‘Odensia,’ he said. ‘Bystro.’
The girl didn’t move. She was trembling hard and stared at him without blinking, as though fearful that, in the instant her eyes closed, he would put an end to her. The visitor tried to remember the word for ‘friend,’ and managed to dredge something from his memory.
‘Drug,’ he said, then corrected himself: ‘Druz’ja.’
It seemed to have the desired effect. The girl stopped trembling, although she still looked frightened. He repeated his injunction to her to put some clothes on. The girl nodded and went to the closet, retrieving a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt decorated with a spangled cat. He watched her as she dressed, but she didn’t seem to mind. He figured that, after all that she’d been through, being semi-naked in front of a stranger was a minor inconvenience. She slipped on a pair of laceless sneakers. He indicated that she should go ahead of him, then followed her into the living room.
He thought that he heard a sound from the hall outside, a door opening and then quickly closing again. The gunfire had been unfortunate but not unexpected, and the visitor did not panic. He searched the apartment, finding two iPhones and a BlackBerry, as well as $4,000 in cash, not including his own $1,000. The woman had stopped moaning and had lapsed into unconsciousness. Her breathing was shallow, there was a blue tinge to her skin, and blood was flowing from one of her ears. He wasn’t sure that she’d live, which suited him just fine.
He took the girl’s hand and pulled her into the bathroom, forcing her to step over Rudy’s body. He could hear sirens approaching as he opened the window, revealing the fire escape. He made the girl go ahead of him, and stepped down after her. A Lexus pulled in at the curb, and he put the girl in the back before climbing into the passenger seat.
‘So how’d it go?’ said the driver. He was short and dark-haired, wearing old jeans and a worn leather jacket. He didn’t look like the kind of man who should be driving a Lexus, not unless he’d stolen it. His name was Angel.
‘Noisy. Messy,’ said his partner, both professionally and personally. His name was Louis, and he was dressed like an executive with one of those shadowy, discreet firms that handle other people’s money, and handle it well. His hair was cut close to his ebony skull, his skin almost entirely unlined. It would have been difficult to tell his age were it not for the gray beard that he had begun to cultivate, an unconnected goatee and mustache arrangement known in the trade as a ‘balbo’ but known to his partner as ‘that fucking growth on your face.’
‘Bad?’ said Angel.
‘Two down, one pending.’
‘You get hurt?’
‘No.’
Louis took out the phones and the BlackBerry, and checked the numbers and contacts.
‘Lot of good stuff here,’ he said. ‘Lot of names.’ He took a netbook from under the seat, powered it up, and began transferring the contact details from the devices to the computer.
‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘I gotta ask: Are we on a crusade?’
‘Unless you got a better word for it,’ said Louis. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d never introduced me to Charlie Parker. I suspect that he may have contaminated me with idealism.’
‘You think you’ve come a long way. I used to just steal stuff.’ Angel looked in the rearview mirror. The girl stared back at him. Her eyes were those of a shell-shocked soldier.
‘You okay, honey?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think she speaks much English,’ said Louis. He dredged up the remains of the little Russian that he knew. ‘Kharasho?’
The girl nodded.
‘Ty v bezopasnosta. Druz’ja.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Angel.
‘I told her she’s safe, and we’re friends. That’s all I got. Anything more, we’ll have to stop in Brighton Beach and get a waiter to translate.’
He felt pressure on his arm. The girl’s pale hand rested on his forearm.
‘Dina,’ she said. ‘No Anya. Dina.’
‘Dina,’ repeated Louis. He took her hand in his, and held it as they drove.
The shelter was in Canarsie, almost within sight of Jamaica Bay. When they were a block away, Angel made a call from one of the stolen cells. He told the woman who answered that they had a young girl with them who was the victim of sex traffickers, along with the phones used by those responsible. They killed the lights in the car, and pointed out the shelter to the girl. He handed her the phones, and the cash.
‘We’ll watch you, Dina’ said Louis. He touched two fingers to his eyes, then turned them to the girl, and toward the shelter. ‘Ja tvoj dryg.’
Angel opened the passenger door for her. The girl put one foot out of the car, then paused.
‘Ya nichevo ne videla,’ she said.
Louis raised his palms in frustration and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
The girl frowned, then spoke again, this time in English. ‘I see nothing,’ she said carefully, then left them. They marked her progress, watching for strangers on the street. A door opened as she approached the shelter, and a woman appeared. Gently, she laid a hand on Dina’s shoulder, and ushered her to safety.
Dina did not look back, and the gentlemen from New York drove away.
14
Dempsey and Ryan were sitting in a chain coffee joint at Boston’s Scollay Square. If there was a more sterile part of Boston than Scollay, then Dempsey hadn’t found it yet. Oh, there were places that were skankier and rougher, projects and wastelands and dumping grounds, but Scollay Square was in the heart of downtown, a series of unforgiving slabs that formed Government Center, dominated by City Hall and the JFK Federal Building. Scollay had once been the home of Boston’s elite way back in the eighteenth century. Bowfront houses and grand row houses followed in the nineteenth century, and then the immigrants arrived and the elite left, and Scollay became the center of commercial activity and entertainment in the city, the latter centered on the grand Howard Athenaeum, later known as the Old Howard. In the 1960s it was decided that old was bad, and ugly was good, and Scollay was earmarked for destruction. The existence of the Old Howard presented the only real obstacle to the plan, and a group of concerned citizens pressed for its renovation, a campaign rendered null and void when the Howard burned to the ground in 1961 for no cause that anyone could establish, although there were plenty of people prepared to take a guess. As Dempsey well knew, there was no shortage of guys in Boston who knew how to light a match. The destruction of old Scollay had subsequently given birth to the strip joints and porno theaters of Lower Washington, although the excesses of the Combat Zone were now largely the stuff of memory.
For now, though, Scollay Square was safe territory, so far as any such place could be found in their current situation, on the grounds that someone would have to be crazy to try to whack anyone within sight of City Hall and a building that was crammed with feds the way a newly filled salt cellar was crammed with salt. Dempsey didn’t know for sure if there was a price on all their heads, not yet, which was why the meeting had been arranged. His belief, which he had not expressed to Ryan but which he suspected the younger man shared, was that it was only a matter of time before final sentence was passed, if it had not been agreed already in their absence. The hit would have to be sanctioned; unsanctioned hits brought an immediate death sentence for those involved, or that was the theory. In reality, except in exceptional circumstances, the sentence tended to be passed solely on the man who had pulled the trigger, and not on the man who had told him where to point the gun. But if a decision had been made to put Tommy Morris in the ground, then the additional expense of a couple of bullets for the men who had remained loyal to him was unlikely to trouble those behind the hit. Like any good gambler, Dempsey just needed to clarify the extent of their exposure before he played his hand.