The Con Man's Daughter (4 page)

The old man kicked feebly at a seagull who swooped down to pick the seeds that had just landed on the boardwalk. "Coney Island used to be a real island," he said, "until a storm joined it to the rest of Brooklyn. Nineteenth century this happened. Sand filled in the channels. Before that, the Dutch took boats out to the island to hunt rabbits. The island was full of rabbits. The Dutch word for rabbit is
konijn
. 'Konijn Island,' they called it. 'Coney' it became in the American tongue. Coney Island is Rabbit Island."

"You have a moral here?"

"Simple lesson, Eddie. You are smart like Russian. This is time to think like Russian. The Russian survived because he put his faith in himself, not the police, not the government. My lesson is this: Be the hunter, Eddie, not the rabbit. The rabbit never wins."

Chapter 4

Monday

5:00 P.M.

After leaving Lukin, Eddie Dunne drove the five minutes to Brighton Beach Avenue. The street was a carbon copy of the Moscow of his imagination. The darkness under the el gave the shopping district a drab, dreary quality. All the signs were written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Women in heavy coats prowled the outdoor markets, speaking in Russian and slinging net shopping bags. Shoving and jostling, these women hunted for each evening's meal as if it were all-out war. Old habits ruled the Brooklyn sidewalks. Hip-to-hip, they fought for position around the fruit and vegetable stands, forcing passersby into the street.

Eddie parked in front of the Sea Lanes of Odessa Bakery. Above the bakery, on the second floor, was the home and business location of Madame Caranina, the Gypsy fortune-teller. Eddie first met her during an investigation of a case where a woman had come to Caranina complaining of stomachaches. The fortune-teller said she had a tumor in her stomach. Caranina told the woman to rub seven thousand dollars in cash over her stomach to draw out the evil, then bring the cash back to her so she could bury it in a grave.

The D train clattered overhead as Eddie called home. Kevin answered on the first ring. Eddie could hear the tension in his brother's voice when he said they had not yet been contacted.

Eddie said, "If they call-I mean, as soon as they call, notify me immediately. If they want to talk to me, give them the number for the cell phone."

"Babsie's shaking her head no," Kevin said.

"Yeah, well. You know what to do, Kev."

Eddie slammed the door as he got out of the Olds, angry at himself for saying "if." He knew that word would be on tape, and what the feds would read into it. He glanced up at the second-floor window. It looked like Madame Caranina was still in business.

Eddie didn't need psychic services. He was looking for Caranina's husband, Parrot. Parrot was a tiny man who wore Hawaiian shirts both winter and summer. He had a huge mane of dyed red hair, swept back in a tidal wave of a greasy pompadour. Eddie didn't remember Parrot's real name. He used so many different names, not even he could keep them straight. The cops in Auto Crime had named him Parrot so there would be no doubt they were referring to the best car thief in New York. His first arrest was for the theft of Reggie Jackson's Bentley from the well-guarded New York Yankees lot. The engineers in Detroit couldn't even imagine a device to stop him. Eddie opened the door and a bell tinkled.

Since fortune-telling was illegal in New York, Caranina described herself as dealing in everything but. Painted on the glass window of her street-level door was a list of services, in descending order: astrology, horoscope, tarot cards, esp, crystal, tarot stones, runes, palmistry, tea leaves, past life, readings.

The narrow, creaking stairway to the second floor smelled of a combination of rotting wood, spoiled food, and dank carpet. Caranina's door was open. Eddie stepped into the front room of the
ofisa
, the Romany word for a fortune-telling parlor. A vinyl-covered card table and three folding chairs took up the center of the floor. The large windows that overlooked Brighton Beach Avenue and stared directly into the passing el trains were hidden by thick gold drapery lifted from a defunct catering hall. Against the longest wall, an old woman in a flowered babushka sat on a greasy sofa, watching
The Montel Williams Show.
A pair of jumper cables was coiled under the sofa. Eddie asked for Parrot. Without looking up, the old woman rattled something in Romany, that strange Gypsy language that sounds like Greek only because it sounds like nothing else.

The beaded curtain to the back room parted. A dark-eyed young girl in a long velvety skirt and ski sweater appeared. Eddie remembered that her name was Tropicalia, one of the seven daughters of Caranina and Parrot. Tropicalia was twelve, or twenty. Her only education had been in her mother's craft, but lying ran through her blood. She denied knowing anyone named Parrot.

"Your father and I are old friends," Eddie said.

"My father has no
gadje
friends," she said.

Fifty dollars jogged her memory. Tropicalia reached under her sweater, shoved the bill inside the waistband of her skirt, then remembered that her father was away on business with the
baro
, the gypsy patriarch. Eddie remembered an old Russian saying that "Gypsy truth is worse than an Orthodox lie." He told her he needed to see him, that he had a huge business opportunity. He waited a beat, thinking that if Parrot was listening in the back room he'd appear at the hint of big money. Eddie gave Tropicalia a slip of paper with the number of Kevin's cell phone.

"Tell him not to call my home number," he said, then handed her another fifty. For the right price, the Parrot would deliver. Again, he told her how profitable it would be; then he let two more fifties drop to the floor. The bills barely hit the carpet. With the others, they disappeared under the ski sweater and inside the waistband of the long velvety skirt. He wished he'd brought more money.

Back down on the street, Eddie realized he hadn't eaten all day. He stopped at Mrs. Stahl's and bought a potato knish that felt like it weighed five pounds. He took a bottle of springwater from the cooler, then walked back to his car. Sparks from the clackety train above drifted through the permanent half-light under the el. A note was stuck on his windshield. At first, he thought it might be from Parrot, but it was a flyer from a cut-rate travel agency. Budapest-round-trip, eight hundred dollars.

The wise choice would be to go home. Just get in the car and drive to Yonkers. No doubt he should go back and relieve the pressure he'd dumped on his older brother. He should take Grace to Christ the King to light a candle, and on to McDonald's for a Happy Meal. It would be the wise choice. But the wise choice was rarely an option for Eddie Dunne.

Here he was in Brooklyn, eating a knish, while his daughter suffered. There was no reason for her to suffer.

The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. People around him were laughing, enjoying themselves, while he suffocated within. Why should these people be happy? The thought of Yuri Borodenko being comfortable, on vacation, gnawed at him, sent his pulse racing.

People like Borodenko lived the good life because they hired people to inflict pain for them. They paid ordinary thugs for acts of cruelty at their direction. Then it was those thugs who took the weight of revenge. The hirelings bled, while the power brokers, like minstrel-show darkies, flashed immaculate white-gloved hands. But the responsibility was theirs. No matter who had actually been driving the car that stole his daughter from him, Yuri Borodenko's white gloves were on the wheel.

Eddie pulled the gun from his bellyband holster and slid it under the car seat. The anger in him beat faster, in his pulse, in his fingers tapping the steering wheel. His fight manager had always told him, "Use the anger; don't let it use you." With the bottle of springwater between his legs, he ate the hot, mushy knish and drove toward Manhattan Beach. He'd be the hunter, not the rabbit.

Borodenko's Brooklyn neighborhood was an upscale enclave immediately east of Brighton Beach. Manhattan Beach was isolated from the city's bustle, wedged between Sheepshead Bay on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south and east. It was mostly a community of single-family homes on twenty-three tree-lined streets, arranged in alphabetical order and named after places and people in England.

Eddie was struck by the amount of new construction, incredibly recent construction. Every street had two or three brand-new homes and another two in the framing stage. Smaller houses were being torn down and replaced by huge brick or stucco structures with columns, corbeled arches, and onion domes. Mother Russia had arrived in the night with hammer and nail.

Yuri Borodenko lived right on the ocean, on a dead-end street named for a famous poet. The only thing separating his house from the beach was a narrow concrete esplanade, badly in need of repair. Austere and window-less, except for the side that faced the ocean, the house was a series of rounded bare concrete walls. From the street, it looked like it could house a military regiment. The only breaks in the white background were a handful of metal boxes for security cameras. Getting in without being noticed would be a challenge. Eddie drove halfway down the block and pulled to the curb.

At the ocean end of the block, an older man in a white T-shirt sprayed Borodenko's beloved Rolls-Royce with a hose. The man had parked the Rolls a good distance from the driveway, not quite under a dogwood tree in full bloom. The tree blocked Eddie's position from Borodenko's cameras, but there was no way to get closer to the house without being on-camera. Even if he could get close, the house looked sealed. Breaking in without being seen seemed a complicated task at best. Keep it simple for now, he reminded himself. The answer will come to you. Eddie made a U-turn and drove away.

On the way back to Brighton Beach, Eddie finished the knish, then dumped the remaining water out the window. At the Amoco on Neptune and Coney Island Avenue, he stopped for gas. Twenty-two dollars and fifty cents filled the Olds. He put another three bucks' worth in the red gas can in his trunk. Lawn-mower season-everyone was gassing up. He paid cash.

One more stop before going home: a weedy, debris-strewn dead end in Coney Island. Gulls screeched overhead as Eddie pissed against the fence protecting the entrance to the abandoned Parachute Drop. He'd heard rumors that the Parachute Drop was going to reopen; it had been closed for years. The structure was visible from the Belt Parkway. People dropping through the air in parachutes might draw customers in. Eddie rummaged through his trunk until he found two old towels he'd used for waxing his car. He tossed them in the backseat, along with a faded Yankees hat. Then he filled his water bottle three quarters full with gasoline and stuffed a dampened oily rag into the neck.

With the smell of gas on his hands, Eddie returned to Manhattan Beach. All the tree-lined blocks were quiet, peaceful, bucolic. Manhattan Beach seemed a great place to live, the kind of neighborhood people never associated with Brooklyn. He adjusted the rearview mirror, then glanced down Yuri Borodenko's dead-end street. He jammed the Yankees hat down tight on his head, then got out and quickly wrapped the old towels over his front and rear license plates.

Back behind the wheel, Eddie took one last look in all directions. Borodenko's block was empty-no drivers, no pedestrians. The guy who'd been washing Borodenko's Rolls-Royce was gone, the green hose no longer on the sidewalk. Eddie put the Olds in reverse and backed down the block at thirty miles an hour, stopping hard at the dogwood tree. Pretty pink petals blocked him from Borodenko's cameras. He opened the door and lit the oily rag. He held the bottle until the flame was fully engaged.

Then he leaned down and rolled it under Borodenko's beloved Rolls-Royce.

Two blocks away, Eddie heard the first explosion. A second explosion, this one louder, occurred seconds after the first blast. Black smoke rose high above the trees. He stopped by an empty lot to take the towels off his license plates. It was a start.

Chapter 5

Monday

8:00 P.M.

Twelve hours after his daughter had disappeared, Eddie Dunne sat at his kitchen table, trying to decipher a recipe for angel food cake. He'd taken refuge in the kitchen, far away from the overly reassuring young detectives hovering over the phone in the living room. The cake was his granddaughter's idea. Grace had called it "angel foot cake" when she was a baby, and it always made them laugh. She wanted to have a happy surprise for her mother when she got home.

"The recipe says a tube pan," Eddie said.

"I know which pan."

Grace stood inside the closet-sized pantry, on the kitchen chair she'd dragged in. She was searching the shelves for the pan she'd watched her mother use. Eddie ran his fingers through his hair and read the card again. The steps were complicated, with words like
volume
and
decompression
.

"Do we have a dozen eggs?" he asked.

"Eggs are in the refrigerator, right under your nose."

At that moment, she sounded so much like her mother, it made his heart pound. Grace hadn't inherited the red hair, but her voice and mannerisms were eerily similar. He remembered when Kate was about Grace's age, sitting on the kitchen floor, sliding little cakes into her Easy-Bake Oven, and somehow getting perfect little pastries out of a forty-watt lightbulb. Eileen had tried to help her, but she wouldn't have any of it. That bossy confidence Eileen always called a Dunne trait would help Kate survive.

"The refrigerator's this big white thing, right?" Eddie said.

The refrigerator held two dozen eggs, neatly stacked in special trays from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. The swanky trays, one of Kate's many kitchen toys, replaced the paper egg cartons in the Dunne fridge. When Kate married Scott D'Arcy, a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, she threw herself fully into cooking. She took classes, inhaled cookbooks, and ordered pastry brushes and souffle pans from overpriced catalogs. All they'd ever talked about were things like presentation and "erbs." After Scott landed a job as a sous-chef at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, they began stockpiling money for a restaurant of their own. Kate worked double shifts at the hospital until the night Grace was born. But less than two years after that event, Scott took their dreams, and a twenty-two-year-old waitress, to Seattle, where he opened his own bistro.