House of Secrets - v4 (16 page)

“Yorkshire farmers have troubles, too,” Christine said.

“They don’t have Jim Fergus.”

“Honey, you love Jim.”

Andy didn’t want to hear it. “Well, I guess if I pay the man to do my worrying for me, he’s doing a bang-up job.” He gestured at the phone on the bed. “In the event that
the topic
comes up tonight, which it will, he doesn’t want me to say one single word in Chris’s defense. He just used the phrase ‘Don’t align with a loser.’ Isn’t that sweet? Jim is positive that Chris is going down. He has these mice he listens to.”

“Mice?”

Andy waved a hand. “Never mind. The point is, he feels it’s time to start putting a clear distance between Chris and myself.”

He reached for his pants and put them on. He tugged his belt tight. “Essentially, Jim wants me to moralize. I’m to talk about transparency and honesty and all that good stuff. All in the abstract, of course. For Christ’s sake, I couldn’t be specific about what Chris is supposed to have done if I wanted to. I’m totally in the dark about it.”

Christine was running dark lines around her eyes. “Probably a good place to be.”

“I suppose. Jim wants me to use the word
integrity
. At least four times, he said. He was serious. That’s my word:
integrity
. Four times at a minimum. He’s got this down to a science. He probably looked it up in the focus-group manual. Jim’s been pulling strings with Mitch Cutler’s and Barry Jefferson’s people. They’re both scheduled to hit the talk shows tomorrow. Would you care for a preview of what they’re going to say?”

Christine paused with her lipstick and addressed her husband in the mirror. “Let me guess. ‘Senator Andrew Foster is a fine man. A man of real integrity.’”

“Exactly. I’m now wearing the scarlet
I
, thank you very much.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

Andy stepped up behind his wife. His scowling face hovered over her shoulder. He started in on his tie, but he was all knuckles. Christine swiveled around and took over the job for him.

“Here. You’re getting yourself all worked up. Hands off.”

With those dark lines etched around them, her beautiful green eyes had an almost Egyptian quality. As Andy looked down at her deftly working the tie, his sense of shame welled up. Shame and cowardice. His beautiful wife deserved better than he was giving. In all their years together, she had rarely complained about the bifurcation in their marriage brought on by his career, his workweek spent largely down in D.C. Theirs was already a relationship with unavoidable gaps; the last thing Christine deserved was to have her husband digging outright chasms. What she deserved was nothing less than complete honesty on Andy’s part. The short weekend was going so nicely for the two of them; they were being reminded of their potential as a couple. Everything could be perfect.

But it wasn’t. Andy watched his wife flipping the ends of his tie and his heart seized. Christine was loving a fraud. The man standing there was a facsimile of the husband she thought she had.
For Christ’s sake
, Andy thought,
She doesn’t even know who I am
.

He wanted to tell her. But that would be suicide. She would be justified in running the knot of his tie right up to his windpipe and squeezing it with all her might until the empty man toppled over dead. If
he
were in his right mind, he would welcome it.

Christine finished up the tie for him and patted him lightly on the chest.

“Time to buck up, Senator Big Shot. People aren’t paying good money tonight to listen to an old sourpuss.”

Christine stepped past him and over to the closet. Andy remained a moment, looking at his reflection in the mirror. He massaged his jaw and presented himself with the demeanor that was expected of him. She was right, of course. People were expecting certain things of him. But even as he practiced his winning smile, his heart dropped deep into the abyss.

Someone
did
know.

This message is for the coward. You know who you are, and I know who you are. That is what is important. I know you…

T
he interview went well. Andy’s interlocutor was Scot Lehigh, the
Globe
columnist, and Lehigh opened the interview speaking of cracking open Andy’s book first thing in the morning in his hammock up at his cottage in Maine and how he had missed an entire day of windsurfing as a result of his being unable to put the book down.

“You owe me, Senator,” Lehigh joked.

Andy graced the anecdote. “Next time I’ll write a dud, Scot. I promise.”

For the bulk of the interview Lehigh held to matters relating to Andy’s book. Only near the conclusion of the event did the columnist signal the shift of the discussion with both his body language and a palpable eagerness in his voice.

“Senator, I’d be tossed out of the fraternity if I weren’t to ask you. You know what’s coming. Chris Wyeth.”

Andy leaned forward in his chair and leveled the columnist with a deadpan stare of intensity.

“Scot, could you maybe put that in the form of a question?”

The audience laughed, as did Lehigh. Andy continued on, speaking eloquently about the vice president. He did not distance himself from the embattled executive. At the same time, he certainly didn’t take the man into any figurative bear hugs. Mainly Andy stuck with an appreciative recitation of Chris Wyeth’s impressive résumé and his list of quantifiable achievements as a husband, a father, and a public servant. Christine noted, if no one else did, that “as a friend” did not make the cut.

Overall, the senator was affable and witty. He’d peppered the interview with several lengthy anecdotes. Before wrapping up, Andy spoke movingly on the role of public service and of his passion for seeking solutions for those who had little voice in matters that profoundly affect their own lives. In all, it was vintage Andy Foster. Even from her seat in the front row, Christine could sense that the crowd was eating out of her husband’s hand. As she knew all too well, he was a hard person not to like.

And he had delivered the word
integrity
seven times.

Okay
, Christine thought as she rose to join the standing ovation.
We’ve got that clear now
.

D
imitri Bulakov spent most of the weekend drinking and smoking and watching television and yelling at his wife. The only times the television was not on were when Dimitri nodded off into a deep enough sleep that Irena could dare shut it off. Those infrequent periods of silence — Irena had long since trained herself to deafness with regard to Dimitri’s raspy snoring — were blessings. Irena hated the television, and she hated the hours of her husband’s life lost to the insipid garbage that Dimitri watched. Hours adding up to days, days adding up to months. It was such a waste, and it left her so lonely.

Dimitri was too nervous about being recognized by one of Aleksey Titov’s goons to dare venture outside the room. Dimitri’s brother had called him on his cell phone on Friday in a state of despair, telling Dimitri what Titov and his soulless employee had done to him. Dimitri had barely been able to recognize his own brother’s voice.

“Dimitri. Whatever this is, you must stop. Our business is destroyed, Dimitri. I… I have been mutilated. Why is this, Dimitri? Whatever you are doing, you must stop. Aleksey will kill you, Dimitri. You and Irena both. This is a fact.”

Dimitri had instructed his brother to leave Brighton Beach immediately. “Go away, Leonard. In a week, I promise, I will make Titov happy and I will make you happy. You must trust me. I will make everything good.”

He also told his brother not to bother calling him again.

“This is for your safety, Leonard. I will call Titov and tell him myself. You will have no more contact with me. He has no reason to hurt you again. I will not be using this phone again. You see? His threats to you will be no use. It is now me who is calling all of the shots, Leonard. Trust me.”

Dimitri had given Irena money to go out and purchase a disposable cell phone. Irena almost called Leonard while she was on the errand, but she had gotten scared that if she did so, she might inadvertently cause more trouble for her brother-in-law.

With her new blond hair and large sunglasses, Irena was the one who could move safely around the streets of Coney Island, though Dimitri insisted that she spend as little time as necessary away from the room. Mainly she fetched cigarettes and beer and food, mostly fried chicken and potatoes.

The room was taking on all the odors of the Bulakov diet: the sweet tang of beer, complimented by grease, infused with the stale smell of an overflowing ashtray. Dimitri had stopped shaving. His large jaw was looking increasingly smudged. His eyes were raw and tender, glazed from the beer and the hours of staring at the television. The first several nights at the hotel, Dimitri had insisted on climbing atop his wife and taking his pleasure. It certainly wasn’t
her
pleasure, the hairy beer keg thrusting and grunting and exhaling his vapors on her. Irena always kept her eyes shut these days when she was making love with her husband. It was better this way; it gave her the fighting chance to reimagine Dimitri as the man she had fallen in love with. Dimitri usually reached his climaxes as Irena was only just beginning to sense her own faint stirrings, and he was always very rough at the end. His final belly flop rarely failed to knock most of the breath from Irena’s lungs. Soon enough afterward he would slide off her, and she would be free to breathe and, if she wished, secretly take over where her husband had left off. Dimitri was always fast asleep, well into his sea-shanty snoring, by the time Irena’s body clenched in its small tremor. Only then would she open her eyes to the familiar darkness. It was a darkness matched in too many ways by the deep hues within her heart.

T
he only other activity that occupied Dimitri’s time were the sessions he spent in front of his laptop. Irena was forbidden to see what it was he was looking at. He would attach the blue flash drive to the computer, put on his headset, and back himself up to the flimsy headboard with the computer perched on a pillow on his lap. Irena could freely study her husband’s face as he peered at the screen. His concentration sometimes was fierce. In a funny way, he almost looked intelligent peering the way he did at the images. Irena knew that whatever it was that was holding her husband so spellbound on his computer was the thing responsible for all that was taking place. It related to Aleksey Titov, of course, and certainly it was related to Dimitri’s spasmodic pronouncements of “When we have our money…”

“What money?” Irena would implore. “When money? Why
our
money?”

Dimitri was no longer even acknowledging the questions.

I
rena’s only clue as to what was holding her and Dimitri hostage in this hotel room came that Sunday morning. She was arriving back at the room with a Styrofoam container of eggs and bacon and the Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses that Dimitri had told her to buy for him. She had paused at the door before knocking. Dimitri had given her two special knocks, one to let him know that she was by herself, the other to use in case anybody had identified her and forced her to lead them to him. Just as Irena was raising her fist to knock, she heard a sound like breaking glass coming from inside the room. The sound was followed several seconds later by a woman screaming. The television, Irena thought, and she knocked on the door.
Rap, rap
. Pause.
Rap
. The sounds ceased abruptly. The door opened, and a red-faced Dimitri grabbed Irena by the arm and pulled her forcibly into the room. The food spilled on the floor.

“What are you!
Spying?
You think now you are a spy?”

His fist was closed when he hit her. She fell sideways, catching her balance against the dresser. In the mirror she caught a reflection of the laptop, in its usual place atop the pillow. She could make out nothing on the screen except the movement of figures in a dark setting. Dimitri lurched over to the bed and flipped the computer shut.

“I am
protecting
you! Don’t you see this! Do not be so stupid, Irena. You will trust me. Anything else and you will be
dead!
Are you understanding?”

The bruise came up within five minutes, just below the left eye. A lump the size of a mothball and the color of a ripe thundercloud.

Dimitri remained annoyed. “Do your sunglasses hide this?”

Normally he was kinder in the wake of hitting her. But now he simply cracked open another beer, showing more concern for the foam that spilled out onto his fingers.

The sunglasses did cover almost all of the black eye. Only a trace of purple halo peeked from beneath the dark lens.

“Good,” Dimitri snorted.

Irena closed her eyes. She refused to cry. It had never helped in the past, and it was not going to help now. She wanted the old Dimitri back. She wanted the man she had married. She wanted to open her eyes and remove the sunglasses and be sharing with the old Dimitri a boundless field of yellow flowers.