“Where will you go, Pani Hauk?” Nadia said.
“I have some friends. Other squatters. They are close by. I will stay with them tonight. Tomorrow we will return and collect the bones. My friends have a root cellar, too.”
“Can we drive you there?” Marko said.
“No. It’s not too far down the road. Maybe there’s a flashlight in the car.”
The trunk contained Nadia’s suitcase, bag, and two knapsacks filled with hunting paraphernalia including ponchos and canteens. Marko fished a flashlight out of one of them. He handed the babushka the flashlight and one of the knapsacks.
“How is Adam?” the babushka said. “Does he love America?”
“Yes,” Nadia said. “He loves America.”
“And do Americans love him back?”
Nadia realized that by now he’d told Johnny the truth. Whatever the details, he had to have been defending himself when he killed Valentin’s son. And now she knew why.
“They will, babushka. They will.”
CHAPTER 55
JOHNNY PICTURED A woman with a rifle falling backward into water she knew to be radioactive.
“Eva and me,” Bobby said. “We didn’t waste time. Once the woman fell in the water, we took off into the forest. We knew the rest of the hunters would be coming once they heard the shot. Because there was only one shot. But there were two of us. They’d want to know what happened. They may have had radios to communicate but she wouldn’t be able to answer. And sure enough, before we could take ten steps I heard a man’s voice shouting for us to stop. He must have been on his way to her already.”
“Valentine’s father. That’s how you recognized him from the picture.”
“Yes. He didn’t even raise his rifle because he was running to help his wife.”
“How did you get out of the Zone of Exclusion?”
“We figured they’d be expecting us to head for the scavenger trails. So we didn’t. We hiked to the main entrance instead. Last place they’d be looking for us. We climbed up a pair of trees that gave us cover but let us see the checkpoint. So we could see every vehicle that came in and out. An ambulance came flying in about half an hour after we got there. Went flying out ten minutes later. We stayed hidden until the car we saw in Pripyat left the Zone.”
“When was that?”
“The next day. In the afternoon. A young man and an old man.”
“Valentine and his father,” Johnny said. “They hunted you through the night.”
Bobby nodded. “I didn’t know their names at the time.”
“I thought your father lived in an abandoned house in Chornobyl,” Johnny said. “Why didn’t you go there?”
“I didn’t want to lead the hunters to him. Squatting is illegal. Squatters are criminals.”
“They might have killed your father. What happened to Eva?”
“She died nine months later.”
Johnny detected the sadness in Bobby’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“She had thyroid disease,” Bobby said. “She left school early one day. She didn’t come home. Neither did Coach. Three days later Coach came back and told me to prepare for a funeral. She was gone. Sometimes it happens quickly. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye.”
“How did Valentine find you in New York?”
“He saw my picture in the paper and the YouTube video of my race against the Rangers in Lasker Park last year. He called me while I was with Iryna one night at her cousin’s bakery in Brighton Beach.”
“He must have been in London. Promised his father to avenge his mother. Made the call then. How did he get your number?”
“It’s on my Facebook page.”
“Facebook? You didn’t hide it?”
“Not until after he called. I’m an American. I wanted to make friends. I wanted to be like everyone else.”
Johnny shook his head. Foolish kid. “What language did Valentine speak with you?”
“English.”
“Did he identify himself to you?”
“No. All he said was that he knew me from Ukraine. That he knew who I was. Which was funny.”
“Why?”
“Because he still called me Bobby. You’d figure if he knew who I was he’d have called me Adam. No matter. He said he’d be calling with instructions for us to meet the next day. That I was to follow those instructions to the letter. That if I didn’t or I told the police or anyone else about that call, he’d have Nadia and me killed.”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think? If it’s not for Nadia, I’m not here. So I did what I had to do to protect her.”
“Which was?”
“I followed the instructions. A man picked me up in a boat at South Street Seaport. It was starting to get dark. He looked like a fisherman. He took me to an island nearby. From the angle of his approach, it looked about one and a half kilometers long, half a kilometer wide.”
“And this was Hart Island.”
Bobby nodded. “I didn’t know what it was called until I got to prison. People talk about it here. The fisherman dropped me off at one end of the island. He gave me an envelope. Said everything would be explained in the envelope. Then he took off.”
“He have a Russian accent, this fisherman?”
“No. He was American. He looked like a random guy. Someone for hire.”
“What was in the envelope?”
“A letter. It said, ‘Welcome to Hart Island, the forbidden burial ground of New York City. In the daytime, it’s off limits to everyone except the prisoners who do the burials. In the nighttime, it’s off limits to everyone. It’s a place New Yorkers can’t visit without special permission. It’s a place no one likes to talk about. Sound familiar?’ Then he told me who he was. That he’d had me in his sights, that he’d missed, and that as a result I’d killed his mother. He said only one of us was going to leave the island alive. The one who survived was to bury the other in one of the mass graves in the potter’s field. He said he was arriving at the southern end of the island at that very moment, and by the time I read his signature the game had begun.”
“And the boat’s gone by now, right?”
“One of them is.”
“What does that mean? There was more than one?”
Bobby shrugged. “As soon as I read the note, I knew Valentin had to have a boat waiting. Whether he had a man with him or not, I wasn’t sure. I was guessing not, that he was doing this alone. Out of some Cossack sense of honor, and to keep his witnesses to a minimum. But there was no way he was waiting to call someone to come pick him up if he managed to kill me. He wasn’t going to put his fate in someone else’s hands. And he wasn’t going to risk any delay. I knew I wouldn’t have. I knew there had to be a boat.”
Bobby’s father had been a notorious con man, famous for his misdirection. If plotting was genetic, the kid had inherited his father’s insight into human behavior.
“You had to be suspicious when you came?” Johnny said. “Did you bring any weapons? Anything at all to protect yourself?”
“I had my screwdriver and my flashlight. I always carried my screwdriver and my flashlight. And I brought a bat. A baseball bat. Louisville Slugger.”
“Better than nothing,” Johnny said.
“I wouldn’t have known how to get a gun if I wanted one. It didn’t matter. I don’t like guns.”
“So you’re alone on an island with a guy intent on killing you. He has a high powered rifle and a hunting knife. You have a screwdriver and a bat. You have no way of leaving the island except swimming. Are you a good swimmer?”