“You can’t pin Dani’s murder on me,” Tolstaya said. “You can’t pin any murder on me.”
He rolled his chair closer, into Hannibal’s silence. The face was the one in the photographs of Boris Tolstaya, except that it was a little thinner. The black hair was a little thinner too. The change in his body was more profound. This man was half the size of the rakish gambler whose photograph Hannibal had been carrying around in his pocket. He wore a heavy sweater and slacks that hung on his frame. Two transparent plastic tubes snaked up from the back of the chair to clip into his nose. Tolstaya stopped just three feet in front of Hannibal. The left side of his mouth curled into a half smile.
“You didn’t know,” Tolstaya said. “Sidorov kept his word after all.”
“I guess he did,” Hannibal said. “What happened to you?”
Tolstaya laughed, a weak but real laugh. “You Americans. Always so direct. But you are right, you never learn anything otherwise. What has happened to me, Mr. Jones, is called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
“ALS,” Hannibal muttered.
“Yes, the disease named after your baseball player Lou Gehrig,” Tolstaya said, turning and rolling back toward the table. “I soldiered in Afghanistan at the same time that Nikita Petrova was there. I believe I was exposed to many of the same chemicals and toxins your soldiers faced during your Gulf War of 1991. Most escaped without harmful effects. Many did not. I am among them. It’s neurological, you know. This wasting disease progresses quickly once it gets hold of you.”
“I’d read that nobody knows what causes ALS,” Hannibal said, sitting at the table opposite Tolstaya.
“I know,” Tolstoya said. “Many soldiers know. Of course, they don’t have much of a voice. No one survives this disease. There is no cure. I no longer have the strength to move my legs, Mr. Jones. My arms will be next and then eventually I won’t even have the strength to breathe. I hope for only two things. One of them is peace and comfort until I die.”
“And the other?” Hannibal asked.
“That my enemies never learn that I became so weak and helpless and died this way.”
“By your enemies, I take it you mean your former mob partners,” Hannibal said. “But I’m not sure I understand,” Hannibal said.
Tolstaya took a deep breath and clenched his jaw. “That is because you think I am simply a gangster. You do not understand who I am.”
Who was this man Boris Tolstaya, Hannibal wondered. He was a Russian gangster. Bu he was also a soldier stricken with a fatal disease. He was a lifelong keeper of secrets. He was an underworld figure who was at odds with his closest allies. And he was a man who seemed oddly at peace with his fate. Then the picture became clear. Boris Tolstaya was not concerned with dying, Hannibal decided, only with the nature of his death.
“Come on,” Hannibal said, “there’s no reason to keep secrets now, except maybe your location and your health situation. If I wanted to give those away, I would have already done it. I can keep those secrets for you until it no longer matters, but you can’t just keep me in the dark.”
Tolstaya nodded and his mouth formed an upside down U, the universal symbol for considering a new premise. He looked toward the house and the half-smile returned. “Ahh, what the hell. Yes, of course I mean my friend and partner Uspensky. But I cannot blame him, really.”
“I don’t know,” Hannibal said, weaving his fingers together on the table. “In my circles, you don’t kill a friend over money.”
“It’s not the money,” Tolstaya said with a short laugh. “It’s the federal charges. I did skim some money from the brokerage firm, you know. So did Uspensky. Between us, it was enough to allow the IRS to build a case for income tax evasion. Ivan fears that if they find me before he does, I’ll turn state’s evidence and help them send him to jail. And he knows that if they never find me, it still leaves him to take the fall. But if he found me, well, he could make me the fall guy. It would be easy to show evidence that I stole the money to avoid taxes.”
“So, you’re saying your low profile has nothing to do with Nikita Petrova’s death, or Raisa’s, or that of Dani Gana?”
Out the corner of his eye, Hannibal saw Queenie approaching slowly from the house. He stayed quiet until she stood beside the table. He could not interpret the look that passed between her and Boris, but it was not the look of love or hate or regret or obligation although it had elements of all of those.
“Is everything OK?” she asked.
“Everything is fine, my dear,” Boris said. “Join us. The time for secrets between us is long past.”
Queenie sat, but Hannibal felt that he was still Boris’s focus. He would sit quietly and hear all that Boris had to say. As was so often true, he counted on silence to draw the truth out.
“I will tell you what there was between me and Nikita Petrova” Boris said, maintaining eye contact only with Hannibal. “First, we had the army experience in common. Then I worked with him to launder local Mafiya money through my firm. Then we gambled. He gambled poorly and he eventually owed me a great deal of money. This put me in the position to pressure him to turn a blind eye while I skimmed from the mob money he brought to our brokerage firm. That was all there was between us.”
“That’s a lie,” Queenie said. “There was the girl.”
Hannibal’s brows reached for his hairline. He was astonished that Queenie would contradict Boris, especially with a third person present. Boris leaned forward, his eyes pressed together as if focusing all his power on Queenie’s defiant face. His breath came in jagged gasps.
“What are you talking about?” Boris said, each word sounding like a separate sentence.
“You wanted his daughter, Viktoriya,” Queenie said, her voice dropping into a deeper, more hateful register. “You wanted that child. You would have used her to clear his debt.”
Boris’s face, already pale and wan, fell like an underdone cake. His eyes stayed with Queenie but his gaze softened. His mouth quivered only for a brief second.
“You knew.”
“Of course I knew,” Queenie said. “And one night, at the Russia House, I told Raisa. I assume she told her husband. I know that Boris would not let you take his little girl away. Like everyone else, he loved her too much. I know that is why you and Nikita fought, that night. That is why you killed him.”
“You can’t know that,” Boris said, raising a weak arm in protest.
“Of course I know,” Queenie said, standing. “There was a witness. Dani Gana saw you kill him.”
Queenie snapped to her feet, knocking over her chair behind her, and ran for the house, leaving a loud sob in her wake. She didn’t seem concerned that Hannibal knew she was living with a philandering murderer, but she apparently couldn’t stand to let him see her cry. Considering all the violence and double-dealing that circled Boris Tolstaya’s life, it seemed odd that the moment felt so awkward. Hannibal let a few seconds of silence sit between him and Boris, but found more questions irresistible.
“So…you and Viktoriya?”
Boris smirked. “Not quite what my wife imagines. I wanted her help in the business. A beautiful, strong, and ambitious young woman can always be useful. I could see that she was attracted to the money and the power it brings. Sadly, her father never got past seeing her as a helpless little girl. She wanted to see northern Africa and made it clear in her clumsy overtures to me. I offered to send her to Algeria to make business arrangements there. But Boris, he stood firmly against me, even after I offered to wipe his debt clean.”
“I’m surprised you would honor his wishes,” Hannibal said.
“Fortune smiled, on him and me. I met Dani back when he was known as Gartee Roberts. He was also young and ambitious and attractive in his way. And he was attracted to the money. And he had family in Africa. In fact, his family ties reached high into the Moroccan government. So I sent him to Morocco with new clothes and enough money to get established. In short order he wormed his way into their foreign service. The test there gets easier the more you pay to take it, you see. And once he was working for the embassy, he could cross borders at will with however much cash we needed to move.”