The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  But Georgina can. She just puts a hand on Claudiu’s chest, tells him to go to their bedroom and come out when he’s ready. He gets quiet and gives her a slow nod. Then leaves the room. Though they can still hear him howling.

  Georgina turns to Petey. Gives him three taps on the cheek with her hand that aren’t gentle.

  “He has it in him to kill you right now, do you understand?” she says.

  Alexandru translates and Petey nods.

  “Good,” Georgina says. “Keep fucking around and I’ll let him. You’re going to tell us everything. Everything you know, so that we don’t spend the rest of our lives wondering more than we have to. Get it?”

  Petey nods again.

  “Good. Now wipe the snot off your nose and start talking.”

  And so he tells her everything, from start to finish. What he was doing before he came to Ukraine. What he got himself involved him. How he met Madalina. It takes a long time because poor Alexandru has to keep translating, asking for clarification. I love her, I swear I love her, he says, and Georgina almost softens, but then remembers how responsible he is for her not being a mother anymore. She wasn’t ready for it to be over, was hoping it never would be. Thought it was her job to go first. Claudiu comes back in the kitchen about halfway through it and Georgina looks at him. Are you okay? she says. No, Claudiu says. I never will be. Me neither, she says. It’s almost dawn when Petey’s done. Then there’s just the question of what to do with him.

  “I hope you’ll understand,” Georgina says, “why we can’t bear the sight of you.”

  “Yes, I do,” Petey says. He’s put himself back together enough to say it in Ukrainian. Alexandru agrees to take him and escorts him back to his house. Tells his family that Petey is Madalina’s boyfriend and something’s happened to her. Please don’t ask me any questions right now, he says to his wife. We’ll talk when this is over, but not right now. But like I said, he’ll never tell her everything.

  Petey’s sleeping a few hours later when Claudiu gets another knock on his door. He hasn’t slept at all and looks as if he’s been in a fight. He’s ready for it to be Alexandru, and he finds himself hoping that he’s come to say that Petey’s killed himself. Hanged himself by his belt from the rafters in Alexandru’s barn. Claudiu hates himself for thinking it, but he can’t help it. Can’t stop thinking about it, either. The way the body moves on the end of the belt, swaying just a little from side to side. The knife they’ll use to cut him down. He’s still thinking about it, wondering if he’ll feel any better, at all, when he opens the door.

  It’s not Alexandru. It’s a tallish man in a leather jacket with a crew cut. Claudiu’s never seen him before in his life, which means he’s not from Negostina. He can’t be from around here at all. The shoes are wrong, the pants are wrong. The stranger’s hands are in his pockets, and he licks his lips. His name is Gleb, and the truth is that he hasn’t slept, either. He’s been chasing Petey since he abandoned Madalina, first through Kiev, then out of it, because he’s guessed—and guessed right, as it turns out—that they were heading to Madalina’s parents’ place. That Petey has nowhere else to go. But it’s been a long trip, down a long straight road that, in the middle of the night, makes him feel like he isn’t moving at all. Then there’s crossing the border, the irritating bribes he has to pay. The Wolf will be paying me back for those, he thinks. And now this town, which he hates as soon as he pulls into it. He looks at the lines of houses, the unpaved roads, and shakes his head. The sooner I’m out of this place, the better.

  “You’re Claudiu?” he says in Ukrainian.

  “Yes,” Claudiu says.

  “I’m Misha,” Gleb says, “and I’m with the police.” He flashes a badge that Claudiu doesn’t get a good look at. “I’m looking for an American. His name is Peter Henry Hightower. I believe he is an acquaintance of your daughter’s. Have you seen him?”

  There’s no way this man is a policeman, Claudiu thinks, and the image of Petey hanging from the rafters comes back. Now there are more images. What will this man do to Petey if he finds him? Maybe just do it fast and shoot him, right through the head, from temple to temple. Or if Petey tries to run, the man’ll shoot him twice in the back to bring him down, once in each knee to make sure he doesn’t get back up, and then get him in the back of the head. Then again, maybe the fake policeman isn’t the only one who’s here for Petey, and they have every intention of taking him alive, a young, healthy man. Then it’ll all be much slower. He’s not a doctor, and he’s only heard stories about what the organ harvesters take. But it’s enough for him to picture it. Petey strapped to a table, with a man sitting on each of his limbs, as a fifth man cuts into him and pulls things out. In Claudiu’s imagination, Petey’s alive and awake for all of it, and because they do the eyes last, he sees everything.

  “Claudiu?”

  “I’m sorry,” Claudiu says. “I’m a chronic insomniac and last night I didn’t sleep at all.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I did see Peter, though,” Claudiu says. “He was here yesterday. But I told him to leave and he did. In all honesty, sir, I hate him and have no idea what my daughter ever saw in him. I hope that he’s in a great deal of trouble, and that he pays for whatever crimes he’s committed. Pays and then some.”

  It’s a convincing performance because Claudiu means every word. And Gleb believes him.

  “Do you know where he might have headed?”

  “I couldn’t care less,” Claudiu says.

  Gleb stands there at Claudiu’s front door, nodding.

  “Do you want to come in for a moment?” Claudiu says.

  A look passes across the gangster’s face that Claudiu can’t read. Not if I have to spend one more minute in this place, he’s thinking.

  “No, thank you,” Gleb says. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

  And the man is off. Claudiu watches him from the window, heading back to his car. Alexandru’s place is only three houses away, and for a minute or so, Claudiu is terrified that the stranger’s going to knock on a few other doors. If he finds Petey at Alexandru’s, what’ll happen then? It’s carnage again, for Petey, his neighbor, his neighbor’s family. Claudiu can’t think about it this time. Afterward, he’s pretty sure the man would come back to the house and finish with Claudiu, just to cover his tracks. Claudiu and Georgina. She’s sleeping, at last, in the next room. I’m so sorry, Claudiu imagines saying to her. I didn’t think fast enough. But the fake policeman just gets in his car and drives away. Claudiu waits ten minutes to leave his house, then takes a quick walk around town, just to make sure the man’s gone. Doesn’t see his car. So he goes to his neighbor’s house.

  “He’s sleeping,” Alexandru says.

  Now Claudiu hates Petey even more. “Wake him up,” he says. He can’t bring himself to use his name. He waits in the kitchen. Petey comes out wearing the same clothes he had on last night. He looks worse than he did before, and Claudiu’s at least glad for that.

  “Someone came looking for you this morning,” he says. “Someone who isn’t a police officer.”

  He waits to see Petey’s reaction; he’s satisfied when he can see that Petey’s more scared than he’s seen him yet. The American says something to Alexandru and Alexandru turns to him.

  “He wants to know what happened. What you said.”

  “I said you’re already gone,” Claudiu says. “Which is far more than you deserve. You are a danger to everyone you meet now. A danger to yourself. If I were you, I would turn myself in.”

  Petey doesn’t say anything, but Claudiu knows he’s about to tip. Knows, too, how to make him do it.

  “For my daughter,” he says, “it is the absolute least you can do.”

  There’s one last, long silence. Then Petey sighs and asks Alexandru a question. Alexandru nods.

  “What did he say?” Claudiu says.

&n
bsp; “He wants to know if I’ll go with him to the station.”

  Claudiu takes two steps closer to Alexandru and hugs him, hard. He tries to say thank you, but doesn’t get past the first syllable before he’s crying again. No. Bawling. Barking. Choking. It’s the next giant wave of grief crashing over him, and he breaks down all the way; he can’t put himself back together again. Alexandru brings him back to his own house, one arm around his shoulder, the other holding Claudiu’s hand, as if Madalina’s father overnight has changed into a ninety-year-old man. It takes a long time to get to his door, and when Georgina meets them there, she’s already crying, too. They hold each other there in the doorway, Claudiu and Georgina, and it’s easy to see that they will think of their daughter and how they lost her every single day, for the rest of their lives. The smallest thing will remind them of her. The wildflowers by the side of the road, which she used to like to pick. Beef stew, which was her favorite. The steps of the bus station, which Claudiu will remember seeing her sitting on, waiting to go into Siret, when she was a teenager and already so ready to leave. Another young girl in town who’s wearing a dress like Madalina used to wear. For her parents, Madalina will be everywhere, always with them. After a few years, they’ll be able to tell themselves, most of the time, that the memories they have of her outweigh the loss. It’s what they know their friends want to hear. But they’ll both know the truth, and feel it so much that they won’t have to talk about it. The grief will never, ever end.

  “Look what you did to them,” Alexandru says to Petey; and when he’s sure the American has gotten enough that he won’t forget, they head toward his car. By then, the mayhem in Chisinau has already started. The Wolf has discovered what strings Sylvie’s pulling, and he and Feodor are on the verge of meeting. And two more hired guns are taking long trips, one to the United States, one to Zambia. The police on two continents are counting the bodies, trying to piece together the story, trying to suss out just what’s going on. They haven’t seen anything like it in a few years, and they worry that it’s all going to blow up this time, that it’s all just going to get worse and worse. That it’s the beginning of something huge. The toppling of governments, a sharp descent into the kind of violent chaos that’ll make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a changing of the guard. It’s what the threat has been since 1991, because it seems like when they put in the new world order, they also started a few time bombs ticking. Every once in a while, one of them goes off; a couple have already, in the Balkans and in Chechyna, and all the other countries to the east of what used to be the Iron Curtain take a look around, at their neighbors and themselves. They wonder who’s next, or if they’ll all go down together. And they wonder, too, if something’s being revealed to them, even if they’re not sure what it is; whether this is capitalism gone wrong, or if it’s working just like it’s supposed to when you let it run free.

  It takes Pocketknife a day to get to New York, another half day to get to Cleveland. A long string of airplanes, airports, food that tastes like paper, bathrooms that have been bombed with antiseptic. It all annoys Pocketknife, a lot. In Kiev, he’s only a medium-sized crook; he lives in an apartment he doesn’t own, and when his boss calls, he comes. But he has something in common with people who have impossible amounts of money: He’s used to being able to do what he wants, to ignore the rules that apply to almost everyone else. The velvet rope gets unhooked for him. There’s always a table at a restaurant, a drink that’s on the house. His car is always parked right in front. He doesn’t pay too much attention to traffic signs, stoplights, speed limits. Those things, he thinks, are for people who worry about the law, about the police. He doesn’t worry about them. He’s hurt so many people, put so many in the hospital, into casts and splints, onto crutches. He’s put more than a few people in the ground. The police have never come for him, for any of it, and he knows they never will.

  But when he leaves Kiev, leaves Ukraine, all his privilege vanishes, and he resents it. The lines he has to wait in, to get his tickets, to get on the plane, to get a cup of coffee, to get through customs. He sleeps most of the way across Western Europe and the Atlantic just to not have to think about it. But as soon as he lands in New York, he finds out his English isn’t as good as he thought it was, and it makes going through customs humiliating. He’s angry switching from the international to the domestic terminals in JFK, just tired out by it once he’s on the way to Cleveland. As the plane soars over Pennsylvania, he wishes, just then, that he’d never met the Wolf, that he had no idea who he was. He lets his impatience take over for a half hour or so because he knows he needs to burn through it, it needs to be out of his system by the time the plane touches down. So he calls the stewardess for a cocktail, gets more upset than he should when he learns they don’t have the kind of whiskey he likes on the plane. I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry, the stewardess says; she’s been trained to just apologize, though Pocketknife knows he’s out of line. He almost wants to tell her that he’s just blowing off steam, but if he did that, he knows it would ruin it. At the end of the flight, the attendant checks into a hotel near the airport and worries that she might lose her job if that man complains like he said he would. Pocketknife collects his bags and feels better.

  There’s a car waiting for him at the terminal, a black Cadillac with tinted windows. The driver, whom the Wolf called himself in an unusual breach of protocol, is fluent in Russian and English. There’s a briefcase on the backseat, all dark leather; he opens it up and finds a beautiful German pistol with a silencer and a full round of ammunition, more than he needs. He picks it up and holds it in his hand to test the weight. He likes it. On the highway into Cleveland, gliding into the city at night, he feels a bit of the power he knows he has in Kiev coming back, appreciates the respect that’s implied by the Wolf giving him the right tools for the job.

  “Do you want something to eat before you go to work?” the driver says.

  “No, no,” Pocketknife says. “Afterward, yes. Come and have a drink with me. Do you know a place?”

  “Of course.”

  “Excellent.”

  It feels like they’re hovering over the city. Cleveland stretches out all around them, darker than he expected an American city to be. It’s way darker than New York. Except for the skyline downtown, which is all lit up. There’s the Key Tower, just four years old, gleaming like a knife, a sliver of glass, next to the grand old dame of the Terminal Tower. Then there are the blocky wedges of the BP Building, the Tower at Erieview. A mass of others, all clustered around a few city blocks, like when it comes to making buildings for commerce, Cleveland remembers that it’s a city, that it’s supposed to build up, not out, even though the suburbs have been crawling into the farmland around Cleveland for decades; thanks to the Van Sweringens, it’s been growing out for as long as it’s been growing up. There isn’t a lot of traffic in Cleveland after dark, and they’re through the downtown in a matter of minutes, hit the highway along the shore of the lake that takes them out to Bratenahl. Now the light from downtown is gone, and Pocketknife gets little glimpses of the things that give Cleveland its reputation. The way someone’s leaning against the wall of a tiny Chinese takeout place with dim lights inside. A car parked halfway down a street with two of its windows broken. They’re just little flashes of something, without any context. Then they’re gone, and the car is cruising down Lake Shore Boulevard. Pocketknife looks at those walls on either side of him, can almost smell the money that’s inside them, all the anger and the fear that comes with it, the anger those families feel that they don’t have even more, the fear that someone’s going to come along and take everything they have away from them. Pocketknife smiles, because he knows that, for one of those houses tonight, the fear is justified. He’s there to take everything away.

  The gate to the Hightower estate is open. The driver tells him that’s normal. They say she never locks the door, he says. That’s how protected she feels. For Pocketknife, this is
hard to believe. He tells the driver to drop him off and circle the block once every five minutes, but after fifteen minutes, just to take off. What do you mean? the driver says. Pocketknife doesn’t bother to answer. When he’s out of the car, he realizes just how quiet the long, wide road is. His footsteps are a lot louder than he wants them to be. He’s expecting that, as soon as he’s standing in front of the place, some motion sensors are going to kick in and the lights are going to come on, the cameras record him, and then the whole thing’ll be blown; he’ll have to work even faster to earn his pay. But no lights come on. He stands there at the edge of the driveway for a few seconds, then starts walking down it, stops to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness. The driveway’s a dark gray band weaving around a ground of even darker gray, the looming shape of the house. Two windows are lit on the second floor, but the curtains are drawn. He can’t see in. He wishes the driveway wasn’t paved with gravel. At last he’s at the front door. He pulls out his gun, tries the door. It’s locked, but the lock on the door is so old that he smiles at it; he could’ve gotten into this place when he was a teenager, back when he didn’t have the first clue. He pulls out a pick, fiddles with the mechanism to make as little noise as possible. It feels a little heavier than he expected, but it doesn’t bother him. He turns the lock, turns the doorknob, then starts to open the door.