The Russian Heist, page 28
“I don’t understand how these shit-lucky mutts can disappear like this. There isn’t a criminal brain in the whole rotten pack.”
She fidgeted awkwardly with the old padlock, hard to do with one good hand, but Kirran decided not to offer help. “Some people learn by doing,” she said.
Downstairs in the musty range, she pulled the string cords for the bank of fluorescents to kick in. She ignored Kirran and walked up to the middle of the range and began assembling her gun. She turned around to see him watchingherand,mildlyirritatedbyhishangdoglook,shepushedtheplugs into her ears, steadied the Glock, and fired at twenty feet. She ejected the clip, reloaded, and sent another sequence into the target. A third clip followed suit with the same results. The silhouette’s head, torso, and groin wereneatlyperforatedintightgroupings.Sheremovedtheplugsandheard a sharp whistle behind her.
“What’s the matter, Kirran? Can’t you do that?”
“I can, but I don’t generally aim at a man’s balls first.”
Chapter 36
Forty One Days after the Heist: Sonny,Puer Eternitatis MacbridelistenedtoSaint-Saens’ CapriceonDanishandRussianAirswhenthe kidreachedoverhisshouldertofiddlewiththetuningbuttons.Hesavored animageof Sonnypullingbackabloodystumpbutsaidnothing.Bobbihad grownmoreprotectiveof theboyeversinceAustinburg.Amaternalswitch had been flipped and she would not allow criticism of her dimpled darling—so be it. Getting the money was all that mattered.
The wretched youth had a talent for tracking his sickening music in the middle of these empty Indiana cornfields. Macbride didn’t doubt that, if Sonny were dropped into a Bedouin caravan in the emptiest quarter of the Saudi Arabiandesert, he would come up with a rap station. Using Dimitri’s wad of cash, they had gone as far as Indianapolis, driving eight hours straight on Interstate 70 west, spent the night at a Days Inn on Meridien well south of West 38thwhere the great historical mansions of the city begin. and African-American pedestrians are not harassed on North Meridien—as long as they’re cleaning houses or doing yardwork. Across the street from the hotel was an IHOP where Sonny loaded up on a gelatinous breakfast of pancakes slimed with syrup and topped with crepes lavished in whipped cream and strawberries.
Macbride had a Danish with his coffee. He was a dozen, maybe fifteen pounds, lighter since his ordeal began. He was a pilgrim without a guide to this netherworld. Fear and terror were lousy aphrodisiacs but wonderful appetite suppressants. He drank the coffee in silence and nibbled the stale pastry while the boy and his quote-unquote stepmother gabbed in their mindless fashion.
Lastnight,shewalkedaroundthemotelroominherpantieswhileSonny glued his face to the television, surfing furiously through the channels in somekindof dementedbacklashof sensorydeprivation.Macbridesnorted withcontempt.Inthemorninghecalleddownforshavinggearandscraped his swollen face clean in a masochistic act of purification. Bleeding from a dozennicks,hewasunawareof thepain.Hismindwasfocusedonthegoal.
They had taken one bed while he had the couch in the other room, no discussioninvolved.Heheardsoundsduringthenightthatwereundeniably coital in nature. He shut this bestiality out with a game based on square roots; not even sudokucould obliterate the sounds of their incestuous passion. What was left to surprise him at this point? Even Treblinka had its mundane routines to the inmate. His battered sensibilities were beyond shocking. They were chained to the Russian as surely as he was chained to them.
“Ithinkourmotel’ssomekindafagflophouse,”saidSonny,chewinghis cud confection and apparently including Macbride in the observation.
“What makes you say that, sweetie pie?”
“All men except us. Blowboys and queers, man. We’re the only family.”
Family—Sweet Christ on a bicycle. Macbride could have spewed coffee. Family indeed. . .
Thedynamicsof thisnewfamilyweresomethingtobehold.Adepraved Valkyrie and her depraved boy-toy—Sophocles’ son and father met on the Oedipal wall and look what fell off into the lap of the wife-mother below. Dimitri, the unwanted outcast of their little family, lay in his own filth on the floorboards of the Durango, half-mummified in rolls of cord and duct tape under a blanket. His head swathed in a bloody, checked dish towel, he looked as if he were sporting a ghutrah. This is hell, Dimitri—his look communicated to the bound man—nor are you out of it .
Macbridesuspectedthat,evenif theRussianweretofreehimself,hiscirculation had been cut off so long he must be gangrenous, not to mention dehydrated and starved. His wounds smelled infected. If one could pity a monster, one pitied him. The gods loved irony, his torturer, the nurse.
Macbride’s queasy stomach rumbled. His interrogation was unceasing. Where did you hide the bags? It’s just money, Dimitri. Tell us, won’t you? Pretty please withsugarontop...Macbrideblockedoutsomeof itwithsudoku,butittook too much concentration. He hadn’t read Barron’s in months, but he knew tothecentavoorgroszywhatthevalueof theU.S.dollarwastotheworld’s currency. He rolodexed through the exoticand familiar alike—baht, rupee, drachma, Deutschemark, ruble, cruzeiro, thaler—anything to drown out the hideous sounds from the back seat. Forty bugshas to a riyal in Yemen.One hundred mongos to a tughrik in Mongolia . . . Even the kid’s odious music was preferable to the imagined acts taking place behind him. Macbride had a fieryaftertasteinhismouth.Buttheobstinacyof theRussianbegantogall even Sonny. “Let’s stop pissing around,” he said abruptly while they traversed the long, wind-scoured miles.
They left Indianapolis on Interstate 80 going east. Macbride simply pointed the Durango back in the direction they had come just the day before. While passing through the Indiana farmlands, Dayton signs would slowly become signage for Columbus as the miles rolled beneath them. Macbride was brooding about his photo on the television news channel. “You don’t look like that so much,” said Sonny. “You lost about a ton for one thing.”
But Bobbi was the only one who didn’t resemble her photos. Those glamshots of her on television were a far cry from her ravaged face now. Her complexion was spotty from a bad diet; her mouth and eyes were creased with worry lines, her hair was clipped short to the ears, not even dirty blonde now, but showing dark roots and even some gray at the nape. Withoutmakeup,rouge,andmascara,shewasstillextraordinarylookingbecause of those yellow eyes—and of course her chest. Those great bouncing teats were at present traveling incognito. Although she added an extra sweater,stoopedherwalkalittle,itmadelittledifference.Somebody,probably a male, would pick her out of a crowd.
Macbride figured another day, two at most, of hiding in freeway traffic like this. Macbride knew that, once she killed Dimitri, their hope for the money was gone and a deal for a reduced sentence was kaput.
His mood plunged for other reasons. Soon, he would be ignored. Then he was sure he would be dealt with by the two of them. At the very least he would be cut out of the money. Time was against him. Sonny fidgeted to another rap station. Even worse, the kid chanted a capellawith the radio. He conjured a vision of ebony thugs with shiny metallic teeth hunched over studio mikes, fat rolls on necks glistening; their gold chains rattling in rhythm to the thudding beat. How did the racist father sire the son who identifiedwithblackmenspangledwithjailhousetattoosandbulletscars— theirdialectamatingof backwaterMississippiwithbig-cityghettoese.Their vile harmonics became a magma of imbecilic din fusing like igneous rock in his head:
Everything about scoring more bitches, conning the system, wearing more gold, driving Lambos and Ferraris . . . representing—whatever the hell that was.
The Durango vibrated with Sonny’s piping rasp and the lead singer’s basso-profundo. Macbride forced to endure it, found himself caught in a terrible voix celeste:
‘Bring yo ass over heah, ‘ho!’
Shakespeare, Milton, Mozart—Macbride saw them spinning dizzily in their urns through each refrain as the lyrics rocked the cab, collided contrapuntally, then spattered over him like sewer flotsam:
‘Lookin’ at a nigger wid yo’ pore mouth,
Bitch, I ain’t ever seen you dance—’
He gritted his teeth until the last odious Negroid syllable dropped. He shot out his hand and clutched the boy’s skinny wrist preventing him from mergingintotraffic.Theyweresandwichedbetweenparallelchromesnakes of whizzing steel as the converging streams of traffic from St. Louis and Chicago squeezed them into the slow lane.
“I swear to God, I’ll kill us all if you touch that dial again.”
“Take it easy, asshole, you’ll get us killed!”
Bobbi ceased her ravening in the back seat to look at him in the mirror. He did not want to attract the mother-lover’s ire so he smiled weakly. He fiddled with the station buttons until he found a classics channel. The golden words of Schiller’s Ode washed away some of the filth of these last hoursof theselasthorriddays.Horribilevisu,Macbridesaidtohimself.The musicunknottedhimslowly.TheboyslippedonhisWalkmanheadphones. Macbride let his churning brain numb to idle. He looked at the distant hills andmile-highcumulonimbuscastingdome-likeshadowsonthelandscape. He summoned the hallelujahs of the alto sopranos to bring him succor. He was close to hallucinating. He had heard of lifeboat victims who plunged into shark-infested waters, saying they were just going out for a pack of cigarettes.
GreenhighwaysignsrolledonpointingfewermilestoColumbus.Sonny subsided from his sugar high into a funk. The brown patchwork scenery rolled past. He thought of his abandoned cat and wondered if he could survive on a diet of field mice and spiders.
Macbridesnappedoutof hisreverie,hismindpartiallyhealed,butthrust backfromthebrinkwherehehadbeen.Hefelteyesonhim—hers.Shewas staringathimfromtheback.Hewilledhishearttobestill,notshowpanic, nor especially what he had been formulating in his brain. She flicked a tongue to lick bloody spittle from her upper lip. He thought of a cobra, so beautiful to behold, so deadly to be near.
Forty-Two Days after the Heist: Annie Cheng in Situ
She loved the slack key guitar, how it fused melody and bass and became personal.Theseraremomentsof harmonywhenshecouldplaymusicwell always presaged a deep sleep at night. When she first went to work with Harry, she used to drop onto the bed without removing all her clothes and wake up in the middle of the night. Then she would stagger into the bathroom to relieve her bladder, go to the fridge for a glass of milk, strip off therestof herclothesandsleepsoundlyforthreemorehours.If theywere to hook her up to one of those REM-sleep gizmos, they’d find a few scattershot dreams between hectic moments of tossing and turning. They would have to read carefully to find interludes of rest. She craved sleep with a need more akin to sexual hunger.
Still, it had been a good day—their first break in the heist came with a call from a motel in Indianapolis and a diminutive hotel clerk who wanted to report “suspicious persons.” When Marge put her through, she heard the dialect of Hubei province and immediately spoke to her in Chinese, choosing a Beijing dialect that was geographically closer to her than what her father used to lament as her slang-ridden Shanghai version.
AnniehadtotakeaconnectingflighttoMidwayinChicagobutarranged to meet her that evening. They were all traveling together, she said—the woman,theboy,andthefatman.Shehadseenallthreegoacrossthestreet to the restaurant in the morning. The blonde woman had checked them in and fetched the key.
It was very unusual, she said, for her motel to have a woman guest, but Annie could not interpret her explanation for the reason and she gave up pressing her. It was possible to communicate despite the clash of accents and meanings. The woman used the expression bao jaozithree times until Annie understood she was not referring to “making dumplings” but giving her a physical description of the fat one, Macbride.
Annie wrote down the names and addresses of the night-shift maids she provided her. Incredibly, she didn’t understand the term for “Russian man,” so Annie used the slang for “big nose,” which the woman misapplied to the fat one. She tried the Shanghai termjiayangguizibut she said no, no “fake foreign devil” had accompanied these three.
Annie immediately excused herself and went into the lobby to call the Indiana and Ohio State patrols for BOLOs to alert troopers covering Interstate 69 northeast to Toledo and the turnpike north to Detroit, Interstate64northwesttoChicago,andInterstate80betweenColumbusandSt. Louis.
Noneof herNewYorkcontactsreportedanysightingsof DimitriByko. A tap on a crime boss known to arrange killings for Aleksei’ uncle turned up some information in code they couldn’t interpret. She made a call to Alex and asked him to take a shot at breaking it.
She kept the details in her report to a minimum, refused to give Kirran any description of what she saw when she entered the farmhouse, nor of theroomwhereshesawBobbiastridetheman.Kirran,whohadseenafew dead bodies in backwater Warren, where people shot and stabbed one another, or gassed themselves with self-loathing, could not cajole a single detail from her. She angrily told him to stop playing streetcorner psychoanalyst.” But away from people, after work, or at home in bed, she foundthenightmaresgrowingmoreformidableandthenightterrorsworse. For every ugly thing she must witness, she endeavored to find a beautiful thing to balance it.
On Maui the Silver Sword bloomed once every twenty-five years. It was scheduledtoblossomthisyear.Shemadeavowthenandtheretoclimbthe volcano and find one in bloom.
Forty-Four Days after the Heist: BobbiDentata
“Mad Anthony” Wayne had once made the Maumee flow with the blood of massacred Indians by the shores around Toledo. For hundreds of years before white men arrived and even long after they were here, Algonquin, Huron, and Iroquois fought and killed one another in tribal wars thatwent on for generations. Macbride used their extinction as a lesson in utilitarianism in his Macroeconomics courses. He called it the whiskey-wampum paradox. Now this countryside was site for a rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike in that architectural style that resembled a crashed spaceship. A small oil painting celebrating Wayne’s victory hung in the lobby above a bank of telephones, racks of postcards and Ohio State souvenirs with risqué Tshirts, including several variations of Brutus the Buckeye having his way with a couple University of Michigan cheerleaders.
Macbride got in line for Starbuck’s Columbian grande. Sonny had a Frappuccino to go with his Sbacco’s pizza slice and brought out a Cherry Coke for Bobbi. Dimitri moaned through his cracked teeth on the floor of the Durango. No one paid him any attention.
Peoplesawthembuttravelerswerenotoriouslyshort-sighted;itwasthe sheer anonymity of impersonal highway travel that shielded them from prying eyes in the midst of crowds and busy roads. The weather saved themafewtimes.Sleetcausedcarsandtruckstoslideoff theroad,which kept troopers busy with tow trucks and away from their radar guns and computer screens. At least once a trooper drew close, which set off a hushed racket of vituperation inside the Durango, but it, too, resulted in nothing.Hedisappearedintothefastlane’sslipstreamneartheCedarPoint exit past Sandusky.
For two hours, Bobbi remained in her seat behind Macbride. This was his sole use to her, he knew. He had to preserve it even though his hands ached and his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. He felt as if he were soldered to the steering wheel. His right leg was numb from the knee to the thigh and his back was knotted with muscle fatigue in so many places that leaning forward or back against the seat did nothing. But he preferred all discomfort to a seat back there next to her—and what lay suffering on the floor.
SonnywasinasulkbecauseBobbivetoedhisdesiretoscoresomedope in Toledo. Macbride tried to ingratiate himself by abetting her decision as wise, but the Winged Fury (his new name for her) ignored him.
“Stop at a fucking Walmart, then.”
“What all you need there, sweetcakes?”
“Spray paint.”
“What for, baby?”
“What do you think, you dumb cunt. I want to paint the fucking car.” Macbride tuned out their vituperation as he tuned out every exchange
of drivel between these cretins. He shuddered; he would almost prefer the sound of her gnawing. Dimitri must have planted the money near the farmhouse somewhere. His mind tabulated the minutes and hours of the disappearance of the money bags. There simply had not been sufficient time for him to drive it to a secure hiding place.
JustastheycameuptotheInterstate75juncturenearCincinnati,Bobbi ordered him to take it, go north, all the way up to the corner of the state and get on the turnpike at a place called Angola. Macbride was sure they’d be spotted by some hick cop going through the tiny burgh. Dozens of semis joined them to avoid an extra twenty miles of toll road.
ThemachinepunchedoutaticketandMacbridereachedanarmintothe frigid air for it. Soon they were back on the turnpike heading east. She had been silent for hours, sitting in a trapezoid of light. As if she were answering the silent question, she said, “They’ll be watching for us at the major exits.” Macbride was dumbfounded, but he was sure she was right.
Sonny, his eyes a dull sheen from self-medication with the last of his Skittles, finally succumbed to stillness. Macbride took revenge on the catatonic boy and hoped every note of the Enigma Variationswould sear itself into his tiny, befogged brain. His fingers roamed the classical stations to keep his groggy mind awake. The beautiful Dies Iraeshimmered from the Requiemand spilled out of the vents. Mozart’s deliriously somber yet terrifying cascade was most apropos to their circumstances, he thought. The
March to the Scaffoldcame on. Macbride refused to see it as an omen. His logic fought with his imagination.If hesawacarventingsteamfromitshoodonthesideof theroad, or a man standing by his vehicle with a blown-out tire, he was certain they were undercover cops. A yellow ribbon around an oak in a front yard was a secret signal they were heading into a trap. Nothing made sense to his frazzledandoverwroughtneuro-transmitters;noweverythingmeantsomething bizarre or perverse.
Bobbi’s depravity warred with his newfound paranoia. His mouth was dry—a Sirocco blowing down his throat. God alone knew what Dimitri must feel like. Stoically he racked up the miles and kept his mind busy with math puzzles and off his hurting bladder. Anything to keep out those hushed arias of pain on the floor.
