Fortunately, I passed well in a crowd of suits. Neatly dressed and self-contained, I pretended to pay attention to a pager as I followed the man around the corner, all too aware that wherever there was Mafia, there was Mafia security. Manelli’s men were watching this street. If they were protecting Maslak, they knew that Rodion and the Yaroshenko Organization would be out for him. I could almost smell the garlic on the wind.
Sure enough, Maslak went into the shade of the garage jungle. Built to serve the hospital and the many smaller laboratories clustered around it, it was reminiscent of the concrete sarcophagus that the Soviet government was currently building around the ruins of Chernobyl. I followed him in, keeping a bead on him while I waited for Vassily to catch up. Every second that passed, every moment we headed deeper in the building and closer to the stairwell, the more tension gathered in my shoulders. It was an eternity before the town car rolled past, Vassily concealed by the tinted windows. Maslak turned a corner, and I took the chance to throw open the door and jump in.
“Where’d he go?” Vassily craned his head, rolling forward.
“Left,” I grunted. “If he goes upstairs, I’ll get out again.”
Vassily sped up and hauled the wheel left, pitching me against the door. A car screeched to a halt to avoid broadsiding us, honking loudly.
“What are you doing?” I righted myself, resisting the urge to grab the wheel.
“I’m trying to follow him!”
“Do you want to play the Soviet national anthem out the window while we do it?” I leaned around him catching glimpses of Maslak weaving through the lines of cars. He crossed the next aisle, then the next… and then got his keys out, twirling them around his finger has he closed in on a black Renault.
“There we go. Get the plate!” Vassily’s voice rose in excitement as we slowed to a creep, as if searching for a spot.
It was my turn to roll my eyes. “You are the worst kind of desk jockey. I already have the plate, Vassily.”
“Write it down!”
“I don’t need to write it down.” I watched as the man pointed something with his hand, and the car flashed its lights and chirped. He had some kind of new electronic entry system, one that didn’t require a keypad on the door. It probably worked with radio waves. Interesting.
We circled around, and then followed him at a distance out into the nightmare that was Manhattan rush-hour. While we were stuck in gridlock with every other poor schmuck on the road, Vassily and I took the opportunity to change seats. It was well understood that I was the better driver, and tailing marks was an art form.
It took us nearly an hour and a half to drive eleven miles. By mile nine, Vassily began to grimace and glance out the window. “We’re headed to that Battery Park development area. If this guy lives where I think he might live, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get him at home, Lexi.”
“Why?” My focus was on the road. Even with air con, the sun through the windshield had turned my gloves into a sauna. As traffic thinned out and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, we were able to pick up some speed.
“This guy’s New Money, and he’s still pretty young.” Vassily rapped his fingers against the door, frowning. “He wants the best of everything, right? The Concrete Club owns some of the biggest apartment towers near Battery Park and Wall Street. And who runs that?”
“The Mafia. But he might not be going home at all,” I said.
“On a Thursday night?”
“Well, I don’t know. Don’t yuppies all go to each other’s apartments and eat sushi on Thursdays?”
Unfortunately, Vassily’s hunch was right. Maslak turned right at the World Trade Center, then left onto South End Avenue to pull up in front of a sectioned off apartment complex with its own boom gates, skywalk, and three skyscrapers’ worth of luxury housing. Ruefully, I watched the black Renault disappear into the dark maw of an underground parking garage. An attended parking garage. We cruised on by and found a place to park down the road, crestfallen.
An apartment complex like this meant security, and it meant cameras: lots of cameras. It didn’t make the job impossible, but it definitely made it harder. I could take out cameras easily enough – electronics don’t really like magical resonance – but not a whole building’s worth. There’d be a trail of fuzzy video. Talented mediums working with forensic videographers would possibly be able to extract the ghostly images of my passing. Besides that, if Maslak could afford a five thousand dollar-a-month apartment, what kind of magical security was he able to contract? And where was he getting the money?
“What are you thinking, Alexi?” Vassily said. “My guess is we pretend to be contractors or pizza boys or something, and go up there and beat the piss out of him.”
“No, no.” I shook my head, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel and staring at the dash as I thought. “No, Rodion wants something more dramatic than that. I’m going to have to do it alone, and I’m going to have to do it tonight… but I have an idea.”
Chapter 7
You had a choice when it came to enforcement work: you could do it fast, or you could do it slow. Slow meant days of surveillance, building up patterns and routines so you could pick the best moment to act. Fast meant more risk during the actual job, but you had the advantages of surprise and spontaneity. I usually preferred slow. This particular job called for fast.
Much later that night, I returned to Gateway Plaza in a different rented car, which I parked down the road and forgot about. I had a duffel bag with everything I was likely to need, including a siphon tube, a bucket of children’s chalk, a can of mace and a telescoping baton, no gun. I was also disguised. One of the advantages of being a short man is that it’s far easier to look taller than it is to appear shorter. Shoe lifts and a padded-out ski cap over a good wig could add a full four inches of height. With coveralls and boots, anyone seeing me would report a well-built man, around six feet tall, brown eyes and brown hair – assuming they even remembered.
The underground lot had an entry boom and a manned attendant booth. The guard was in there, reading a tabloid and smoking out the window. We were going to have to engage… there was no route to sneak past him, and my gift for magic did not extend to invisibility.
As I strode toward the gate, he looked up and frowned. I made a beeline for the window, hands in my pockets.
“Hey, uh, Sir.” The man folded his paper and pushed his cigarette to the corner of his mouth, puffing on it. “Sorry, but this isn’t a public access garage.”
“Hey, buddy. I’m here to work on a car,” I said. “What’s it take for a man to get a guest pass?”
To my surprise, his eyes narrowed. “A guest pass? Hang on… wait. Did you just try to bribe me to let you in here?”
“Yes, sir.” I nodded, pulled out my keychain canister of bear spray, and maced him in the face.
He threw his hands up, but the mace got in his eyes and caught the cigarette with a small fireball that set his carefully teased and moussed hair alight. The shout of alarm turned to a scream. As he thrashed back and forth in the confines of the booth, eyes streaming and hair burning, I leaned in, grabbed him by the collar and shoulders, and hauled him through the window. He wasn’t too big, so he didn’t get stuck. Instead, he slithered to the ground in a sobbing, smoking heap, his Maglite clattering to the ground.
“Your job cannot be worth this much trouble, puttanta.”[20] I grasped him by the collar and hauled him up. I frisked him, searching for a gun and cuffs, and then doubled over as he landed his fist in my gut.