What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  He started once again to turn around.

  “Don’t fucking move until I tell you to. You look like your dad and you act like him. The rules just don’t apply to you guys, huh?”

  “Don’t say that!” he screamed at the wall, fighting the urge to turn and scream it at me. “I’m nothing like my father.”

  “Suit yourself. Now, what was this bullshit about, you coming at me like that?”

  “My family’s been through enough. Leave it alone, please. Linh Trang is dead and nothing is going to bring her back. Nothing. Leave it alone. Leave us alone.”

  At least he wasn’t shouting any longer. I probably understood his frustration better than he could have imagined. I tossed his wallet down between his spread feet.

  “Pick it up and turn around.”

  He did so. He looked even more like his father in person than he did in his license photo. Same eyes, same cut of the jaw. I handed him his cell phone and keys.

  “Jesus, you really were pointing a gun at me.”

  “I still am. It makes me angry when people act the way you just did. Makes me think if you had a gun you would have used it. Upsets me to think that.”

  “I’m not my father. I would never own a gun, but I will protect my family.”

  “You keep saying that, Mr. Spears. Protecting them from what?”

  “From you, from my father.”

  “Look, I mean you no harm, and so far I haven’t approached you or your wife. Abby seemed okay with me talking to her, relieved almost. You Google me and you’ll see that I understand a little about what you’re going through. All I’m doing is trying to find out why your daughter was killed. Your father wants to know and, frankly, I’m surprised you don’t want to know.”

  He did a very odd thing. He laughed. It was a laugh not unlike Mr. Gordon’s, icy and cruel.

  “Listen to me, Mr. Murphy, my father is interested in Linh Trang’s death for one reason and one reason only: his own skin. It’s the only thing he’s ever cared about or ever will.”

  “How does that work?”

  He laughed that laugh again.

  “You’re an investigator of some sort and a cop. That’s what you’re telling people, anyway. Figure it out for yourself. In the meantime, stay away from my family and my friends.”

  I had to get back to the club and I wasn’t in the mood for empty threats or warnings.

  “I’m sorry about your daughter. From what everyone’s told me, she was a great person. That she was happy and had it all together. I get that you must still not have your feet back under you. Took me a long time. But to be clear, I’ve been hired to do a job and I’m gonna do it. Now get outta here.”

  As I watched Kevin Spears walk to his car, I realized that I had lied to him about his girl. From what everyone but Lara had told me, LT had issues. John Jr. had issues, too. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He worried about it a lot—too much. But the young can’t hear that. They lack perspective. What did any of that matter now? What does anything matter after you’re in a box in the ground, when who you are is only who you were and where you’re going is where you are. Forever.

  35

  (SATURDAY, BEFORE SUNRISE)

  For the second time in the last few hours I got that funky feeling that something wasn’t right, but this go-round there were no rushing footsteps or nervous breaths. Nothing obvious I could point to as I ambled down the hallway toward my room. I felt nearly spent, as if I’d run a marathon or if I’d been swimming for an hour against the tide. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual in that, nor did I dislike the way I felt. It was a kind of satisfied exhaustion. Shifts at the Full Flaps did that to me, wore me out even on nights when no one tried to coldcock me or kick my head in between cars in the parking lot. The crush of people, the volume of the music, the heightened vigilance all took a toll on me, and then we usually finished the night with me and the guys having a drink or two. I always slept well, and then I’d go have a late breakfast with Slava.

  I tried talking myself out of feeling apprehensive, telling myself that it was just my exhaustion playing tricks on me. Or maybe it was a sign that I was off my game and that I was already missing Maggie. Oddly, as much as I hadn’t wanted her to go, I now wanted her to leave early for her own safety and my peace of mind. I thought that maybe I was thrown off by fear for Slava, that not only weren’t we going to have breakfast later that morning, but that we might never have breakfast together again.

  After getting back to the hotel from Gyron, I’d done some Internet research on the incidents Brother Vassily had talked about at lunch. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of who Mr. Gordon was or why he was trying to kill Slava, but I now had a pretty good idea of just how high the stakes were. I also understood the depth of Slava’s shame. That’s what I was thinking about, Slava’s shame, as I came up to my door and nestled my gun in the crook of my hand.

  I stood to the side of the door, flat against the wall, and very carefully slid my keycard into the lock with my left hand. The lock made its familiar mechanical click and sang its muted electronic song. I turned the handle, shoved the door open as best I could, pressed against the wall as I was, and waited. There was nothing: no gunfire, nobody rushing at me, nothing. The door swung slowly shut, the lock engaging with its double click. I repeated the routine once more. Again, nothing. Click. Click. Still, I could not shake that strange feeling that something wasn’t right. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand out in the hallway until sunrise and I was getting pretty desperate for sleep. I did the lock thing one more time, only on this occasion I didn’t let the lock engage. Instead I kicked the door open just before it closed and kept my gun at the ready. Inside, I flicked on the lights and saw that I’d been right to feel something was off. There was a man sitting on the edge of my bed—Slava.

  “Is good morning, Gus? How was club going tonight?”

  “Small talk, Slava? C’mon. How did you get in here, anyway?”

  He answered with that big, ugly grin of his. I wiped it right off his face.

  “I know, Slava. I know.”

  I don’t know what made me say it. It wasn’t generally in my nature to blurt things out that way or to expose people, certainly not a friend. It wasn’t my nature to say “Gotcha!” or to hurt someone. But of course that was ridiculous. I wasn’t at all sure what my nature was anymore. I could’ve made excuses for myself, told myself that it was anger over Maggie being threatened or of my being caught up in a mess that wasn’t my mess to begin with. But last year Slava had saved me from more than one mess that had nothing at all to do with him.

  “You know. What are you knowing?” he asked, his voice full of anger and defeat. But he knew the answer. Slava was nothing if not intuitive. He was good at reading people. Even better at reading me.

  “C’mon on, Slava, you and me . . . we can’t start making believe with each other.”

  “No, Gus, there is no making believe between us. You are understanding my shame now. I see this in your eyes. I am killing men and women and children who are doing nothing to me. I have made killing because a man says this is what I must do like making order for me to sweep floor or taking out garbage.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  “That is why I am wishing to tell the only friend I have had for many, many years. Please, for our friendship, you are letting Slava explain.”

  And then he did something I never thought I would see him do—he cried. And when he cried, the bed shook. I swore I could feel the intensity of it through the floor and the soles of my running shoes. I think he must have been saving up those tears for sixteen years. Then the tears stopped as suddenly as they had begun. He turned to me, eyes red, wet, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “How you are knowing?”

  “In Mikel’s room, after I was attacked, I found an old newspaper art
icle about the murder of a man on the commission investigating the apartment building bombings. One of Bill’s friends translated it for me. It wasn’t hard to figure out from there.”

  “My father was an electrical engineer, a Pole and a communist. What you are calling a true believer. After the Great Patriotic War—”

  “Huh?”

  “In Russia is what we are saying is World War Two.”

  “Okay.”

  “So he was true believer and, with help from Soviets, resettled our family in Grozny, Chechnya. Stalin is doing this, putting Slavs in places that are ethnically different. I become a policeman there when I get out from school. The Chechens, they are hating us because they are Muslims and Soviet Union has no place for religion. For Muslims especially there is very little liking. For many years there are small terrorisms, but then, after Soviet Union is collapsing, there is madness. The Muslims are wanting us out and to be their own country. Many police are being killed. My best friend on police, I am loving like brother, he is being tortured to death and his body is left burning in middle of street in Grozny.”

  “So,” I said, “when they came to you, you volunteered to do whatever had to be done.”

  “Like a stupid child, yes. I was full of hating for them. Such hate . . . but what am I knowing? I am a dumb policeman who doesn’t see the bigger things in the world. What am I knowing about Yeltsin and Putin and their plans to making war on Chechens because they are not being popular with the people? With blood in my eyes all I am seeing is revenge for my friend. When FSB man is coming to me to be part of death squad and says they have tracked Chechen rebels to buildings here and here and here, I am blind to truth.”

  I told him about Mr. Gordon’s ride in my van and his threats. That shook him up. He began pounding his huge right fist into the palm of his left hand. His eyes got a very faraway look in them.

  “He is wanting me, not Maggie.”

  “I know. I have Smudge keeping an eye on her. He’ll let me know if something’s up.”

  Slava grinned his ugly grin again. “Smudge. Ha! Strange little man.”

  “But I trust him and he’s had to watch his own back for so long. He’ll be good at watching Maggie’s.” Then I returned to what we had been discussing. “So Mikel, Goran, you, and this Mr. Gordon who threatened Maggie, you were all part of these death squads?”

  “This Mr. Gordon’s real name is Bogdan Lagunov,” Slava said, finally standing and walking over by the drawn window shade. “He is not from the squads. He is ex-Spetsnaz, Russian special forces, working for rich oligarch who is acting on behalf of Russian politicians that were involved in helping make bombings possible. It is how it is working in Russia. Corruption there is like cancer in a body spreading so there is being more cancer than body. The rich and the politicians, they are being in bed so close that they have the same face. Do you understand what Slava is meaning by this?”

  I nodded that I did.

  Slava still had his back to me, ashamed to face me when he spoke about this. “You know what is amazing, Gus?” He snorted and gasped. That’s how Slava laughed, a series of snorts and gasps. “I am telling you. One of bombing squads was caught, how Americans say . . . red-handed, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of the bombing squads is caught red-handed before bombs can explode and they are all Russians, not Chechens, but still we let politicians blame the Chechens and make war on them. This is when I knew I must run or be dead myself. I got to family still in Poland and then people there are helping me come to America. In Brighton Beach there are people who are making a new person of me. Many of us ran. Many others who are not running are dead.”

  “But why come after you now after so long?”

  “Because of how Putin is taking back Ukraine. It is making people remember how he makes manipulations with Chechnya. He wants to shut the door on this, I think. It would be bad for him to having one of us show up at UN or on television. Slava is an untied end.”

  “A loose end.”

  He snorted and gasped and slipped into Russian. “Da, da, a loose end, that is Slava. A very loose end. I want you to know this, Gus, I am having no love for the Chechens. They have done many terrible things.”

  “I know about the murders at the school and what they did in the theater.”

  “But I am no better than them. Worse. I make terrorisms on my own people. Even with the hate I am having I know most Chechens, like Russians, are wanting to just live lives with no bother to families. I have much blood on my hands and must live with this shame. I must live with it as long as I can. Dying is too easy for Slava.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  He handed me a slip of paper with another phone number on it.

  “If Bogdan Lagunov is approaching you again or he is making threats on Maggie, give to him this paper or number is on it.”

  “But—”

  “No, Gus.” He shook his massive head. “You give paper and is not your problem no more. I have read once in a store a sign in the mall that is saying ‘What you break, you own,’ or something like that. What has happened back in Russia, all those people I killed . . . I am breaking. I cannot fix, but I must own it, not you.”

  “I heard about Mikel.”

  “His pain is no more.”

  “Where are you going after this?”

  “It is better for you to not knowing.”

  I didn’t argue the point.

  “I’ll go take a walk, so you can go as you came,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Breakfast next Saturday?”

  “Yes, Gus,” he said, his big, beefy hand covering and shaking mine, “breakfast next Saturday.”

  He wasn’t smiling as he said it. I don’t know that I had ever seen a man look any sadder, not even in the mirror after John’s death. In a strange way, Slava’s sad face made me wonder not about his shame or about the long-ago bombings in Russia, but about Micah Spears. I now knew of Slava’s shame, why he considered himself a kind of monster. I left the room and walked back to the lobby. As I did, I wondered some more about monsters and men and what turned one into the other.

  36

  (SATURDAY, AFTER SUNRISE)

  When I got to the lobby after my talk with Slava, tired as I was, I didn’t head back to my room. Instead I sat down in what passed for our business center and began hunting monsters. I knew it didn’t make any sense to worry about Micah Spears’s past. Monster or not, he’d clearly had nothing to do with Linh Trang’s murder. That was the odd thing about this case, the needle on the compass kept pointing away from the murder itself and to Micah Spears. But why? What was his pull on the needle? It was like I felt I couldn’t get anywhere with LT’s murder unless I found out about the old man. And I couldn’t get Kevin Spears’s words out of my head. Listen, Mr. Murphy, my father is interested in Linh Trang’s death for one reason and one reason only: his own skin. It’s the only thing he’s ever cared about or ever will.

  I didn’t waste a lot of time concerning myself with the reasons Kevin Spears seemed to hate his father so. I’d been a cop too long for that, seen too much to be surprised. I’d seen husbands murder their brides on their wedding nights and wives murder their husbands after forty years together. I’d seen just about every combination of relative killing relative as you could imagine. Wherever there’s potential for intense love there’s also potential for intense hate. But I didn’t have to plumb the depths as far as murder to understand that sometimes relatives just didn’t get along. I didn’t need to look any further than to my own drunk of a father and my poor reticent mother. One was never going to take a baseball bat to the other. No, they seemed too content to grind each other down with the drip, drip, drip of insults and the vacuum of passive-aggressiveness.

  There was plenty of stuff about Micah Spears’s businesses and how he had smoothly parlayed a profi
table COD home heating oil business into two ESCOs—energy service companies—selling natural gas and electricity to commercial and residential accounts. Apparently, he was quite the entrepreneurial superstar and was much admired for his business acumen. There were several glowing pieces written on him that had appeared in the business section of Newsday, Long Island’s lone newspaper, in Long Island Magazine, and several business-oriented publications. A lot of it was the usual up-by-the-bootstraps bullshit. I started out with one used truck, a thousand bucks in cash, and a determination to succeed in the oil business. Like that. You know, the kind of stuff us Americans have had drilled into our heads since we could crawl. He might just as well have said he began with one mule, a ten-dollar stake, and a fierce desire to prospect for gold. Or the updated version about the guy in the garage and his idea for a personal computer.

  At least one thing did show through in the stuff online as in real life. Micah Spears did not come across as a happy-go-lucky family man. Not that most of the pieces or interviews with him gave him much room for talk about his family or his personal life, but still there was an iciness, a sort of refusal on his part to ever take the conversation in that direction. Even when asked the rare direct question about his family, Spears would shut the interviewer right down. He was a classic compartmentalizer. It was a skill I was familiar with. Cops have to develop the ability to compartmentalize or they don’t last on the job. You open up the gates between the separate parts of your life and it’s trouble. Yet in spite of Micah Spears’s chilliness and hard-nosed business practices, there was nothing evidently more monstrous about him than the head of any privately held corporation, large or small.

  There were two things I came across that got my attention, though. One was a black-and-white photo of Micah Spears from the early ’90s at a chamber of commerce event, but it wasn’t him I was so much interested in as the woman standing to his left, her arm looped through his. The caption identified her as Roberta Spears. From what I could glean, Roberta Spears was quite an attractive woman and probably ten years younger than her husband. What I found fascinating was the look on her face. Her expression, as far as I could tell, was one full of love and admiration. For his part, Micah Spears had the same expression he wore the first time we met: distant, superior, knowing, with hints of blackened soul. I didn’t bother trying to reconcile their expressions. Nor did I try and reconcile the fact that two years after the photo at the chamber of commerce function was taken, Roberta Spears and Micah were divorced.