Father Night (15 page)

“I understand,” Jack said, though he had no clear sense that they could successfully emerge from this encounter without gunfire.

Inside the car, Annika was already awake and stirring. He filled her in as to why the train was stopping and asked her to rouse her father and Katya. He crossed to help Kurin take the cushions off the old love seat. Underneath was a plank of wood, worn smooth as a baby’s cheek, and the same color. Kurin knelt and inserted a tiny key into an almost invisible hole just beneath the curved arm. An instant later, the plank popped up, revealing a framework of struts and crossbeams.

“Will this work?” Jack said.

“It had better.” Kurin lifted the framework out in one piece. Beneath, a hollowed-out space gaped. “Or chances are we’re all done for.”

*   *   *

A
LLI GOT
the text from Waxman during her last morning class. She had her cell on vibrate mode, so only she knew it had come in. She read it with the cell under the desk, shielded from sight. When she was finished, she looked up to find Vera watching her.

So,
Vera texted.

Lunchtime,
Alli texted back.

Vera returned a compact complicit smile. Her profound mischievous streak was one of the things Alli liked about her; Vera was always up for anything, no matter how illicit or dangerous. Rebellion was, by and large, how she dealt with what she saw as a deeply hostile world. It had not taken Alli long to understand why she was so closed off, why she lacked sympathy or even empathy for others. She had no idea of what those emotions were; she would not know what to do with them. In fact, when on occasion they did arise, Alli had witnessed Vera shrinking from them like a frightened turtle. Otherwise, however, she was utterly fearless, even, in Alli’s opinion, to the point of recklessness. Nevertheless, she was the only ally Alli could count on right now. Even Jack, were he here, would try to stop her from meeting again with Waxman.

Class was dismissed on time at 12:25.

“Lunch,” Alli said as she passed Dick Bridges, who lurked in the hallway like Medusa, ready to turn any threatening presence into stone.

“Want to come with?” Vera said to him in her most nonchalant tone. “I guess even you have to eat sometime.” This was all according to plan.

The three of them went off-campus to Starstruck Eats, a luncheonette Alli and Vera favored because of its 1960s rock ’n’ roll theme. Posters of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, and Elvis vied for attention on the walls. “Please Please Me” was playing from multispeaker outlets as they sat in a high-backed booth covered with lipstick-red vinyl. The table had chromium sides and that iconic period boomerang pattern on its Formica top. The waiters all wore T-shirts with slogans such as M
AKE
L
OVE,
N
OT
W
AR
, N
EVER
T
RUST
A
NYONE
O
VER
30
, and Y
OU
A
RE A
C
HILD OF THE
U
NIVERSE
. Their waitress’s shirt was emblazoned with S
EX,
D
RUGS AND
R
OCK &
R
OLL
, which fit both her foxy looks and her demeanor. Alli had to laugh. The waitress dropped off three large menus, filled their water glasses while flirting intensely with Bridges, and was gone, all in an instant.

Bridges frowned to cover his embarrassment. “This place serves liquor. Isn’t she too young to work here?”

“What’s the matter?” Vera said. “Can’t deal with your hard-on?”

Bridges buried his head in the menu while Vera laughed openly.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Alli said. “She’s got no inhibitor on her mouth.”

Bridges lowered his menu, but his throat still looked scarlet. “This was a mistake.”

“What was?”

“Agreeing to come eat with you.”

“It’s a free country,” Vera observed. “Buzz off, if you want.”

“Like I said, ignore her.” Alli put down her menu. “I’m having a bacon cheeseburger, fries, extra-crispy, and a coffee milkshake. How about you, Dick?”

The Stones’ salacious version of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” blasted out of the speakers.

“Kids,” Bridges muttered.

“We’re not kids,” Vera said, clearly offended.

“You’ve still got cast-iron stomachs.”

“Oh, come on,” Alli said. “Live a little.”

He reached into his pocket, popped a couple of Zantacs, crunching down hard on the tablets. He swallowed and, as the waitress appeared, said, “What the hell.”

Alli gave their orders. Vera wanted a Caesar salad with a side of bacon. “Cooked fresh,” she added. “Don’t serve me any of that precooked shit.”

“Have you heard anything more from your sources?” Alli asked Bridges in all innocence.

“Blank walls and dead air,” he said glumly. “I’m beginning to think this was a fluky one-off.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Alli leaned back and stretched, nonchalant. “I’d like to think so, anyway.”

“Hey, Dick,” Vera said, “what do you do with yourself when you’re off duty? You married?”

“Was,” he said sourly. “I’m a walking cliché.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Vera!”

“No, it’s okay,” he said, waving away Alli’s protest. “There is someone, but to be honest, she’s more interested than I am.”

Vera leaned forward. “You interested in anything, then?”

“Keeping Alli safe.”

“I mean beyond that.”

He shrugged. “Not much.”

“Dead man walking, huh? How come?”

He paused for a long time, as if weighing the consequences of his words. “When you fail at the job you love, it changes your perspective on everything.”

The Stones’ “Play with Fire” ripped through the shocked silence. Vera looked away, unable for the moment to meet his gaze.

“Because of my dad,” Alli said at length.

Bridges nodded. “My job was to protect him.”

“But no one could’ve protected him from that accident. You’d have to’ve been a magician.”

“Still.”

Alli considered a moment. “Anyway, I imagine that kind of thing would make you think of life as more precious.”

“A logical conclusion,” Bridges said. “Whatever I’m feeling has nothing to do with logic.”

The food came, which afforded Alli time to feel very bad about what they were going to do to him. Still, she reasoned, it couldn’t be helped. She had to make her appointment with Waxman in twenty minutes, which would never happen if Bridges was shadowing her.

As they began to eat, she sent a clandestine text message. This was a meal she would normally have savored, but now she could taste none of the food. Halfway through her burger, as, according to her plan, Vera engaged Bridges in a conversation guaranteed to both nettle and distract him, she excused herself, ostensibly to take a pee. Thinking about it beforehand, she figured she’d have no more than three minutes, four at the outside, to slip out of Starstruck Eats and get clear of the immediate area before Bridges grew suspicious.

The early afternoon was chilly but glowing with bright sunshine and promise. She wished it were raining, or at least smudgy with haze, but she had to play the hand dealt her. Besides, without her winter jacket, she was already breaking out in gooseflesh under her turtleneck sweater. The taxi, whose company she had texted from beneath the boomerang-patterned table, drew up just as she turned the corner. Hauling open the rear door, she ducked inside and gave an address eight blocks from the actual meeting point. If she was a few minutes late because she walked part of the way, so be it. She knew better than to leave a trail to where she was actually going.

Waxman had given her an address in the southwest quadrant of Washington, all the way at the end of P Street, where it abutted the Washington Channel. She already knew what was there: a thirteen-foot-tall red granite statue of a partly clothed man with his arms outstretched, a memorial erected to the men who had died saving women and children when the
Titanic
had been hit by an iceberg in the North Atlantic. His pose was the one James Cameron had had Kate Winslet ape at the bow of the ship in the film. Most importantly, the memorial was a block away from Fort McNair, so the meeting spot made perfect sense to Alli. Ideally, she would have taken the subway’s Green Line to Waterfront Station, but she could not determine whether it would get her to the rendezvous within a reasonable time frame.

When the taxi pulled over on Eighth Street SW, she paid in cash and exited as quickly as she could. She walked in the opposite direction she needed to until the taxi was out of sight, then turned around and walked quickly down to Fourth Street SW, made a right, and headed toward the junction of P Street SW.

The
Titanic
monument loomed up, but the area around it was cordoned off with wooden sawhorses, so no tourists were around. In fact, the area was deserted.

She saw Waxman when she was still more than a block away. His back was to her, but between his walking stick and his faintly ridiculous porkpie hat, he stood out like a cold sore on a lip.

Coming up to him, she said, “You know, Waxman, you should lose the porkpie and get yourself an ace fedora.”

The instant he turned around, she saw it wasn’t Waxman who confronted her, but a man who, unfolding himself from a first-rate imitation of Waxman’s stance, appeared to be much younger, much more fit.

And then, as he lifted his head, the brim of the porkpie no longer obscured his face, and she felt the blood freeze in her veins.

E
IGHT

“T
HERE IS
only one way to play this,” Kurin said. They had been joined by Huey, a squat man with red jowls and wisps of hair standing up on top of his semibald pate.

The train, having slowed to the proper speed, was about to be shunted off to the siding, where the men in long leather coats and grim faces were waiting to board and, presumably, go through the cars.

“If it doesn’t work we’re all in a shit-pile we’ll never get out of.”

Were they looking for Dyadya Gourdjiev or were they looking for the illegal immigrants the circus was hiding under its multicolored tents? Either way, Jack thought, Kurin was right—gunplay was out of the question if they wanted to get to Saint Petersburg without an official committee waiting to take all of them into custody. Jack was already regretting talking the ringmaster into taking them out of Moscow. There were a lot of innocents on this train, people who depended on the circus for their livelihood. It was their life.

“This goes in two parts,” Kurin continued. “Jack and Annika will go with Huey to the elephants. Mr. Gourdjiev and Katya, you’re with me.”

“I don’t like us splitting up,” Annika said.

The train clickity-clacked off the main track and onto the siding rails.

“No time for protests now,” the ringmaster said. “We have only minutes before we’re boarded.” He looked from one to the other. “Everyone do as you’re told. All right?” He gestured them into action. “Quickly, now.”

*   *   *

“Y
OU’RE NOT
listening to me,” Vera said with the kind of prurient vitriol only she could muster, but by this time Bridges was immune to her slings and arrows.

“She’s gone.” Looking up from his cell phone, he threw a wad of bills onto the table and rose. “Come on.”

“What? Where do you think—?” Vera gave a little owl hoot as he reached across the table and lifted her bodily to her feet. He was immensely strong, and now, she could tell, immensely determined.

“Did you think you could get away with this a second time?” he said as he herded her out the diner door and down the concrete steps. A dark-colored four-door sedan was waiting for them, its engine humming. Pushing her into the backseat, he climbed in beside her. The sedan took off even before he was fully settled.

“She took a cab to Eighth Street Southwest,” the granite-faced driver said. No neck, shoulders as broad as a shithouse, he looked like a corn-fed linebacker on steroids.

As the sedan sped south, Bridges glanced over at Vera, who was intensely studying the apelike back of the driver’s neck. “I won’t bother asking you where she went—”

“I don’t fucking know,” Vera snapped. “And even if I did…” She didn’t bother to end the sentence.

“Cut the attitude,” Bridges said. “This idiotic idea could get Alli killed.”

Vera curled her upper lip. “Christ, don’t go all Jason Bourne on me. Everything’s under control. You’re the one who’s out of—”

“Who is she meeting?”

Vera shrugged. She could feel Bridges’s animosity rising like a cobra out of a wicker basket, and this only got her back up even more.

Bridges leaned forward. “Lenny, I need you to get us the fuck there five minutes ago.”

“I’m doing the best I can, boss. Look at this fucking traffic.”

“If this’s your best, I’ll come up there and take the wheel myself.” Bridges put his face close beside the driver’s. “Trust me, Lenny, you don’t want that to happen.”

“No, boss, I sure as shit don’t.” Leaning forward himself, Lenny turned the wheel and the sedan jumped the curb, running half along the sidewalk, scaring the crap out of every pedestrian in the vicinity. When they began to scream obscenities, he repeatedly slammed the heel of his hand on the horn to drown them out.

A block and a half later, they had skirted the tie-up and Lenny guided the sedan back onto the street. “There it is,” he said, pointing up ahead.

“Keep going. Don’t slow down,” Bridges commanded. “She’s smart enough not to have the taxi let her off at the rendezvous.”

He looked around. “We’re near Fort McNair.”

“Yeah,” Lenny said, “and the
Titanic
Memorial.”

“Righto, but she could have gone anywhere along here,” Bridges said. “Even into a house or an apartment building.”

The sedan slowed, cruising while the tension inside ratcheted up to an unbearable level.

Vera stirred beside Bridges, and he turned. “What?” His eyes narrowed, but when he spoke again, his tone had turned conciliatory. “What aren’t you telling me?”