The Family Hightower (31 page)

“He's sleeping,” Alexandru says.

Now Claudiu hates Petey even more. “Wake him up,” he says. He can't bring himself to use his name. He waits in the kitchen. Petey comes out wearing the same clothes he had on last night. He looks worse than he did before, and Claudiu's at least glad for that.

“Someone came looking for you this morning,” he says. “Someone who isn't a police officer.”

He waits to see Petey's reaction; he's satisfied when he can see that Petey's more scared than he's seen him yet. The American says something to Alexandru
and Alexandru turns to him.

“He wants to know what happened. What you said.”

“I said you're already gone,” Claudiu says. “Which is far more than you deserve. You are a danger to everyone you meet now. A danger to yourself. If I were you, I would turn myself in.”

Petey doesn't say anything, but Claudiu knows he's about to tip. Knows, too, how to make him do it.

“For my daughter,” he says, “it is the absolute least you can do.”

There's one last, long silence. Then Petey sighs and asks Alexandru a question. Alexandru nods.

“What did he say?” Claudiu says.

“He wants to know if I'll go with him to the station.”

Claudiu takes two steps closer to Alexandru and hugs him, hard. He tries to say thank you, but doesn't get past the first syllable before he's crying again. No. Bawling. Barking. Choking. It's the next giant wave of grief crashing over him, and he breaks down all the way; he can't put himself back together again. Alexandru brings him back to his own house, one arm around his shoulder, the other holding Claudiu's hand, as if Madalina's father overnight has changed into a ninety-year-old man. It takes a long time to get to his door, and when Georgina meets them there, she's already crying, too. They hold each other there in the doorway, Claudiu and Georgina, and it's easy to see that they will think of their daughter and how they lost her every single day, for the rest of their lives. The smallest thing will remind them of her. The wildflowers by the side of the road, which she used to like to pick. Beef stew, which was her favorite. The steps of the bus station, which Claudiu will remember seeing her sitting on, waiting to go into Siret, when she was a teenager and already so ready to leave. Another young girl in town who's wearing a dress like Madalina used to wear. For her parents, Madalina will be everywhere, always with them. After a few years, they'll be able to tell themselves, most of the time, that the memories they have of her outweigh the loss. It's what they know their friends want to hear. But they'll both know the truth, and feel it so much that they won't have to talk about it. The grief will never, ever end.

“Look what you did to them,” Alexandru says to Petey; and when he's sure the American has gotten enough that he won't forget, they head toward his car. By then, the mayhem in Chisinau has already started. The Wolf has discovered what strings Sylvie's pulling, and he and Feodor are on the verge of meeting. And two more hired guns are taking long trips, one to the United States, one to Zambia. The police on two continents are counting the bodies, trying to piece together the story, trying to suss out just what's going on. They haven't seen anything like it in a few years, and they worry that it's all going to blow up this time, that it's all just going to get worse and worse. That it's the beginning of something huge. The toppling of governments, a sharp descent into the kind of violent chaos that'll make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a changing of the guard. It's what the threat has been since
1991
, because it seems like when they put in the new world order, they also started a few time bombs ticking. Every once in a while, one of them goes off; a couple have already, in the Balkans and in Chechyna, and all the other countries to the east of what used to be the Iron Curtain take a look around, at their neighbors and themselves. They wonder who's next, or if they'll all go down together. And they wonder, too, if something's being revealed to them, even if they're not sure what it is; whether this is capitalism gone wrong, or if it's working just like it's supposed to when you let it run free.

It takes Pocketknife a day to get to New York, another half day to get to Cleveland. A long string of airplanes, airports, food that tastes like paper, bathrooms that have been bombed with antiseptic. It all annoys Pocketknife, a lot. In Kiev, he's only a medium-sized crook; he lives in an apartment he doesn't own, and when his boss calls, he comes. But he has something in common with people who have impossible amounts of money: He's used to being able to do what he wants, to ignore the rules that apply to almost everyone else. The velvet rope gets unhooked for him. There's always a table at a restaurant, a drink that's on the house. His car is always parked right in front. He doesn't pay too much attention to traffic signs, stoplights, speed limits. Those things, he thinks, are for people who worry about the law, about the police. He doesn't worry about them. He's hurt so many people, put so many in the hospital, into casts and splints, onto crutches. He's put more than a few people in the ground. The police have never come for him, for any of it, and he knows they never will.

But when he leaves Kiev, leaves Ukraine, all his privilege vanishes, and he resents it. The lines he has to wait in, to get his tickets, to get on the plane, to get a cup of coffee, to get through customs. He sleeps most of the way across Western Europe and the Atlantic just to not have to think about it. But as soon as he lands in New York, he finds out his English isn't as good as he thought it was, and it makes going through customs humiliating. He's angry switching from the international to the domestic terminals in JFK, just tired out by it once he's on the way to Cleveland. As the plane soars over Pennsylvania, he wishes, just then, that he'd never met the Wolf, that he had no idea who he was. He lets his impatience take over for a half hour or so because he knows he needs to burn through it, it needs to be out of his system by the time the plane touches down. So he calls the stewardess for a cocktail, gets more upset than he should when he learns they don't have the kind of whiskey he likes on the plane.
I'm sorry, sir, I'm sorry,
the stewardess says; she's been trained to just apologize, though Pocketknife knows he's out of line. He almost wants to tell her that he's just blowing off steam, but if he did that, he knows it would ruin it. At the end of the flight, the attendant checks into a hotel near the airport and worries that she might lose her job if that man complains like he said he would. Pocketknife collects his bags and feels better.

There's a car waiting for him at the terminal, a black Cadillac with tinted windows. The driver, whom the Wolf called himself in an unusual breach of protocol, is fluent in Russian and English. There's a briefcase on the backseat, all dark leather; he opens it up and finds a beautiful German pistol with a silencer and a full round of ammunition, more than he needs. He picks it up and holds it in his hand to test the weight. He likes it. On the highway into Cleveland, gliding into the city at night, he feels a bit of the power he knows he has in Kiev coming back, appreciates the respect that's implied by the Wolf giving him the right tools for the job.

“Do you want something to eat before you go to work?” the driver says.

“No, no,” Pocketknife says. “Afterward, yes. Come and have a drink with me. Do you know a place?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent.”

It feels like they're hovering over the city. Cleveland stretches out all around them, darker than he expected an American city to be. It's way darker than New York. Except for the skyline downtown, which is all lit up. There's the Key Tower, just four years old, gleaming like a knife, a sliver of glass, next to the grand old dame of the Terminal Tower. Then there are the blocky wedges of the BP Building, the Tower at Erieview. A mass of others, all clustered around a few city blocks, like when it comes to making buildings for commerce, Cleveland remembers that it's a city, that it's supposed to build up, not out, even though the suburbs have been crawling into the farmland around Cleveland for decades; thanks to the Van Sweringens, it's been growing out for as long as it's been growing up. There isn't a lot of traffic in Cleveland after dark, and they're through the downtown in a matter of minutes, hit the highway along the shore of the lake that takes them out to Bratenahl. Now the light from downtown is gone, and Pocketknife gets little glimpses of the things that give Cleveland its reputation. The way someone's leaning against the wall of a tiny Chinese takeout place with dim lights inside. A car parked halfway down a street with two of its windows broken. They're just little flashes of something, without any context. Then they're gone, and the car is cruising down Lake Shore Boulevard. Pocketknife looks at those walls on either side of him, can almost smell the money that's inside them, all the anger and the fear that comes with it, the anger those families feel that they don't have even more, the fear that someone's going to come along and take everything they have away from them. Pocketknife smiles, because he knows that, for one of those houses tonight, the fear is justified. He's there to take everything away.

The gate to the Hightower estate is open. The driver tells him that's normal.
They say she never locks the door,
he says.
That's how protected she feels.
For Pocketknife, this is hard to believe. He tells the driver to drop him off and circle the block once every five minutes, but after fifteen minutes, just to take off.
What do you mean?
the driver says. Pocketknife doesn't bother to answer. When he's out of the car, he realizes just how quiet the long, wide road is. His footsteps are a lot louder than he wants them to be. He's expecting that, as soon as he's standing in front of the place, some motion sensors are going to kick in and the lights are going to come on, the cameras record him, and then the whole thing'll be blown; he'll have to work even faster to earn his pay. But no lights come on. He stands there at the edge of the driveway for a few seconds, then starts walking down it, stops to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness. The driveway's a dark gray band weaving around a ground of even darker gray, the looming shape of the house. Two windows are lit on the second floor, but the curtains are drawn. He can't see in. He wishes the driveway wasn't paved with gravel. At last he's at the front door. He pulls out his gun, tries the door. It's locked, but the lock on the door is so old that he smiles at it; he could've gotten into this place when he was a teenager, back when he didn't have the first clue. He pulls out a pick, fiddles with the mechanism to make as little noise as possible. It feels a little heavier than he expected, but it doesn't bother him. He turns the lock, turns the doorknob, then starts to open the door.

The explosion that follows is so big and so fast that he doesn't feel it. He just sees a hint of the flash, and then it takes him apart. But two minutes later, the driver sees the aftermath, the huge fire, the thick smoke rising into the sky, passing through the branches of the trees in the garden. The neighbors are coming out of their gates, walking down the boulevard to see it. The fire engines are coming down the road; the driver can hear the sirens, see the flashing lights. He drifts by the place to get a good look. The Hightower place is gone, and nobody's coming out. Then he speeds up, lets the fire trucks through. He's gone before the police arrive. He tries to reach the Wolf. But nobody picks up the phone.

That's because it all happens at once. As Pocketknife is being driven through Cleveland, Feodor meets with the Wolf. It's that time of night when it's either very early or very late, and almost everything in the center of Kiev is closed. The hardest partyers are going home; the earliest risers are just getting up. Cabdrivers are sleeping in their cabs, waiting to take someone to the airport, to the edge of town. The single coffee shop that's open has three people in it, a man in a leather jacket who just sits there smoking, looking angry, and a couple in the corner, smoking more than he is. They stop taking drags on their cigarettes just long enough to kiss each other, make out a little. There's a shout from a side street, a whistle; then almost no noise on the wide boulevards, except for the bass still thumping out of the casinos with tinted windows, the ones with the Mercedes-Benzes parked in a slanted row on the sidewalk in front.

The Wolf's own car is a silver Bentley, a little inspiration he had a couple years ago when he decided he wanted to set himself apart from everyone else. He's been pleased at the way the news has spread; everyone who works for him and a few of his rivals all know that it's his car, though almost none of them have ever seen the man in the backseat. Now and again he has his driver take it for a lap around the city without him, just so people can see it and think he's always out there, in two places at once, like the KGB used to be. Like he owns this town.

The Bentley is gliding down the highway the Soviets built that runs right along the shore of the Dneiper. They pass under the bridge to the Hidropark, fly by the hill where there's still enough of the old city for Kiev to remember what it was like before World War II, before Stalin ever showed up and Ukraine's dreams of being its own country were postponed for a hundred years. Then he's in front of an older Soviet apartment block that looks almost identical to the ten other blocks around it.

“This is the place?” the Wolf asks.

“That's what Feodor's man told me.”

They've agreed on a neutral spot, a vacant unit in a building neither of them owns. The driver parks the Bentley, leads the Wolf into the building, up the stairs. Knocks on the door, makes a show of putting himself between his boss and whoever opens it.

“Right on time,” the man who answers the door says. He's in a neat black suit with a crisp white shirt, his hands clasped in front of him. He steps aside. “Come in.”