The crowd erupted into a thunderous round of applause that shook the building.
“As some of you may know, Ursula hasn’t brought the torches out in over three and a half years.” More applause halted Max’s dialogue. “And she’s been kind enough to agree to a one time show for her favorite club in the country!”
The crowd went wild again, and even the dancers, who were usually bored by feature shows and irritated that it stopped their money, were eager to see.
The last fire show Ursula performed had left her with third degree burns on large portions of her torso. It was a show she’d done a hundred times before but the beast that had been her friend turned on her in a instant and leapt to her body, burning her alive. Her shrieks for help and clawing at the flames were misinterpreted as part of the show. By the time her manager got to her, she was nearly unconscious from the pain.
“Please stay in your seats for the show. We don’t want anyone getting hurt and we’re gonna dim it down to darkness, so if you gotta pee, cross those legs. Your cash is much appreciated, but save those bills for the last song. Don’t wanna distract the little lady while she’s in her groove. Plus, you’ll fuck up the show for the rest of us. So again, SIT THE FUCK DOWN!” Laughter erupted and broke the wisps of tension that had begun to gather in the room.
“UR-SU-LA! UR-SU-LA! UR-SU-LA!” Chants from the audience gained in strength as the lights dimmed to nearly total darkness. The ever-blowing fan on the main stage went still.
Moments passed as movement on the darkened stage let the crowd know Ursula was taking her place. The show was about to commence. A hush fell over the crowded room. The tinny sound of drums melted into the mellow rap of “The City Sleeps.”
Stealin’ down an alley on a cold, dark night,
I see a halo and the rain ‘round a street light
For most, the ambient dirge probably sounded like nothing but hypnotic background music for the slow, sexy start of Ursula’s fire show. Sam smiled to herself thinking of how wicked Ursula’s choice of music was.
Clutching the tools of the trade in my hand,
An old box of matches and a gasoline can.
Ursula agreed to do the fire show as a personal favor for Sam and Grace. After the accident, she had received the best care money could buy. Several rounds of surgery and obsessive attention to her aftercare program restored Ursula to her former beauty. The scars that were left were on her psyche, not her body.
Pausing at the railing of the balcony, Sam took a moment to marvel at Ursula’s graceful baton twirling, as flames lept from both ends. Her oiled body twisted and moved with no less agility than the fire itself.
Reflections of the flame splashed light across the faces of those closest to the stage. Ambient light from the computer screens on the cash registers behind the bars glowed against the back wall. Red and white exit signs dotted the blackness without providing any real illumination.
Tearing herself from her trance, Sam shifted her gaze toward the office where Grace’s shape was barely visible, cloaked in the shadow of the back wall. A quick scan of the balconies and main floor reassured her that Ursula had cast her bewitching spell. She and Grace remained unobserved.
Moving through the town like a ghost in the rain,
A dim reflection in a dark windowpane
“Shit,” Sam mumbled as her eyes darted to the DJ booth. How could they have forgotten the most obvious lookout? In all their careful planning, they’d completely forgotten the one person with a bird’s-eye view of the club.
It was hard to see through the smoky darkness, but Sam could vaguely make out the facial features of Max, the DJ. The dull yellow glow of the soundboards shone up from below, giving him a devilish look, like a flashlight held under a scared summer camper’s chin. Max was the digital music god, with the power of a microphone in hand. That made him a serious liability. Because of the angle, Sam couldn’t tell where those beady eyes were fixed. He looked like he was alone, which was some help. Many of the nineteen-year-old vixens that might have joined him in the booth practiced stream of consciousness communication. A very dangerous thing. Innocently babbling on about Grace’s progress along the back wall might not have been any more important to them than comparing nail colors. It might merely be something to comment on. But Max, on the other hand, would have smelled a rat and become a problem.
“Shit-shit-shit.”
As Sam edged along the balcony toward the booth, she could see Max’s eyes flick between Ursula and the soundboard, or more likely, notes about Ursula’s performance and her music list. Sam’s pulse was pumping as she turned and hustled back along the balcony toward the door where Grace had been piling garbage bags. The same door that led to the back stairway and, God willing, freedom.
Grace wrangled another two bags from the darkened office and was now padding more quickly through the shadows.
“Left my shoes in the office. It seems to be speeding things up.” Grace breathed in a low, urgent voice. “There are four more bags in there.” She stopped and cocked her head to listen:
A simple turn of the wrist will suffice,
To open a passage, to paradise.
“ Three minutes, thirty seconds. Hurry!” Grace hissed.
Ursula had given the girls her stage set a few days earlier. They’d memorized the words to each song and worked the timing out to the second. They learned her routines, knowing exactly where she’d be onstage and where people would, with luck, be looking. They had done their best to plan for every eventuality. Yet, in the end, there is no way to fully control a room of eight hundred people. And they knew it.
The distinctive smell of accelerant tickled their noses. Peeking over the balcony, Sam saw Ursula hit her mark onstage, twirling the torch like a majorette in a marching band — with the added twist of a body grind no majorette could match.
Sam stepped from her Lucite mules; looping two fingers through the toe straps, she broke into a crouched run to the office door. Stepping inside Gio’s lair, the reality of what they were doing hit Sam. Gio swiveled lazily in his chair, pants around his ankles, shoelaces tied behind the central stem. Chinese finger cuffs trapped digits in what was at the time an impossible puzzle for him. This would have seemed like child’s play for a fully aware person. But after a shot of Versed-spiked Sambuca, all bets were off for Gio.
Everyone has a little secret he keeps,
I light the fires while the city sleeps.
The music in the club pounded.
“Hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Gio.”
“Have you ever seen these before?” Gio held up his fingers trapped in the multicolored woven straw and looked at her with the innocence of a child. Sam felt a pang of guilt as she snatched two bags from the shrinking pile and turned back toward the door.
“I’ll be back in a sec, Gio. We can talk about it then.”
Hustling along the balcony, she was relieved to see the doorway leading to the stairwell was almost pitch black.
“Grace!” she hissed.
Grace’s blonde head bobbed out of the shadow behind a big ficus plant.
“Say a quick prayer that Mary Jane killed the stairwell lights.” Grace pressed the release bar on the door before Sam had a chance to respond.
CHAPTER 70
Tanya pictured herself walking into an elegantly appointed old stone building, with a warm cherry wood interior and overstuffed leather scattered artfully in seating groups around Persian rugs. She imagined beautiful blonde tellers named Inge and Gretchen attending to her every whim, responding in perfect, but accented English. The Helvetia branch, into which she strode, on the Albisriederplatz in Zurich was not that.
It was plain. If there were a design school called Homely American Rural Midwest, this would be it. Various shades of gray and beige in uncomfortable fabrics and wall treatments were accented with industrial strength fluorescent bulbs. Washed-out looking tellers were propped behind a glass partition on stools that must have been new sometime during
the Carter administration.
Striding across the small lobby, Tanya smoothed the moustache and beard she’d purchased at an upscale shop in Atlanta prior to her trip. The beard tapered down to a frizzy point just above her collarbones, now hidden by a starched men’s button down. She had spent her life playing one role or another and had become adept at assuming identities. She’d played the role of a boy as a child, then of a woman as an adult.
Spirit gum and careful placement of single strands of beard hair had been judiciously placed to cover her femininely arched eyebrows, giving her a much more masculine appearance. The beard covered her lack of Adam’s apple, which had long ago been surgically shaved. A neat black turban covered her head. Her single-breasted, tailored black suit was the finest money could buy. The small breasts she had grown on hormones were held down by tightly wrapped Ace bandages. She was conscious of controlling her gait in a perfectly ordinary masculine stride. She had always been liberal with sun block. Since she was a light-skinned black woman with aquiline features, her complexion passed for evenly tanned rather than black.
Sliding the passport and credentials from the inside breast pocket of her suit jacket, she approached the counter. Mindful of her angles, she did her best to obscure her face from the four security cameras monitoring the room.
Looking up at the stranger, the teller delivered her standard greeting in a flat monotone, “Grüezi. Redet sie Schweizerdeutsch?”
Tanya shook her head. “Russisch?”
“Nei. Hochdeutsch?”
Shaking her head again, Tanya pressed on praying that English would be the common language. “Englisch?”
“Ja.” The teller gave a bored nod. “Ouat can I do to you today?”
Staying in character, Tanya tucked the slaughtered English in the back of her mind for a chuckle later. In her best Russian accent, she played the game. Sliding a small index card across the counter, she said “I conzolidate deez accounts. Written to ze left are account numberz and on right is what to leave in account. All else must go into account at bottom.” She tapped her finger on the card for effect.
A total of four Swiss accounts had been located. In addition there were several more in Moscow they wouldn’t attempt to touch. Since Tanya was heading to Switzerland to pick up money for her operation, it seemed only natural that she might be able to help with a few little transactions the girls needed to have taken care of. Because it appeared as though money moved quickly through Fedya’s accounts, they were unsure as to how much would be in any account at any given time. Ping-Pong wire transfers between Moscow, Zurich, Atlanta, Medellin, Kabul, Tokyo, and several other cities made it difficult to figure out who had what.
“Identification, bitte.” The clerk delivered her lines in a clipped tone without looking up while she shuffled through a rack of paper slips in triplicate, searching for the required materials.
Tanya slid the passport under the teller window glass.
Flipping it open, the teller read the name: “Fyodor Il’yavitch Patrushev?”
CHAPTER 71
The portly homeless woman pushed her shopping cart along the cracked sidewalks of Piedmont Avenue. Although the neighborhood was in the heart of an upscale neighborhood known as Buckhead, the area through which she meandered was commonly inhabited by the homeless. Away from the expensive homes, which were tucked neatly along tree-lined streets, this stretch of Piedmont was filled with strip malls, businesses, and a nearby transit station.
Her shopping cart overflowed with black trash bags, presumably filled with cans she could turn in for cash at the recycling plant. A few personal possessions dotted the bottom of the cart in a colorful mess. She wore several layers of clothing. Since she lacked a dresser or closet in which to keep her things, she wore them all at once. It was her clothing, and her bed. It also didn’t hurt that the layers kept the chill of the winter air at bay.
Head down as if studying the sidewalk beneath her feet, she muttered obscenities to herself. Passers-by averted their gaze for fear she might want to start a conversation, or worse, let loose with a verbal assault. She melted into the urban backdrop. Woven into the very fabric of the city, wandering unseen as the homeless often do, she was one of the invisible people.
CHAPTER 72
The match makes a graceful arch to the floor,
And time stands still as I turn for the door
Hearing the click of the door open without the shock of blinding fluorescent lights, Sam and Grace exhaled.
“Two minutes, twenty seconds. Don’t forget my shoes in the office. I’ll load the stairwell.”
Slipping back along the balcony, Sam entered the office for a second time. The only illumination was the glow from Gio’s laptop and the digital bath of light from the wall of monitors.
“Hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Gio.”
“Do you know what these are?” Gio held up his fingers again for Sam to see.
“No babe, whatchya got there?”
“Dunno, but they’re tricky.” Gio’s focus had shifted back to the finger cuffs, but with the short-term memory issues, he wasn’t getting much done in the way of problem solving.
Sam was relieved to see that he was as docile as they’d hoped.
The walkie-talkie on Gio’s desk cleared its throat and delivered the message that Pietra had just entered the building.
Sam froze.
Gio cocked his head and blinked. “Oh, I think my ma’s here.”
Flying across the office, she checked the lock on the door closest to the elevators. A quick glance through the wall of windows reminded Sam that the club was pitch black. Pietra could have been walking up the staircase and no one would have been the wiser.
Sam snatched the two remaining bags and bolted for Grace.
Remembering the shoes when she hit the door, she doubled back and looped her fingers through the straps.
I make my escape with the greatest of ease,
And safe in the darkness, drop to my knees
Sam cleared the length of the hallway in four seconds flat. Adrenaline made the two thirty-pound bags seem weightless. Skidding around the ficus and onto the landing of the open stairwell doorway, she narrowly avoided knocking Grace down the steps.
Grace’s head snapped around, sensing danger.
“Fucking Pietra!” Sam hissed, breathless.
Like a deer in headlights, Grace’s reaction was the same as Sam’s had been. She froze.
“We’re into the instrumental, there’s only a minute forty left.”
Grace looked at the pile of bags laying at their feet, then back at Sam.
“Where?”
“She wasn’t to the floor yet when I left the office.”
“What do we do?”
Sam looked at Grace for what seemed like too long, “Go back to the office and start the cover-up, and I’ll get these,” she said, gesturing to the bags.
“You go to the office. I can’t take Gio. Please, Sam?”
Grace was already reaching for the neck of one of the garbage bags.
Descending the stairs two by two, Sam popped the door to the outside open and fresh air streamed in with the sound of traffic and a distant train.
Reaching down, she nabbed a medium sized Victoria’s Secret bag that had been placed just outside the door, at the top of a small flight of concrete steps, which led to a set of dumpsters. Turning, Sam sprinted back up the steps stopping half way.
“Grace,” she whispered loudly.
Turning, Grace looked up at her.
“We forgot about Max. Keep an eye on him if you can.”
Before Grace could respond, Sam was up the stairs and through the open doorway into the club.
Grace pulled the door closed, almost. In the stairwell, she needed what little ambient light she could get from the interior of the club.
Making her way down the staircase, she gripped the metal railing with her free hand and dragged her quarry to the bottom of the flight.
CHAPTER
73
The drab teller studied the photo momentarily before shifting her eyes back to the man standing before her. Tanya couldn’t tell whether the woman’s scrutiny was real or just an act for the security cameras all around.
Her eyes slipped back to the handcrafted passport Sam had given her just two days earlier.
“Amerikanisch?”
“Ja. I leev in Atlanta, Georgia sometime.”
The teller nodded and directed her attention back to the passport. Tanya began to feel the prickly heat of nerves stinging her palms. Trying not to seem antsy, she reasoned with herself that the tellers back home lingered over I.D. in the same fashion. Squinching her toes in her shoes, she tried to release the nervous energy now flooding her body.
The teller began punching numbers into the keyboard of her computer with her right hand while her left hand and eyes stayed focused on the card Tanya had provided. After what seemed like three minutes of nonstop clicking, the teller turned to the monitor. Hand poised unmoving over the keyboard, the teller stared at the screen. Tanya waited, and watched the reflection of the green glow in the banker’s glasses.
Several moments passed before the woman sprang back to life. More clicking and studying. Clicking and studying. The only indication that the task was progressing were the slow movement of fingers down the card Tanya had provided.
Slipping a sheet into a franking machine, a series of numbers were imprinted on the face of each. This ritual was repeated on four separate sheets. Papers were shuffled. Duplicates were removed, then tapped end-up on the counter for alignment and slipped into a drawer by the teller’s hip. More shuffling and sorting before the teller sat with a neatly stacked pile of paper to the left of the keyboard. Turning to a wall-mounted phone to the right of her station, she punched in two numbers and spoke in low tones to whoever was on the other end. Hanging up, the teller resumed her study of the passport and papers.
Tea Leafing: A Novel Page 22
