, the boss shoots him twice, before the doctor has time to turn around. Now the boss has a situation he knows what to do with. He hacks the bodies into small pieces so he can put them in garbage bags he can carry himself. It ends up being a lot of garbage bags and it takes the boss all night to get rid of them. But he does it. By then it's almost dawn and he doesn't smell very good. He goes home and changes his clothes. Calls his superior to tell him what happened. His superior congratulates him and says they should get together to celebrate. Of course, the superior then kills the boss. For the next two and a half days, this keeps going right up to the guy below Mercedes, who by then knows what's going on inside the organization and kills the man below him just because he doesn't need the aggravation. Then off he goes with a big wad of cash, to Vladivostok, he thinks, where the money can last a long time and no one will know who he is. But he won't be there for more than a month before someone else kills him, not for who he is—the killer has no idea who he is—but for the money he's got. On this branch of the Wolf's organization, the destruction is so complete that you might call Sylvie the right hand of God, even though Sylvie's no angel, at all, and she's doing what she's doing just to save her family. Maybe this is what they mean by mysterious ways.

But it's messier for the rest of the organization, and it takes a day or two for the results of Sylvie's plan to hit the papers. There are dead gangsters all over town. They've been killed every which way, found every which way. In an apartment block in Chisinau, someone is found in the doorway to a near-empty apartment. His skull has been smashed in, as though he were dropped on the tile floor on his head five or six times. A piece of his tongue is lying on the floor nearby, as though he bit it off one of the times he was dropped. The squatters in the apartment across the hall aren't saying anything. In Balti, another man, who had a wife and child, is found in a field with a gigantic hole in the side of his head. Someone's found burned alive in a car. Someone's stuffed in an outflow pipe. Someone else is sitting upright at his kitchen table. The problem is that he's tied to the chair and his throat is cut. The carving knife that did the work is on the table in front of him. There are no prints on the handle. The police have found twenty-six bodies already and are expecting a lot more. They see a rash of death inside the Wolf's organization, like the sweep of a scythe, the rampage of some giant predator, from Moldova to Ukraine to Romania. Even a few deaths that might seem random otherwise: a man killed in Paris, two in London. Five in Berlin. It's devastating—most of all, for the police, to their investigation. Almost all the information Sylvie gave them, in three days, has become the roll call at a morgue. The police have almost nothing to follow it up with, and someone at Interpol calls Agent Easton in Cleveland to tell them that they've been played. Agent Easton tries to call Sylvie, and when she doesn't answer, goes to the house and shouts at the door. But Sylvie's long gone.

In time, the Moldovans get tired of living in a country run by criminals, and not in the way that Americans mean when they say that politicians are crooks, but for real, run by criminals, who do whatever they want, among themselves and with thousands of innocent victims, while nobody tries to stop them. In time, they vote some of the Communists back into power—well, they're not calling themselves Communists anymore, but it's the same people, just a few years older—because if nothing else, the Communists were good at security. The police get stronger then, the army gets bigger. Fifteen years later, legitimate capitalism still looks a little shaky. In the center of Chisinau, the bright signs for new stores are put up on old buildings that need a lot more money than the store's making, as though capitalism is a thin layer over everything that you could peel off in maybe a week if you wanted to. But the crime isn't as rampant or as obvious. There are far fewer guys in crew cuts and leather jackets strutting around like they own the place, which they used to do. Spring comes in the week before Easter, and the benches of the parks in the center of Chisinau fill with people. Old men in jackets and caps. Old women with their hair covered in scarves. Young people, the boys in tight jeans, the girls in high skirts. They don't have jobs but they do have cell phones. They sit next to each other and everyone talks to people who aren't there. Or they pair off and share headphones, or just neck for hours. In the afternoons, when the schools are out, the playground is full of children, the parents hovering near. Still almost no one goes out at night, because so little is open, but people know things are better. They start to think of the mid-
1990
s as the bad old days, though they're too smart to consider themselves past all that now. This is Europe, and it's been a rough century; it can't afford to believe, like America still does, in the story where things always get better. Not with what they've seen. Not with what they know.

But we're still in
1995
, and the Wolf is in Kiev, furious. He knows he's been screwed, and it doesn't take him very long to find out who did it. He has more information about Sylvie and Petey than the police do, and though he never made the connection between them before—there was no reason to—within a couple hours, he has. It's more than a coincidence, he thinks, that Petey should get in trouble with him, and then his aunt descend on him.
Mother hen stuff,
he thinks. He has no idea why Sylvie would go so far, can't grasp that Sylvie is trying to do much more than just bail out her nephew. It occurs to him that maybe the man he sent after Petey killed him already, and somehow the White Lady found out about it before he did. It's possible. The truth, though, is that he wouldn't understand what Sylvie's doing even if someone explained it to him. This need to get the whole family out, to end things that started almost a century ago.
Why would anyone want to do that?
he would say.
Can you do that?
In about two seconds, he chalks up what Sylvie's done to hysteria and sentimentality. It's not a satisfying explanation. He knows the White Lady is tougher than that. But it's enough that his brain can stop thinking about why and get down to the business of revenge.

One of the Wolf's boys—Pocketknife, remember him?—gets a call at one in the morning. He's in a casino near the center of Kiev, at the bar, sipping on a neat whiskey. Watching the room. He likes being around gambling, but doesn't like to put his own money down. The odds aren't good enough for him; he's too careful for that. Besides, he wants to be there with a loan ready when one of his friends goes broke over a game of blackjack and needs money. Not that he likes extorting money from his friends, he tells himself. He just likes them being in his debt, and it tells you something about what kind of life he leads, the kind of man he is, that the distinction matters.

His beeper goes off and he checks the number, knows who it is. Heads toward the bathroom where there's a payphone.

“Pocketknife,” the Wolf says.

“It's me.”

“You have heard about everything.”

“Of course.”

“Where do you stand?”

“Do you still have money?” Pocketknife says.

“Of course.”

“That's where I stand,” Pocketknife says.

“Good,” the Wolf says, “because I have an expensive job for you. It's because you did so well with that woman Petey was fucking. You have a good crew.”

“What's the job?”

“To go to America.”

“I don't have to go,” Pocketknife says. “I have people I can call.”

“I want you to do it yourself,” the Wolf says.

“That will be more,” Pocketknife says. “There are engagements I will need to disentangle myself from, which will cost me.” Pocketknife is lying, and he's pretty sure the Wolf knows it. But he also knows that the Wolf isn't in a strong position to argue now. Why shouldn't he use it to his advantage?

“That's fine,” the Wolf says.

“Okay. The job.”

“It's three people, plus any witnesses. I don't think any of them will put up too much of a fight.”

“That's what you said about that woman and she bit off a part of my man's hand.”

“You call that a fight?”

“There were medical expenses involved,” Pocketknife says. “We understand each other, right?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the people?”

“Two in Cleveland,” the Wolf says. “One outside of New York. In a town called New Canaan. Full of rich fucks, I think.” They both laugh, just for a second.

“How much time?” Pocketknife says.

“As soon as possible.” Then the Wolf sighs. “A week at the most. Call me when you're done and not before. If I don't hear from you in a week, understand, I may send someone else after you.”

You don't have anyone else,
Pocketknife wants to say, though he knows it'd be counterproductive to completing this transaction. “I understand,” he says.

They agree on a price. The Wolf starts low and Pocketknife bargains him up. They end the conversation as genteel as can be, as though they're royalty or diplomats. On the way back into the bar, one of Pocketknife's friends approaches him.
Hey, can you spot me a thousand? I'm low.
Sure,
he says.
We'll talk terms later.
He reaches into his pocket and smiles. Business is good.