In for a Ruble (29 page)

“Where?”

“Crestview Main Street. There’s a liquor store across from the pizza joint, in the next block. This place is over that. Looks like they got the whole floor. Two-story building, one entrance and a fire escape.”

“How’d you find it?”

“Two kids showed up for pizza Wednesday night. Ten to ten. Not the Leitz kid and the girl, but two others. They looked like Gibbet School kids, I know a couple at NYU who went to that place, and they’re a type, you know? I took a drive by when I got up here. That campus has more money than most country clubs. Looks like everybody should be wearing blue blazers or white dresses and be waited on by—”

“I get the point.”

“Anyway, these kids were driving a BMW, New York plates, BDK one-three-five-eight. They bought a pie to go and went across the street. The entrance is around back. I circled the whole building. Every window’s covered, no lights anywhere, except one over the door outside. All you can see inside is stairs going up into the dark. They stayed until after two. I didn’t call you yesterday because I didn’t know who they were. Last night the Russian chick shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s her—tall, blond, real looker. She hits the pizza joint and goes in the same entrance as the others. I thought about going up the fire escape, but you told me to lay back, so I did.”

The BMW was Irina’s car. The ghostly image of Nosferatu, all six-feet-seven inches of him, fingernails as long as knives, materialized in my imagination. He could make me come to miss Beria.

“You did right. How late did she stay?”

“Two thirty-eight. I tailed her back toward the school, but she turned off on a side road just short of campus. Martin Lane. No way I could follow without getting spotted. What kind of high school lets kids go and come at all hours?”

“The kind that believes their students don’t use the same toilets as the rest of us. You didn’t see the Leitz kid?”

“Nope. But he could be inside the place above the liquor store, for all I know.”

“You’ve done your job. Pack up and head for Logan. I’ll catch a late afternoon shuttle. Meet me at the gate with the car keys.”

I called Victoria, and told her she was her own for at least one night. She asked where I was going, in a tone that indicated she didn’t expect an answer.

“Batkin business,” I said, which was true.

“Shit.”

That she didn’t precede “shit” with “bull” said she believed me, and she wasn’t happy about it.

“I’m running down the connection between the Leitz kid, the Lishina girl, and Coryell/Druce. Could be fruitful for you too.”

“There’s laws about what kind of evidence we can use, you know.”

“How’s that search warrant coming?”

Silence.

I started to say good-bye, but she’d already hung up.

CHAPTER
30

Gibbet, Massachusetts, settled in 1635 according to the marker announcing the town line, still had all the signs of a prosperous New England colonial township. Why they named it after the gallowslike structure from which convicted corpses were hung as deterrents to those who might follow their misguided path was a question, but four centuries ago someone apparently thought it was good idea. Town founder was a hangman, perhaps. In the intervening years, the Gibbet folk had built lots of white and gray wood-sided houses with green and black shutters. A brick town hall, stone library, and Doric-columned historical society lined Main Street, interspersed with Federal, Greek Revival, and Georgian homes. The supermarket, gas station, and convenience store all looked out of place. The police station, fire station, and post office had been moved to the edge of town, their former Main Street facilities now occupied by an Italian restaurant, health food store and Pilates center. Gibbet had made a seamless transition from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.

Hayfields Drive ran south out of town, a big leafy road, or would be come spring, with a wide double yellow stripe. The houses here were bigger and whiter and grayer. The owners weren’t mowing their own lawns. A tall wrought-iron fence demarcated the border of the school’s property and paralleled Hayfields Drive for the better part of a mile until I came to the entrance. No sign, but two square stone columns supporting iron gates with medieval coats of arms left little doubt this was an institution that took its importance seriously.

The Duke of Wellington supposedly said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Gibbet School had taken the Duke at his word and was doing everything it could to apply the principle in the land that won a revolution against his countrymen. Gibbet’s playing fields stretched in all directions—soccer, football, baseball, track and field—snow-covered now, but ready as soon as spring arrived to prepare this generation of aristocratic kids for the next nineteenth-century war. Scattered among the fields were copies of eighteenth-century Georgian buildings and a late Gothic chapel. The Valdez was decidedly out of place.

I parked the car and strolled the plowed pathways through the fields and buildings. No one else was out, which meant no one questioned my presence, but there was no one for me to question either. Sunday night, the buildings were all locked, dorm and nondorm alike. The chapel, administration building, gym and performing arts center were dark. Lights in the dorms, built to look like houses, as well as in the Russell Wilcox Stu-Fac Center, which all required an electronic pass to get into. The place exuded as much welcome as the Gulag camps I grew up in.

I found Martin Lane, the side road Gina had described, a quarter-mile cul-de-sac with three houses and a barn. Parked in the driveways were a Ford Explorer, a Saab, two Subarus and a Dodge Ram pickup. No BMW, but it could have been in the barn.

Four and a half miles away, Main Street, Crestview, was a study in contrasts. A hardscrabble, working-class town, whose best days were a century behind it. The houses were side-by-sides and double-deckers, many with peeling paint. At 8:30
P.M.
, the sidewalks were all but rolled up. Downtown was next to a rail yard and handsome enough in a way that evoked its blue-collar roots. The business district stretched four blocks. About a quarter of the store fronts were empty. The pizza place anchored one corner. The grocery was two doors down. Both looked exactly like they should. A half-dozen chrome-legged tables and fake leather chairs filled the former, racks of the supposed staples of modern life—chips, soda, cereal, toilet paper, and laundry soap—the latter.

I pulled into a parking spot across the street from the liquor store at the other end of the block. The lights were still on there as they were at the pizza place and the grocery. The rest of the street was dark. Enough parked cars to give me cover. It had been snowing heavily when I left LaGuardia, but the storm hadn’t moved this far north yet, a good thing for me. A chilly, dark night, cloud covered sky, no moon. Also all to the good for my purposes. The snow was coming, though. I could feel it.

I sat in the dark for fifteen minutes. Two cars and a police cruiser passed. None paid me any attention. No pedestrians. I could see the guy behind the counter in the liquor store reading the paper, marking time until closing. No light or sign of life from the second floor. At 8:55, he stood and folded the paper. A few minutes later the lights went off. A minute after that, he came out, and turned to lock the door behind him. He walked down the block until he came to a Honda showing more than a few years of age, unlocked the door, climbed in and drove away. The grocery store closed a few minutes later. The pizza joint was the only life left, maybe still hoping to sell a pie or two to the kids from Gibbet School. Or it didn’t know it was done for the night but was holding true to its hours.

Gina said Irina came last night at 9:50, the others around the same time the night before. After dinner, after study hall, after they were supposed to be tucked in for the night. No way of telling whether anyone would show up tonight, but if they did, I doubted they’d come any earlier. I made sure the dome light was off, checked the rearview mirror, and pushed open the door. A gust of damp wind cut through my flannel pants. I locked the door quickly in case the guy in the pizza joint—or anyone else—was paying attention, trotted across the street, and took shelter in the shadows. I walked down the block, sticking close to the dark building, all but invisible, I figured, turned the corner and went around back. A parking lot of mostly broken pavement. A couple of Dumpsters backed up on train tracks that hadn’t been used in years. Like Gina said, a single bulb shone over a doorway at one end of the building. An iron fire escape dropped from the second floor at the other. The windows were all dark. A rat scrambled across the lot, coming straight at me, until it veered off and found protection under one of the Dumpsters. Supper time.

I returned to the Valdez and its heater, mildly regretting not buying a pint of vodka before the liquor store closed. Never a good idea to drink on duty, but who knew how long I had to wait. The Boston public radio station played a recording of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues. I knew the record—the pianist, Tatiana Nikolayeva, supposedly had inspired the pieces. You don’t hear it often. I sat in the dark, marveling at Shostakovich’s ability to write a series of works in which not one, but two, beautiful songs played off each other, point and counterpoint, with absolute harmonic perfection in every note. Bach had done it three hundred years earlier, of course, but for my money, Shostakovich had raised the bar. Bach would argue that Shostakovich cheated—he employed dissonance.

Shostakovich had morphed to Mozart just after 10:00 when a pair of headlights turned into Main Street from the direction I faced. I slid down behind the wheel as a dark colored 3 Series BMW came straight toward me until it swung off into the parking lot behind the liquor store. I waited until the lights were out of sight and ran to the alley at the other end of the building, not worrying this time about who might see me. I reached the back in time to see a young woman, tall and blond, unlock the door below the lightbulb and go inside.

I walked back to the train tracks, looking up, waiting for a light to go on.

Nothing.

No light on the Main Street side either. I returned to the parking lot. Still dark. As Gina said, they had the windows blacked out.

I was heading back to move the Valdez when more headlights swung into the lot. They belonged to a black Cadillac Escalade, which looked a lot like the black Cadillac Escalade I’d last seen in Long Island City. I followed the rat to the Dumpsters, ducking behind before the SUV’s lights swept across. Then they were gone. I peeked out to see the taillights turn left onto Main Street. I stayed where I was.

Two minutes … Three … Four …

Fifteen before the headlights announced the Escalade’s return. I didn’t move.

This time, the driver did one revolution of the parking lot, pulled up next to a rundown concrete structure that had once been part of the rail yard and maybe still was. The same spot I’d been thinking to park the Valdez. I couldn’t see the driver but any doubt was erased by the New York plates.

I waited a cold half hour, checking my watch while I shivered, to see if Nosferatu would get out of the car. Three brief flashes of light from the cab indicated he hadn’t kicked his smoking habit. When I was convinced that he was waiting, as I was, I crossed the tracks, bent low until I was shielded by buildings on the other side. I took a circuitous route back to the Valdez. Gambling, I moved it, lights off, to the rail yard behind the parking lot, next to a building where it was all but hidden but still had a distant view of the Escalade and the lighted door beyond.

That’s where I spent the night.

CHAPTER
31

Dawn would’ve just been lighting the sky, had there been any sky to light, when they came out. Snow had fallen hard all night, starting about the time I moved the car. Six inches or more now on the ground. I’d been dozing on and off, but you learn to keep one eye half awake. Foos had called a little after 2:00
A.M.

“Weird shit. BEC’s back online.”

“You sure?”

“I’m calling at two a.m.”

“What’s going on?”

“Could be anything. Technical difficulties. Somebody—maybe Andras, like you suggest—screwing around inside, but they fixed the problem.”

“Could Andras do this?”

“Technically feasible. There’s still the question of why.”

“I’ll tell you this. I’m sitting outside some kind of crash pad he’s got in the next town to his school. I’m pretty sure he’s inside. I know the Russian girl is. Guess who else is watching the place?”

“He suck blood?”

“Not mine, I hope.”

“You got a plan?”

“Not beyond figuring out what’s going on. And keeping Nosferatu away from the kids, if I have to.”

“I’ll hang here. Let me know if you need anything.”

When the door opened, Irina and Andras stopped under the naked bulb just long enough for me to get a look, before they hustled through the snow to her car. Neither looked around nor looked worried. Neither appeared sleepy either. Irina took the driver’s seat, and the BMW backed out and pulled away. I waited for the Escalade to follow, but it didn’t. The BMW pulled into Main Street and disappeared. I couldn’t follow. I couldn’t move without being spotted.

Wait … and wait some more. Five minutes before the Escalade’s doors opened, and the tall man’s head rose above the car. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and the same overcoat I remembered from Second Avenue. He removed something from the back of the SUV and walked toward the building. A short man got out of the passenger side and followed. He wore an overcoat, no hat, and had a large messenger bag strung over his shoulder. With a quick glance around, Nosferatu used a crowbar to pull down the fire escape ladder. He and Shorty climbed to the second floor, and Nosferatu spent a quick minute fiddling at the window. Then he pushed it up, and they climbed inside.

I flipped another mental coin. On the assumption Nosferatu’s attention was now focused inside the building, I put the Valdez in gear and drove as fast as I dared toward Gibbet. The road was a mess. The plows hadn’t reached it yet, and the Valdez made its own free-form progress. No other cars, the only reason I didn’t hit any, but we came close to the ditch three times. When not pumping the breaks and spinning the wheel, I told myself Andras and Irina couldn’t be going much faster, but they had a big head start. The single set of tire tracks ahead of me made generally straight progress, an indication they were taking it easy or the Bimmer had all-wheel drive. The tire tracks turned into Martin Lane. They stopped at the door of the barn.