by Alan Hruska
“Oh, that place,” Lawton says. “We’ve listed it for sale.”
“Planning on staying here permanently, are you?” Elena asks, uninterested in the answer.
Lawton shrugs. “Suits us quite well, yes.”
Tom steps between them. “You seem to think I was joking. I wasn’t. You either get the fuck outta here now, or I’ll throw you out. One by one. And enjoy it.”
Connie smiles condescendingly at her sister. “Fascinating friends you make.”
“He means it,” Elena says. “I’ve seen him do worse.”
“I’m sure you have. No doubt in your own bedroom.” She takes her husband’s arm. “Come along, Lawton. We’ll fumigate after they leave.”
“You can take your clothes with you,” Elena snaps.
“Oh, we have lots of clothes,” Connie says. “You can pick through them, take whatever you like.”
With that, Connie walks to the front door and out of the house, the others dutifully following. Standing alone together in the living room, Tom says, “So you and your sisters get on real well.”
“Fuck them,” Elena says.
“Yes, that’s what I meant.”
They stake out Robbie Riles’s bedroom for themselves. Second floor, back corner, view through the draperied windows of a significant part of southern Connecticut. Inside it’s a high-ceilinged, pastel paradise of old-but-good furniture and antique rugs.
“Does this bother you?” Tom asks.
“It’s just a bedroom,” Elena says. “I’m sure Connie and Lawton slept here. We change the sheets, should be fine.”
There’s a staff in attendance. Not workers who hover below stairs; they have a separate wing. And they’re happy to change the sheets.
The rest of the day, Elena and Tom go hunting through the entire premises: living room, dining room, study, library, solarium, kitchen, pantry, basement rooms, wine cellar, pool house, four-car garage, and all the bedrooms and parlors upstairs. If her father had stashed documents in this house, his papers are not to be found, upstairs or down, or even in the servants’ wing.
Before dinner, they wander to the edge of the property, at the seawall on an inlet to the Sound. They sit on the wall, which is fashioned of fieldstones with a smooth concrete top. There’s a Hallmark view of a spectacular sunset, but Elena is still thinking about their arrival. “What would you have done if they hadn’t taken your bluff?”
“What makes you think I was bluffing?” he says.
“I can’t really see you picking up my sisters and tossing them out on the pavement.”
“What about Lawton?”
“I suppose I could see that.”
“And if I tossed him,” Tom says, “what do you suppose the others would have done?”
“So that was your plan?”
“I didn’t need a plan. I knew they’d leave on the threat.”
“So you do this often?” she says.
“What do you think?”
“You mean based on the ten days I’ve known you?”
“How else could you judge?”
“I think you’re pretty crazy.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Turns you off?”
She smiles. “What do you think?”
They both gaze at the sky streaking colors in overwrought hues, like a performer overanxious to please.
At bedtime, in a darkly lit room, rummaging in the back of a night table drawer, Elena, in PJs, comes upon a handwritten letter addressed affectionately to her father. “Oh, ho!” she exclaims, getting into bed.
“What?”
She reads aloud, “Dearest Robbie. I hate the absences. Even more the silences.” Sitting up on crossed legs, she gives Tom a look. “Your S. Not Yours, S. Your S. And S is Sofi, I know it.” She hands him the letter. “They were lovers!”
“Not surprising,” he says.
“You picked up on that?”
“The way she talked about him, yeah.”
He’s standing at the side of the bed in his shorts, not getting in.
“Tom?” she says, in a tone questioning his reticence.
“Do you realize,” he says, “that this will be the first night we’ve slept together, when we could each have slept in a bedroom alone?”
“You’re making a point,” she says.
“Significant one, don’t you think?”
“How ’bout just getting into bed?”
He laughs, but there’s a louder sound downstairs. Like breaking glass.
They freeze, listening for more.
There is more. A creaking window. Tom says, instinctively whispering, “Is there an alarm system in this house?”
“I think,” she says in a hushed voice.
“Which you didn’t activate?”
“Shit,” she says.
Steps on the staircase.
“This whole night,” she bemoans, “is about to be ruined.”
The door slams open. Three armed figures burst in, casting high shadows behind them, like characters on a comic book cover. Black ski hood masks, black gloves, black exercise jumpsuits. One of them, a woman, says, “Do what we say, no one gets hurt.” With a scream meant to rouse servants, Tom hurls himself at one of the men, his momentum thrusting them both through the doorway and out the room. The woman pulls Elena, screaming, from the bed and drags her into the hallway by her hair. They and the other man stand over the battle, consisting of two men, untrained for the event, wrestling and punching, trying to kill each other.
As Elena keeps screaming, the woman silences her momentarily with a swipe of the gun barrel into her face. Tom and his adversary tumble near the edge of the staircase, then careen down the stairs, both of them rattling their heads against the banister and landing, slumped and still, on the floor below. Elena, wresting free and now screaming nonstop, runs down after them, her assailants in pursuit. At the foot of the stairs, the woman grabs Elena by the throat. She and the other assailant observe the two lying on the lower step, both bleeding from scalp wounds. “Cuff her and cover her eyes,” she directs the tall man beside her.
“We could kill this one,” he says, nodding down at Tom, while affixing handcuffs and a hood to a struggling Elena.
Lights flash on in the servants’ wing.
“Both or neither,” the woman says.
“You’d kill Piet?”
“It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”
“So we leave the both of them just lying here?”
“You think we have time to drag them to the car while we’re also dragging the girl?”
“I dunno,” he says, now panicked with indecision.
“Just fucking leave,” says the woman, yanking Elena again by the hair. “He doesn’t know anything.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Teddy and Birdie meet at the bar of a Cuban restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. Neither of them has ever been there before, but Teddy knows of it. About Manhattan, and public places in which one might invisibly confer, Teddy knows most everything.
It’s past midnight, but the crowd still lingers over dinner in the next room. At their end of the bar, Teddy and Birdie sit alone, nursing piña coladas. The establishment is old but clean, and everything—the long bar, the high stools, the wall paneling—is made of bamboo darkened with age.
“Another fuckup,” Teddy says, “but this one may be irredeemable.”
“You’ll think of something,” Birdie says. “You always do.”
“Yes, yes, I already know how to try to fix this. But the more ingenious these solutions, the more implausible they become.”
“We have the girl.”
“And that helps how? Given that you left the boy, who’s now an eyewitness that the girl did not flee but was kidnapped. And you left Piet, who’s living confirmation of the boy’s story.”
Birdie has already thought this through. “We could—”
“I know,” Teddy says impatiently, “since there’s on
ly one play left having even the remotest chance of succeeding.”
She nevertheless wants to say it. “Get Piet to say tonight was staged,” she urges. “By the boy and Elena. Just like New Orleans. Whenever Elena feels she’s under suspicion, that’s her knee-jerk, to stage someone attacking her.”
“Obviously. But he’d also have to say his being knocked out was an accident. The boy, Weldon, overdid the playacting.”
Birdie’s brow furrows. “We need to tell Piet immediately. He won’t think of this on his own.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t. Or carry out such a plan, without convincing threats to his continued existence.”
“Which you will be able to deliver?”
“Future tense?” Teddy says. “Even ten minutes from now would probably be too late.”
“So it’s been done?”
He gives her a look the equivalent of a sarcastically delivered Oh please! “Where do they have him?” she asks.
“In the lockup. Supreme, New York County.”
“And you have someone, there,” she says, “in the lockup.”
“My dear, you should know by now, I have people wherever I might need them. Or people who can get there.”
Birdie finishes her drink and takes a deep breath. “Well, I’m afraid you won’t have me any longer. I’m quitting.”
“Oh, really.” He doesn’t believe it.
“You’re right about tonight. And there’ve been too many. Fuckups. So the girl’s gratis. But I need some time off, and I mean to get lost. New town, maybe a new life. And Teddy,” she pauses as she gives him a knowing look. “I would not take kindly to anyone tracking me.”
Teddy gives this speech a sour expression. “You just came to this conclusion? All in a rush, tonight?”
“It’s been growing on me,” she says.
“I want you to finish this job. After that, you can go anywhere you like.”
“Jacob can do it.”
“I don’t know Jacob,” he says. “He works for you. You control him.”
“No more. And for me, no mas. I’m gone, I mean it. Jacob’s ready. More than ready. He’s no idea who you are, but wants to. He’s had it with being a subcontractor. And you’ll like him. He’s absolutely ruthless.”
“Smart?”
“You don’t need that smart,” she says. “I’m that smart, and I keep screwing this job up.”
“Because you don’t want to do it, Birdie.”
“That’s bullshit. I’m just tired.”
“Tired?” Teddy repeats, as if he had more of a right to claim that condition.
“That’s what I said.”
“So now you’re a civilian?”
“That’s right.”
“Just walk away?” Teddy laughs, tosses the umbrella from his drink. “What’s happened, Birdie? You’ve fallen for someone?”
“I’m done, Teddy. That’s all you need to know.”
Teddy downs the remains of his colada. “Okay, tell you what,” he says. “I’ll talk to your man. If I like him, you’re free to go. But I won’t have to come looking for you. Wherever you’re going, you won’t last six months. You’ll be back here looking for me.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Shortly past seven a.m., Tom awakes with a migraine. He’s in Greenwich Hospital with a bandaged head.
“You have a concussion,” says Mike Skillan, a seated figure in the white room.
“Where’s El?” Tom says, starting to get out of bed. Someone thoughtful has hung his clothes in the closet.
Mike jumps up to restrain him. “Easy! You’re beached for a day more, at least.”
“Where the hell is she?” Tom sees himself staggering within two rooms that don’t quite coincide.
“They have her,” Mike says. “We’ve no idea where.” He looks purposefully at Tom. “Do you?”
“Me?” Tom, still in a hospital gown, sits heavily on the bed. “How the hell would I know? Did anyone see them? See what happened?”
“Some of it,” Skillan says, pulling his chair closer to the bed and sitting directly opposite Tom. “We do have a witness. That thug you fought with and apparently threw downstairs.”
“He was there when you came?”
“When the Greenwich police arrived, yeah. Still unconscious, like you. He didn’t see Elena being grabbed, and he doesn’t know what was done with her—is his present story. As is his assertion that the fight and the kidnapping were staged. By you. That you’ve been part of their team from the outset.”
“That I’ve been what?” says Tom, now rising again.
Skillan leans forward and pushes his ADA, still weak, back on the mattress. “Nurse!” he calls out.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe.”
“What,” Tom says, “you believe this shit?”
“At the moment, I’m not in a position to believe or disbelieve it. But he’s given us the name—Jacob Wozniacki—and physical description of the other guy you recruited for your plan, the one who got away with her last night.”
“My plan?”
“That’s his story. You’re the brains.”
“Why the fuck would I do anything that stupid?”
Skillan shrugs. “Money?”
“Oh, Christ!”
“You asked,” Mike says.
“And if the fight was staged, why would I knock him out, so the cops could get him?”
“Fight got out of hand, is his version. You took playacting too far. That’s why he’s pissed and is ratting on you.”
“This is so fucking implausible.”
“Has its weak points, I agree.”
“Right. Like how does the murder of Robbie Riles fit in?”
“According to Piet—that’s his name—you shot Riles. Wasn’t supposed to happen, as far as Piet knew. In fact, Riles was there only so he could see his daughter being kidnapped and pay up.”
“Really, so what’s the present plan?”
“Piet doesn’t know, but suspects you and Elena have something very clever worked out.”
Tom laughs. “This story is falling apart all over the place.”
“Maybe,” Mike says. “It’s a wacky story. But sometimes wacky stories are true.”
“Okay, look, believe what you want—”
“I didn’t say I believed anything.”
“The important thing is to find Elena. Get me out of here, and I’ll help you do that.”
“I can’t get you out of here!” Mike says, as if the idea were preposterous.
“Of course you can. You’re the goddamn New York District Attorney. You can say you’re transferring me to a hospital in the city.”
“You’re risking your health, man.”
“Right. And how does that stack up to our risking Elena’s life?”
In an ambulance on I-95, Tom, dressed but strapped to a gurney, says, “Salient facts. One bidder for GT&M gets killed. His daughter and a bystander get kidnapped; stuck someplace that’s easy to escape from; and as soon as there’s a record of their fleeing, a contract killer, a woman, is sent to murder them in Ashaway, Kentucky, then New Orleans. A second bidder gets killed. A third races to tell us—unconvincingly—he’s innocent and wants to help. And then the first victim’s chauffeur lies about who directed him elsewhere on the night of the first murder. The next day he leaves town, apparently in flight. Obviously, someone paid him to lie, and he may be running scared of that person. No doubt the same person who paid the contract killer who stalked Elena and me, and paid whoever shot Jockery and the two thugs who shot Robbie Riles, and whoever now has Elena. Does anything in these facts suggest who that person might be?”
Mike gives him a smirk. “You’re missing some salient facts.”
“Which? The ones you think incriminate Elena—or just me? You really want to fool with that horseshit now? When she may have hours to live, if she hasn’t been killed already?”
They hit a pothole and hold on for dear life.
“Try
to stay calm,” Mike says.
“I am. Who’s the other guy in the UAE consulate that Riegert talked to?”
“A guy named Yasim Maktoum. Why?”
“Let’s bring him in,” Tom says. “Now. We should talk to him.”
“We already have.”
“You’ve brought him in again already?”
“Well, bringing.”
“He knows a lot about Rashid al-Calif that we don’t, and he hasn’t told us.”
“I agree,” Mike says.
“So who’s bringing? Sammy?”
Mike, reflecting for a moment, puts in a call to Riegert, who has news that shocks both of them. Yasim is gone. Run off with the consulate receptionist, an American woman named Birdie O’Shane.
“It’s a goddamn exodus,” Skillan says.
Tom says, “Tell Sammy to get their files. And tell him to tell Rashid this will test his willingness to cooperate.”
“You hear that Sammy?” Mike asks on the phone.
“Got it,” Sammy says and hangs up.
“Whatta you expecting to find?” Mike says.
“Another piece of this.” Tom smiles grimly. “Or nothing.”
“Let’s hope it’s the former.”
“Khalil’s in flight; Yasim’s in flight; an American in an Arab embassy is with him? Dots in a puzzle, Mike. Something connects them. Something bad.”
Just as they arrive at Mike’s office, Sammy bursts in. “Look at your emails.”
Mike finds one from Sammy and opens the attached PDF. Photographs flash on the screen. He turns to Tom who is also observing.
Tom says, “That’s her. The woman sent to kill us in New Orleans. And probably Ashaway. We can confirm that with the waitress at the local restaurant.”
Mike looks at him strangely. “You knew this? That the consulate receptionist was a paid assassin?”
“Before seeing this photo? Of course not.”
“But you asked for their files. So, what are you, a mystic?”
“Just rational, Mike. To suspect a connection.”
“That she’d run off with Yasim Maktoum?”
“Well, that’s al-Calif’s story.”
“So what else is coming to you?”
“Nothing,” Tom says. “We’re still missing something.”
