I sped up. Better to just take it in all at once and not piece by gruesome piece. One last roll, and there he was. Displayed on the ground in front of us were the earthly remains of Vladislav Tishchenko.
I had hoped for skeletonized. No such luck. The plastic, much like a large freezer bag, must have preserved him. He looked like Beetlejuice. His skull was partially covered with skin and random tufts of hair. There were no eyeballs, only sockets staring up at me. His suit was mostly still there. It was a double-breasted affair, probably brown, but it was being worn by only half a body or less. He had been wearing a gold chain, which was now draped around his spine.
“Shanahan.”
“What?”
“Get the wallet. Let’s plant this guy and get the fuck out of here.”
I moved around to where his waist was…had been. My outer gloves were too bulky to rifle through his pockets, so I took one off, leaving only the surgical glove. I started to reach and recoiled. It was instinctive. I had to concentrate really hard to reach down and lift his suit jacket. But once I had broken the barrier, once I had touched him, I couldn’t move fast enough. I turned him slightly to reach into his back pants pocket. I tried not to notice how the corpse moved under my hands. Parts of it around the waist felt somewhat solid but spongy. Other parts felt like what they were: a bag of bones. I tried his side pocket. Loose change and some keys. I pulled everything out and dumped it in the dirt behind me. No wallet.
I stepped across him to stand on the plastic and try the other side. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I forced every ounce of concentration I had into the few square inches where my hand was searching. His cell phone was in his other side pocket. I took it. There was nothing in the back pocket.
“Shit. It’s not here. It’s not here.”
Dan was standing at his post near the feet. “Breast pocket,” was all he said.
Like an experienced necro-pickpocket, I lifted his jacket, reached in with just the tips of my thumb and index finger, and extracted a long, flat leather wallet. I took it over to where I’d dumped the other stuff. I whipped off the other big glove and started rifling. There was money. I pulled it out. It was a stack of hundreds. Driver’s license. No credit cards. Some kind of identification card written in Russian and what looked like a stack of food stamps, probably stolen. Here was a man who stole millions, maybe billions, and he felt a need to steal food stamps.
That was it. There was nothing else. There was no card or case or token. Nothing. I rocked back and sat on the ground.
“Maybe it’s one of these keys,” Dan said, poking at the key chain.
“It’s not a key. Not a real key. It’s a card the size of a credit card. I was sure it would have been in his wallet.” Dan went back to Vladi. Without hesitating, he reached down and patted down the entire body, starting at the shoulders. He found it in one of the pant legs, the one that still had a foot attached. He pulled out his knife, cut open the pants, and came out with a sleek carrying case, like a business card holder, only slightly bigger. He tossed it over.
“Oh, my God.” I couldn’t believe it. “This is it. This has to be it.”
“Must have been strapped to his leg.”
The case looked as if it might have been brass. I looked for the mechanism to open it but couldn’t find it. No buttons or slots or hinges. There must have been a trick. While I was looking, Dan was busy trying to roll up Vladi.
“A little help here?”
I gathered all the stuff we’d collected and dropped it into a plastic bag. I put the bag into my backpack. I pulled on my fisherman’s gloves and went back to work. The body made a soft thud when it landed in the bottom of the grave. We grabbed our shovels. Compared with digging him up, it took hardly any time to bury him. Still, it was almost five in the morning when we’d finished. The last of the glow sticks had gone out, but the sky was brightening when I turned to take one last look at Vladi’s final resting place.
31
THE SUN WAS COMING UP AS WE DROVE INTO BOSTON. Dan had to get home and get cleaned up for work. I dropped him off at his place. Then I drove over to Felix’s house of electronics, figuring to head off any Kraft requests before he even made them. Felix used his digital camera to take photos of the token. The one I liked best showed it lying on the front page of the Boston Globe right next to the date. Then he used his scanner to scan it in and his computer to send it to an e-mail address Kraft had provided. In the process of doing all that, I learned how to open the damned case.
When I got back to Harvey’s, I was covered in mud and sweat and smelled as if I’d marinated in a swamp. Not surprisingly, Rachel was the first to greet me.
“Did you get it?”
“I got it.”
“Oh, my God. Where is it? Let me see it.”
I opened my backpack, pulled out the plastic bag with the token in it, and held it up. She reached for it, but I snatched it back.
“No one touches this but Felix.”
Harvey was in his office. The empty popcorn bowl was still on the coffee table.
“Harvey, are you okay?”
“Did you have success?”
“We did.” I found myself feeling good, for a change, that I had actually accomplished something I’d set out to do, something important. “I beeped Kraft. We should hear from him soon.”
“She won’t let me see it.” Rachel had followed me in. I took out the second bag, the one with Vladi’s personal items-the pinkie ring, the wallet, and the chain from around his neck-and tossed it to her. She held it for a matter of seconds before she figured out what it was and dropped it onto a side table. She glared at me, and I couldn’t help but enjoy it a little. For someone as tough as she was, she seemed awfully delicate sometimes.
“I’m going upstairs, babe, to finish packing.”
I needed to get showered, too, but it was pretty clear Harvey was upset, probably about the packing. I decided to sit with him for a few minutes. I was about to collapse into the wingback before remembering my encrusted condition. I sat on the floor and leaned against the couch. I dropped my head back and closed my eyes and enjoyed for a few moments not having Rachel sitting between us. There were few of those moments left to enjoy anymore.
“There is not much left of us,” Harvey said, “after we are gone.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. He had found his way over to the side table and was holding the bag that Rachel had dropped. He studied each item carefully through the plastic as a blind man might-with the tips of his fingers.
“There was more of Vladi left than I would have preferred.”
“I am not speaking in terms of the material things or the biological matter we leave behind.”
I put my head back again. “I suppose what you do with your life is more important than how much stuff you leave behind, even if it is a lot of stuff. Vladi Tishchenko left a billion dollars behind, yet he’s in a grave where no one will ever visit because of the life he lived and the things he did.”
I heard him pushing his chair closer. The wheels still needed oil. I knew I should have gotten up and done it right then-I would never remember to do it when I actually had the time-but I was too exhausted.
“Did you know that I was drafted to go to Vietnam?”
That woke me up. Harvey hardly ever told me anything personal about himself, and he never reminisced. I lifted my head to look at him. “You were drafted?”
“In 1968, I was eighteen years old.”
I did know that, but not in the way you really know things. I knew how old Harvey was, but I had never considered him to be anything but the middle-aged guy who wore glasses and drank tea.