The Devil_s Garden

by Richard Montanari

  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 plie,” 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, h
ad 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.”

  Michael would tell Tommy about the call from Max Priest, but not over the phone. “Who’s got it?”

  Michael heard the clicking of keyboard keys. “Paul Calderon.”

  “Do you think he’ll give it up?”

  Tommy took a few seconds. “Hang on.”

  Paul Calderon was good news. When the call had gone out at around 4 AM, it had most likely been a Group Seven notification – the ADA on call, the chief assistant, the executive staff. The ADA, in this case Paul Calderon, would have been awakened, along with a riding assistant, usually a first- or second-year lawyer. It may have been the assigned ADA who supervised everything, but it was the riding assistant who figured out the details, the legal propriety of the warrant, the probable cause, whether or not the information was timely. Staleness was always a concern.

  Michael knew that Calderon was no more than a month or two from announcing his retirement, and a case like this, a brutal homicide of a well known figure, was going to take a lot of time and effort, effort Michael was hoping Calderon did not want to expend. The hope, for the moment, was that Tommy could wrest the case away.

  Tommy returned a full minute later. “I’m in,” he said. “We have to run it by the boss, but Calderon was happy to let it go.”

  “Any warrants?”

  “There’s one in the works. It’s already with a judge.”

  “I want to ride on this.”

  Tommy fell silent. “Uh, aren’t you in court at two?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you.”

  Tommy knew Michael well enough to let it go. “You know where it is?”

  Michael would never forget. “Yeah. 31st and Newtown.”

  “That’s it,” Tommy said. “Meet me in front of Angelo’s.”

  “Thanks,” Michael said.

  Michael clicked off the phone. He took another Advil, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and brought out a windbreaker with the QDA logo on the back. He scribbled a quick note on the whiteboard in the kitchen, took five hundred dollars in cash from the safe. He took his suit and shirt and new tie, grabbed his briefcase, got into the car, and headed to the train station.

  FOURTEEN

  Abby spent the early part of the afternoon at the block sale, haggling good-naturedly with other women from the neighborhood, bargaining over glassware, picture frames, jigsaw puzzles, flatware.

  She had always thought that garage sale items were nothing more than worthless junk being sold and resold to the same people over and over again. Granted, sometimes there were pearls to be found in the suburban oyster, but rarely.

  Earlier in the day she had brought over three large boxes from the house, a good deal of it things she had picked up at garage sales and flea markets over the years, proving her point. One of the boxes was full of paperbacks; yellowed mass-market copies of books she had been shelving and reshelving since college. Colleen McCollough, Harold Robbins, Stephen King. She found it terribly difficult to part with books, but she made herself a promise this time.

  At just after one, while talking to Mindy Stillman, who seemed to have an immeasurable trove of anecdotes about her ex-husband’s infidelities, Abby waved over Charlotte and Emily. She needed to get them fed and ready to drop off at the babysitter’s house.
r />   She did not see or hear the black SUV turn the corner, drive up her long driveway, and park behind the garage.

  In the distance, the smoke of burning thatch writes the village’s epitaph in the sky. He feels alive, connected to history by the blood beneath his boots, still electrified from the insanity of battle. He checks himself for wounds. He is unscathed. Around him is a meadow sown with the fallen.

  He enters the farmhouse. He knows every stone, every timber, every sill. It has lived in his dreams for a long time.

  The old woman glances up from her task. She has met Koschei before, knows the centuries of madness in his eyes. Her house is warm, heated by the burning fields, the fires that have brought Grozny to its knees. The kitchen smells of fresh bread and human flesh. The senses are ashamed of their hungers.

  “You,” she says softly, the tears rimming her ancient eyes. She draws the knife to her own throat. “You.”

  While Abby flipped through the new issue of Architectural Digest, the girls played in the backyard. In about an hour Abby needed to drop them off at the babysitters, before heading to the clinic. She had a twelve-hour shift coming up and, as much as she had intended to catch up on her sleep, she was tired already. On the days when she worked, and Michael was in court, there was usually a three- or four-hour window where they needed someone to watch the girls.

  Regardless, she needed to give the girls a bath before they left. It was getting to be more and more of an ordeal these days, ever since Charlotte and Emily discovered the world of skincare products. She also needed to make them a snack.

  As she took out the peanut butter and jelly she heard the back door open and close.

  “Let’s get ready for your bath, girls,” Abby said.

  She made the sandwiches by rote, her mind on her upcoming shift. She cut the crust off Emily’s sandwich. Charlotte liked the crust. Grape jam for Emily; strawberry for Charlotte. She bagged the half-sandwiches, listened to the house.

  Had the girls come in? If so, they were a little too quiet. It could only mean one of two things. They were tired, or they were scheming.