A petite woman in black tights with a perfectly formed ass walked a pug on a leash ahead of them.
“Two cloves of garlic,” Stefan said. “All they need is a loaf of bread and some salt.”
Victor let Stefan enjoy the view for a moment. “Bread costs money,” he said. “Have you wired that money out of my personal account to Tara yet?”
“How could I? Banks don’t open until tomorrow.”
“Change in plan. Wire her seven thousand. Get the other five thousand in cash. And I want to get it to her tomorrow so she can leave town before Misha does some damage she can’t walk away from.”
“I’ll take care of that and the girl’s surgery in Kyiv first thing in the morning. Speaking of Misha…”
“Yes?”
Stefan looked away. “He offered me a job.”
“Of course he did. And you accepted.”
Stefan regarded him with a look of surprise. “You don’t seem surprised. Or upset.”
Victor veered off the trail toward the wrought-iron fence, where darkness would hide the embarrassment on his face.
“The other day,” Victor said, “when you joked I was scaring you because I was senile and you said you might leave me, what did I tell you?”
Stefan kicked a pebble out of his way. “That the day you stopped scaring me is the day I should leave you.”
Victor stopped walking and faced his sovetnik of twenty-three years. “So tell me, Stefan. Do I still scare you?”
“No, Victor. You don’t scare me anymore.”
“Then it’s time for you to go,” Victor said.
They left in opposite directions.
When Victor got home, he sank to the floor in the corner of his dark kitchen. The cat meowed and jumped in his lap. He wrapped his arms around it and kissed its head.
“It’s just you and me,” he said. “It’s just you and me, Damian.”
CHAPTER 15
ON SUNDAY EVENING, long after most churches conducted their services, another form of worship began at 7:00 p.m. at Brasilia in Willimantic, twenty miles outside Hartford.
Giant speakers suspended above a runway stage thumped with a Joan Jett rock-and-roll anthem. Two women gyrated on the floor, arching their backsides within inches of the faces of their worshipping clientele. Nadia counted thirty-three customers scattered around her brother’s club. None of them wore fine black leather coats, and none of them looked familiar.
Marko came around from behind a bar the length of a destroyer and gave her a lukewarm hug. With his shiny head and gray goatee, he looked like a prematurely old Cossack. A blast of mint gave way to the inevitable stench of alcohol.
“Oh, man,” she said in Ukrainian. “You’re drinking again.”
He blinked. “I can control it.”
“Last month, you told me you were sober for twenty-three days straight. What happened?”
“I think I can handle one cocktail.”
“Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me, Marko.”
“Just stop. You call me from your car all frantic and shit, telling me to be careful like my life is in jeopardy. Then you show up here with your holier-than-thou attitude. I don’t need this, Nancy Drew. I really don’t.”
Nadia looked around to make sure someone hadn’t crept close enough to listen. She pulled her checkbook out of her purse.
“I’m giving you an early birthday present,” she said. “It’s going to be a big one to make up for all the years we were incommunicado.” She wrote her brother’s name on the check. “I want you—no, I need you—to leave the country for two weeks. Immediately.”
He laughed in disbelief. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ain’t no one leaving the country”—he stopped laughing—“unless it’s you. What the hell’s going on?”
Nadia started filling in the amount. “I don’t have much money left, or I’d make it more. Three thousand dollars. The Bahamas. Or maybe Aruba—”
Marko grabbed her wrist and lifted the pen off the check. “Stop. Stop writing.”
Nadia tried to force the pen down, but Marko wouldn’t let her hand budge.
“Talk to me, little sister,” he said. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?”
She pulled her hand away and rubbed her wrist. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She looked around again. No one suspicious. “It’s not safe for me to do so.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you anything except that your life is already in danger. If I tell you more, someone could try to get it out of you, and I won’t put you in that position. You have to trust me on this.”
“Trust you? Listen to yourself. I’m your brother, and you won’t trust me by telling me what’s going on.”
Nadia remembered when Marko had secretly tracked her during her three-night survival test on the Appalachian Trail to make sure she didn’t get hurt. She was twelve years old at the time. Her father had insisted she become the youngest girl in the history of the Ukrainian scout organization PLAST to earn the survival merit badge. Marko had saved her from a pair of criminals who’d escaped from prison. Now his life was in jeopardy because of her.
“I’m so sorry this is happening,” she said. “I’m so sorry we’re having this conversation.”
Nadia resumed writing the check.
Marko said, “Does this have something to do with that antiques ring you busted up last year?”
Nadia didn’t answer.
“Does it? Were the people you put away just a front for someone else?”
Nadia signed the check.
“Oh no,” Marko said. “They were, weren’t they? Oh, shit. Uke or Russian?”
Nadia tore the check out of her book and slid it across the bar toward him. “Will you please leave the country? For your own protection.”
Marko glared at her, slipped off his stool unsteadily, and raised both pant legs. A gun was strapped to the left, a twelve-inch Bowie knife to the right. “Got all the protection I need right here.”
“No. No, you don’t,” Nadia said. “Not from these people.”
Marko’s face darkened, as though he understood her message.
“I’m begging you,” Nadia said, pushing the check closer to him. “Please go on a vacation. For me?”
Marko tore the check into eight pieces.
“Asshole,” Nadia said under her breath. “I knew this would be impossible.”
“Then why did you bother coming?”
She added a dollop of sarcasm to her voice. “Because I hate you and I want you to get hurt.”
Nadia gathered her purse and started to leave.
“Yo, Nancy Drew,” Marko said.
She turned. As a child, Nadia had escaped from her parents’ demands that she be the perfect student, Ukrainian, and daughter by reading mysteries. She always had a Nancy Drew in her hands, and it was Marko who supplied them. He delivered newspapers before school and bought her books with the proceeds.
“I’m leaving for Bangkok on Monday. Bunch of us are hiking to Burma. Two weeks. You need me to cancel and stay, just say the word.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that from the beginning?”
“That would have been the normal thing to do. Not our family way, though, is it?”
Nadia managed a smile. “Watch out for the snakes.”
“You too, Nancy Drew. You too.”
CHAPTER 16
NADIA ZIPPED DOWN the highway to Rocky Hill, a bedroom community between Hartford and New Haven. Her mother’s condo conveniently abutted Dinosaur State Park. Yellow paint peeled from the clapboard exterior. The glass on the bottom half of the storm door was missing, as though her father were still alive and had kicked it during one of his tirades. She remembered how his temper had frayed when she resisted taking the three-day survival test. She didn’t need to be the youngest Ukrainian Girl Scout ever to win the most coveted merit badge, she told him. He screamed at her that she would never make it in America. That she had to be stronger, tougher, and more fearless than the other children because she was an immigrant’s daughter.