“It was careless of you to lose your gun,” said the Russian.
“As you can see, I have another. If I lose that, I can always borrow one from my friend behind you. He has lots of guns. Anyway, I didn’t have anything to do with Demarcian’s death, the weapon apart.”
“So you say,” said the Russian.
“Yeah, but we have guns, and you don’t, so our word wins.”
The Russian shrugged, as though the whole matter was immaterial to him anyway. “I believe you, then. We would still like to know about the man who killed Demarcian, this Merrick. Tell us about Merrick.”
“Do your own homework. You want him, you find him.”
“But we think you, too, are looking for him. You want your gun back. Perhaps we find him, and we get it back for you.”
His bald companion snickered and said something under his breath. It sounded like “frayeri.” Louis responded by striking him across the back of the head with the barrel of the Glock. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, but it laid him flat on his face. His scalp began to bleed.
“He called us suckers,” explained Louis. “That’s not nice.”
The redheaded man didn’t move. He just shook his head in apparent disappointment at his colleague’s stupidity. “I think your friend does not like Russians very much,” he said.
“My friend doesn’t like anybody very much, but he does appear to have a particular problem with you two,” I admitted.
“Perhaps he is a racist. Is that what you are?”
He turned his head slightly, trying to see Louis. I had to give him credit: he wasn’t easily intimidated.
“I can’t be no racist, man,” said Louis. “I’m black.”
It didn’t quite answer the Russian’s question, but he seemed content with what he heard. “We want Frank Merrick,” he continued. “We could make it worth your while if you tell us what you know.”
“Money?”
“Sure, money.” His face brightened. This was the kind of negotiation that he liked.
“I don’t need money,” I said. “I got too much as it is. What I need is for you to take your friend and get out of here. He’s bleeding on my driveway.”
The Russian looked genuinely regretful. “That is a shame.”
“It’s okay, it’ll wash off.”
“I meant about the money.”
“I know. Get up.”
He stood. Behind him, Louis was checking the interior of the Chevy. He found a little H amp;K P7 in the glove compartment, and a Benelli M1 tactical shotgun with a pistol grip stock and click-adjustable military ghost wing sights in a flip compartment under the rear seat. Again, he emptied both, then opened the back of the Chevy, wiped his prints from them, and stuck them under the gray lining in the trunk.
“Go back to Boston,” I said. “We’re all done here.”
“And what do I tell my bosses?” said the Russian. “Someone must answer for what happened to Demarcian. It has caused many problems for us.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
He sighed deeply. “Can I put my hands down now?” he asked. “Slowly,” I said.
He let his hands drop, then bent down to help his companion to his feet. The back of the bald man’s head was wet with blood. The redhead took in Louis for the first time. They exchanged nods of professional respect. Louis removed a pristine white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to the Russian.
“For your friend’s head,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“You know what blat means?” said Louis.
“Sure,” said the Russian.
“Well, my friend here has major blat. You be sure to tell your bosses that.”
The Russian nodded again. The bald man climbed gingerly into the passenger seat and rested his left cheek against the cool leather, his eyes closed. His colleague turned back to me.
“Good-bye, volk,” he said. “Until we meet again.”
He climbed into the Chevy, then began to reverse it down the drive, Louis keeping pace with him all the way, the Glock never wavering. I went back to my Mustang and moved it out of the way, then watched the Chevy head toward Route 1, Louis beside me.
“Ukrainians,” he said. “Maybe Georgians. Not Chechens.”
“Is that good?”
He shrugged. It seemed to be contagious. “They all bad,” he said. “Chechens just real bad.”
“The redhead didn’t seem like a foot soldier.”
“Underboss. Means they real pissed about Demarcian.”
“He doesn’t seem worth that kind of effort.”
“They lose business. Cops start tracing their clients, ask questions about pictures of children. Can’t let it slide.”
But he seemed to be holding something back.
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Feels off. I’ll ask around, see what I hear.”
“Will they be back?”
“Uh-huh. Might help if we found Merrick first, buy us a little influence.”
“I’m not going to give them Merrick.”
“Might not have a choice.” He started to walk back to the house.
“What does ‘blat’ mean?” I asked.
“Connections,” he replied. “And not the legal kind.”
“And ‘volk’?”
“It’s slang, word for a cop or an investigator. Kind of a compliment.” He put his gun back in its shoulder holster. “It means ‘wolf.’”
Chapter XXIX
We drove north to Jackman late that afternoon, through Shawmut and Hinckley and Skowhegan, through Solon and Bingham, Moscow and Caratunk, past places without names and names without places, the road following the bends and curves of the Kennebec, the banks lined with bare trees, the forest floor brilliant with their lost foliage. Gradually, the nature of the forest began to change as the evergreens raised their spires, dark against the dying light as winter winds whispered of the promise of snow. And as the cold began to bite, the woods would grow ever quieter as animals retreated into hibernation and even birds grew torpid to preserve their energy.
We were following the route that Arnold took on his expedition up the Kennebec to Quebec. His force of twelve hundred men marched from Cambridge to Newburyport, then took to the river on transports, navigating the crooked channel of the Kennebec as far as Gardinerstown. From there, they transferred to light bateaux, more than two hundred of them, each capable of holding six or seven men along with their provisions and baggage, perhaps four hundred pounds of weight in all. They were built hastily and from green lumber by Reuben Colburn at Gardinerstown, and they quickly began to leak and fall to pieces, ruining the troops’ supplies of powder, bread, and flour. Three companies were sent ahead under Daniel Morgan to the Great Carrying Place between the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, the others following slowly behind, using ox teams borrowed from settlers to move the bateaux around the impassable falls above Fort Western, hoisting them up the steep, icy banks at Skowhegan Falls, most of the men reduced to walking in order to ease the burden on the boats until they came at last to the twelve low, marshy miles of the Great Carrying Place. The soldiers sank into deep, green moss that looked firm from a distance but proved treacherous underfoot, a kind of calenture on land, so that the madness suffered by sailors too long at sea, who hallucinated dry earth where there was no earth and drowned beneath the waves when they jumped, found its echo in ground that was soft and yielding as water. They stumbled on logs and fell in creeks, and in time they cleared a road in order to travel, so that for many years the path they took could be traced by the difference in the color of the foliage on either side of the route.
I was struck by a sense of landscape layered upon landscape, past upon present. These rivers and forests were inseparable from their history; the distinction between what was now and what had gone before was fragile here. It was a place where the ghosts of dead soldiers passed through forests and over streams that had changed little in the intervening years, a place where family names had remained unaltered, where people still owned the land that their great-grandfathers had bought with gold and silver coin, a place where old sins persisted, for great change had not come to wash away the memory of them.