The Pandora Key (31 page)

“Are you coming back? Or do I have to do this sick fucking thing by myself?”

Dan, who had not stopped to vomit, had apparently uncovered the body. He climbed out and popped another chemical light stick. I went to my bag of supplies and pulled out a set of gloves. They were heavy-duty fisherman’s gloves that came up to my elbows. I tossed a pair to Dan. Then I pulled out two pairs of surgical gloves and a couple of surgical face masks. Having been wrapped in plastic bags before he was planted, Vladi could be a skeleton or a still-rotting puddle of putrid tissue, but I figured one way or the other, there would be something bad to smell. We put on our masks, and I joined him at the side of the pit.

What Dan had dug out looked like a giant, mud-encrusted cocoon. “Do you think we have to pull him all the way out?”

He snapped on his first set of gloves. “What else would we do?”

“Slice open the plastic and dig around until we find his wallet. That way, we don’t have to see that much.”

“Right. We just have to stick our hands into it. Come on, Shanahan. How bad can it be?” He pulled on the heavier gloves and dropped down into the hole. “You didn’t happen to bring any rope, did you?”

“Uh, no.”

He shrugged. “I’ll push from down here. You pull from up there.”

He grabbed the feet end and yanked hard, dislodging the body from where it had been embedded for four years. Loose soil fell from around the roll of plastic. When he had it mostly worked out, he paused for a moment, perhaps to see if any ghosts came forth. If they had, they had arrived in silence. I crouched down. When he put the feet into my hands, only one thing came to mind. Vladi wasn’t a skeleton yet.

I started to pull. Dan moved along the body toward the head, pushing as he went. The fact that neither of us wanted to touch the thing was problematic.

“Grab him,” he said, huffing through his nose.
“Grab
him. Don’t let him roll the fuck back on me.”

“I’m trying. I can’t get a good…grip.”

The body wasn’t heavy as much as awkward and hard to hold. We teetered at one point with the mass hanging half in and half out, until I found a better way to grasp it. Unfortunately, the better way required me to put my arm around it. Dan gave one last shove and pushed the shoulders ashore. I rolled the mass away from the ledge and sat back on my butt. Dan climbed out and sank down next to me. The two of us sat there, sweating, breathing fast, eyes fixed on the task in front of us.

“We should get on with it,” I said after a few shallow breaths.

“Yeah.”

“Before someone comes and finds us.”

“I know.”

“This would be hard to explain.”

“No doubt.”

Neither of us moved. I could smell his exertion. I’m sure he could smell me. It was hard, dirty, tedious work, this grave robbing.

I stood up, reached down, and offered a hand. He grabbed it and pulled himself up. Then he surveyed the cigar-shaped package at our feet.

“I’ll take the head,” he said.

“No. You’re doing this as a favor to me.”

“For Harvey, Shanahan. I’m doing this for Harvey.”

“Whatever. I’ll take the head.”

I didn’t have to tell him twice. We took our positions and crouched. I found the place where the edge separated from the roll and nodded to him. The plastic was wrapped tightly around the corpse but not fastened in any way. As we started to unroll it, I had the absurd image of a crescent roll. The plastic was thick and dried out. It cracked and complained as we unwound Vladi’s shroud.

“We need to anchor the end,” I said. “Or it will just wrap itself again.”

Dan looked around and found a couple of heavy rocks. We used them as weights and kept unrolling. We went slowly, inch by inch, both of us drawing away as far as we could without losing contact. Nine-foot arms would have been useful.

“Jesus
fucking
Christ.” Dan was staring at the first thing to fall out at his end. It was a foot. Actually, it was a leather O. J. Simpson loafer with a foot in it. The shoe was stuck to the plastic, as if it had gum on the bottom, which meant it stopped as the rest of the body had rolled forward.

I sped up. Better to just take it in all at once and not piece by gruesome piece. One last roll, and there he was. Displayed on the ground in front of us were the earthly remains of Vladislav Tishchenko.

I had hoped for skeletonized. No such luck. The plastic, much like a large freezer bag, must have preserved him. He looked like Beetlejuice. His skull was partially covered with skin and random tufts of hair. There were no eyeballs, only sockets staring up at me. His suit was mostly still there. It was a double-breasted affair, probably brown, but it was being worn by only half a body or less. He had been wearing a gold chain, which was now draped around his spine.

“Shanahan.”

“What?”

“Get the wallet. Let’s plant this guy and get the fuck out of here.”

I moved around to where his waist was…had been. My outer gloves were too bulky to rifle through his pockets, so I took one off, leaving only the surgical glove. I started to reach and recoiled. It was instinctive. I had to concentrate really hard to reach down and lift his suit jacket. But once I had broken the barrier, once I had touched him, I couldn’t move fast enough. I turned him slightly to reach into his back pants pocket. I tried not to notice how the corpse moved under my hands. Parts of it around the waist felt somewhat solid but spongy. Other parts felt like what they were: a bag of bones. I tried his side pocket. Loose change and some keys. I pulled everything out and dumped it in the dirt behind me. No wallet.

I stepped across him to stand on the plastic and try the other side. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I forced every ounce of concentration I had into the few square inches where my hand was searching. His cell phone was in his other side pocket. I took it. There was nothing in the back pocket.

“Shit.
It’s not here. It’s not
here
.”

Dan was standing at his post near the feet. “Breast pocket,” was all he said.

Like an experienced necro-pickpocket, I lifted his jacket, reached in with just the tips of my thumb and index finger, and extracted a long, flat leather wallet. I took it over to where I’d dumped the other stuff. I whipped off the other big glove and started rifling. There was money. I pulled it out. It was a stack of hundreds. Driver’s license. No credit cards. Some kind of identification card written in Russian and what looked like a stack of food stamps, probably stolen. Here was a man who stole millions, maybe billions, and he felt a need to steal food stamps.

That was it. There was nothing else. There was no card or case or token. Nothing. I rocked back and sat on the ground.

“Maybe it’s one of these keys,” Dan said, poking at the key chain.

“It’s not a key. Not a real key. It’s a card the size of a credit card. I was sure it would have been in his wallet.” Dan went back to Vladi. Without hesitating, he reached down and patted down the entire body, starting at the shoulders. He found it in one of the pant legs, the one that still had a foot attached. He pulled out his knife, cut open the pants, and came out with a sleek carrying case, like a business card holder, only slightly bigger. He tossed it over.

“Oh, my God.” I couldn’t believe it. “This is it. This has to be it.”

“Must have been strapped to his leg.”

The case looked as if it might have been brass. I looked for the mechanism to open it but couldn’t find it. No buttons or slots or hinges. There must have been a trick. While I was looking, Dan was busy trying to roll up Vladi.

“A little help here?”

I gathered all the stuff we’d collected and dropped it into a plastic bag. I put the bag into my backpack. I pulled on my fisherman’s gloves and went back to work. The body made a soft thud when it landed in the bottom of the grave. We grabbed our shovels. Compared with digging him up, it took hardly any time to bury him. Still, it was almost five in the morning when we’d finished. The last of the glow sticks had gone out, but the sky was brightening when I turned to take one last look at Vladi’s final resting place.

31

THE SUN WAS COMING UP AS WE DROVE INTO BOSTON. Dan had to get home and get cleaned up for work. I dropped him off at his place. Then I drove over to Felix’s house of electronics, figuring to head off any Kraft requests before he even made them. Felix used his digital camera to take photos of the token. The one I liked best showed it lying on the front page of the
Boston Globe
right next to the date. Then he used his scanner to scan it in and his computer to send it to an e-mail address Kraft had provided. In the process of doing all that, I learned how to open the damned case.

When I got back to Harvey’s, I was covered in mud and sweat and smelled as if I’d marinated in a swamp. Not surprisingly, Rachel was the first to greet me.

“Did you get it?”

“I got it.”

“Oh, my God. Where is it? Let me see it.”

I opened my backpack, pulled out the plastic bag with the token in it, and held it up. She reached for it, but I snatched it back.

“No one touches this but Felix.”

Harvey was in his office. The empty popcorn bowl was still on the coffee table.

“Harvey, are you okay?”

“Did you have success?”

“We did.” I found myself feeling good, for a change, that I had actually accomplished something I’d set out to do, something important. “I beeped Kraft. We should hear from him soon.”

“She won’t let me see it.” Rachel had followed me in. I took out the second bag, the one with Vladi’s personal items—the pinkie ring, the wallet, and the chain from around his neck—and tossed it to her. She held it for a matter of seconds before she figured out what it was and dropped it onto a side table. She glared at me, and I couldn’t help but enjoy it a little. For someone as tough as she was, she seemed awfully delicate sometimes.

“I’m going upstairs, babe, to finish packing.”

I needed to get showered, too, but it was pretty clear Harvey was upset, probably about the packing. I decided to sit with him for a few minutes. I was about to collapse into the wingback before remembering my encrusted condition. I sat on the floor and leaned against the couch. I dropped my head back and closed my eyes and enjoyed for a few moments not having Rachel sitting between us. There were few of those moments left to enjoy anymore.

“There is not much left of us,” Harvey said, “after we are gone.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. He had found his way over to the side table and was holding the bag that Rachel had dropped. He studied each item carefully through the plastic as a blind man might—with the tips of his fingers.

“There was more of Vladi left than I would have preferred.”

“I am not speaking in terms of the material things or the biological matter we leave behind.”

I put my head back again. “I suppose what you do with your life is more important than how much stuff you leave behind, even if it is a lot of stuff. Vladi Tishchenko left a billion dollars behind, yet he’s in a grave where no one will ever visit because of the life he lived and the things he did.”

I heard him pushing his chair closer. The wheels still needed oil. I knew I should have gotten up and done it right then—I would never remember to do it when I actually had the time—but I was too exhausted.

“Did you know that I was drafted to go to Vietnam?”

That woke me up. Harvey hardly ever told me anything personal about himself, and he never reminisced. I lifted my head to look at him. “You were drafted?”

“In 1968, I was eighteen years old.”

I did know that, but not in the way you really
know
things. I knew how old Harvey was, but I had never considered him to be anything but the middle-aged guy who wore glasses and drank tea.

He smiled a little. “The answer to your question is no, I did not serve. I requested and received a deferment, and then I enrolled in college.” He shrugged and looked down at me. “Accounting.”

It was odd being the one looking up at him. “Sounds like a good decision. You’re lucky you had a choice.”

“It was an exciting time to be young and away from home for the first time. Everyone had an opinion on absolutely everything, as you might well imagine. It was an age of debate and discussion. I listened and read and tried to inform myself, and I began to develop my own opinions.” His voice had taken on a warmth and verve that made him sound like a much younger man. “I cannot express to you what a wondrous thing it was to have an opinion of my own. One of the things I was drawn to was the peace movement.”

“Really? You were a peacenik?”

“Not the violent antiwar radicals but those making reasoned arguments against U.S. involvement in a region of the world that neither wanted nor needed our help. The arguments of those who wanted peace seemed more compelling to me than the logic of those defending the war.” He put his elbow on his armrest and rested his chin in his hand, as if thinking it through all over again. “I also could not see a way to win, which meant men…boys were dying for nothing. And so I became an activist for peace.”

Had I given it any thought, I would have had him hanging out at the library, working as a proctor, afraid to talk to girls. I almost smiled as I pictured him with long hair, granny glasses, and a bong. “Did you march?”

“I did everything that was asked of me that was not violent in any way. I was not a leader but a follower, a fact that my father was gracious enough to point out on more than one occasion.”

“You father didn’t approve?”

“He was desperately disappointed in me, in the things I believed in, the things that I did. He accused me of intellectualizing my fear, of making up an argument to justify a decision that came from cowardice. He called it postdated conviction.” His voice had developed a sharp edge, and the warmth was gone.

“He wanted you to go to Vietnam and get mowed down in the jungle? Or addicted to heroin? Or so damaged by your experiences you could never be a fully functioning member of society again?”