"Stop. Do you at least know her friend"s name?"
"Uh ... no," Wally said.
"Then I can"t help you," said the rocker clerk, and returned to her artwork. "Have a nice day."
Wally sighed and walked out of the shop, crossing back over Myrtle and sliding into the Town Car again.
"What happened?" Tevin asked, and Wally explained the situation. "So," said Tevin, "we just figure that it"s still her box and wait her out."
"And hope she checks her mail more than once a month," said Wally.
"Friday is a big day for people to get stuff done," Tevin said confidently. "Before the weekend, you know? Something will happen."
"Then we need to get closer," Wally said. "We can"t pick out the individual box numbers, and we need to be sure if someone is using the right box."
"I don"t think so. If we get closer, we might spook her."
"Yeah," Wally agreed.
"You know what they do in the movies?" Tevin said with a mischievous grin. "They send a huge red box to the person at the box number so it"s obvious who picks up the mail."
Wally smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. "I can"t believe I forgot to bring a huge red box."
Tevin laughed. "I have an idea," he said, then reached into the seat well for his backpack, rifling through the various contents until he found a cheap ballpoint pen. He opened his door and climbed out of the car. "What"s the PO box number again?"
"310," Wally said. "What"re you doing?"
"Workin" it out." Tevin shrugged with that mischievous grin again.
Tevin crossed Myrtle and entered the store, walking straight up to the clerk, who looked up from her "artwork" with her standard expression of annoyance. "Yeah?"
"You got a piece of notepaper?" Tevin asked. "I need to leave a message for my friend Sisco."
"Sisco," the woman repeated in a snide tone, annoyed again at the interruption of her work. She pulled out a piece of notepaper and slapped it onto the counter in front of Tevin. He scribbled some words onto the paper and then folded it in half, writing Box 617 on the outside. He held the note out, and the clerk took it without looking up at him but made no move to actually deliver it to the box. Tevin remained at the counter.
"What?" the clerk said.
"The message is really important."
"Oh my G.o.d." The clerk groaned the words, as if being subjected to torture. She slammed down her art pen and rose from her stool. With Tevin"s note in hand, the woman left her post and walked back around behind the wall of PO boxes to place the note in the appropriate box. As soon as she was out of sight, Tevin scrambled across the floor of the shop and headed straight for Box 310. Once there, he jammed the tip of his pen into the box"s keyhole and twisted it hard to the side, breaking the tip off inside the keyhole.
"Thank you!" Tevin called out to the clerk as he turned and left the store.
TWENTY-FOUR.
Near the corner of 94th Street and West End Avenue, a gypsy cab was pulled halfway back into a service alley, its nose poking out far enough to allow the pa.s.sengers a full view of 94th Street. In the backseat of the cab sat Klesko and Tiger. Behind the wheel of the cab was Ramzan, the Bulgarian from the bas.e.m.e.nt credit card shop in Queens, fidgety and sweating despite the cold of the day. Klesko and Tiger kept their eyes on the abandoned dry cleaner"s on the first floor of an empty building, half a block away.
Within an hour, they spotted three of the four teens arriving-none of them the girl-and watched the youths as they snuck in the back entrance of the dry cleaner"s, using their own key.
Locating the new hiding place had not been difficult; once Klesko had figured out the girl"s scheme with the empty commercial s.p.a.ce, it had been a simple matter of obtaining the real estate listings from the same company-Desmond & Green Realty-and searching for the empty location that best suited the girl and her crew.
Soon afterward, two of the kids had reemerged and walked off, leaving the black one alone in the dry cleaner"s.
"We wait for the girl," Klesko said, and Tiger nodded.
Tiger watched his father, anger and impatience growing in the old man with each pa.s.sing hour. So far, Tiger had been able to rein Klesko in, to keep him focused on their goal so that his thoughts would not drift back into the vortex of rage that was clearly swirling inside the dark recesses of his father"s mind. The violence at the office building of Charlene Rainer had done nothing to appease Klesko"s need for vengeance. If anything, the urgency of his need had been whetted by spilling all that blood.
Tiger wondered how long it would be before his father"s actions surpa.s.sed reason, surpa.s.sed the man"s ability to control himself or to be influenced by his son. What would Tiger do then?
The men"s patience was rewarded when the blond girl-the one they had encountered at Dr. Rainer"s office-arrived on the scene by herself and behind the wheel of a large American sedan. She proceeded to park on the street in front of the cleaner"s, a very bad parking job in fact, and entered the cleaner"s. Within minutes, she reemerged with the black kid. The two of them climbed into the Lincoln and drove off, the boy behind the wheel.
Within thirty minutes the three men in the gypsy cab were parked half a block up from Carlton Street in Brooklyn, watching the two teens. The men had a clear view of the Town Car but were still partially hidden behind a red-and-white-striped tow truck parked just in front of them. Behind the wheel of the cab, Ramzan was anxiously alert to the mood and movements of Klesko, seated directly behind him.
"Klesko," Ramzan whined, "I say it again. So long ago, Klesko, troubles came to you in our deal, but it was not me who brought them."
"No, not you," Klesko grunted.
"I offer to help because we do business over many years, trusting each other. Making each other much money. That day ... the police were there already ... twenty Darzhavna and there was nothing I could do-"
"A truck full of Abakan rifles and nothing you could do?"
"By myself and just the two Serbs? Just muscle, a couple of patsani only?" Ramzan could see that Klesko had no appet.i.te for his arguments. He mumbled a lament, mostly to himself: "It was so long ago."
Bringing Ramzan and his gypsy cab with them had seemed like a good idea at first-the girl did not know Ramzan"s face at the time, so having him behind the wheel would be good cover-but after several hours in the Bulgarian"s presence, Klesko was tiring of his incessant mewling and the sour smell of fear that reeked from the man"s pores.
"Something ..." said Tiger, who had a pair of binoculars trained ahead on the Town Car. "The black one is doing something."
Klesko took the binoculars and watched as the girl"s companion entered the postal shop, the same shop the girl had visited just a few minutes earlier. The boy ran some sort of game on the witless girl behind the counter, getting her out of the way with a ruse and then fouling one of the box locks when she wasn"t looking.
"A plan," said Klesko. "They are watching one of the boxes."
"I want to smoke," said Ramzan.
"So smoke, pizda," said Klesko.
"Outside," he pleaded. "I need air."
Klesko stared for a moment at the back of Ramzan"s head, boiling up with irritation. Every sound and smell and motion of the man seemed to inflame Klesko"s wrath, and finally he was unable to contain it. Tiger kept one eye on his father and recognized his mood.
"No ..." Tiger began to urge restraint.
Too late. Klesko reached forward and with his left hand grabbed hold of Ramzan"s thick, wiry hair, pulling the man"s head back as Klesko drew an ice pick out of his coat pocket and thrust it into Ramzan"s neck, slipping it with a discernible crunch between his vertebrae. Ramzan"s body went slack.
"Father ..." Tiger began, betraying his thoughts with a look of disapproval.
"Yes?" Klesko growled. "Something to say, Tigr?"
But Tiger changed his mind and remained silent. Klesko reached to Ramzan"s face, closing the dead man"s eyes and gaping mouth. He turned Ramzan"s head to the side, shielding his seeping wound from view in case any curious pedestrians should pa.s.s by. Tiger wanted to speak but waited a moment, listening to his father"s breathing to determine when calm had been restored to the man.
"What after this, Father?"
"Eh?"
"We will find the stones."
"And the wh.o.r.e," said Klesko.
"And then?"
"She dies."
"Of course. What then?"
Klesko gave Tiger a look of incomprehension.
"America is big," said Tiger. "Many places to go when we have what we need. Yes?"
Klesko just shrugged and returned his attention to watching the street, waiting for the girl and her black boy to make their next move.
TWENTY-FIVE.
In the four hours that Wally and Tevin had been waiting, at least three dozen customers had come and gone from the PO box shop. No one had tried to access box number 310. The interior of the rented Town Car kept going icy cold, and each time, Tevin had fired up the engine to reheat the air so the two of them wouldn"t freeze solid.
"I don"t know," Wally said. "What are we going to do? Stay watching here for days? A week?"
"She"ll come," Tevin said.
"Eight years," Wally said. "That"s how long it had been since I had my last appointment with Dr. Rainer. The address has got to be at least that old."
"If the address is no good, then that"s what you"ll find out today. An answer you didn"t want is still an answer."
They had been waiting for almost an hour more when a woman entered the shop from the east, wearing a knee-length French army surplus woolen overcoat, with mismatched knit gloves and a rainbow-striped scarf wrapped around her neck. On top of her head was a bright orange hunting cap with earflaps that flopped down. The overall effect was artsy bohemian. The woman moved directly to a different section of the PO boxes and removed some mail, shuffling through it casually and tossing the junk in a blue recyclables container. Wally sighed and checked the car"s clock for the twentieth time that hour. It was a quarter to five and almost completely dark outside.
"s.h.i.t," she said.
"Hold up a sec," Tevin said, his eyes still focused on the shop. Wally looked ahead and saw the woman with the rainbow scarf move to another section of the boxes-somewhere very near box 310-and shuffle through the keys on her chain until she found the one she was looking for. She tried to stick the key into the lock but failed and tried again, pushing harder and twisting at different angles. The lock wouldn"t take the key. The woman bent over and seemed to be looking at the box"s keyhole, and then she turned away and stepped to the service counter. From their watching post fifty yards away, Wally and Tevin could see the shop attendant leave her post to walk around behind the mailboxes. She returned a few seconds later with a small collection of envelopes-maybe three or four-and handed them to the rainbow scarf lady.
A surge of adrenaline jolted Wally awake, her eyes now fixed on the woman.
"Do you recognize her?"
Wally had shared with Tevin some of her conversation with Dr. Rainer; Wally had come away from their meeting with the sense that Yalena Mayakova was already a part of Wally"s life, at least peripherally, that her Russian mother was someone she would recognize.
"I don"t know ..." Wally said, a little frantically. She couldn"t get a good enough look at the woman"s face. "She looks like she might be around the right age."
"So we stop her?"
Wally"s mind was spinning now. The woman took mail from two different boxes. The mail from box 310 might be hers, or someone else"s.
"No, not yet," Wally said. "First we follow."
They had already worked out their plan: Wally would get out of the Town Car and pursue on foot while Tevin stayed behind in the Lincoln and followed close by, ready to pick Wally up in case the subject moved to a vehicle or bus. If the pursuit led to a subway stop-the G line stopped two blocks away at Clinton and Washington-then Tevin would hurry to park the car and join Wally on foot.
The woman in the scarf left the shop and walked out onto Carlton. Wally climbed out of the Town Car as Tevin started the engine.
"Don"t get too close," Tevin said. "She might be spooky."
Wally nodded and shut the car door behind her, heading immediately toward the corner of Carlton, keeping pace with the woman as she headed north. The woman walked casually, not in any hurry. On the first block, there was a housing development on the left side of the street, a full square block with a handful of eight-story apartment buildings, but the woman pa.s.sed those by and continued on. The next intersection was at Park Avenue, where the noisy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway pa.s.sed high overhead. The woman walked under the expressway, crossing Park and continuing to the north.
Wally noticed that almost no one else was on the sidewalk other than herself and the woman, so she slowed down a bit, wary of revealing her presence. Wally glanced behind her to confirm that Tevin was still in contact and found that he was, driving slowly up Carlton with the Lincoln"s headlights off, pulling into open s.p.a.ces against the curb whenever he could in order to stay out of sight.
The woman continued onward until she reached the end of the block, where Carlton ended in a T at Flushing Avenue and the broad fenced-in lot just adjacent to the dark Brooklyn Navy Yard. The woman crossed Flushing Avenue to use the opposite sidewalk, which ran along the high cyclone fence that surrounded the lot, a dense thicket of razor wire at the top. Wally followed from the opposite sidewalk, keeping her distance. Within a hundred yards the woman came upon an entrance in the fence-a driveway with a motorized gate. The woman must have held a remote control unit in her pocket because as she approached, the gate began to open for her, its old motor grinding into action and rolling the gate to one side.
Wally watched all this from across the street, where she was able to get a good view of the area the woman was entering. The lot contained a village of rusted old Quonset huts-perhaps fifty in all-arranged in a grid with barely enough s.p.a.ce in between them for a small vehicle to pa.s.s. A few of the huts had lights on inside. Wally watched as the woman headed into the yard and toward the huts. As she moved onto the site, the motorized gate automatically began to roll closed behind her.
Wally raced across the street and, as she ran, spotted an empty malt liquor bottle in the gutter. Wally bent down to grab the bottle and reached the driveway opening before the gate was fully closed. She set the bottle down lengthwise in the gate"s track, and the mechanism came to an abrupt halt as it b.u.mped up against the obstacle, leaving an opening in the gate wide enough for Wally to squeeze through. Wally stopped and looked west on Flushing, spotting Tevin in the Lincoln and signaling for him to park the car. Tevin found a parking spot and jumped out of the Town Car, joining Wally outside the front gate.
"She"s in there?" he asked, scoping out the village of metal huts on the other side of the fence. "What is this place, anyway?"
"Don"t know," Wally said. "C"mon." Tevin followed Wally, both of them turning sideways to shimmy through the narrow gap in the gate. They began to walk slowly among the huts, hearing the woman"s footsteps somewhere nearby but unable to tell which direction they were headed.
"Which way did she go?" Tevin asked.
"I lost her." Wally shrugged, frustrated.
Wally and Tevin began to move crossways through the huts, checking down each lane as they went, hoping to spot the woman. At the third lane they finally spotted her-she had stopped in front of a hut down toward the far end and was pulling out her noisy key chain. She unlocked two heavy bolts and swung the metal door open, its rusty hinges squeaking loudly. She reached inside the doorway and turned on an inside light, which spilled out of the hut and illuminated her for a moment.
Before entering her s.p.a.ce, the woman paused and looked down the lane in the direction of Wally and Tevin, as if sensing that she was not alone, but Wally and Tevin ducked behind a corner just in time to avoid being seen. The woman entered the hut and closed the door behind her. Wally and Tevin could hear the woman locking the door behind her, both heavy bolts sliding into place with a secure ka-chunk.
Tevin turned to Wally with a questioning look. "The light from inside the hut ... it showed her face."
"I saw," Wally said, "but we"re too far away...."
"Okay." Tevin shrugged. "Then let"s go see her up close."
Wally nodded and the two of them moved down the quiet lane, tense with antic.i.p.ation. As they walked, they noticed that many of the huts had interesting items arranged outside them: sculptures, engine parts, paint-splattered benches.