Authors: Brian Haig
A slight smile. “We don’t want Volevodz and his people to have an unfair advantage, do we?”
“Jesus, his own government, and now the Russian mob. I guess the only question is who’ll get him first.”
“Not really,” Tromble said, glancing out the darkened window. “We’ll beat them to him. Your job’s to make that happen, Terrence.
Don’t let me down.”
“He and that wife are going to be paranoid.”
“Yes, I believe they will. That’s the idea. You just make sure they realize America is more dangerous for them than Russia.
I want them so hopeless they’ll be more than ready for our offer, when it comes. We’ll be their only help.”
Hanrahan thought about it a moment. He had been an agent for eighteen years; Tromble was the fifth director he had served.
By far, he was the toughest and most heavy-handed, but there was no question he got results. “And if they don’t fold?”
“No problem. We’ll turn up the heat. Pull out the stops and ship them back.”
T
he three men sat in the white van, swapping American girlie magazines, sucking on cigarettes, sipping stale coffee, bored
out of their wits. After that initial day of heart-thumping surprises and emotional terror, things had quickly retreated to
a dull grind.
During the days, surprisingly little took place in the Konevitch apartment. Long bouts of silence, broken occasionally by
tedious discussions about incredibly inane things—the laundry, the latest stupid game show on TV, Oprah, and so on. On Tuesday,
the wife, Elena, read to her husband, out loud, a stream of interminable passages from
War and Peace
. Wednesday was
Anna Karenina
’s turn, which proved even worse. The men inside the van contemplated suicide, or rushing upstairs to drive a gag down her
throat.
The Konevitches never left their building, or even their apartment, the best the men could tell. This had been a sore topic
with Volevodz, who popped by occasionally to gather updates. As long as the couple stayed inside, the three listeners were
trapped inside the van, crammed in with all the electronic equipment and debris from their meals. It seemed to shrink by the
day; they were peeing in bottles, for God’s sake. Theories and conjectures rumbled around the rear of the van. It was unnatural
to stay penned up so long inside that cramped apartment. On the other hand, the Konevitches no longer had jobs. And money—actually
the sudden lack of it—was undoubtedly a serious factor in their minds. Wasn’t like they could afford to splurge on the theater
or an expensive restaurant. Why not a movie, though? Better yet, a nice long stroll along the canal, like they used to? How
much could that cost?
When it turned dark, things picked up and turned slightly more interesting. The Konevitches were like rabbits. Every night,
for hours, groans and giggles, sheets rustling, and an occasional scream or “oh my God” to cap off the festivities. The first
few times the volume had been kicked up full blast. The three men tried to imagine what was going on in that bed. Why hadn’t
Volevodz been thoughtful enough to plant a camera? It would have been so easy, they whispered among themselves. Eventually,
the constant lovemaking only contributed to the enveloping air of misery.
It was almost as if the Konevitches knew all about the three listeners, that they were taunting and rubbing it in.
The phone action had turned virtually nonexistent. A few frustrated calls from their lawyer, who complained constantly about
being stonewalled by his old friends in the INS.
An occasional call to order pizza and Chinese deliveries—that was it.
“What are they doing out there?” asked the note Elena passed over the dining room table to Alex.
A glance at his watch—8:00 p.m.—and he scribbled a hasty response and flashed it to her. “Going nuts, I hope.” After days
of corresponding like this they had finally mastered the awkward art of balancing two conversations at once—inane verbal ramblings
to mollify their listeners while they scrawled brief messages back and forth. It was tedious and slow, and absolutely necessary.
They chatted in English and they wrote in Russian.
“Why didn’t we buy a bigger place?!!!!” she scribbled back. “It’s closing in on me, Alex. I can barely breathe.”
Alex wrote, “At least the company’s better in here than out there.” Who knew how many Mafiya thugs were prowling nearby, trying
their damnedest to collect the bounty? Volevodz knew their address—they had to assume he had somehow passed it along to the
cabal in Moscow. So the thugs now had a firm fix on their location and Alex was sure they were huddled somewhere nearby, waiting.
Going outside was out of the question. The first few days they had tried to suppress their terror, to find ways to cope with
their anxiety and rearrange and repair their living conditions. Day three Elena had gone on a mad hunt for electronic bugs.
She discovered six. They suspected there were more, plenty more, and they were right.
On day four, they agreed upon a strategy—they would work overtime to appear like they were going through the motions of a
normal life, battling boredom, praying, and waiting for MP to whip a legal rabbit out of his hat and end this miserable nightmare.
They weren’t fooling themselves, though. MP was a gnat battling giants. This was way over his head—over any lawyer’s head,
probably. At any moment, the people outside would become tired of this, and the next hammer would fall. And Alex, ever the
clearheaded businessman, was sure things would become worse, whatever that meant.
With each succeeding day, the situation became more intolerable. Elena tried reading, watching TV, meditating—nothing worked.
Nothing. Alex walked endlessly around the apartment, doing laps and searching for a solution. He thought best on his feet,
and was wearing out shoe leather to find a way out of this.
They had no money. They were trapped inside this building. Unable to escape. Unable to communicate with anybody outside without
the mice listening in. If there was a way out, it was up to them to find it. Alex patted Elena’s knee and wrote, “Time for
the bedroom.”
They got up and together made the short trek down the hall. Alex loaded the tape they had produced the first night, carefully
and quietly inserted it into the cassette player, then cranked the volume knob to maximum. He said to Elena, “Get your clothes
off. I’m in the mood again.” Neither of them had been in anything close to the mood since the visit from Agent Hanrahan with
the terrifying news about all the bugs and the thugs waiting outside to kill them.
The idea that their every word was being overheard was sickening.
Elena kicked off her shoes, flung them hard against the wall, and made a point to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, with
an accompanying groan from the springs. She opened the nightly banter. “You’re always in the mood.”
“And you’re always beautiful.”
“You’re insatiable.”
“And you’re a doll.” Then, “Take off your blouse.”
“You first, with the shirt… that’s it. Now the pants.”
They went back and forth, trying their best to make the listeners gag, then Alex sat heavily on the bed, right beside her.
They stared at each other a moment. Without another word, Alex pushed start and the tape kicked in. The sounds of the two
of them sexually mauling each other shot full-blast into the listening devices.
They had nearly killed each other producing that tape.
Elena leaned close to Alex and whispered, “How many more days do you think we have?”
“One… twenty. Who knows?”
“What are they waiting for?”
“For us to break. Or run out of money and start starving.”
“Why? What do they hope to gain?”
“They want us desperate. They have our money, and they’ve made us too terrified to step outside. It’s a box, and the only
way out is to accept their condition. A one-way trip to Russia.”
“Maybe we should try to just make a run for it.”
“How?”
“Disguise ourselves. Sneak out. Early in the morning when they’re tired and their senses are dull. Create a diversion of some
kind.” She pecked him on the cheek, then pulled back. “You pulled it off in Budapest. We’ll do it again.”
“And go where, Elena? They have our passports.”
“Montana, Idaho, Nevada. I’m past caring, Alex. A town in the middle of nowhere. Hot, cold, dry, wet, it no longer matters.
Someplace small, neglected. America has millions of illegal immigrants. We’ll live in the underground economy, find a way
to blend in.”
“I’ll open a lawn service, and you’ll be a maid. Is that the idea?”
“We’ll be alive, Alex. And free.”
He leaned over and touched her shoulder. “Listen to me. All of those millions of illegal immigrants don’t have the FBI hunting
them. The FBI doesn’t know their names, doesn’t have their physical descriptions, and could care less about them. We’d be
looking over our shoulder every day. One day we’d wake up to a bunch of men in gray suits.”
“But I’m tired of sitting here, waiting.”
“Well, I have an idea.”
“I’m willing to try anything.
“Unfortunately, it will take time.”
“How much time?”
“Probably a lot. Probably too much. It’s a complete gamble, anyway, an outside shot with a million things that can go wrong.”
She stared up at the ceiling. “A million things can go wrong here. Tell me about it.”
They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched
the volume and napped.
One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close
eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.
Nicky had a modest, not overly prosperous operation in Chicago run by a half-crazy, doped-out boss who put up the hunter-killer
team, along with five of his own people, in a cramped, run-down rowhouse in one of the most crime-infested sections of the
South Side. He called it a safehouse. It was barely a house, and anything but safe. Black and Hispanic gangs roamed the surrounding
streets at will. They did not particularly cater to these Russians who were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to muscle into
the local action.
The rowhouse quickly became a prison, a quite miserable one. The gangs were large, mean, and tough. A tiny bodega was positioned
on a corner across the street. They hung there, blacks and spics in variously colored bandanas, mixing freely together, never
less than fifteen of them. They sipped from canned beers, rapped back and forth, shared menthols, and glowered at the rowhouse
across the street. They seemed to be honoring a local cease-fire among themselves, a temporary alliance against a common foe.
For decades, they had battled and scrapped with one another for these streets—every inch of concrete, every crackhouse and
whore’s corner was a victory, paid in blood. No way were they going to let these Ivan-come-latelys have a piece of the action.
At night they sometimes sprayed the rowhouse with bullets. They scattered when the cops arrived, only to reappear the instant
the last blue suit departed. Once, a pair of Molotov cocktails sailed through the windows.
The Russians slept on the floors, and crawled on their bellies every time they passed a window. A stack of portable fire extinguishers
was stored in the kitchen. First aid kits were in every room in the house.
Katya and her crew ventured outside as infrequently as possible. Two left on a grocery run one night and never returned. They
may have fled. Nobody blamed them.
A few weeks later, a box with four ears was left on the doorstep. They studied the shriveled things and debated at length,
but nobody could be entirely certain they belonged to Dmitri and Josef. Dmitri did in fact have two earrings. And okay, yes,
Josef’s ears were sort of large and floppy; but no one knew for sure.
It constipated the search for the Konevitches terribly. The first few months, Katya and her comrades snuck out only in the
wee hours of the morning, trying to elude the gangs. Their car had been shot at more than they could count as they sped down
the street. Nicky’s locals had a firm fix on the Russian immigrant pockets of the city; naturally, this was where the bulk
of effort was placed. At some point, inevitably, the Konevitches would turn up.
Occasionally, they got word that Alex Konevitch had been seen cruising a few local Russian clubs, flashing a wad of bills
and bragging about the flourishing real estate empire he was establishing in the city. It sounded like Mr. Big Shot. And after
flashing photos at various witnesses, they were sure it was him. Queries to the local phone companies had revealed a cell
service account, though the number was unlisted and the phone service stubbornly refused to provide the billing address. That
was it. No matter how hard they dug, no matter how many cops they paid for information, this was all they had.
Additional pictures of the couple were plastered everywhere. Hundreds more were pressed into the hands of Russian expats with
vile threats about what would happen should they fail to snitch on first sight.
After those first few months, the hunters became dispirited—and worse, seriously frightened. The party outside the bodega
seemed to grow bigger by the day. The Russians took to cowering in the rowhouse, contriving false reports back to Moscow,
manufacturing hopeful leads that never existed. The lies would never be caught, they were confident of this. Nobody would
dare run the gauntlet and pay them a visit.
Massive quantities of food and beer and vodka were stockpiled. They watched the same tired porn flicks, ate and drank heavily,
and bickered among themselves. The men outnumbered Katya, and they cruelly exploited this advantage against her. They pressed
her into service as their cook, their laundry lady, their maid.
Even the long year of killing in the Congo, her previous record for unadulterated wretchedness, paled in comparison.
Oh, how she hated the Konevitches. The last iota of icy detachment had melted months before. Her pouched eyes now burned with
a scary intensity. It was all their fault, that awful couple. Why couldn’t they just let themselves be killed? It would’ve
been so much easier for everybody. How could they be so selfish?