Death Roe

by Joseph Heywood

  He collected his bag, stepped outside to the taxi stand, and found himself first in line. The cabbie who pulled up had teeth filed to points, and the pinkie fingernail on his left hand was four inches long and painted bright red. His BO was a mix of unwashed goat and sun-rotted roadkill. He wore a multicolored striped toque tilted on the left side of his head, the right side filled with petrified pigtails, sticking up stiffly like stalacmites or exposed punji stakes.

  Service tossed his bag in the backseat and got in. The cabbie looked back. “I dry, you rye, o-gay? Bo-tel?”

  “OK,” Service says. Bo-tel? “Hotel?”

  “Jess, Bo-tel, pless sid beck, suh?”

  “Garibaldi in Brooklyn Heights, o-gay?”

  “O-gay, suh; sid ewe back,” the driver said with a menacing grin before mashing down the accelerator. The taxi barreled into the traffic with NASCAR commitment, surging and surfing past slower vehicles, leaving behind a startled and cranky wake of honking horns and single fingers being waved angrily.

  At the hotel the cabbie tapped the meter with his magic pinkie. “I dry, you rye, boss say him you pay thet mush.” The amount was $24.76. Service gave him a buck tip, not sure if it was too little or too much, and dismounted on rubber legs, thinking the man could be anything from a paroled mob wheelman to a closet vampire. As a cabbie, he doubted the man’s professional career would be either long or venerable.

  There was a note at Reception from Roy Rogers: “Meet in the lobby, seven p.m.”

  Two hours hence. A bellman wanted to carry his bags, but Service told him thanks-but-no-thanks and got a dirty look. His ninth-floor room looked out on the Brooklyn Bridge if you ignored most of the vista being blocked by two high-rises in the foreground.

  His mind was on Dani. She was unhappy with her exclusion from this trip, seemed to take it as involuntary exile, but also seemed committed to mining Horn’s files and documents in his absence. He had no time—and worse, no facts—to reason with. What he felt was in his gut, a sense that taking this trip together would have been a mistake, and though Anniejo Couch had not made a peep about expenses, why spend what you didn’t need to spend?

  Rogers arrived with a six-footer in tow. The other man wore a brown leather coat that draped his thighs, six tiny gold stud earrings lined up on the rim of his right ear, stacked like monkeys on a totem, a grimy Mets hat, knee-high brown leather boots, tattoos extending above his shirt collar, the rest hidden like an iceberg.

  “This is Eco ‘Down-Deep’ Depp,” Rogers announced. “We call him Three-D.”

  “Caw me Three-D or caw me Deep, not Depp; I share no blood wid faggot actors.”

  “Deep,” Service said, shaking his hand. “Grady.”

  “Yo, I think I caw you whatever you say, man,” Deep said, craning his neck to look up at the taller, more hulking Service.

  “I’ll pick up warrants in the morning,” Rogers said. “Your flight okay?”

  Service shrugged.

  Rogers said, “Crimea will know we’re coming; they’ll have their lawyers there to greet us.”

  “I thought it was a raid,” Service said.

  “Yo,” Three-D said. “We raid the Ukes, guns come out, and shit happens. We don’t want no rounds exchanged. Someone at the court will tip them, or it will come from the precinct house, it doesn’t matter who. This is a simple professional business transaction, paper for product samples, in and out, no hard feelings.”

  “You’re saying we’re compromised?” Service asks.

  “Yo,” Depp said. “Not compromised. This be fac-il-ih–TAY-shun, yo. Crimea a victim, see, like they customers victims, of Piscova caviar. Ain’t no reason we dis our Uke brothers.”

  Service understood. Someone had told Crimea they were victims in order to get the samples. “What time?” Service asked.

  “High noon,” Rogers said.

  “Like the movie.”

  “Without hardware,” Depp added.

  The two men disappeared into the night, leaving Service alone. He grabbed a beer and some popcorn in the lobby bar, checked the menu, decided he wasn’t hungry and needed sleep, and called it a night after a quick call to Karylanne.

  He fell asleep with the regular sound of jets departing the city and arriving from all around the world.

  The Crimea warehouse was between Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, a sooty low building in a block of warehouses with one major difference: It was the only one without graffiti on the walls. A tall man in a suit met them at the loading-dock entrance. Depp carried two large and garish red, white, and blue backpacks for the samples.

  Rogers presented the warrants to their greeter, who read them slowly, word by word, page by page. He wore a suit, not new. His hair was neat, his face clean-shaven, his black leather shoes a little pointy, but freshly polished.

  Warrants verified, the man led them inside and down a long green corridor to a room with metal shelves and a hundred forty-five-pound red, white, and blue buckets marked piscova: caviar rouge. Depp selected six buckets from various parts of the stash, pried off the lids, took six packages from each, placed the samples in the backpacks, and put the lids back on the buckets.

  Their black-suited watcher was joined by four others, dressed identically, all of them looking like they were trapped between faintly devout and severely bored. They looked like clones or identical quintuplets.

  “Crimea bosses?” Service asks.

  “Their lawyers,” Rogers said.

  The visit lasted twenty minutes; ingress to egress seemed to be over before it could even get started. “You outta here today?” Rogers asked when they got outside.

  “Tomorrow, noon.”

  “Grab a bite and a beer tonight?”

  “Thanks, but no.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “Couldn’t make it.”

  “You don’ like New York?” Depp asked.

  “No feelings one way or the other,” Service said.

  “I hate the fucking place,” Rogers volunteered.

  “His office in Syracuse,” Depp said, grimacing. “Wouldn’t recommend no tourist walking ’round here after dark, yo.”

  “I thought Giuliani cleaned up the city.”

  “Maybe tourist Manhattan; rest of the boroughs, not so much. He gone, got his eyes on the White House. We run that greasy fuck out and he moves up. Go figure. Nine-eleven bin bera-bera-good to Rudy-baby,” Depp said.

  “Samples to the FDA,” Rogers said interrupting the rant. “Ten days to two weeks for results. We don’t have priority on caviar. Not enough consumers.”

  “Even if they squirtin’ mercury columns out their butts,” Depp adds. “Fucking FDA.”

  Service made his way from the hotel to Sid’s Fish House on Fulton Street. What attracted him was a sign that read our customers can still smoke in our bar! He ordered blackened sea bass and steamed veggies and ate alone. He smoked and tried to think about the case, but couldn’t generate the necessary concentration. Things seemed to be closing in on him, an unspecified sea change under way, magnitude undetermined. He hoped Denninger was finding good stuff in Horn’s files, still he felt disconcerted by the silly firepower show of the Capitol cops. He had envisioned a bit more drama at Crimea, but it had been more like going to the Secretary of State’s office to pick up extra blank forms. Shit was happening. No grand jury to look at his stuff, Black after his ass, Roxy dead, not a fucking inkling of anything positive in any of it. How the hell had Fagan built his empire?

  A block from his hotel he encountered three men in black leather jackets. They spread out across the sidewalk, a human fence blocking his way. “Can you spare a dime?” one of the men asked.

  “I doubt a dime would buy a single square of asswipe in this city, which means the real question’s not if I can spare a dime, but if I will,
and given the virtual worthlessness of a dime, I gotta ask, what the fuck for?”

  “You got ’tude, man?”

  “Depends on you Three Musketeers,” Service said. “What you really want to know is how good I am, and more to the point, if I’m willing. You look like smart guys. Go ahead and figure it out.”

  “You Clint-Fucking-Eastwood,” one of the men said.

  “Clint reads lines somebody else writes,” Service said. “I don’t.”

  Seconds passed and the men gave way. “Where you from, man?”

  “A place where we’d carve ‘pussy’ on your forehead and make you walk around with it the rest of your life as evidence of what you are.”

  Service walked on, waiting for a rear attack that never came, got to his room, and opened the door to find a man sitting at the table next to the window. The man was in a black suit and wore the whitest shirt he had ever seen, and a black yarmulke. He was smoking a small green-black cigarette. A razor-thin cell phone sat on the table.

  “You’ve got fifteen seconds to tell me who you are and what you want,” Service said. “I’m not even going to ask how you got in.”

  “I am Krapahkin,” the man said. “I wanted to see face-to-face this man from the taiga who alone makes so many things happen.”

  Krapahkin, the big boss of Crimea. “Now that you’ve seen what you came to see, it’s time for you to walk out.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Or?”

  “There’s no or. Just go.”

  “You are not intimidated.”

  “It’s a genetic flaw.”

  Krapahkin smiled. “I share this flaw. Did you get your samples?”

  “You know we did.”

  “Did you ever imagine one man’s efforts could reach so far?”

  “I never think in such terms,” Service said.

  “I think this way all the time—how I began with nothing, built it into something.”

  He wants something, Service thought.

  Krapahkin held out his pack of cigarettes. Service took one, sat down across from him, and lit up.

  “We have been told Piscova is your target,” Krapahkin said. “But we are not so stupid, and in the end, the feds will come after my company. But my lawyers will drag it out and we will pay a token fine and continue to do business.”

  “That’s between the feds, the state of New York, and you.”

  “To be sure,” the man said. “I had no idea Quintan Fagan was mixing good eggs with bad.”

  “You didn’t know and didn’t care to know.”

  “Had I known, we would not be here now.”

  “You see yourself as a victim?”

  “I came alone to this country at twelve, from the Ukraine through Israel. I stopped being a victim when I stepped off El Al.”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “A sentimental lapse,” Krapahkin said. “There was a woman who worked for Piscova.”

  “Roxanne Lafleur?”

  “Da.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Krapahkin’s eyes flashed.

  “Just yesterday,” Service added. “Cancer.”

  “God kills all of us,” Krapahkin said.

  “God didn’t kill Lafleur. Quintan Fagan did—with the same eggs you’ve been selling to cruise lines.”

  “It is said you are not a man who allows his focus to be diluted. Lafleur was special to you?”

  “I barely knew her.”

  “Then this is not a simple matter of revenge.”

  “No.”

  The Ukrainian nodded. “A zealot’s life is not a happy one. I will pay a fine. What price will you pay to get what it is that you want?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Service said.

  Krapahkin mashed his cigarette, picked up his cell phone, and flipped it open. He dialed a number and said, “Five minutes,” then closed it. “All these badges running around, swelling with testosterone,” the head of Crimea said, “and it falls to one policeman from the taiga to undo so much. You and I, Detective, we are not so different.”

  Krapahkin left his cigarette pack on the table. Service put it with his own and called Karylanne to check on her. She was still tired, but still upbeat and she wanted to know when he could get over to Houghton again. “I’ll be there when you need me,” he told her. He was tired, and sick of everything to do with work.

  Rogers was waiting for him in the lobby the next morning. “Got a ride for you,” the New York ECO said. There was a cab outside, driven by the same psycho who had brought him from the airport the day before. Service found himself balking.

  “It’s cool,” Rogers said. “Get in.”

  The driver looked back and grinned, “I dry, you rye, o-gay?”

  Rogers looked amused. “Grady Service, meet Fish and Wildlife Special Agent John N’Dinga, son of a diplomat, MS in wildlife biology from Cornell, law degree from Columbia, the finest, sneakiest sonuvabitch undercover Fish and Wildlife ever had the good luck to hire.”

  Service nodded.

  N’Dinga said, “Didn’t mean to frighten you, mate, but gots to play the part, sayin’? I heard Krapahkin wanted to meet with you.”

  “He came to my room last night.”

  “Have anything interesting to say?” Rogers asked.

  “Not really. He’s convinced you guys and the feds will come after him, but his lawyers will make sure he’ll skate with a fine.”

  “On this point, he may be right,” N’Dinga said, “but he’s got a dirty operation with beluga out of the Caspian area, and it won’t be long before we bring him down. He’ll do real time on that one. The thing you should know is that he looks and talks like a businessman, but he’s Organizatsiya, hard-core Russian mob, very connected to the Lev Lazarus group out of Tel Aviv. L-Two plays dirty and rough. If they decide you’re hurting business, you disappear.”

  “Is that a message for me?”

  “Dose guy dey mi’ lye meg you die mon,” N’Dinga said.

  “Theoretically?”

  “Consider it real,” Rogers said, “and let that thought have a prominent and permanent seat at your table of shit to be on the lookout for.”

  N’Dinga drove with the same recklessness back to the airport and even Rogers looked pale when they got out. “You’re not going back with him?” Service asked.

  “That motherfucker’s certifiably insane,” Rogers said with obvious admiration, tapping the roof of the taxi, which raced away.

  The two men stepped over to a floor-to-ceiling window next to the entrance. Service groped for his smokes, but found the Ukraininan’s pack and held it out to Rogers. They each took one and the pack was empty. Service started to crumple it, but saw some writing on the paper and stuffed the pack in his pocket. Rogers said, “When you get inside, go to the Lufthansa lounge.”

  “What for?

  “Just go. You’re expected.”

  It took some time to find the lounge. He went inside and announced his name to one of the blond, blue-uniformed women at the desk.

  She said, “This way, please,” and led him to a private room. There was a man sitting at a table pounding on a laptop. He had gelled hair, looked fortyish, was short with manicured nails, an expensive suit, and a thin gold wedding band. “Manny Florida,” the man said, not bothering to get up. “You the woods cop?”

  “Grady Service.”

  “Whatever. Piscova’s my case. That pussy Endicott wouldn’t know how to prosecute fucking Hitler. I heard he was making noises about my case, called him up, and injected him with a dose of reality. New York is a green state. The contaminated eggs are ours because the mirex comes from our waters, and the eggs came back here to Crimea. Ours. End of discussion. Comprende?”

  “Without us, ther
e would be no case.”

  “Big fucking deal. We’ll make sure a bone gets thrown your way.”

  “A woman is dead,” Service said.

  “You have an MD? How about a PhD in toxicology? I didn’t think so. The woman died. Maybe from the mirex, maybe not. Or maybe she had shitty genes, or her lifestyle sucked the big one. I don’t know, and I don’t care. This is my case and it’s solid, and I’m not gonna complicate it with morality of dubious veracity.”

  “What about the IRS?”

  “What about them? It’s my case. They’ll stick to my sheet music.”

  Manny Florida looked at the door. “Get the fuck out. I’m working.”

  Service felt like he’d gotten a chicken bone stuck in his throat as he went through Security and out to the gate. He pulled out Krapahkin’s cigarette pack, smoothed it out, and saw what was written: “Costa Rica.” What the fuck did that mean?

  He had time before his flight and needed something to eat, so he went into a nook café and sat at a tiny counter. A waitress asked, “What is you wand?”

  “Truth and justice,” he said, “but I’ll settle for a beignet.”

  The woman made a huffing sound. “Beg-ney—what that?”

  “You have or no have?”

  He felt like he was back in Vietnam, drowning in pidgin. “No got no beg-ney.”

  “Okay, how about a breakfast pasty.”

  “We got cheese Danish pastry,” she said. “You want?”

  “Just coffee. Who knew LaGuardia was an epicurean wasteland?”

  “We got peppercorn,” the server said, smiling.

  Her rage and confusion had fled, replaced by resignation to deal with reality, weird as it was. “You pick for me,” he said.

  “You see, I pick good,” the woman said.

  His flight was called before the coffee came. He left a five-dollar bill and headed for the gate.

  54

  Monday, December 6, 2004

  DAYTON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, DAYTON, OHIO

  Service’s flight stopped over in Dayton en route to Grand Rapids and his cell phone buzzed. “Where are you?” Gus Turnage asked.