The Devil's Garden

by Richard Montanari

  He climbed the tree next to the south side of the house, and slipped onto the upstairs porch. He stepped up to the window. At first he thought the room was dark, or that heavy drapes had been pulled, but as his eyes adjusted he saw there was a dim light coming from the room.

  A light snapped on in the window to the right of the bedroom. It appeared to be a bathroom. Frosted glass prevented him from seeing in. He turned back to the bedroom window.

  Nothing inside the room stirred.

  Within seconds, Aleks had the window raised. He slipped silently into the house. Except for the sound of the television below, the house was quiet.

  He stood at the foot of the beds. The two little girls slept in the darkened room, in the hands of angels. They had not awakened, were unaware of his presence. The room was filled with plush animals – ducks, rabbits, teddy bears, turtles. On one wall was a long low table, a pair of bright plastic chairs. Above it was a large corkboard, collaged with a menagerie of Sesame Street characters.

  In the dim light Aleks could only see their small forms beneath the covers.

  Suddenly – noise behind him. Metal brushing metal.

  The door opened. In a blur Aleks had the Barhydt out of its sheath, open, at the ready.

  In front of him, in silhouette, a small figure.

  Aleks flipped on the overhead light, and saw it was a woman. She was waif-like, in her late forties, south-east Asian. Aleks looked at the beds. He backed across the small room, slipped the covers down. The twins were Asian, too.

  The girls were not his tütred.

  He looked into the woman’s eyes. There he saw pain, as well as fear and something that looked like understanding. She did not move. Aleks closed his knife, sheathed it. He put a finger to his lips. The woman nodded.

  “This is not Anna and Marya,” Aleks said softly. “I have made a mistake. If I have frightened you, you have my deepest apologies. You are in no danger.”

  Moments later he was out the window, down the tree, across the street, and into the waiting car.

  Aleks now knew where he had to go. He knew where his daughters lived.

  A town called Eden Falls.

  TWELVE

  Two hours later Aleks stood near the bank of the East River, in the shadow of the massive United Nations Building. A chill had fallen over the city, a wind that whispered that spring had not fully arrived.

  He took out one of the disposable cellphones, tapped the number written on the cocktail napkin. After two rings, the woman answered. They chatted for a minute or two, dancing the dance. Finally, Aleks asked. Moments later, after what might have passed for coquettishness in the woman’s experience, she gave Aleks her address. He committed it to memory, signed off. He then snapped the phone in half, threw both pieces into the river.

  As he walked toward the avenue, and a cab stand, he felt the heft of the Barhydt on his hip.

  Jilliane Murphy was the woman’s name. She said she would make tapas, and open a good bottle of Barolo. She said that from the moment they met on the plane, she had known he would call.

  It had been a mistake to let her see the marble eggs on the plane. This Aleks knew. What he did not know was whether or not, when she moved the papers from the seat next to his, she had seen the name Viktor Harkov, or the address of People’s Legal Services. The lawyer’s murder was bound to be all over the news very soon.

  As Aleks slipped into a cab on First Avenue, a Yankees cap pulled low on his head, he gave the driver an address eight blocks from Jilliane Murphy’s apartment.

  He lay back his head thinking about the next day. His heart began to race. He was going to meet his daughters, a moment about which he had dreamed for four years.

  But that was tomorrow.

  Tonight he was really looking forward to the Barolo.

  THIRTEEN

  Whiskey dreams were the worst. in this version Michael was in his underwear, in public – so far, the standard horror show – but this dream was not about being in such a state in a junior-high classroom, locker combination unknown, surrounded by cheerleaders. It was not even the nightmare he used to have where he was in court, sans suit, standing in front of a jury populated with octogenarian garden club ladies. No such luck.

  This dream had him running down the street in Astoria, chasing a scantily clad Gina Torres. Behind him was Abby who, for some reason, was carrying an AK-47.

  He opened his eyes.

  Gina Torres?

  His heart suddenly leapt into his throat. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t. Did he?

  Pulse racing, he bolted upright, felt around the bed. Empty. He glanced around the room. His own bedroom. He had overslept, but that was the good news.

  Thank you, Jesus. Put it on my tab.

  Gina Torres. He had seen her at the bar. That much he remembered. And he remembered how good she looked, although that was a given. And that he’d kissed her.

  No. She kissed me, your honor.

  He hadn’t gotten drunk, but when had he gotten home? It was late, he knew that. It was all starting to come back to him. Especially the part where Abby had –

  A gun?

  He ambled into the bathroom, saw the note taped on the mirror, written in a quick script Abby saved for when she was royally pissed off.

  When did you start wearing Jean Patou?

  He made a mental note to buy flowers.

  THE GIRLS WERE SITTING at the table when Michael made his way downstairs. Abby was cutting fruit for the new juicer, a huge stainless-steel contraption that seemed to have more dials and settings than an MRI machine. The girls had placed a hard-boiled egg on Michael’s plate. It wasn’t one of the fancy eggs – they were probably saving those for his basket – but rather a solid blue egg with Daddy written on it in that special yellow Easter egg crayon, the kind that’s invisible until you dip the egg into the vinegary bowl of mysterious dye.

  Michael kissed the girls on the top of their heads. He tried to kiss Abby, but she craftily bent away from him, a chilly, silent willow in the wind.

  “So what’s up for today?” Michael asked. He cracked the egg, peeled it. It was as hard as a rock, but he would happily savor it nonetheless.

  “Ballet,” Emily said through a mouthful of cereal.

  “I love ballet,” Michael said. The truth was, he hadn’t known they were taking ballet lessons. He chided himself for this.

  “Miss Wolfe is our teacher,” added Charlotte. She took a spoonful of cereal, wiped her lips, then replaced her spoon on the placemat, squaring it next to the fork. Precise, geometrical Charlotte.

  “Is she nice?” Michael asked.

  Both girls nodded.

  “She puts stars on the floor, and we have to run away from them,” Charlotte said. “Then she claps her hands and we have to run back.”

  To Michael this sounded more like some kind of football drill. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Today we’re going to do a dummy play,” Emily said.

  “A dummy play?”

  “It’s called a demi plié,” Abby chimed in.

  “Ah, okay,” Michael said. “Is that like Demi Moore?”

  The girls giggled, even though Michael was certain they had no idea who Demi Moore was. Abby, on the other hand, did know who Demi Moore was, but there would be no humor found in any of Michael Roman’s terrible jokes this day.

  “We do it at the barre,” Emily added, matter-of-factly.

  Michael recoiled in horror. He grabbed his chest. “You guys are too young to go to a bar!”

  The girls rolled their eyes.

  “Unlike their father,” Abby said under her breath.

  Michael picked up the newspaper, held it up for cover.

  “Come on, girls. Let’s get our dishes in the sink and get ready,” Abby said.

  As Abby got the girls dressed for ballet class, Michael slammed a quartet of Advil, finished his coffee, scanned the Daily News. There was a brief article about the trial of Patrick Ghegan, recapping the original story about
the murder of Colin Harris, which had made the front page of both the Daily News and its bitter rival, the New York Post. There was even a mention of “tenacious assistant district attorney Michael Roman.” It wasn’t exactly front page and above the fold in the Times, but he’d take it.

  A few minutes later Charlotte and Emily walked back into the kitchen. They were both wearing pink leotards and white quilted ski jackets, even though it was nearing fifty degrees outside. As a rule, Abby kept them bundled up until about May 1 every year. She was, after all, the one who nursed the girls through their bouts with sore throats, coughs, colds, and ear infections.

  “Let me see,” Michael said.

  Charlotte and Emily both spun slowly around, hanging onto the edge of the table for balance, as close to being en pointe as they could get.

  “My pretty ballerinas.”

  The girls gave Michael a hug and a kiss. Abby did not. It told Michael all he needed to know about the height, depth, and breadth of the dog house in which he was now boarding.

  As he watched Abby’s car pull out of the driveway he made a second mental note to get a box of Godiva chocolates in addition to the flowers.

  BY TEN-THIRTY HE WAS gaining a semblance of a day, and everything he had to do. He had to be in court at two o’clock, and after that he had to stop by and check on the progress of an office on Newark Street. A group of Queens and Brooklyn lawyer friends were opening a small legal clinic, working strictly pro bono and, as a favor – a favor he now regretted offering – Michael had taken on part of the burden of helping get the place renovated, painted, and ready for business.

  He got onto his computer, logged onto the DA’s office secure website. It had been a relatively slow night, it seemed. In addition to a pair of robberies in the 109, and a suspected arson in Forest Hills, there had been one homicide. A woman named Jilliane Suzanne Murphy had been stabbed to death in her apartment. She was a forty-one year old stockbroker, a divorcee, no children. There were no suspects.

  New York, Michael thought, closing down the web browser. The city that never sleeps.

  MICHAEL WAS JUST ABOUT out the door, bagel in fist, when his cellphone rang. He looked at the LCD screen. It was a private number. It wasn’t Abby, it wasn’t the office, so how important could it be?

  The phone rang again, loud and insistent and annoyingly cellular. Take it or leave it, he debated. His head was killing him.

  Ah shit. He answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Michael?”

  A familiar voice, although Michael had a hard time placing it. “It is. Who’s this?”

  “Michael this is Max Priest.”

  The name brought him back. Way back. He had not spoken to Priest in nearly five years. Priest had done some electronic and photographic surveillance work for the DA’s office, had wired more than a dozen confidential informants for Michael and his team.

  Back in the day Michael always considered Max Priest to be a true professional – prudent, honest, and as forthright as one can be and still maintain the anonymity needed to do the kind of work he did.

  While the two men were friendly, always cordial, they were not what either of them would consider friends. Michael instantly wondered how Priest had gotten his cellphone number. On the other hand, considering Max Priest was an expert on all things electronic, it was no real surprise.

  “How is suburban life treating you?” Priest asked.

  It was a good question, one to which Michael still did not have an honest answer. “It took a while, but we’ve settled in,” he said. “Suburban life is good. You should try it.”

  “Not me,” Priest said. “If I don’t hear a car horn honk every five seconds I can’t sleep.”

  They made shop talk for another minute or so, then Michael brought the conversation back.

  “So what’s up?”

  Michael heard Priest draw a deep breath. It sounded like a prelude to something. Something bad.

  Michael had no idea.

  Priest chose his words carefully, related them in a calm, reassuring manner. It didn’t help. The subtext of what Priest had to say was something Michael had always feared, but never thought would actually happen.

  And, for the third time in his life, the world dropped out from beneath Michael Roman’s feet.

  ABBY SAID SHE HAD known the minute they stepped into the restaurant. It wasn’t that she was blessed with any sort of prescience, it was just that Michael Roman – despite being one of the hottest young ADAs in New York, a job all but dependent on playing cards close to the chest – was terrible at hiding anything when it came to affairs of the heart. She saw it in the way he couldn’t seem to finish a complete sentence. She saw it in the way he fawned over her, how the ice cubes rattled slightly in his glass of water, the way his leg seemed to itch every ten seconds or so. She saw it in his eyes.

  As soon as they were seated, Abby told him that she knew he was going to propose. And that she had something she needed to say before he popped the question.

  Michael had almost looked relieved. Almost.

  Abby steeled herself, and told him that she could not have children.

  For a moment, Michael said nothing. It was, Abby eventually told him, the longest moment of her life. She had prepared for it, had told herself that if there was a moment’s hesitation on Michael’s part, if there was any indication that he no longer wanted to spend his life with her, she would understand.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  It really was.

  Two months later they were married.

  IT WAS ABBY’S IDEA to try and adopt an Estonian child. Michael could not have been happier. At first, everything seemed to go smoothly. They contacted an agency in South Carolina, the only agency on the east coast that handled Baltic adoptions, and learned that married couples and single men and women over twenty-five years of age could adopt from Estonia. They learned that there were a number of waiting children. They were also told that before an adoption could be approved, the adopting couple needed to go to Estonia and meet the child. This was fine with Abby, and especially with Michael. He had long yearned to visit his parents’ homeland.

  But one day, as they got closer to the event, they got the bad news. They learned that the total process, from dossier submission until the time adoptive parents receive the child, averaged six to twelve months. And that waiting children were generally over five years old.

  They agonized over the decision, but in the end they agreed that, while children five and over certainly deserved loving homes, they wanted a baby.

  The process seemed hopeless, until Max Priest put Michael in touch with a lawyer, who knew a lawyer, a man who could speed up the process, and would know how they could adopt a child under the age of six months. For a price.

  While the initial exit processing was done in Tallinn, the medical exam and visa preparation took place in Helsinki. Applicants with ethnic ties to Estonia were given preference.

  Six weeks after their application, Michael and Abby flew to Columbia, South Carolina, and drove an hour west to a small clinic in Springdale. That afternoon, after waiting what seemed like a lifetime in a small waiting room, a nurse walked in carrying two small bundles. The girls were two months old, and they were beautiful.

  Michael recalled holding them for the first time. He recalled how everything else swam away, how the sounds in the background blended together into one far off symphony. It was in that moment he knew that everything bad that had happened to him in his life was now part of the past, a dark and terrible prologue to this, the first chapter of his story. It was the happiest day of his life.

  They named the girls Charlotte and Emily. Charlotte, after Abby’s father Charles. Emily – and Michael would deny this under oath – because he was a slavish fan of British actress Emily Watson.

  As he looked at their tiny faces, at their little fingers, he vowed that nothing bad would happen to them. He would give his own life first.

  According to everyone
Michael spoke to, the man to whom he had paid ten thousand dollars to broker the adoption – a Queens storefront lawyer who specialized in handling the legal affairs of people of Russian and East European ancestry – was discrete, trustworthy, and above all, appeared to be unconnected to the world of illegal adoption. Or so they had all thought.

  That man’s name was Viktor Harkov.

  And now that man was dead.

  Max Priest told him what he knew. He said that someone had tortured and murdered Viktor Harkov in his office, and had apparently stolen a number of files. If this were all true, Michael knew, investigators would begin looking into motives, into client lists, into the legality and illegality of Viktor Harkov’s dealings, into his files, into his past.

  Into Charlotte and Emily.

  If that happened – if investigators discovered that the papers regarding the adoption of his little girls were not completely above board, that payoffs were made and documents were forged – the state could take his daughters away, and life would be over.

  He could not let it happen.

  TOMMY ANSWERED ON the first ring.

  “Tommy, it’s Michael.”

  “Hey cugino.”

  “Can you talk?”

  Through the phone, Michael heard Tommy cross his office, shut the door. “What’s up?”

  Michael knew enough not to get too specific on an open line. “Have you heard about the homicide in the 114? The lawyer?”

  “I heard something,” Tommy said. “No specifics. Why?”

  Michael felt as if he was about to crest the first hill of the Cyclone, the Coney Island roller coaster of his youth. He felt his stomach lift and fall. “It was Viktor Harkov.”

  Michael heard a short intake of breath, as well as the sounds of Tommy getting on his computer. Tommy knew Harkov professionally, had faced him in court a few times, but he also knew that Michael had had dealings with the man. “Fucking city,” Tommy said. “How did you hear? It was just posted on the site maybe two minutes ago.”