The Domino Game (44 page)

He looked aside, measuring his response, turning back to his daughter and fixing her with his gaze.

“I understand,” he said evenly. He thought for a moment. “Yesterday when we were at the cafe, further along the boardwalk we could see a fun park: roller coasters and a big wheel?”

Larisa nodded solemnly. “It’s called Coney Island. Katrina told me about it. She said she would take me there. There’s a funfair, like Gorky Park, but a lot bigger.”

Nikolai watched her. Thought about how to say this without causing her alarm. His hand closed gently on his daughter’s shoulder. “Larisa, this is very important.” Her eyes held his. “If anything should happen… If you are afraid or if there is a problem of any kind I want you to go there. Go to the big wheel and wait for me there.” He cast a glance across his shoulder to the travel bag that lay propped against the legs of the chair. “Take the bag, alright? Whatever you do, don’t lose it. There’s money in the side pocket. Use whatever you need.”

Larisa’s eyes flicked across the room and returned to his. Her voice began to falter. “What if you don’t come?”

Nikolai pressed his smile as far as it would go. “I will,” he said quietly. “Remember what I said. We only have each other so you must trust me as I trust you.”

The car was a Jaguar. Painted silver, low and sleek, its cabin drenched with the heavy rich smell of leather. There was a black hole in the dash, gouge marks to the timber around it where the radio deck had been pried loose leaving a twisted trail of red and black wires that hung down across the center console. Nikolai sat silently in the passenger seat as Yuri guided the car north through Brooklyn and Queens, taking the reverse of the route Sergei had driven when he had picked them up at La Guardia a few nights before. To the west the towers of Manhattan rose against the skyline like the bars of a crowded graph. As they drew closer to the airport Yuri picked up a highway that swung left, taking them onto the approach to a massive bridge that thrust out across the river. Nikolai pulled down the visor to block the lowering sun and turned to the man next to him.

“Where are we?”

Yuri looked ahead, his gloved hands set on the wheel. Why the gloves, Nikolai wondered. “Triborough Bridge,” he answered sparingly. “Crossing the East River.”

Nikolai turned back to the road. “Where are we going?”

Yuri shrugged his thick shoulders. “Upstate,” he replied without expansion.

Nikolai squinted against the sun. “How long?”

Another shrug. “An hour or so.”

There was no point, Nikolai recognized, in pursuing the conversation. Instead he settled back, thinking, nursing the black nylon jacket cast across his lap.

What was it Larisa had sensed, he wondered?

Whatever it was he now felt his own tense foreboding. Since Novokuznetsk everything had happened so smoothly and so fast he had barely had time to think. But now the fragments of illusion were beginning to form a shape. When he was a child – perhaps nine or ten – his parents had somehow found the money to buy him a small electric train set. He would sit in his room in their tiny flat and play with it for hours, enthralled by the way he could set the toy engine down on the shiny silver rails and immediately some unseen power would seize it from his hands and propel it forward, round and around on its circular course, while from the switchbox on the side he could control its speed and even its direction, slowing it down one minute, speeding it up the next, bringing it to a stop and throwing it into reverse. The faster the engine went the more mesmerized he became as he watched it loop the track, past little wooden houses and a tall water tank and through the station, past the platform where tiny painted figures waited, round and around and around, so fast that after a while everything began to blur, and that was how he felt now. Like that train. As though he had been set down on a line already charged with current, invisible hands regulating his speed and his direction, propelling him forward at a pace that left no opportunity to question individual events or their sequence, each vague doubt or uncertainty swept aside by the next turn of the track. He gazed out the window, replaying his course, slowing it down, considering people and events and coincidence now in a different light. As his mind worked, his hand absently smoothed the fabric of the jacket draped across his legs, his fingers tripping to rest on something out of place. Something rigid and almost square in shape, smooth and flat beneath his touch.

He stopped. Shifted in his seat and threw a sideways glance. Yuri’s eyes were fixed on the road, his wrapped hands nursing the wheel. Nikolai drew the jacket aside and slipped his fingers into the inside pocket, their tips tracing the object’s surface – a booklet of some kind – feeling their way around its curved edge. As casually as he was able he folded his left arm across his body, forming a shielded space in its crook where his fingers could work. Gradually, inch by inch, he eased the object free until it rested ominously in his lap, his eyes lowering, settling on the deep red cover with its embossed gold lettering.

He blinked. Glanced at Yuri again and then back to his lap, his eyes narrowing as his mind worked the puzzle.

It was a passport. But he had no passport…

The documents Vari had arranged had been handed over to Sergei the morning after they had arrived. He needed them, he had said, to arrange the American papers. So what was this and where had it come from?

He edged the cover aside with his thumb and a face he had forgotten stared back at him. A younger version of himself, trapped behind a celluloid shield, with clear unsuspecting eyes and an open, confident smile and his own name –
Nikolai Aven
– typed below in bold Cyrillic script. He found his head moving, turning gradually from side to side in dismay as his eyes rolled down across the rows of type below. It was the passport he had been issued more than a decade ago when he and Natalia had travelled to Estonia to set up their overseas account. The passport he had been carrying in his jacket pocket the night they had taken him from the street.

His brow drew tight as his eyes fell to the dates.

It had expired now but it was still his passport. His likeness. His name.

He glanced up and found Yuri regarding him, his small dark eyes shifting inquisitively between Nikolai’s face and his lap. He swung his gaze back to the road and spoke ahead.

“You alright? You look pale. Like you seen a ghost.”

Nikolai flicked the booklet closed and slid it back into the sheath of the pocket, thinking. His mind fell back to the image of the toy train gliding onwards, diligently gathering momentum as the hand at the side twisted the dial. Picking up speed and whirling faster and faster around the track.

Yuri swung the Jaguar onto a wide parkway heading north and tripped the gas and the sleek sedan shot forward, the sudden acceleration pushing Nikolai back against his seat.

So whose hand was it, he wondered. Who was working the controls?

34

They were an
hour into the trip – fifteen minutes into the countryside – when Yuri slid the Jaguar onto the road’s soft shoulder bringing its wheels to a crunching stop in the gravel. His hand slid into his jacket pocket and Nikolai’s limbs instinctively tensed then relaxed again as Yuri pulled out a cell phone, his short squat fingers stabbing buttons, making an error, cancelling and trying again. He held the cell to his left ear, reaching across with his right hand to open the door, dumping it back on its hinges as he waited for an answer then, when it came, swinging his legs out of the carpeted tunnel and onto the gravel, pulling himself upright, sauntering away from the car as he began to talk.

When he was ten paces off with his back turned, standing at the edge of a grass bank overlooking the river, Nikolai reached for the catch of the glove box, dropping the polished timber door and working quickly through its contents. A street directory for Baltimore. Insurance and registration. Notes and receipts. A cheap silver-barreled ballpoint pen. A small matt black plastic case. He retrieved the case and thumbed the lid. Found a slender black torch nestled in the gray foam housing; next to it a miniature Swiss Army knife. He scooped them out, snapped the lid into place and tossed the box back into the glove compartment. Hesitated a moment then grabbed the pen; slipped everything into his trouser pocket and pressed the compartment cover closed as Yuri turned away from the river, studying the face of his cell phone a second then flicking it shut.

He slid back into the driver’s seat and Nikolai cast him a questioning glance.

“Final check. It’s all on.” He glanced at his watch. “We are to be there around seven-thirty. Plenty of time.”

Nikolai nodded. Glanced around. They were pointed north on a country highway that traced the line of the Hudson. On the right side of the road dense green forest trickled down the hill and pressed in tight to the shoulder. On the left the verge extended to the lush grassed knoll where Yuri had been standing. Beyond it the gray river glistened with flakes of evening light. Every so often another car swept by, blasting aside a rush of displaced air. Otherwise, apart from the evening chatter of the birds and the crickets, everything was silent. Nikolai ran down his window and listened to the quiet, his right hand working unobserved beneath the cover of the black nylon jacket.

After a moment he sprung his door, glancing back to Yuri, answering the other man’s unspoken question. “I need to take a leak.”

Yuri nodded and pulled out a packet of Turkish cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. As Nikolai passed in front of the low raking hood he lit up and drew in the smoke, his head turning slowly, observing Nikolai’s path.

Nikolai reached the spot where Yuri had been standing and carried on a few paces beyond to a straggly cluster of bushes at the edge of the knoll. As he passed behind them his left hand moved to his zipper while, beyond the other man’s view, his right slid into his trouser pocket. When he was certain that the shrubs concealed him he pulled the passport from his pocket, tearing it into fragments and tossing them over the bank, watching the wind skitter them across the steep grassed slope below. He waited until they had dispersed, watching as the last section of red cover cartwheeled down to the water’s edge and slipped into the stream, the torn fraction of gold Cyrillic script on its surface glinting in the evening light as it drifted away. Then he turned and walked back, zipping up his trousers as he rounded the bushes. Yuri slipped out of the driver’s seat again as he approached, stretching his arms back from the shoulders and out to the sides. For the first time in the journey his face lifted in something approaching a smile.

“Tell you what,” he said, with a strained casualness, “why don’t you drive for a while?”

He yawned and stretched again, raising his arms, his jacket lifting briefly from his side. Beneath its hem Nikolai noticed the butt of the pistol tucked backwards into his belt. Yuri lowered his arms and the jacket fell back. Nikolai regarded him for a moment.

“Sure,” he said, finally, his expression cast in a tight shallow smile. “Why not?”

Kelly sat in the passenger seat of the big Mercedes, inclined slightly towards Alex Bukovsky, silently admiring his casual style. Not only was he charming and good looking and a marvelously attentive lover, but he also knew how to dress.

It had been a day in the country, more or less, if you could call North Salem
country.
She had entertained herself for an hour in the town while Alex disappeared for his meeting then they had driven on to Yorktown where they had stopped for a leisurely lunch. He had dressed down for the occasion. Dark brown, knock-around leather shoes, beige chinos with expensive wrinkles and a soft white, open-neck shirt with the cuffs turned back from his wrists, the white cotton a stark contrast to the deep golden tan of his arms. Kelly studied them: the sinews and muscles that worked beneath his skin as his hands rode the wheel. He cast a sideways glance and saw her watching him, looked up to the mirror and back to the road. She had dressed for the country too but, on reflection, with a little too much Madison Avenue chic. Taupe trousers from Sonya Rykiel with four hundred dollar sandals to match, topped off with an extravagant handmade shirt from Alexander Kabbaz. Trying too hard to make an impression, she decided, when they were already past that.

After Yorktown they’d taken a drive out to Croton-on-Hudson, spending a couple of hours wandering around the grounds of Van Cortland Manor, lazing away the late afternoon on the brick pathway they called the Long Walk, winding their way through the magnificent eighteenth century gardens. Then they’d headed back to the car and struck south again and now they were coming up to Mount Pleasant, which meant it would be another half hour to Pocantico Hills.

She watched Alex as he drove. Since the call he’d taken on his cell phone as they were pulling back onto the highway he had been unusually quiet and detached. She made a play now, to restart the conversation.

“You looking forward to it?” Kelly asked.

His lips pursed a moment. ‘To what?”

She kicked off her sandals, lifted one leg and crossed it under the other thigh, nestling back down again. “Meeting my dad.”

One side of a delayed reaction smile pressed across Alex’s profile. “Of course.” he answered. “I feel almost like I know him already.”

Her question came apropos of nothing. “I never asked you. How come you were in the pizza shop that night?”

His reaction seemed to follow on delay again, as if he had to think about the response. He shrugged. “I’ve been there before. They make great pizzas.”

Kelly studied him. Passable pizzas maybe, but great? Maybe Russian tastes were different.

He glanced at her. Must have decided himself that the explanation didn’t quite cut. “We have a customer nearby. I had a late appointment. I just decided to pick up something to eat on my way home. That’s all. No big deal.” He wrapped it all up with a dismissive shrug. Given the velocity with which their relationship had developed it seemed to Kelly there was something offhand about that. When it came to his explanation of their chance encounter she’d been hoping to hear words like
destiny
and
fate.
Instead she got
No big deal.
Curious.

They were on a long straight stretch of highway now. Where the wedge of perspective narrowed up ahead other cars were slowing, tail-lights flaring as drivers hit their brakes. When she peered more closely beyond the slowing traffic she could see the whirling flash of blue and red lights. Alex had seen them as well. A tight grimace was puffing at his face. Kelly looked back to the highway.

“Looks like a jam up ahead. Accident maybe.”

They were closing in now, slowing into the tail of a dozen propped vehicles. Ahead of the line two white police cruisers were chevroned across the traffic, dome lights swirling. Maybe twenty yards further on another cruiser stood at the center of the road holding back the traffic from the other direction. In the section of roadway cordoned off by the three police cars she could see the outline of a twisted overturned wreck. Alex eased off the gas and switched pedals and Kelly felt the tug of the brakes. From behind she caught the rising shriek of a siren. Her eyes traced across to the wing mirror, picking up the tinted reflection of more flashing lights coming up from behind.

Alex brought the car to a stop, his eyes falling to the console clock. Kelly heard him curse sharply under his breath.

“Hey,” she waved a hand aside dismissively. “No panic. At least it’s not us. No problem if we’re a little late.”

Her smile was met by a rigid silence. Alex was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his knuckles closed tight around the wheel. He was somewhere else. Another world, not this one. She reached her hand across and set it down on his thigh.

“What’s the matter?”

She peered at him, shaking her head at his silence. “Alex, tell me. What’s the problem?” His head turned briefly, his blue eyes glancing off her with an unfamiliar coolness. Kelly’s hand drew back.

“Alex…?” Her tone was suddenly cautious. “Alex, what is this? Talk to me. You’re scaring me.”

Wherever he had been for the last minute he suddenly returned. His face softened and the coolness lifted from his eyes as he swung towards her, reaching across to take her hand.

“I’m sorry, Kelly.” He pretended to look sheepish. “I’ve never liked surprises, that’s all.” He paused a moment then squeezed her fingers.

Kelly studied him with a bemused expression. Turned back to the road again, puzzling over his reaction.

Hartman checked the clock on the oven. Fifteen minutes or so and dinner would be ready. He just hoped everyone arrived on time. The chime came as he was finishing stacking the dishwasher. He closed the door, pulled the towel from his shoulder and wiped his hands then slung it back again, making his way around the kitchen bench, into the living room and on to the hall. Through the patterned sidelight he could see Gina standing on the veranda, slipping her car keys into her purse. When they’d completed the security audit on the house a few years back they’d gone crazy on locks. He supposed it made sense but it was a pain in the neck. Brass bolts and chains and catches everywhere, like a downtown hotel. He slid back the bolts, unhooked the chains and twisted the handle, hauling the door back into the foyer. Gina rolled her eyes at the performance. She stood on the stoop a moment shaking her head.

“Sometimes, Jack, I think you’re completely paranoid. I know the sort of stuff you’re into is top secret and everything but really, this is Sunday evening in Westchester. It’s not like we’re in Beirut.” She sighed with mock exasperation then switched to her deep dimpled smile, leaned towards him kissing him lightly on the lips then rocked back again and marched past, setting down her purse on a sideboard as he closed and bolted the door. As always, she looked terrific. This was her
West Side Story
ensemble. Tight black leggings that started six inches above her ankles and hugged her legs and hips all the way to the narrow belted waist: above them a black summer blouse dotted with tiny white spots, with a stand-up collar that traced the lower edge of her thick gleaming bob of almost black hair. She looked around with an expectant smile.

“So… I’m the first?”

He moved towards her, sliding an arm around her waist. “Yep. You’re early. Just us kids for now.” His gray eyes crinkled in a grin. “Wanna fool around a little?”

She prodded a bright red nail into his chest. “Behave yourself, buster. You’ve had your share today.” She turned around, giving herself a quick check over in the mirror, flicking back a stray strand of hair.

Hartman shrugged. “Okay. Please yourself.”

She turned again and traced a hand lightly across his crotch, grinning. “Why would I need to do that when you do such a terrific job.” She winked. “So,” her brows peaked. “How about a glass of wine?”

He pulled the towel from his shoulder and set off towards the kitchen. “Right this way, ma’am. Follow me.”

She held down the counter while he poured, touched glasses then took a sip. “Mmm,” she approved. “That’s good.” She lifted her nose to the air. “And so is whatever’s cooking.”

“Rack of lamb with olives and anchovies. Specialty of the house.”

Gina dipped her head in approval. “Smells terrific.” She sipped her wine, swallowing quickly, then set the glass down. “I almost forgot. I have something for you. Just give me a second, I’ll be right back.”

She slid around the counter and disappeared into the lounge, returning a few moments later carrying her purse, opening it and reaching inside, extracting a small, foil-wrapped package and setting it down on the counter.

Hartman looked at it. “For me?”

“For you,” she smiled. “Just a little good luck gift for Monday.”

She knew what he did for a living, of course. She’d never pressed him for details but over the months they’d spent together he’d sketched it out. And there was no secret about his forthcoming appearance before the organized crime hearing; anyone who read the papers knew about that. He picked up the package, turning it around in his hand with a questioning look, found the end of the blue ribbon and tugged it. The knot unwound and the ribbon slithered to the bench as his fingers worked the turn of the wrapping. Inside was a small black leather box. He flipped the lid back on a set of gold monogrammed cufflinks nestled in a velvet pad. Loosened one onto his fingers and studied it with an expression of surprised delight.

“Gina, they’re beautiful.”

She gave a pleased shrug. “Just a little something for a very special man.” She held her smile and Hartman felt himself blush. He shook his head in embarrassed dismay.

“I’m overwhelmed. Really.”

She held his gaze for a moment then winked. Tucked her purse under her arm, picked up her glass and carried it across the room to the basement staircase, peering down the single flight to the door below, taking another mouthful of wine.

“You know, you’ve never showed me what it is you’ve got down here. How about a peek?”