Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (45 page)

Hardwick cleared his throat. “Tip of the proverbial iceberg. Or more like the tip of an insane asylum. We still don’t know for sure what business Karnala is in, but I got some data on the Skards. Definitely not people you want to fuck with.”

“Hold on a second, Jack.” Gurney opened his coffee container and took a long swallow. “Okay, talk to me.”

“We’re getting this in bits and pieces. Before they came to the U.S. and went international, the Skards originally operated out of Sardinia, which is part of Italy. Italy’s got three separate law-enforcement agencies, each with its own records, plus local stuff, and then there’s Interpol, which has access to some of it but not all of it. Plus, I’m getting snatches of stuff that’s not in any file—old rumors, hearsay, whatever—from a guy at Interpol I’ve done some favors for. So what I have is disconnected chunks, some of it unique, some of it repetitive, some of it contradictory. Some reliable, some not, but no way of knowing which is which.”

Gurney waited. It never helped to tell Hardwick to skip the preamble.

“At the visible level, the Skards are high-end international investors. Resorts, casinos, thousand-dollar-a-night hotels, companies that build million-dollar yachts, shit like that. But the betting is that the money they use to acquire those legal assets comes from somewhere else.”

“From a nastier enterprise they’re concealing?”

“Right, and the Skards are very effective concealers. In the whole bloody history of the family, there has been only one arrest—for an atrocious assault ten years ago—and not a single conviction. So there are no real criminal files, almost nothing on paper. Rumors keep surfacing that they’re into very-high-end prostitution, sex slavery, extreme S&M pornography, extortion. But none of that can be verified. They also have very aggressive legal representation that pounces with an instant libel suit when anything remotely critical appears in the press. There aren’t even any photographs of them.”

“What happened to the mug shot from the assault arrest?”

“Mysteriously disappeared.”

“Nobody has ever testified against these guys?”

“People who might know something, people who might be persuaded to say something, even just people who happen to be in the general vicinity of the Skards in times of stress, have a hell of a time staying alive. The few people who cooperated with media stories about the Skards, even anonymously, disappeared within days. The Skards have only one response to trouble—they erase it, totally, without compunction, and without a hint of concern for collateral damage. Perfect example: According to my Interpol contact, about ten years ago Giotto Skard, presumed head of the family, had a business disagreement with an Israeli real-estate developer. After a meeting in a small Tel Aviv nightclub during which Giotto appeared to agree to the Israeli’s terms, he said good-night, stepped outside, barred the exits, and burned the place down. He managed to kill the real-estate developer, along with fifty-two other people who just happened to be in there.”

“Their organization has never been penetrated?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“They have no organization in the usual sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Skards are the Skards. A biological family. The only way in is by birth or marriage—and right off the bat I can’t think of any female undercovers devoted enough to the job to marry into a pack of mass murderers.”

“Big family?”

Hardwick cleared his throat again. “Surprisingly small. Of the oldest generation, only one of three brothers is believed to still be alive. Giotto Skard. He may have killed the other two. But no one will say that. Not even whisper it. Not even as a joke. Giotto has—or maybe had—three sons. No one knows how many of them are still alive, or exactly how old they are, or where they might be. As I said, small as they are in numbers, the Skards operate internationally, so it’s presumed that the sons are in various places around the world where Skard interests need to be looked after.”

“Wait a second. If only family members are involved, what do they do for muscle?”

“The word is, they take care of problems themselves. The word is, they’re very prompt and very efficient. The word is, the Skards over the years have personally eliminated at least two hundred human obstacles to the family’s business objectives, not counting the nightclub massacre.”

“Nice people. With three sons, presumably Giotto had a wife?”

“Oh, indeed he did. Tirana Magdalena—the only member of the whole rotten Skard menagerie about which anything is actually known. And maybe the only person on earth who ever seriously inconvenienced Giotto and lived to tell it.”

“How’d she manage that?”

“She was the daughter of the head of an Albanian mafia family. I should say she
is
his daughter—she’s still alive, somewhere in her mid-sixties, in an institution for the criminally insane. The Albanian don is about ninety. Not that Giotto would be afraid of a mafia don. The word is, it was purely a business decision on Giotto’s part to let his wife live. He didn’t want to have to waste time and money killing the angry Albanians who would try to avenge her death.”

“How the hell do you know all this?”

“I don’t, really. Like I said, it’s mostly rumors from the guy at Interpol. Maybe mostly bullshit. But it sounds good to me.”

“Hold on. A second ago you said she was the only member of the Skard family about which anything is actually known.
Known
, you said.”

“Ah. But I haven’t gotten yet to the part that’s
known
. I was saving that till the end.”

“T
irana Magdalena was Adnan Zog’s only daughter.”

“Zog being the don?”

“Zog being the don, or whatever they call that exalted position in Albania. Anyway, his daughter was drop-dead gorgeous.”

“How do you know that?”

“Her beauty was the stuff of legend. At least in the seedy underbelly of Eastern Europe. At least according to my Deep Throat contact at Interpol. Also, there are photographs. Many photographs. Unlike the Skards, the Zogs, particularly Tirana Magdalena, had no problem with fame. In addition to being gorgeous, she was also high-strung, weird, artsy, and obsessed with wanting to be a dancer. Papa Zog didn’t give a shit about what she wanted. He just saw her as something of potential value. So when the ambitious young Giotto Skard took an interest in the sixteen-year-old Tirana at the same time as he was negotiating a business alliance with Zog, Zog tossed her in as part of the deal. Probably saw it as a win-win. Zog gives Skard something Skard values that costs Zog nothing, plus he gets rid of his nutty, pain-in-the-ass daughter. This makes him and Giotto like blood brothers without even having to prick their thumbs.”

“Very efficient,” said Gurney.

“Very efficient. So now this wacky sixteen-year-old who has been raised by a lunatic Albanian murderer is married to a lunatic Sardinian murderer. And all she wants to do is dance. But all Giotto wants is sons—a lot of sons. Good for the business. So she starts having Giotto’s babies, which turn out to be all sons, just like he wants.
Tiziano, Raffaello, Leonardo. Which makes him pretty happy. But all Tirana wants to do is dance. And each kid is making her a little crazier. By the time she has number three, she’s ready for the loony bin. Then she makes her big discovery. Coke! She discovers that snorting coke is almost as good as dancing. She snorts a lot of coke. When she can’t steal any more money from Giotto—a very dangerous activity, by the way—she starts fucking the local coke dealer. When Giotto finds out, he chops him up.”

“Chops him up?”

“Yeah. Literally. Into little pieces. To make a statement.”

“Impressive.”

“Right. So then Giotto decides to move the family to America. Better for everyone, he says. What he really means is, better for business. Business is all Giotto cares about. Once they’re over here, Tirana starts fucking American coke dealers. Giotto chops them up. Everyone she fucks gets chopped up. She’s fucking so many guys he can hardly keep up with it. Finally he kicks her out, along with son number three, Leonardo, who is now about ten years old and either gay or schizo or just too fucking oddball for Giotto to deal with. She takes the money Giotto gives her as a good-bye-and-get-lost present, and she opens a modeling agency for kids whose parents would love to get them into commercials, TV, whatever—offers acting and dancing classes to enhance their budding careers. Giotto meanwhile settles down with his two older sons to focus on their sex-and-extortion empire. Sounds like a happy ending for all concerned. But there was a flaw in the ointment.”

“Fly.”

“What?”

“A
fly
in the ointment, not a flaw.”

“Fly, flaw, whatever. The problem with cokehead Tirana’s modeling agency is that she’s molesting the kids. Not only is she still fucking coke dealers, now she’s fucking every ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old boy she can get her hands on.”

“Jesus. How did it end?”

“It ended with her being arrested and charged with about two dozen counts of sexual abuse, assault, sodomy, rape, you name it.
She ended up being committed to a state mental hospital, where she remains to this day.”

“And her son?”

“By the time she was arrested, he was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Either ran away or was taken back by his father or was spirited off through some kind of private adoption. Or, knowing the Skards, he could very well be dead. Giotto would never let sentimentality keep him from tying up a loose end.”

H
alfway between his Stewart’s stop and Walnut Crossing, Gurney’s phone rang again. Rebecca Holdenfield’s voice was smart, edgy—as reminiscent of the young Sigourney Weaver as were her face and hair. “So I guess you’re not coming?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Don’t you check your messages?”

He remembered. That morning there had been one text and one voice mail. He’d checked the text first—the message that had spun him off into a world of speculation about his brownstone blackout. He’d never checked the voice mail.

“Christ, I’m sorry, Rebecca. I’m running too damn fast. You expected me this afternoon?”

“It was your request in your voice mail to me. So I said fine, come.”

“Any chance we could do it tomorrow? What’s tomorrow, anyway?”

“Tuesday. And I’m jammed all day. How about Thursday? That’s my next free time.”

“Too far away. Can we talk now?”

“I’m free till five. Which means we have about ten minutes. What’s the topic?”

“I’ve got a few: the effects of being raised by a promiscuous mother, the mind-set of women who sexually abuse children, the psychological weaknesses of male sex murderers … and the behavior range of adult males under the influence of a Rohypnol cocktail.”

After a two-second silence, she burst into laughter. “Sure. And
in the time we have left after that, we can discuss the causes of divorce, ways to eliminate war, and—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Pick the topic you think we have enough time to talk about.”

“You planning on spiking your next martini with Rohypnol?”

“Hardly.”

“Just an academic question, then?”

“Sort of.”

“Hmm. Well, there’s no standard range of behavior for intoxication in general. Different chemicals skew behavior in different directions. Cocaine, for example, tends to produce a heightened sexual drive. But if what you’re asking is, are there limits to the behavior that a nonhallucinogenic disinhibitor will allow, the answer is yes and no. There’s no specific limit that applies to everyone, but there are individual limits.”

“Like what?”

“There’s no way of knowing. The limitations on our behavior depend on the accuracy of our perceptions, the strength of our instinctive desires, and the strength of our fears. If the drug is a disinhibitor that removes our fear of consequences, then our behavior will reflect our desires and be limited mainly by pain, satisfaction, or exhaustion. We’ll do whatever we would do in a world with no consequences, but not things we have no desire to do. Disinhibitors give free rein to one’s existing impulses, but they don’t manufacture impulses that are inconsistent with the underlying psychic structure of the individual. Am I answering your question?”

“Bottom line, give people a drug like that and they might act out their fantasies?”

“They might even do things they’d been afraid to fantasize about.”

“I see,” he said, feeling sick to his stomach. “Let me change the subject to something completely different. A recent Mapleshade graduate has turned up dead—a sex murder in Florida. Rape, torture, decapitation, body in the suspect’s freezer.”

“How long?” As usual, Holdenfield was unfazed by gory details—or adept at making it seem that way.

“What do you mean?”

“How long was the body in the freezer?”

“ME thought a couple of days, maybe. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering what he was saving it for. It was a
he
, right?”

“Jordan Ballston, hotshot in the financial-derivatives business.”

“Ballston, the super-rich guy? I remember reading about that. First-degree murder charge. But that was months ago.”

“Right, but the identity of the victim was originally withheld from the media, and the connection to the other disappearances at Mapleshade was just discovered.”

“You’re sure there
is
a connection?”

“Hell of a coincidence if there isn’t one.”

“Do you guys get to interview Ballston?”

“Apparently not. He’s hunkering down behind a thorny hedge of attorneys.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

“Suppose I manage to get to him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. Just suppose I do.”

“Okay. I’m supposing. Now what?”