Jack Wakes Up (18 page)

Next they head north toward the waterfront and the meeting with Alex Castroneves. In the car, Jack drives with the windows open so he can hear the air rushing past. It sounds like a 151

vortex, but at least it sounds. Vlade motions for Jack to roll up the window, and Jack does. “I guess you must want to say something,” Jack says.

When he gets the window up, Vlade says, “I want to say something.” Jack nods. He’s watching the road but steals a glance at Vlade and sees he’s serious. “Niki and I used to be KGB, Jack. I want you should know. We can make that problem back there go away.”

Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know about in your country, man, but here shit like that doesn’t just disappear. That was a big fucking mess back there. Fingerprints, witnesses—”

Vlade nods. “That is why I tell you.” He opens his hands on his lap. “We are sorry. I am sorry. We did not want to get you involved in all of this, but now it is too late.”

“Too late? Now we’re driving around in a car with bullet holes in it, my car, the ’66 Fastback K-code. Bullet holes. Fuck.”

“Yes. We are sorry, I can tell you.”

“Fuck. Fucking holes Vlade, five of them in my car.”

Vlade puts his hand on Jack’s knee and yells, “We will pay you for the damages, Jack. We will pay!”

“I can hear you,” Jack says, shaking Vlade’s hand off his knee. “You don’t have to yell anymore.”

Vlade turns to Jack, surprised. “Good. It is good you can hear again. You should be normal soon.”

“It’s OK,” Jack says. “I’m just upset about the car.”

“Then OK. But let me tell you what I was saying to you, Jack.” Vlade waits a second, then continues. “Niki and I have been agents for the KGB. We know other agents come here and to work in drug industry. They do not like that we have left, moved to Czech. That man, the one who shoot at us in the car and at the club last, he was also K.G.B. A Russian. That is why this is serious. There will be others here too. His friends. These Russians.”

Jack watches the road; he’s doing his best to make out everything that Vlade’s saying, put all of the pieces together. “What about Al and David?”

“These others, David? Al?” He waves his hand dismissively. “Pfft. This is all fun and games for them. They want to have good time and explore American country. But to us this is serious.

This is about life and dealing.”

“And what about Michal?”

“Yes,” Vlade says. “He was ex-KGB too. That is why we are so upset when he got killed.

Why we have to revenge him.”

Jack’s getting closer to the piers; he looks back in the rear view and sees that Niki and the others are right there behind him. “And now you did?”

“Yes. But there will be others.”

“OK, but my guess is that that mess back there is going to come after us, even if it takes a little while. Our prints were all over that car.” Jack takes his cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

“You see this? When it starts ringing and it’s a policeman on the other end, he’s going to want some answers. And if he doesn’t get them, he’s going to bring our asses in.”

Vlade shakes his head, pointing to the Bay and the bridge, and beyond that the roads that lead east. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will be gone.”

They park near the piers in one of the expensive pay lots for tourists. Normally Jack would want to spend some time looking for a parking lot that had an easy way out, but they’re late enough, and he doesn’t want to miss Castroneves. It’s a Saturday afternoon and the piers are jammed full of tourists—more than crowded, they’re packed almost wall-to-wall with people wanting to see the seals, go to the aquarium, take boats out around the Bay, to Angel Island and Alcatraz. Jack and the Czechs have to go all the way up to the top level to find open parking spaces. From here, they can look down on Pier 39, where they’ll be having the meet. Jack leads the Czechs to the edge of the lot and then points down to where Alex will be. There are a lot of tourists walking around, watching the street performers and shopping. Almost everything below them is a restaurant or some kind of boat trip into the bay. And all of them are crowded. At the meet, Jack will be surrounded by the crowds, which is good: no one will have an open shot if anything goes wrong. Jack turns back toward the parking lot to face the Czechs. “He only wants one of you this time,” Jack says, and then, knowing who it’ll be, “Who’s going to come?”

Vlade steps forward.

Jack nods. “The rest of you can watch us from up here. When you see us coming out from behind that building,” he points to the Hard Rock Café, the first of the shops on the pier. “Bring this rental SUV piece of shit down there and get us. We don’t need to be out there with this kind of product for too long.”

Niki steps to the edge of the parking lot, acts like he’s holding a rifle and sighting down onto the pier; he points into the crowd. There’s no way he’s going to get a clear shot: they’ll be less than fifty feet away from the crowd, but with so many people all milling around, he’ll never get a fix on one person. But maybe that’s not Niki’s goal. If shots are fired, most of the tourists will either panic or hit the deck, maybe both. He nods and gives Jack the thumbs up.

“Right,” Jack says. “If something, anything, goes bad, get your asses down there in the car.

Fast.”

Vlade says something else to them in Czech that David and Al respond to. This leads the three of them into a heated discussion, Al pointing at David and Vlade and yelling, then David chiming in. Jack watches for a minute and then interrupts. “Guys. Guys.” He taps on his watch.

“Time to go.”

They cut it short, and David gives the briefcase to Vlade.

“Listen,” Jack says. “This is good. I told you tomorrow we’d have this stash for you and now we’ll have it today, Saturday. We’re way ahead of schedule. Great, right?”

The Czechs look less enthused than Jack would have hoped. Part of it is the fact that they got shot at out of nowhere, and that they’re giving up their money to Jack and Vlade while they have to wait and cross their fingers, but really, it’s not all that bad. Jack reminds them, “Soon you guys will be out on the open road, having good times and laughing about all of this. OK?”

They nod. “OK,” David says.

Al looks like he just wants to shoot up the whole pier and Castroneves, like he won’t be happy with anything less.

“Fuck.” Jack nods to Vlade. “Let’s go then.”

From the foot of the parking lot stairs, it’s a short walk across the street and over a small stand of damp, bumpy grass onto the Waterfront Park area, where the crowds begin: tourists walk around wide-eyed, and the Navy and Marines have set up stands for recruiting. The Saturday afternoon crowds are dense, watching all of the Wharf events happen around them. On a stage 155

outside of the Hard Rock Café, a band of four female singers and an all-male backup band plays to whoever will listen—mostly tourists from out of town and families with matching sweatshirts that say “SF” on them somewhere, most of which get bought because people don’t expect the weather to be cold here in sunny California and then need another layer. Some of the people have on T-shirts and shorts, some have jeans and sweatshirts. It all depends on whether you’re in the sun or not. Jack’s gotten used to the weather, but he still gets cold all the time. Now he’s got his leather jacket on and checks his phone: still no call from Maxine.

“Task at hand,” Jack whispers to himself, repeats it like a mantra. “Task at hand.”

Vlade starts tapping his ring against the handle of the briefcase, and Jack’s glad he can hear it—it’s a small sound in all of the crowd noise and the music—though Vlade’s tension puts him on edge. Now would be the perfect time for a cigarette, but Jack pats himself down. They’re back in the car somewhere, not in his pockets. With this many people around them, it could be hard to smoke though; they have to weave through the crowd to get anywhere, go wide around the gathering at the front of the bandstand. Groups stand around talking, some browse at the restaurant windows looking at menus, others walk quickly to the escalator entrance for the San Francisco Aquarium. Further out Jack can see a huge NFL shop and more restaurants advertising as many kinds of seafood as you can imagine. Kids are running everywhere.

“So you were KGB?”

Vlade nods.

“What’re you doing here then, partying it up and buying cocaine? How’s that fit?”

The two walk closer together. A kid runs right at them and only realizes at the last moment that Jack and Vlade aren’t going to part and let him through; he almost crashes into Jack’s legs but manages to turn himself at the last second.

“David and Al are our friends,” Vlade says. “Al is just a businessman but he thinks he is K.G.B.”

“He’s fucking crazy,” Jack says.

Vlade laughs. “He is not all bad. A little hot-headed, yes. But good in business.”

They pass a small ice cream stand similar to the one where Juan José bought Jack a cone the last time he was here. There’s still no sign of Castroneves; Jack looks at his watch: they’re ten or fifteen minutes later than he planned, just over the two-hour mark. He hopes Castroneves hasn’t left, understands he’d be spooked given what happened at The Mirage and might disappear if anything didn’t feel right. They walk around the line of people waiting to get ice cream.

“We were agents in Czech Republic,” Vlade says. “Undercover. They set us up in business there to watch, report to K.G.B., and then, when the countries break up, we stay. We leave our duties and make business and now are friends. Now that we have money, we want the good times.”

Jack looks over at Vlade. “Did you speak Chinese to those guys at the body shop?”

Vlade nods. “Yes. I speak some Chinese, some German, Russian, Czech of course. The English.”

“That’s good. No Spanish?” Vlade shakes his head. “Then those aren’t going to help us now.”

Jack stops walking, looks around for Castroneves. “What was that back there downtown?” he asks Vlade. “You guys went apeshit.”

“No,” Vlade says. “We cause mess, yes. But it will go all right, as I tell you. That man in the car, he see us in club and start shooting. He shoot at us from his car. We know that he is Russian.

How does he find us?” Vlade shrugs. “So we have to shoot back. When his papers come through, they see he is non-person, already dead in our country. Your police won’t know what to do.”

Jack starts to say something, but Vlade cuts him off. “We don’t have time to guess, Jack. We know. We act.”

“No,” Jack says. “But now there’s a block of downtown with cars and blood all over the place. How’s that shit not going to come after us?”

“Yes,” Vlade says, shaking his head. “This is not good.” He spits on the ground. “Now we have to finish and move on. Our time is more important now.”

“Damn right.” Jack starts to take out his cell phone to make the point again about Sgt.

Hopkins calling him at any time, but he sees Castroneves up ahead in the crowd, toward the end of the pier. Jack points toward him with his chin and they start to move. “The guys in the Ford might not have been K.G.B. And I don’t know if it’s better or worse for us if they weren’t. Shit.”

Jack shakes his head, trying to clear out the fog and what’s left of the ringing. “Someone else could have sent them, too.”

“No,” Vlade says. “This I tell you: this is reason why.”

Castroneves notices them and raises his right hand above his shoulder, gives a slight wave.

He’s with another guy, someone Jack doesn’t recognize from The Mirage, probably his new Juan José. They both have nice suits on, Castroneves’ a light blue. He starts to move across the pier to the far side, coming slightly toward Jack and Vlade, but moving away from them as well. Then he turns toward a row of shops and a small coffee shop set into the rest of the restaurants. Jack and Vlade start to head for the same shop. Castroneves stops at its glass window, sets down a large, white shopping bag on the ground.

Jack and Vlade have to move through the crowd to get there, and it takes them a little while.

Mothers with strollers, a large woman wearing a wide-collar T-shirt that reveals too much pale skin, another woman who looks just like her and must be related. Inside the coffee shop, several boys stand around in a circle, watching one of them play a hand-held video game of some kind while they wait for their parents to stand in the line.

“We are glad to see you,” Vlade says, looking at the shopping bag.

“Yes,” Castroneves says, scanning the crowd behind them. “You came alone?”

Jack nods. “The product?”

“Right here.” Castroneves looks at Vlade. “It is the amount we decided at the club. To be truthful, I was lucky to get it out before the police.”

Jack laughs. “You can thank your boy for that, as it turns out.”

Castroneves spits on the ground, wipes his mouth. He says something to his friend in Spanish. This new guy is wearing a dark suit and a silky black shirt, tucked in. He’s got big silver cufflinks at the end of his sleeves, his hair slicked back. Castroneves points his chin at Jack, says,

“What is this now?”

“Your friend. The owner of The Mirage. He’s the one who called the police.”

“Motherfucker.” Castroneves spits again onto the ground. This time he doesn’t wipe his face.

He says something else in Spanish to his guy. The guy makes a fist and wraps his other hand around it. He regards Jack like he’s ready to hurt someone. “How do you know this? This about Vitelli?” Castroneves asks.

“Vitelli?” Jack says. “How’s he in this?”

“He is my friend who owns the club Mirage.”

“Fuck,” Jack says, feeling like a few of the pieces just slammed together. “So that bastard knew the whole time.”

Castroneves looks disgusted. “How do you know this?”

“I have a friend on the force,” Jack says. “I heard it from the inside this morning.”

Castroneves tightens his lips into a pucker, then makes a noise from the back of his mouth.

He looks like he might spit again, but doesn’t. “How do I know you are telling me the truth? That you did not tell the cops?”

“Come on,” Jack says. He gives Castroneves a few slaps on the shoulder. “Who’s here now with you, with a trunk of money and a crazy fucking Czech K.G.B. assassin buying your blow?”