It all hinges on how much his father knew about it before he left the United States forever. Peter had always thought Rufus was driven by something more personal, a version of the mix of conflicting feelings some rich hippies feel, the shame at having so much, wrapped up in a childish selfishness, the glorification of being able to live with so little. It’s impossible to imagine that it’s not part of the equation. But it never occurred to Peter that maybe Rufus was also protecting himself, and after Peter was born, him, too. That Rufus’s refusal to tell him much at all about his family, his complete ambivalence about Peter wanting to visit them, wasn’t just him projecting some long-held grudge onto his son. If his father knows as much as Peter does now, then it took some strength—holding back for so long, not unloading the entire family story onto him the minute Peter said he just wanted to visit his cousins. At the end of this train of thought, Peter’s respect for Rufus rises, until he’s proud of the way the man raised him, of how Rufus taught him to get by in the world, to survive on so little and yet be able to do almost anything he wanted, even if he didn’t know what that was. He wants to call his dad and tell him he’s sorry. He wants to thank him over and over. But then he starts swinging the other way. If Rufus knew everything, why didn’t he just tell his kid after a while? He could have just let it all go, let it go and stayed with Peter’s mom. Peter’s only seen one picture of her, a woman with dark hair and a long face. They lost it years ago, somewhere between Addis Ababa and Kampala, but he had memorized it by then anyway and still thinks about it all the time. In the picture, her arm is flung over Rufus’s shoulder; she’s thrown her head back and letting out what must be a huge, big-toothed laugh. Rufus is smiling so wide you can see it under his mustache. They could have stayed together, the three of them, stayed even in the town where Peter was born. Lived a simpler life, one that didn’t involve cash in bottom drawers, cash under the bed, cash in kitchen cupboards. Just clothes, a few toys for him, pots and pans, plates and spoons. They might still be there, then, and this whole misunderstanding, the mistaken identity, that’s drawn Peter into something he didn’t ask for and wants no part of, would never have happened. Then Peter wants to call his father and scream at him. But both extremes assume that Rufus knows. How much do you know about your sister, Dad? Peter wants to say. What do you know? But then what if Rufus doesn’t know anything? How much is Peter allowed to tell him? Because his family’s toxic legacy is still alive, the animal is still out there and coming for him, and he’s scared of it, of what it can do. Scared of what Rufus might do if he learns just how much Peter’s been pulled in.
Peter doesn’t know who his father is right now, and he just needs to talk to him and can’t, because he’s on an airplane and this is 1995; because there’s no way he’s going to talk to Rufus about any of it over an airport payphone. In a flicker of self-awareness in between the bouts of self-doubt, he thinks of how awful airports and airplanes are for people who are in a real hurry to get where they’re going. All that waiting around at the gate, not moving at all. All those hours sitting on the plane, which feel like you’re not moving, even if you are. It’s dead time, dead space, and Peter’s the kind of person who winds up counting every minute. He doesn’t know that Sylvie’s done the same thing; that she’s using him as much as she’s helping him. Stalling with the FBI until she’s sure Peter’s on the ground in Zimbabwe and crossing over into Zambia. Banking on what Peter would never assume: that Rufus is, in the end, much more his father’s son than he would ever admit, and when the beast comes for him—because after what Sylvie does, it will—he’ll know what to do.
Sylvie’s liquidated almost everything now, her legitimate and illegitimate holdings. The legitimate transactions, she knows, the FBI can see, but she can explain it as getting ready for the witness protection program, to go into hiding. They’d be able to see the illegitimate ones after a while, but by then everything will be done. She’s moving too fast. She knows so much about the Wolf’s organization, thanks to years of dealing with him, getting him to let his guard down by putting so much money with him. She knows who’s involved, who’s been doing it for a while, who’s new to the game. She knew when Petey joined as a fellow investor and asked Kosookyy to try to talk him out of it. She felt a little sick to her stomach when Kosookyy told her later that he hadn’t. She remembers what Kosookyy told her then. You could stop him, you know. All you have to do is tell him the truth. She winces a little at how she responded. It’ll blow my cover. He has too big a mouth. What Kosookyy must be thinking now. Look what your silence cost you and everyone around you. And so many people you don’t even know.
And thanks to Feodor, who’s been spying on the Wolf, just as the Wolf has been spying on him, she knows who Mercedes is and how to get to him. Mercedes—a government official who, for some reason, has decided to name himself after a car—works for the Moldovan ministry of the interior and also the Wolf. He’s in his office, in a blocky Communist-era building overlooking a small park with a bust of Stefan cel Mare, the hero and icon of Moldova who, some say, also cursed it. His beeper goes off, gives him a number he doesn’t recognize, but that doesn’t matter; he knows that whoever has his beeper number means business. Hours later, Mercedes is in a part of Chisinau where he never goes. He gives twenty dollars to the owner of a hardware store with a painted sign out front to let him use the phone. Makes his call. It’s Feodor on the other end, though Mercedes doesn’t know that.
“You’ve wasted a lot of time, waiting so long to call,” Feodor says.
“I had to make sure it was safe. Who am I talking to?”
“An acquaintance of the Wolf,” Feodor says.
“Do you have a name?”
“Is it important to you?”
It is. Mercedes is very suspicious; it’s how he’s gotten this far.
“I can wire you money to indicate my seriousness,” Feodor says.
“That would be better,” Mercedes says, and gives him the details for an account in his uncle’s name, a man who died a few months ago of tuberculosis, though he knows the various authorities involved haven’t put the picture together enough to shut the account down. He’ll use it for maybe a month more, he thinks, and then close it out. But what he’s wired turns out to be a lot of money, much more than Mercedes thought it would be. And the number isn’t random; it’s just under the limit where the bank starts to ask questions before allowing the transfer. That evening, Mercedes finds a tailor in a different part of town, gives her fifteen dollars, and calls the number again.
“You’re going to need a lot more accounts,” Feodor says.
“I figured,” Mercedes says. “How many?”
Feodor tells him, and Mercedes, for a moment, balks. It’s a huge transaction.
“Can you come up with the accounts?” Feodor says.
“Yes,” Mercedes says. “But before I do, I have to ask what this is for.”
“I have learned that there’s a mole in your organization, sir,” Feodor says, “and to scare him out, each member of your organization has a part to play. I thus need contact information for everyone down the line—”
“I don’t have it.”
“Of course you don’t. But you have it for the next in line. And you can distribute the money.”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. Tell me how to contact the next in line.”
“How many of them?”
“All of them.”
Mercedes takes a deep breath. Then gives Feodor information on more bank accounts than he ever thought he would in one phone call. The money’s wired to them the next day. Then there’s a third phone call from a barbershop in yet another part of town, when Mercedes gives Feodor the beepers for the eighteen managers he oversees, tells Feodor to wait a couple hours before calling so he can tell them, in a general way, what’s up. Feodor agrees and thanks him for his cooperation; if they find the mole, he says, there’ll be something in
it for him. They hang up almost at the same time. Mercedes walks out of the office and gets a haircut. Looks at himself in the mirror, himself and the other men getting their hair cut, the men waiting in a row of seats by the door. Outside, it’s a beautiful day. If he were in a better mood, he would think of the light as bright, but today, it seems hard to him. Harsh. Glaring. Angry. The barber, who hasn’t seen what happened between Mercedes and the owner, asks him a routine question—do you live around here?—and Mercedes struggles to answer before remembering that it’s better to lie and say yes. The minutes in the vinyl chair seem much longer. His eyes are always on the front door reflected in the mirror. He’s waiting for someone to open it and come for him. If it’s the police, he thinks, they won’t wait for the barber to finish. They’ll drag him out of there with the cut half done. The pictures in the paper will be embarrassing, enough to earn him a nickname in the press. He doesn’t want to think about what it might be. The police’ll finish the job in jail by shaving his head, as if he had lice. But that’s better than the criminals who might come for him instead. He realizes that, as many times as he’s talked to his managers on the phone, he doesn’t know what any of them look like. They’re all high up enough in the organization that it’s been in everyone’s interests not to know. It means they can’t identify each other to the authorities, can’t acknowledge each other on the street if they happen to be tailed, which is great when it comes to protecting themselves. But now the problem is inside the organization. What if one of them is the mole? Or what if, somehow, the organization makes a mistake and thinks Mercedes is—despite, or no, no, because of his eagerness to cooperate? I’m fucked either way on that one, Mercedes thinks, and feels sick to his stomach, swallows back the bile rising in his throat. Either way, one of the people he oversees could come for him right now. He could walk into this barbershop, get right behind Mercedes, and blow his brains out of his face, all over the mirror in front of him. It wouldn’t take more than five seconds, because Mercedes knows that the rumors are true: some of them are ex-KGB and know what they’re doing when it comes to executing people. Nobody in this barbershop would save him; they wouldn’t pretend to be able to identify the killer, because nobody’s that stupid, or righteous. If there’s a difference.
For the rest of the haircut, Mercedes is in a cold panic every time the door opens. He regrets everything he’s ever done for the Wolf’s organization, every little thing. When this thing dies down, he thinks, I’m getting out. He pays fast, leaves too big a tip, and walks home—it takes him over an hour—because he’s too paranoid to get in his car. There’s someone hiding in the back, he thinks, or there’s a bomb under the driver’s seat. He decides he’ll come back for it later, and the bus is just out of the question. But halfway home, the terror leaves him. They’ll find out who it is very soon, he thinks. They’ll know it’s not me. If this was the Wolf testing him, he thinks he might have passed, maybe excelled. He starts to feel almost euphoric, thinking of the good things coming his way. He wouldn’t mind moving up in the organization one bit. Maybe in his official job as well. Maybe he’ll take over from the Wolf one of these days. Meet the man at last, just in time for him to shake Mercedes’s hand before he retires to a villa on the Black Sea. Someday you’ll be here too, the Wolf will say to him. Mercedes can’t wait, and his impatience makes him reckless. He calls all seventeen of his contacts from a phone in a hotel lobby in central Chisinau, maybe six minutes from his office. You’re about to get some very specific and very important orders. And yes, the compensation to carry them out. The news shoots down all seventeen branches of the organization’s operations, loses a bunch of the official finesse along the way. You’re about to get a weird order and a lot of money.
The letters are all over Moldova the next day, delivered by Feodor’s boys. They’re in Chisinau and Balti, in Orhei and across the countryside. A manager named Ion gets an envelope slipped under the door of his apartment. It has a mark on it that indicates it’s from the Wolf. He opens it fast, before his wife can see it. Inside is a wad of American dollars and a printed note. We suspect that Evgeny Razin, your underling, has been informing on the organization to the authorities and that a police raid of the organization is imminent. If you have any indication that this is true, including an increased police presence around your activities, you are sanctioned to dispatch Mr. Razin as soon as possible. We trust that the compensation in this envelope is enough to convince you of the seriousness of the threat and to secure your vigilance. You will receive double this amount again if you are required to carry out this order and do so. The wad is thick; the denomination on the top is pretty high. Not everyone believes the letter they get, of course. But enough do to set the whole organization on edge, stretching the connections between everyone inside the network. And they’re all afraid enough, of the enforcers, the spies, their superiors, and the Wolf himself, that nobody says anything, at least for the first few hours. Sylvie knows that’ll change. For all the money she’s thrown at the scheme, the lie at the center of it is rotten; it’s decaying fast, and the longer she waits to use it, the more it’s going to smell. But she guesses that for the next two days, they’ll all feel like they’re in incredible danger, and the truth is that almost all of them are. About the only person who’s safe is Mercedes, which means he almost pissed his pants in the seat of a barbershop for nothing. He’s safe because Sylvie doesn’t want to assassinate a public official, and because she’s a good enough judge of character to understand that without the organization around him, he’ll be harmless. It’s the Wolf who isn’t; getting him will be the most important of all, if she wants her and her family to be free. She’s counting on creating enough chaos to get him, for once, to lose his cool. To forget one of the protocols that keep him out of harm’s way. To make himself vulnerable. It’s the one part of her plan that requires her to be, above all, lucky.
But for now, a lot still has to happen. Which is why, as soon as she’s talked to Feodor and they’ve agreed on their plan, Sylvie calls Agent Easton and Agent Guarino again.
“What’s the FBI’s relationship with police in Moldova right now?”
“It depends,” Agent Easton says. “On the city, on the province, on specific police chiefs. There’s a lot of red tape and bureaucracy to deal with over there.”
“What if I could hand you an entire organization?”
“That would be incredible.”
“When could you start to act on the information?”
“As in, a raid of some kind? Not soon. But beginning to investigate? Sure. Why do you ask?”
“Because if the investigation were to start, say, tomorrow, I would need protection very soon after that.”
“You got it.”
She hands over the information. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Everything she has. The information moves fast, from the FBI to Interpol, to local police in Moldova. Some of those police officers have been paid off. Some of them just don’t have the manpower or the firepower to do anything with what they’re given. But some of them can do something. They start spying on the addresses they can reach, and they try to be inconspicuous about it. Agent Easton and Agent Guarino are delighted; for them, it’s a huge breakthrough, and they go out for a quick dinner to celebrate before they go home to their families. It also feels like the beginning of a long process for them. There’s entering Sylvie in the witness protection program deep. They’re thinking somewhere in Nevada or Arizona. And there are the many, many leads to follow, the trips to take, the people to interview. We’re still being used somehow, Agent Easton says, and I wish I could see how. Yeah, Agent Guarino says, but there’s only one real way to play the cards she’s given us, right? Besides, isn’t it something that we started moving this boulder forward, at last? He holds up a wineglass. He doesn’t know he’s using the wrong metaphor: They’ve started a fire. They just can’t see the smoke yet.
Livingstone, Zambia. Rufus is living in a low-slung house
in town, behind a tall cinderblock wall that was painted white and yellow maybe ten years ago and has been chipped away at ever since, by the rain, the rocks that passing trucks kick up, the cars themselves. Three years ago, a drunk taxi driver backed right into the place, messed up his bumper and a piece of the wall, but got away without anyone seeing him; he hasn’t been back down that street since. The house is a pretty simple affair: tile floors, white walls. Some square wooden furniture Rufus bought in town. A few carved hippos on the coffee table that he bought in the central square—he traded them for two American dollars and an empty plastic water bottle—just to give the place a little touch of home. He’s almost the only white guy in town. There are the owners of the two backpackers’ hostels and the couple of backpackers who were just passing through but got roped into working for them. There are the owners of a couple of the businesses on the main drag, a restaurant and a souvenir shop. There are also what Rufus thinks of as the exploitation scouts: All along the long, straight road from Livingstone to the Zimbabwean border, which passes right over the canyon the Zambezi tumbles into to make Victoria Falls, some white people with money have plans to build a series of very exclusive hotels. Rufus pretty much hates this idea, it and the giant land-clearing construction equipment it brought along with it. He doesn’t know where these white people are from. Maybe they’re Europeans, or South Africans, or both. But they stand out more than he does, and Rufus feels like he’s a lit candle every time he walks down the street. The Livingstonians know he doesn’t work for one of the businesses they can see. Not for the fancy hotel at the end of the main drag, where the traffic doesn’t obey all the laws and has to dodge baboons besides. Not for any of the other small businesses, most of which are run by Indians. They get the impression that he’s either a criminal or just sitting on a big pile of money, and they lean toward the pile because of the way he dresses, as ever, in linen clothes, and because of his ridiculous salt-and-pepper mustache. He’s earned a nickname, Yankee Doodle Dandy, which is a term of endearment. Rufus has stuck around longer than any of the other Americans the people in town can remember, and he’s done his best to ingratiate himself. He’s not like some of the white people around Livingstone, who almost act as if they’re under siege, driving from place to place in an air-conditioned truck with tinted windows, spending as little time as possible outside. Rufus is out during the day, walking around, buying overripe fruit and cassava, shooting the breeze with the friends he’s made when he meets them in the shadow of the broken-down colonnade that the British built and nobody has the money to keep up. He’s out at night in the club that pumps out highlife music on the stereo as loud as it can, playing cards over coldish bottles of Mosi, winning and losing money fair and square. Not long after moving to Livingstone, he’s broken into and held at gunpoint while the home invaders liberate him from his cash. The people in Livingstone expect him to leave after that. Instead, he shows up at the club the next day, has a talk with the right people, gets himself the right talisman for his door. He’s never broken into again. The people in town nod when they talk about it. Yankee Doodle Dandy knows how to live here, one of them says. Mmm, says another. But why do you think he’s here at all?
The Family Hightower Page 28
