Moonlight Rises

by Vincent Zandri

  “Four Orchard Grove,” I recall. “Peter Czech’s house.”

  Georgie smiles. “That’s the great thing about the left brain,” he offers up. “It wants to remember things the way they happened. It’s the right brain that messes everything up.”

  As the fog lifts in my brain, I picture Lola.

  “Lola,” I say. “Christ, we left her and Claudia behind in Lola’s office, those Obamas banging on the door. You think her old man will protect her, Georgie? Protect her from harm, those Russians get desperate enough?”

  “Call her,” Georgie says. “Call her now.”

  I pull out the cell phone, dial the number for her North Albany terrace apartment. No answer. I call her school line. I get her answering service. I hang up, call the secretary in the psychology department. She tells me Dr. Ross has yet to report to school. I ask her what time it is, like I can’t just find out by looking at my watch. She says it’s 8:35 in the morning. She also says that usually Dr. Ross would be on site by now, in her office working. Perhaps she had a doctor’s appointment, she adds hopefully. Maybe a hair appointment. But I know better inside my gut.

  My newly rebooted built-in shit detector is hounding me.

  The goon in the back seat is still out. He’s moaning up a painful storm, however.

  “How fast can you make it to Lola’s?” I beg of Georgie. “I’m thinking that’s where the Obamas will go next now that they dug up a whole lot of nothing at Czech’s house.”

  “I’m on it,” he answers.

  “Make like lightning,” I say.

  We speed off in the old Beetle.

  Chapter 44

  Lola lives in an apartment in North Albany that belongs to a much larger complex called Dutch Village. A series of three- and four-storied Dutch revival brick buildings constructed during World War II that look more like the dormitories for an Ivy League university than an apartment complex. I have a key to her place on my small key ring. I let us in the front door to the building, head down the steps to her bottom floor terrace apartment.

  Her door is wide open.

  Like my built-in shit detector has already warned, the place is trashed, no stone left unturned; no decoration, furniture piece, or eating implement not shattered or broken. As if a smashed antique ladder-back chair was going to suddenly reveal the contents of some secret box.

  Fucking Russians.

  Automatics out and poised for battle, Georgie and I already know that danger no longer lurks in the five-room apartment. That the danger has come, trashed the joint, and fled.

  Empty-handed. Except for Lola, and maybe her sister.

  I know that if Rose is desperate enough to kidnap his own daughter, the mother of the son he sold off for profit, then she might be as good as dead.

  “You feel the need to search the place?” Georgie asks.

  I lower my weapon, thumb scratching the safety. “Negative.” I head out the door. “I say let’s just cut to the chase.”

  We rush back out to the Beetle. I open the driver’s side door, push the pistol barrel up against the Russian’s temple. He starts to heave and kick. Georgie goes for his stun gun.

  “No!” I shout.

  I cock back the pistol hammer, just so the goon can hear how close he is to blood and pain, and panic. Then I reach down with my free hand, tear the duct tape off his mouth.

  He spits foamy saliva and mucous.

  I slap him with the barrel. On the ear, where it hurts the most.

  “Mother…fucker!” he barks. Russian accent.

  I slap him again because I can.

  “Keep moving like that, Boris, and I’ll shoot you. Call me names again, and I’ll shoot you. If you don’t tell me where Rose is keeping Lola Ross, I will shoot you. Do we have an understanding, Boris?”

  “Go to devil, little man!” He’s grinding his teeth, feet kicking at the interior sidewall, making the whole ride rock ’n roll.

  “It’s go to hell, Boris. That could be your name, right? Boris? It’s a possibility with you being Russian and all?”

  I press the bad-ass end of the pistol barrel tight against his left knee.

  “Boris, I need you to hold still for just one moment.”

  He obeys.

  I pop one off.

  An explosion. Instantly followed by bone and blood spatter and one former Soviet kneecap that’s all but evaporated. All except a little piece of pink tendon that’s hanging outside skin and torn trousers.

  The goon doesn’t scream. He just makes a yelp like a dog and then he starts sobbing. I didn’t think Russian goons cried.

  “Lola Ross. Her location. Rose must have her. Tell me now, or head back to the motherland in a wheelchair just like Peter Czech’s.”

  “Rose, he is dead!” he cries.

  “I think he’s very much alive, Boris.”

  I aim for the other knee, pull back on the hammer. He keeps on sobbing.

  “Yes, yes. Rose, he is alive. But he does not existing anymore.”

  I go back to the new wound, push the black barrel against it. He yelps, begs for me to stop. I pull back.

  “Tell me he’s not really dead. Tell me, Boris. Tell me he’s not dead and that he’s holding Lola and that you know where he’s holding her.”

  “Nyet! Not existing. Not really dead, yes?”

  “Which is it Boris?”

  “Rose’s heart. It beats. His eyes. They see. His lungs. They breathe the air. But, officially, he is very, very, very fucking dead.”

  Click. The lightbulb flashes on bright over my head. I finally fucking get it. That explains the county record. It lists one Harvey Rose as dead. How he pulled that one off, I’ll never know. But then money talks. Russian money. Mob money. Or maybe Russian government money. Putin money.

  “Where does the dead Rose live?”

  More crying, more yelping.

  I tap the wound with the barrel.

  He screams.

  Outside the car Georgie stands his ground, surveying the surrounding parking lot for cops or interested bystanders. I’m assuming we’re in the clear thus far. This won’t take much longer in any case. No matter which way things turn out for this Russian goon.

  “Mr. Rose…he lives in the Montgomery Ward building, yes? Down in the North Albany. How you call it? Men-Yands-Land.”

  “That old abandoned white elephant at the bottom of the North Albany hill,” I say. “It’s Menands…The Village of Menands, founded by Louis Menands. Greedy motherfucker born in Paris and immigrated to Albany in search of freedom, the American dream and cold hard cash. You got that, Boris? He didn’t immigrate to Russia for cold hard cash. He came here to the good old U-S-of-fuckin’-A, just like you and your greedy mobster goon friends did. And nobody lives in the Montgomery Ward building. It’s a rat-infested ruin. Been abandoned for years, bro.”

  “That’s because it is locked up tighter than gulag. Believe it. He lives there, yes? Up in white tower.”

  “The tower. And that’s where we’ll find Lola?”

  “Da.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “She’s his fucking daughter, man. Mr. Rose, he does not kill his fucking own daughter.”

  I make like I’m about to pistol-whip the knee wound again.

  “She is alive, alive, alive! Rose, he thinks she could be person hiding something and he, poppa…he wants it back, yes?”

  “The box. Rose wants the box.”

  He looks up at me, eyes slanty, forehead scrunched and furrowed in pain.

  “What…fucking…box?”

  Aiming for the second knee.

  “I am serious man here, dude. I am on soil that is foreign, dude. What…fucking…box is it you speak of?”

  “The box you guys are convinced Peter Czech handed over to me while I was still in the hospital. The one you and those other Russian, porno-meat, Obama-mask-wearing monsters killed me for.”

  “Not one ever mention box to me.
”

  “So, I’m hearing things, Boris?”

  That’s when the injured, crying thug does something completely out of character for some poor bastard with his right knee freshly shot off. He begins to laugh. Despite the pain and the blood. Despite the fact that if and when he ever walks a straight line again, he will display a permanent limp.

  “Not box!” he spits, choking on his laughs, even though what’s left of his knee is hanging down on his shin. “Not box, not box. But flash box. What you call a flash drive or zeeepy-zip-zip drive.”

  I pull the gun away.

  I’ll be dipped.

  I heard wrong. Those synthesizers the Russian Obamas pressed up against their throats distorted the words they pronounced. No wonder I have no recollection of a box or a shoebox or a big cardboard kind of box. What they’re after are computer files and no doubt they must have been stored on some flash drive, or old-fashioned zip drive that has to belong to Peter Czech.

  Makes sense.

  A flash drive doesn’t resemble a real box. But I guess it can be confused for a little, rectangular box-like device by a foreigner who has no idea how to properly communicate it in English. These Russian goons were literally lost in translation when they were torturing me for a “fleshy or zippy box.”

  “Tape him up again, Georgie,” I say.

  My big brother immediately goes to work on it.

  I hop in the shotgun seat, pistol still aimed at the goon, while Georgie finishes wrapping him up. When he’s done, I say, “Montgomery Ward building, Georgie. Boris is going to lead us directly to Harvey Rose. The dead one who’s alive and holding my girl.”

  “It’s full light still,” he points out.

  “Head to Moonlight’s first,” I agree. “Drive around back and pull up beside the dumpster. We’ll hole up there until nightfall.”

  “It’s almost ten in the morning,” Georgie points out. “I could use a cold one right about now.”

  Chapter 45

  I close up Moonlight’s soon as we get inside, lock the doors after sending my senior-in-college bartender home with a full day’s pay stuffed inside his jeans pocket. No one’s busying himself with drinking his way through a fine fall morning other than Uncle Leo, anyway. For his troubles, I send the Korean War Vet home with a large to-go cup full of rum and coke.

  Free of charge.

  Georgie and I take turns looking in on Boris who, by now, is passing in and out of consciousness. Georgie’s worried that he’ll bleed out all over the rehabbed Beetle before he can become of use, so he decides to suture him up as best he can using the small sewing needle and biodegradable thread from the first aid kit mounted to the bar back. He also gives the goon a bottle of water.

  Sitting back down at the same table where I first sat down with a wheelchair-bound Peter Czech, I crack open a beer a piece for us, while Georgie pulls the much-needed half-smoked medicinal joint from the pocket on his leather and fires it up.

  Breathing in the pot, he sits back, exhales, much like a cigar-smoking, brandy-snifting aficionado would do. I drink some beer. It tastes good, and it’s calming me down. But I know I have to limit myself to only one or two. Reflexes ain’t what they used to be. And I’m finding it harder and harder these days to stay alive. But then I’m finding it just as hard to die, too.

  “So, what’s the bottom line on this train wreck Georgie?” I pose after a beat. “In your humble pathological opinion.”

  “Bottom line no bullshit opinion?” he says, stealing a quick sip of beer. “Rose is a spy, and probably has been one since the Cold War.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Makes sense to me. He’s old enough to be a Cold war spy and from what you told me inside your loft, he was working as an accountant for the government on the Knolls atomic plant account. Greedy prick probably started selling secrets to the Russians from day one. Back then it was real easy to be a spy. All you had to do was set up a PO box at the direction of some Russian agent living and thriving in a local suburb, and you were in business.”

  “And how would you know that shit?”

  “Don’t you watch the History Channel Moon?”

  “Don’t even have a TV bro.”

  “OK, whatever. Anyway, Rose the spy likes his work and the easy cash it brings him, so he starts building an empire of his own.”

  “But when his daughter gets knocked up, Granddaddy Rose gets very pissed off, doesn’t he?”

  “Precisely, Moon. So, he arranges to hand little baby Peter over for adoption. Bit of a control freak, he picks the adoptive parents himself—a Russian immigrant couple he’s come across in his spy dealings and who also happen to work for Knolls. But also, being a vain asshole, he makes sure he gets included in a photo of himself and the happy couple with their new baby while his daughter is off in the bathroom. No fan of loose ends, hand-picking the parents is his way of keeping tabs on little baby Peter. This attention to detail pays off when Peter the adolescent happens to show an aptitude for engineering. Ends up going to engineering school and, lo and fucking behold, becoming an employee of the Knolls atomic plant. Now how’s that for the warm and cozy American fucking dream?”

  My big brother smiles, drinks some more beer.

  “Listen, Moon. Rose must have been selling secrets for decades,” he goes on. “As a fed accountant he would have audited the Knolls atomic books. Dude must know precisely what a nuke reactor costs, where to get one, and exactly what stores sell them. And it ain’t Amazon-dot-com or Lowes.

  “So what a huge fucking break to have a talented, Russian-sympathizing engineer of a grandson pop up to steer toward the nuke plant where it so happens the boy’s adoptive father works, and which his secret grandfather has been monitoring for ages on behalf of the Feds. It’s of course a risk all the way around. But what does Rose have to lose? Not a thing. He’s already got a foothold in the Russian spy business. He’s looking for longevity, a continuation program to keep the family business growing and thriving.

  “It might have been a no-brainer for Czech. That is, so long as old man Rose was paying him and his foster parents the whole time. Or maybe Czech had no choice but to toe the red line, or face something dreadful. Like his own death or the death of his adoptive parents.”

  “Czech told me his biological mother died of cancer,” I interject. “But he also told me both his foster parents died in an automobile accident.”

  “Look into it further,” insists Georgie, “and I can bet that car wreck was more than just an accident. Could be that Czech wanted out. Especially after his own accident and resulting paralysis. But Rose wouldn’t let him get out. And he proved how serious he was by killing the foster mother and father, made it look like an accident.”

  We both chew on that one for a while.

  “So why now?” I chime in after a beat. “Why does Czech come to me with some crazy story about finding his father who’s really his grandfather?”

  “Like I said, he wants to expose Rose for who he is.”

  “But in doing so he’ll expose himself.”

  “Risk he’s willing to take.”

  “Why?”

  Georgie, shrugging narrow shoulders. “Maybe he wants to protect Lola, his mother. Maybe he wants something else from Rose and he’s willing to expose him in order to get at it.”

  We both look at one another. Despite some pretty good guesses about what the fuck is going on in Albany, we’re empty of real answers. But…

  “We just might find out in a few hours just what Czech wants from his partner and grandfather,” I suggest.

  “I suspect we will, Moon. And let’s hope that Lola is no worse the wear for her son’s double-dealing.”

  “A mother’s love for her son. It supersedes everything. Even federal and state law.”

  “And good old common sense.”

  My stomach drops at the thought of Lola being harmed and also at the thought of her having a son and a father like Rose an
d never revealing it to me. Then there’s the question of her being disloyal to me. It’s all too much to handle in one sitting. I drink down my beer, grab another from the cooler behind the bar.

  Stamping out his joint and pocketing the roach, Georgie drinks down the rest of his beer, sets the empty on the table. He stands.

  “Gonna check on our injured Boris,” he informs. “He is a guest in our country after all.”

  “Sorry about the blood all over your Beetle.”

  “Don’t worry. Got friends who can clean that stuff up.” He smiles. “Gonna cost you though.”

  “Put it on my tab,” I insist.

  “Getting to be a huge tab,” he says, walking out the back door.

  Chapter 46

  I recall the old Montgomery Ward building with some affection. I remember as a kid anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Montgomery Ward catalogue to my dad’s funeral home. It was so big and thick, about the only book in the home that held more weight was the Bible and the phone book. For the entire fall season right up until Christmas I’d stare at full-color glossy pics of the toys I expected Santa to deliver. Trains sets, electric car racetracks, cowboy six-guns, basketballs, baseballs, footballs, fishing poles. You name it, Montgomery Ward had it.

  While the toys miraculously appeared for me under the Christmas tree on the morning of December 25th, every now and then the old man would splurge and allow me to pick something out from the catalogue during the year. That’s when we’d make the short drive to the Montgomery Ward building, which was located on lower Broadway in what then was the thriving North Albany village of Menands. That is, before the shopping malls took over and the big stand-alone department store went belly up and half of Louis Menands’ village got laid off.