Authors: Hazel Hughes
Chapter Sixteen
A short subway ride and a few blocks’ walk later and she was in the crowded, smelly funk of Chinatown. She was haggling in butchered Mandarin with a wrinkled shopkeeper over the price of dried shrimp when her phone pinged with a text.
Day off tomorrow.
It was from Alexi.
That’s right,
she thought.
It’s Sunday.
Her day off, too, officially, though she couldn’t remember the last time she had actually taken it.
Yes. Plans?
“You want? Yes or no?” The woman asked shaking the bag under Sherry’s nose.
Sherry took the shrimp, handing the woman a few bills, then returned her attention to her phone. Her heart had already kicked up a notch.
You.
Tucking the fragrant shrimp into the white plastic bag with the other ingredients, she responded.
Can you be more specific?
Out in the street, she hailed a cab. It wasn’t too far to Alexi’s place in Soho. Normally, she’d walk, but she wanted to get back to Alexi’s and start cooking immediately. She wanted the smell of her Singapore noodles to greet him when he got home, tired and wired from his last performance of the week.
I want to explore every centimeter of your naked body, top to bottom. Is that specific enough?
Smiling, she tapped a message back.
For now.
She had just tucked the phone back in her bag when it pinged again.
Also, I have something for you. A surprise. No guessing.
She was about to reply when her phone started ringing and vibrating in her hand. The number said, “home”. She didn’t have a landline, couldn’t see why she ever would, so the brownstone on West 114
th
would always be “home”.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
“Sherry. Where are you?” This was always the first question her mother asked when she called.
“Just leaving Chinatown, going to Soho.”
“I hope you went to Hung Fat. Some of those grocers, you can’t trust them,
la
. What’s in Soho?”
“Yes, I went to Hung Fat. Mrs. Lee tried to rip me off with the bean sprouts, though. She wanted three dollars a pound.”
“But you didn’t pay that.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course not!”
“So, no problem. Why are you going to Soho? Not that dancer boy again.”
Sherry avoided the question with one of her own. “Why are you calling, Mom?”
“You know there is no future with a dancer. After thirty, they are finished. Then what? They have no education. You are married to a dishwasher?”
“Mom.” She sighed, shaking her head in frustration. She made eye contact with the cabbie in the mirror. He shrugged. His expression said, “Mothers. Whaddaya gonna do?”
“Randall called me.”
“Whoa. That was fast. I just left him, like, half an hour ago.”
“He said you wanted to talk to Ken Wu.”
Ken. That was his name,
she thought,
not Kevin.
“Well, not Ken Wu, specifically. An immigration lawyer.”
“See. Already you have problems with this dancer. Not only a dancer. A foreigner.”
“Mom, you’re a foreigner.” Despite having lived in America for almost forty years, her mother refused to give up her Singaporean citizenship.
Sherry’s mother ignored her. “I called Ken. Such a lovely boy. So polite. I can’t believe nobody grabbed him yet.”
“He probably has some deep dark secret. He’s a hermaphrodite.” She winked at the cabbie in the mirror. They were pulling up at Alexi’s building.
“No dark secret. Just hasn’t found the right girl.” She made a tsking noise. Sherry could picture her shaking her head, hand to forehead.
“Mom, I’ve got to go.”
“Okay, okay. He will meet you at Lumière . Seven o’clock.”
Sherry handed the cabbie a bill and mouthed the word thanks as she got out of the taxi. “What, tonight?” she asked her mother.
“Yes. Don’t be late. He’s a busy man. And wear a dress.”
“Geez, Mom…” Through the phone she could hear the chimes of her parents’ doorbell ringing.
“Oh, oh. Have to go. It’s Charlotte. She wants my opinion about her daughter’s seating arrangement, she says. Only wants to boast, I say. Call me tomorrow.”
Sherry’s phone went dead. She sighed. Seven o’clock. She could do most of the prep for the noodles, meet Ken, and be back before Alexi had finished his last curtain call. It would be tight, but she could do it.
“Need any help with those, miss?” the doorman asked, pointing to her plastic bags.
“No, I’m good. I’m going to…”
“Mr. Davydenko. Yep. He gave us the 411. Nobody goes up but you.” Holding the door open for her, he smiled, gesturing an “after you” with his free arm.
Taking the stairs two at a time, Sherry felt a little glow in her chest. She wasn’t used to being treated as if she were precious. Sure, Glenn and the others had told her how beautiful she was, how sexy, how desirable. Glenn had even said he loved her, and maybe he had, in his way. But no one had made her feel like this. Like she was a rare species of orchid that needed special care.
She opened the door with the key Alexi had given her and stepped inside his empty apartment. Walking down the hall, she passed the closet with the shoebox in it holding tens of thousands of dollars. A feeling of unease lurched in her stomach, contrasting sharply with the warm glow. There was a story behind the money, she knew, and the simplest explanation was that it had something to do with the unaccounted for donations.
Putting the white plastic bag down on the table, she began unpacking the groceries. In the big scheme of things, ten or twenty thousand dollars wasn’t a lot, she rationalized. A year’s worth of Tylenol and Band-Aids for ABC. But if it had come from donor contributions, it was still stealing. Or worse, bribery. The Alexi she knew wouldn’t steal or accept bribes, but then, how well did she know Alexi Davydenko? They had been together less than a week.
Shaking her head to dispel the thought, she grabbed a knife from the block and laid out a bunch of scallions. No. He might have had a troubled past. He might have some self-destructive tendencies. But he wasn’t a thief. He would never deliberately take what didn’t belong to him. What worried her was that he was too trusting. And perhaps too idealistic. He had had so little love in his life that he might do anything to keep the love he did have. A picture of Sergei flashed through her mind, and the knife slipped, slicing a sliver of skin off her finger.
“Damn it!” She brought her finger to her mouth instinctively, sucking away the thin line of blood. Sergei was Alexi’s savior. Yes, Alexi had been angry with his mentor the night Sherry was attacked. Yes, he had asked the doorman not to admit him to the building. But he had done that for Sherry’s peace of mind, not because he actually believed Sergei had anything to do with the attack.
As she picked up the knife again, she sighed. She and Alexi were going to have to talk tonight. About the money in the closet. About Sergei. And about the article she was writing on the ABC. It was not going to be pretty, she knew, and it might end with Alexi asking her to leave, but it had to be done. It couldn’t wait until after the article was published. The way things were looking now, the article would cast a dirty light on his mentor, at the very least. At worst… She didn’t want to think about the worst. Not until she talked to Ken Wu.
Sherry chopped some red peppers and grated several cloves of garlic and a chunk of ginger. Having finished with the vegetables, she put the rice noodles in water to soak and started on the meat—pork tenderloin, chicken breast, and a few slivers of anise-scented barbecue pork. The chopping and slicing soothed her. She wasn’t what you’d call a domestic goddess. Baking was something other people did, preferably trained pastry chefs. And her cluttered, dusty apartment was testament to her skill and interest in housekeeping. But cooking was a different story. She wasn’t experimental, sticking to the recipes she learned almost by osmosis, sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework while her mother cooked and lectured Sherry on whatever happened to be on her mind that day. The familiar rhythm of the knife, the sizzle of the oil, the smell of garlic, ginger, and chili, they helped her mind to settle.
With all the ingredients for the meal prepped, she cleaned the knife and cutting board and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open. Before she could change her mind, she started writing, taking the outline she had constructed earlier and filling in the blanks.
Two hours later, the first draft of the article was done. All it needed was a headline.
“Ballet Funds War in Ukraine,” she said, typing. “No. Too boring.” She thought again. “Ballet for Bullets—ABC Donations Supply Russians with Ammo.” Frank would change the headline, of course, and maybe a lot more. The article wasn’t perfect. There was a gap. She needed a credible source to verify the link between the missing money and the fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk. Maybe she’d find that source before the deadline and maybe she wouldn’t.
Normally, she was careful not to make direct accusations, displaying the facts so that the reader could fill in the missing pieces. Journalism school had shown her what was safe to publish to ensure the paper wouldn’t be sued, and her years of reporting had taught her just how far past safe she could push. This piece was pushing pretty far. Maybe so far that Frank would decide it wasn’t worth the risk to publish it. And maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
“What the hell are you saying, Sherry, baby?” she said to herself. She had an honest-to-God scoop, a story that, as far as she knew, no one else had even gotten a whiff of. And here she was half-hoping it might not get printed.
Looking at the clock on her laptop, she could see she was going to have to make a move if she was going to meet Ken Wu at seven. She clicked “save copy”, but didn’t send an email to Frank letting him know the piece was ready to look at. He was so busy, he probably wouldn’t have time, she figured. There would be plenty of time to edit, revise, or even delete it completely before the deadline. She closed the laptop.
She got ready in ten minutes, pulling on her little black dress, brushing her hair and slicking on some lipstick. Stepping into her heels, she tried to ignore the urge to look in the closet again. Like a little girl checking under the bed for monsters, she thought. Except this time, the monster was there. She opened the door and was surrounded with the familiar scent of Alexi—soap, clean sweat, and that orangey makeup remover. She allowed herself a moment to just breathe it in before opening the box.
She lifted the lid and looked inside. The gun was still there. But the hundred dollar bills were gone.
Just to be sure, she checked all the other shoeboxes in the small space, but each of them held just shoes. The money was gone.
Maybe it had never been there in the first place, she thought as she left the apartment, locking the door behind her. Maybe she had hallucinated it.
If only.
It had been bad enough that the money was there. Now it was gone, leaving only more questions to ask and making it even harder to ask them.
She hailed a cab, sinking into the back seat, eyes closed.
“Park East,” she told the driver.
One thing was for sure, she was going to need a drink. She had just had the thought when her phone rang. She looked at the screen. Unknown caller. The number was blocked.
“Hello,” she said.
“Is this Sherry Wilson-Wong?” The voice said. It was female and vaguely familiar.
“Yes,” she said, sitting up, eyes wide open. “Who’s this?”
“I can’t give you my name,” she said. “But I have some information that you need. And I’m willing to give it to you. For a price.”
“I don’t buy information,” she said. It was the standard opening line of a journalistic negotiation.
“I think you’ll be willing to pay my price.”
“What is this pertaining to?” she asked, though she was pretty sure she already knew.
“Your piece on the ABC. I know what’s been going on. The money being funneled into Russia to support the separatists.” The voice breathed, triumphant.
Sherry’s heart beat faster.
“How did you get this number?”
“Does it matter?” The woman paused. “I saw you at the benefit. After. Horrible,” she said, but she sounded almost gleeful.
Sherry didn’t say anything. Was the woman a donor? A server? A dancer? Why did her voice sound so familiar?
“I’ve seen documents. An email showing the request to change accounting firms sent from Sergei Antonov to Ninny Vanderbeck. A bank statement showing a very large deposit. Much larger than the head choreographer of a failing ballet company usually gets. And…” She stopped as if waiting for a drum roll. “I’ve heard conversations. He doesn’t know I understand Russian. My mother’s from St. Petersburg.”
Sherry made a mental note of that fact. “Conversations don’t prove anything.”
“What if I can record them?” the woman asked.
Sherry let out a long exhale. “Conversations between whom?”
“Sergei and the boys in Brighton Beach. He mentions dollar amounts.”