I made a tutting sound. “I have no reason to think Lev would send me on a job and then try to kill me the morning after, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Vassily sighed. “Not necessarily Lev, but I wouldn’t be surprised, you know? You did just kill Sem Vochin, and that dead Italian guy turned up yesterday. And I mean… he looked like he was killed with magic, didn’t he?”
I grunted. Now that I was in cool, familiar surroundings, I was really feeling that tiredness. The burn in my muscles, an ache deep in my joints. “I was told not to discuss it with anyone. So was Nic. I don't know why he didn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“Because Nic doesn’t trust Lev as far as he could kick him, and he wants people to know what’s going on.” Vassily’s voice took on a familiar stubborn tone, one I hadn’t heard in many years. Insistent, distracted. He was a very intelligent man. Cavalier as he was, we both had earned our scholarships, and he’d always been my better at mathematics and chess. “Nic says a lot of guys have been dying since Lev took the throne.”
“Nic was also the one who told me to tell you not to try and take him down.”
“Well, sure. I’d be fucking crazy to. One bad word to my parole officer, and I’m back in the slammer.” Vassily scowled and toyed with the crushed cigarette. His usually restless hands were shaking, trembling as they roamed. “But I’m going to collect the information, and I’m going to hold onto it because damned if I let some white-collar desk monkey destroy this place. I've got an MBA, Lexi. I know what guys like this do. They come in and clean an organization out, strip it bare, and fuck off to Miami with all the money. The only reasons he’s in the big man’s chair is because he’s got Sergei, Vanya and all of AEROMOR’s union guys backing him, and because of this cocaine gig. He’s got the boats and the goods.”
I exhaled thinly and rubbed my mouth with the palm of my glove. “For now. He… has me on another job already.”
Vassily pursed his lips, cocked an eyebrow enquiringly, and mimed shooting someone with thumb and forefinger. “Another friend of his?”
“No. A contact. He wants him alive.”
“Huh.” Vassily began to layer and sort the spares. His fingers were still shaky, but he played three-card Solitaire with the kind of skill that spoke of long practice. “Well, speaking of business, Nic already set me up with something. I can’t fucking believe it. Same day I get out, and he’s hanging the millstone around my neck. Oy. I have to see my parole officer on Monday.”
“He asked you to work already?” I rested my forehead on my hand, leaning on the tabletop. “That’s... unnecessary.”
“Tell me ’bout it. But it’s good money, and good blat’. Lev has a million or that needs cleaning at Atlantic City, so we set up a date with George Laguetta. Says that he and Lev need my silver tongue to butter up the Family. We’ll cycle the cash, wine and dine them. I’ll get enough money to set me up for the year once it’s all said and done.”
Putting Vassily under all those cameras alongside a known Don and in light of Vincent’s disappearance? “No. Vasya, I have a dreadful feeling about this.”
“Why?” He frowned.
“Because the man Lev has asked me to find and return is the man who arranged this whole cocaine business for Laguetta and Lev in the first place,” I said. “He was supposed to be at a meeting last night and never showed. The whole thing—”
“Smells like shit, yeah.” Vassily cut me off, shaking his head. “But I already gave my word. I won’t lose face to Nic by backing out. And honestly, man, I need the money. The government took all my stocks. I have to get a hold of my old broker and hope he’s willing to work my fake ID and build up my portfolio from scratch.”
I ground my teeth until they creaked and crossed my arms. “Well, if you have to go, I go with you. I’m your bodyman for this event. Let the Laguettas wonder how you’re able to field a spook as personal protection.”
“Even if you weren’t a spook, you’re the hardest man in this crew. Of course I want you there.” Vassily smacked another card down. “And you know what? I told Nic I want Yuri on my other side. You know, Yuri Beretzniy? His old war buddy. He’s like a million years old, but I'm pretty sure that guy eats lead and broken glass for breakfast. Figured that’d remind Nic who calls the shots around here.”
“He’s missing.” I rubbed my face again. The fatigue was eating into my ability to focus. “Yuri, that is.”
Vassily looked up sharply. “What?”
“Missing.” I glanced down at the rows of cards. “He didn’t show for work last night.”
“Yuri? Missing? But I mean… how?”
“Probably the way most men go,” I replied. "By surprise."
“No way. That guy’s a seriously tough motherfucker.”
I looked up at him pensively. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how tough you are. He’s gone missing with the man I’ve been tasked to find, Vincent.”
“Huh. Maybe Yuri cut some money and ran off with him, then. That happens, even with the old guys.”
Yes, it was possible Vincent was worth enough to the various underworld high rollers that Yuri stood to gain more by handing him over to someone than by protecting him for Lev. But in that case, who? Vincent’s blood family?
“Who is this guy, then? Vincent?”
“One of Manelli’s boys, oddly enough.” I made the decision to talk it out, no matter what Lev thought. If I could trust one person in the Organization, it was the man sitting across from me. “Vincent Manelli.”
“Blood family? Never heard of him. There’s Lou Manelli, Celso Manelli, and his little brother, Joe. They all work out of a big chicken factory over in Jersey. Elite Meats, something like that.”
“Perhaps because he’s the youngest of the sons? He defected to George’s team.”
“No shit? And he went missing on our watch? Well, bad as it sounds, at least Yuri went missing with him. If he fucked up, it’d be more than just his head in line for the guillotine. How much are you getting out of it?”
“Three hundred thousand.”
Vassily’s eyebrows nearly hit his hairline. “Lexi, that’s a lot of cash for one guy. Too much cash.”
The observation sat with me uncomfortably because it was true. It was a lot of money, though I’d managed to rationalize it somewhat. Vincent made the Organization millions of dollars in trade. The Twins hadn’t run shipments to anyone except Mama Perez in Miami until Vincent talked to them.
Vassily seemed to notice my struggle and shook his head. “Seriously. That’s too much. I don’t mean that in the ‘you suck and you shouldn’t be paid that much’ way. I mean in the ‘that’s a lot of fucking money that’s being used to hide something from you’ way.”
“Not compared to what he’s worth.”
“After your car got rigged this morning? I don’t have to be a wizard to work it out, my friend.” Vassily looked away, his jaw working. He was down to only a few spares now. “There’s something we’re not seeing.”
“You’re right,” I said, after a minute or two. “But I have to do it. Not just that I’m obliged, but I’ll be able to clear the money Grigori owed.”
Vassily leaned in toward me. “Lexi, if you’re hurting for money, just leave it to me. You broke me out of prison, for fuck’s sake. I’ll rake it in on Monday and we can pay it off.”
I shook my head. “I appreciate it, I really do, but I want to do this. Lev will put in a word for me to Sergei.”
“He shouldn’t have to. We’re blatnoi[5], we were made for this. Sergei should be back here and paying attention to his own men.”
“He will be. Lev thinks he’ll be here by the end of the month.”
“And that just makes me twitch harder over the whole damn thing.” Vassily tch’d and opened his mouth to speak again just as Mariya arrived with tea and plates of food.
“Here we go,” she said cheerfully. She’d brought crepes for Vassily, salad and chicken cutlets for me. “You eat everything, now. The pair of yo
u look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
Vassily changed tack, cheerfully masking his fatigue with a grin and a wave. “Sure thing, Mom.”
Mariya slapped him without force, and he sputtered in protest. “Vassily Simeovich, I spent five damn years worrying about your skinny ass. Don’t you give me cheek. What would your grandmother say?”
“She would have said I needed to lay on the bullshit better.”
I made a motion with my hands, silent agreement. Lenina Lovenko had been a fearsome, pipe-smoking Ruska Roma hellcat with more tattoos than her son and grandsons.
Mariya rolled her eyes. “Impossible. Are you two going to gym this evening?”
“I will be going to bed,” I said, as I took up my knife and fork.
Vassily swatted his sister away from his chair. Mariya shoved her brother’s head forward, and he made a rude gesture back at her. She motioned at him with two fingers. Come get it.
“I will. I feel pretty good, actually. It’ll be good to work out without someone trying to shank me.” Vassily chuckled and started furtively on his early dinner, glancing aside at her. “Sisters, man, I’m telling you. Can’t live with them, can’t shoot them.”
Mariya scowled. “I’ll take that plate back, Vivy.”
“The hell you will. These are amazing. Don’t call me Vivy.”
I watched them both contemplatively, folding salad onto my knife and fork. I often envied Mariya her simplicity and strength. She had lost parents, grandparents, and three brothers over the span of a decade. She took charge of her household when no one else could or would, a self-made and self-taught matriarch. As the years had gone by and more Lovenkos had died, she became increasingly fussy over us. Now that I had the time to look at her under yellow light, I thought her deep-set eyes were a little shadowed.
It was good Vassily hadn’t told her about the explosives. And it was good she and Vassily both didn’t know that tonight, I would not be going to bed. Instead, I would be jacking a car, finding a way into Vincent’s house, and looking for clues to his whereabouts.
It was time to begin the hunt.
Chapter 8
Vincent Manelli’s mansion on Turner Drive was faced with high fences that protected lawns so large and lush they looked like golf courses. The pavement here was new and uncracked, the cars clean, and my overall impression was that the whole street was strangely sterile and vacant. Vincent’s house was a huge Colonial villa that loomed over a winding gravel driveway lined with solar lamps. They cast muted light over the empty driveway and the clean-raked paths leading up to the front porch.
B&E is the one time you will ever find me in anything other than slacks and collared shirts. Some men do all black, but it’s a color that stands out under the muggy New York summer sky. Charcoal and brown work better. I like sportsgear for this: riding breeches, a light tracksuit jacket, and shoes with restaurant tread for extra grip. In this wealthy part of town, the outfit doesn't stand out too much, either. I could always claim to be ‘the help’.
I have a toolkit especially for this kind of work, and none of it is particularly supernatural in nature. The problem with B&E is that thresholds of all kind—walls, doorways, and especially circles—have strange power of their own. They are built with the intent to keep outside things out and inside things in. Intent is the basis of magic, and the focus which underlies the construction of any barrier acts as a weak enchantment of sorts. On the physical level, walls and locks don’t mean a whole lot. Without wards, the worst you get is the skin-prickling, uncomfortable sensation which accompanies trespass, the ghostly understanding that you are somewhere you do not belong. However, walls and doors that don’t belong to you make even easy magic harder than it ought to be. Lockpicking, for example: I can pick a practice deadbolt with magic, but not a deadbolt mounted on someone else's door. For this kind of work, I have effective, but mundane tools.
After the drive-by, I parked down the road and covered the distance on foot. The front gate was unlocked, so I let myself in and had a look over the barriers to entry. They were formidable: The front facade was separated from the rear yard by a high brick-and-steel spiked fence. The front door was locked, the windows closed and locked with roller shutters. There was going to be an electronic security system, maybe even cameras.
The gate into the backyard was locked with a classic cylinder deadbolt. I set my messenger bag down there and crouched, removing a ring of bump keys. Bump keys are evenly notched along their lengths, like a comb. Three of the keys had small rubber O-rings fitted near the head. To use bump keys, you match a key to the size of the lock and insert it, slowly, while tapping it with a heavy object. I took my knife from my pocket, fixed my eyes ahead on nothing, and used the key to feel for the tumblers and bump them open. One, two, three, four. It clicked, and I was in. Sticking to the shadows, alert for the sounds and smell of dogs, I made my way down the white pebbled path that led into the rear yard.
Vincent’s backyard was a gaudy concrete courtyard full of statues, pots, and cheap-looking—though undoubtedly expensive—Faux-Classical ornaments. A swimming pool lapped and gurgled in the darkness, storm-gray under the heavy, smoggy sky. The night wind had a bitter edge that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck, and I held the knife low, the blade turned away, as I advanced around towards the back door.
The garden bed just next to the attached sunroom was planted with rows of mature angel’s trumpets, and my nose was full of the dizzying vanilla smell of them as I unlocked the door with my bump keys. It was a strange plant to grown in a heavily trafficked place like this. Angel’s Trumpets, Datura, are very poisonous and are used to make one of the more terrifying drugs to come out of Colombia, scopolamine. I knew of it because it was an ingredient used to create zombies: the living slave sort, not the walking dead.
I turned on a small flashlight to scrutinize the second lock on the inside door. It was of better make than the last one, with a heavy bump-proof cylinder. Frowning, I put the keys away and, with the flashlight clutched between my teeth, got out a small tension wrench and picks. After five minutes and two broken picks, I was finally able to press in the trick tumbler and carefully, delicately turn the lock. Done.
I pulled a cap down over my ears, shouldered my tool bag, and padded inside with the knife up and ready, warily navigating the sunroom in the dark. Light spilled across the floor from a door further down. I let my eyes adjust, my breathing harsh in my own ears. The sunroom was pretty enough, like the rest of the house, though the plants that lined the glass sill along the far wall were brown-lipped and dying. Something about the stillness of the air was acutely uncomfortable, an eerie disturbance of the ear like a badly tuned violin being sawed at its highest key. Nothing was visibly wrong, but the place felt... hollow. Wounded and bleeding, like Nacari’s dump site.
The kitchen was expensively furnished, the air of the interior house cool and temperate, but I did not step inside. Every room had a motion sensor, but judging by the sensor lights, only the rooms beyond the kitchen were armed. The control panel was just outside the kitchen door in the sunroom, a ten-digit number pad with newish numbers.
The unsubtle way to deal with any electronic device is to draw a sigil on it and blow it with a push of blunt force power. A more skilled mage could probably do it without setting the wall on fire, but they’d still probably draw the cops. The problem a lot of spooks have is that as a true magus, capable of the Art, they tend to over-rely on their eldritch might. Being caught out by a problem that can’t be solved with magic has been the downfall of many spooks better than me. They have a prison just for us, somewhere out in Wisconsin, and you can bet there are mages in the police force: The Adepts of the Vigiles Magicarum. They track and profile spooks. Legends say that magi are a subtle breed, and it is always good to prove them right.
I took my flashlight and a small mirror and used the intense, reflected light to scan the surface of the keypad. The thing about ten-digit number locks like this one is that the own
ers very rarely change the numbers. If there are no break-ins, they forget to change the code, or they do it infrequently—perhaps twice a year, if that. The codes are always four digits. People also often use their birth day and month or the year of their birth. I knew Vincent’s, but it was important to look and check first.
The light caught the delicate prints and smears of grease on the buttons. I leaned in and exhaled hoarsely against the metal a few times until they could be seen more clearly. To my surprise, only three digits were highlighted: Vincent had better sense than most. Three buttons, four numbers. One of them was a repeat. Zero had the heaviest prints and the most smearing, followed by one and four. I tried it: 0104. When I hit the key button, the sensor lights shut off.
Yes. Good password, but he had greasy hands.
Something clicked overhead. I froze, gut tightening, and only eased down when a puff of cold, crisp air blew against my face from an overhead vent. Air conditioning. There was mail on the kitchen counter, but it was all bills and junk. I rubbed my gloves on a soft cloth, then started my investigation from the counter outwards. The pantry was stocked with snacks, and the refrigerator shelves were packed full of food of all kinds: amongst them was a box of reasonably fresh pizza with a half-empty bottle of beer beside it. The lit lights, the air-con, the alarms, the lack of mess... everything told me the same story. Vincent’s home had not been invaded and its occupant removed. It had been abandoned.
I trod quietly through the rest of the house, which was unlit, and the lights behind me gleamed off the knife blade. I passed through spills of cold, stale-smelling scent. The air of the den was heavy, humming with faint electrical discharge from the abandoned appliances. Signs of Vincent and Yuri’s habitation remained: impressions of their buttocks on the plastic sheets that covered the Romanesque furniture, an empty bottle of beer on the table, the small flask of cheap Polish vodka beside it. Two half-filled glasses and a stack of video cassettes sat beside the VCR.
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