“Kirill’s wife, you know about her?”
“Violeta? I’ve heard stories.”
“Her father heads a Mexican drug cartel. She believes in some arcane religion that practices animal sacrifice and, if you believe the rumors, worse. She was diagnosed with severe mental problems—in Mexico. Her family dealt with it by killing the doctor. And she’s married to Kirill, not just because their marriage gives Kirill’s gang an unbreakable drug supply but because the only person crazier than Violeta is Kirill and they love each other for it.”
“And you stole their baby,” Angie said, and the moment the words left her mouth we both knew she was right.
The bottle slipped from Claire’s mouth.
“I . . . what?”
“You have the Russian mob after you and it isn’t because you’re so great at identity theft they can’t afford to lose you. Yefim took Sophie.”
“He what?”
“Took her,” I said. “And when he did, he said, ‘Maybe we have her make us another one.’ ” I cocked my head, got a good look at Claire. That’s where I’d seen those lips before, that hair. “That’s Sophie’s baby, not yours.”
“She’s mine,” Amanda said. “Sophie didn’t want her. Sophie was giving her up.”
I turned to Dre. “And who would’ve helped facilitate that process?”
“Better than aborting them.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure they have a great life. Claire’s is certainly starting off wonderfully—you two on the run, a bunch of scary gangsters breathing down your necks, a small matter of identity theft and crank production being your primary sources of income up to this point. Oh, and illegal baby-brokering, I assume. Yeah, Dre? That’s the confidential part of your job—you specialize in unwed mothers, I’ll bet. How warm am I?”
He gave me an embarrassed smirk. “Blazing.”
“Sounds like you guys got this all figured out.”
“How am I any different,” Dre said, “from any legal adoption agency? I find parents for women who don’t want their babies.”
“With zero oversight,” Angie said. “You telling us you’re able to investigate the people the Russian mob sells babies to? Are you serious?”
“Well, not all the time, sure, but—”
“Amanda,” Angie said, “of all the babies you could have stolen, why steal the one who was supposed to go to two of the craziest sociopaths in the city?”
“Your answer is the question.” Claire was asleep against her breast. She placed the bottle on the coffee table and stood. “I can only assume most times where the babies Dre brokers end up. And no”—another damaging glance at Dre—“I don’t normally assume it’s a great place they go to.” She placed Claire in a dark rattan bassinet by the hearth. “But in this case? I
knew
she’d end up in a bad place. Sophie’s a crank-head. She stopped doing it while she was pregnant, mostly because I had her move in with me and I stayed on her ass. But she went right back to it when Claire was born.”
“Well, she had a reason,” Dre said.
“Shut up, Dre.” She turned back to me. “Sophie wasn’t going to be raising Claire anyway—Kirill and his certifiably insane wife were.” She came over by me and sat on the edge of the coffee table so that our knees were almost touching. “They want that child. And, yeah, the easy thing would be to give her back. I sure don’t want to imagine what’s going to happen when Yefim and Pavel get me in a room alone. Yefim keeps an acetylene torch in the back of his truck. The kind they use on construction sites, with the hood and everything?” She nodded. “That’s Yefim. And he’s the sanest one of that pack. So am I scared? I am petrified. And was taking Claire away from them borderline suicidal? Probably. But you two have a daughter. Would you want her growing up with Kirill and Violeta Borzakov?”
“Of course not,” Angie said.
“Well, then?”
“It’s not simply a case of the baby grows up with the Borzakovs or you kidnap her. There were other options.”
“No,” she said, “there weren’t.”
“Why?”
“You had to be there.”
“Where?”
She shook her head and walked back to the bassinet and stood looking down into it, her arms crossed. “Angie, would you look at something for me?”
“Sure.” Angie joined her by the bassinet and they both looked in at Claire.
“See those red marks on her leg? Are those bites?”
Angie bent at the waist, peered in.
“I don’t think so. I think it’s just a rash. Why don’t you ask Dre. He was a doctor.”
“Not a very good one,” Amanda said, and Dre closed his eyes and lowered his head. “A rash?”
“Yeah,” Angie said, “babies get rashes. A lot.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“It doesn’t look really serious, but I understand how you feel. When are you seeing her pediatrician next?”
She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. “Her one-month checkup is tomorrow, so, I mean, do you think it can wait till then?”
Angie gave her a soft smile and touched her shoulder. “Definitely.”
We heard a sharp noise behind us and we all jumped in place, but it was just the mail being pushed through the brass slot in the door. It fell to the floor—two circulars, a few envelopes.
Amanda and I moved toward it at the same time, but I was closer. I scooped up three envelopes, all addressed to Maureen Stanley. One was from National Grid, a second was from American Express, and the third was from the U.S. Social Security Administration.
“Miss Stanley, I presume.” I handed the mail to Amanda and she snatched it from my fingers.
We walked back over to the baby as Dre slid his flask back into his jacket.
Angie stood over the bassinet, looking in at the baby, her features softening until she looked ten years younger. She turned from the bassinet and her face grew harder. She looked at Dre and Amanda. “On the top of the list of things that don’t add up about all the BS and half-truths you guys have been selling us since we walked through this door is this—why are you still here?”
“Here, as in Planet Earth?” Amanda said.
“No, here as in New England.”
“It’s my home. It’s where I’m from.”
“Yeah, but you’re an identity-theft master,” I said.
“I’m adequate.”
“You got Russians with blowtorches on your ass and you decide to hide out ninety miles away? You could be in Belize by now. Kenya. But you stayed. I’m with my wife on this one—why is that?”
Claire fussed and suddenly let out a wail.
“Now look,” Amanda said, “you woke the baby.”
S
he took the baby into a bedroom off the living room and for a minute we could hear them in there—Amanda cooing, the baby crying—and then Amanda closed the door.
“When do they stop crying?” Dre asked us.
Angie and I both laughed.
“You’re a doctor.”
“I just deliver them. Once they leave the womb, they leave my sight.”
“You didn’t study child development in med school?”
“Sure, but that was a few years ago. And it was academic then. Now it’s a bit more immediate.”
I shrugged. “Every kid’s different. Some start sleeping regular by the fifth or sixth week.”
“Yours?”
“She went four and a half months before her sleep got dependable.”
“Four and a half months? Shit.”
“Yeah,” Angie said, “and then she started teething not long after that. You think you know what screaming sounds like now. But you don’t. You don’t have a clue. And don’t even get me started on ear infections.”
I said, “ ’Member when she got infections in both ears
and
a tooth coming in?”
“Now you’re just fucking with me,” Dre said.
Angie and I looked over at him and shook our heads slowly.
“How come they’re never like this in TV shows and movies?” he said.
“Right? They always conveniently go away when the main characters don’t need them around.”
“I was watching this one show the other night, right? The father’s an FBI agent, mother’s a surgeon, and they got, like, a six-year-old? One episode opens, they’re on vacation together, no kid. I figure, okay, the kid’s with the nanny, but the next scene they show the nanny moonlighting at the mother’s hospital. The kid? Driving stick-shift to get groceries, I guess. Playing hopscotch on the interstate.”
“It’s that Hollywood logic,” Angie said, “the same way in the movies there’s always a parking space right outside hospitals and city halls.”
“But what do you care?” I asked him. “She’s not yours.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“But what? Let me ask you now that we’ve gotten past the kid-is-yours bullshit—you sleeping with Amanda?”
He leaned back, propped his right ankle up on his left knee. “If I was?”
“We already went down that road. I’m asking if you’re not.”
“Why would you—?”
“You don’t seem her type, man.”
“She’s seventeen years ol—”
“Sixteen.”
“She turns seventeen next week.”
“Then next week I’ll say she’s seventeen.”
“My point is, what
type
could she possibly have at this age?”
“And my point is, not you.” I spread my hands. “Sorry, man, but I just don’t see it. I see the way you look at her and, yeah, I see a guy waiting for that seventeenth birthday so his conscience can let him off the hook. But I don’t see anything like that when she looks at you.”
“People change.”
“Sure,” Angie said, “but attraction doesn’t.”
“Oh, man,” he said, and he suddenly looked forlorn and cast-off. “Man, I dunno, I dunno.”
“What don’t you know?” Angie asked.
When he looked at her, his hair was damper, his eyes had picked up a milky film. “I don’t know why I keep fucking myself
up
. I do something like this every few years just to make absolutely positive I’ll never have a normal life. And my shrink would say, sure, I engage in compulsive behaviors and I’m trying to replay patterns that go all the way back to my parents’ divorce and somehow get a different result. And I understand that, I do, but I just want someone to tell me how to stop fucking doing dumb fucking things. I mean, you know how I ended up losing my medical license and owing the Russians?”
We shook our heads. “Drugs?” I offered.
“Well, sort of. I wasn’t addicted to them or anything. It wasn’t that. I met a girl. Russian girl. Well, Georgian. Svetlana. She was, whew, she was everything. Crazy in bed, crazy out of it, too. So beautiful you wanted to eat your hand just looking at her. She . . .” He dropped his right foot back on the floor, sat there looking down at it. “One day she asks me to write her a scrip for Dilaudid. I say, Of course not. I quote the Hippocratic oath, the Massachusetts statutes prohibiting doctors from writing scrips for anything but diagnosed medical conditions, blah, blah, blah. Cut to the chase, she wears me down in less than a week. Why? I don’t know. Because I’ve got no center. Whatever. But she wears me down. Three weeks after that, I’m writing her OxyCon scrips and scrips for fucking fentanyl, for Christ’s sake, and pretty much anything else she wants. When that starts leaving too much of a paper trail, I start clipping the shit outright from the hospital pharmacy. I even took a moonlighting job at the Faulkner so I could do it there, too. I didn’t know it, but they were already investigating me by that point. Svetlana, God love her, she’d noticed how much I liked playing blackjack at Foxwoods the couple times we went, so she hooked me into this game over in Allston. They played it out of the back of a Ukrainian bakery. First time I played, I cleaned up. Good, fun guys, great-looking women hanging around, all of them probably stoned on my shit. Next time I go, I win again. A lot less, but I win. By the time I start losing, they’re all nice about it—they’ll accept more OxyCon in lieu of actual money, which is good, because Svetlana’s pretty much cleaned me out of money. They give me a grocery list—Vicodin HP, Palladone, Fentora, Actiq, boring old Percodan, you name it. By the time the state medical board has me arrested and files charges, I’m already in the hole twenty-six grand to Kirill’s sharks. But twenty-six grand is like tip-jar money at a coffee shop compared to what’s on the horizon. Because unless I want to do three-to-six at Cedar Junction, I got to come up with money for good lawyers. Another two hundred fifty grand in the hole to pay Dewey, Screwum and Howe, but at least I only get my license revoked, no jail time, no criminal finding. Kirill slides up to me at one of his restaurants a couple weeks later, tells me that the ‘no criminal finding’? That was his doing. And that costs another quarter-million. I can’t prove he
didn’t
influence the judge, and even if I could, if Kirill Borzakov says you owe him five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, guess what you owe Kirill Borzakov?”
“Five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,” I said.
“Exactly.”
My cell phone vibrated and I took it out, looked at the screen, saw a number I didn’t recognize. I put it back in my pocket.
“Pretty soon, one of Kirill’s guys—Pavel; I think you two met—he comes to me and says I should apply for a job opening at the Department of Children and Families. Turns out they got a guy in HR working off his own debt. So I apply and he waives the CORI check, and I get the job that I’m eminently overqualified for. A few weeks later, after a particularly attractive fourteen-year-old pregnant girl leaves my office, my phone rings and they tell me I have to present her with an offer.”
“What do you get per baby?” Angie’s voice was weary with contempt.
“One thousand off my debt.”
“So you’ve got to get them five hundred and twenty-six babies before you’re off the hook?”
He gave that a resigned nod.
“How close are you?”
“Not close enough.”
My phone vibrated again. I looked at it. Same number. I put it back in my pocket.
My wife said, “You know even if you got them five hundred and twenty-six babies to sell on the black market . . .”
He finished the sentence. “They’ll never be done with me.”
“No.”
My cell vibrated a third time. I had a text message. I flipped the phone open.
Hey guy. Anser your
fucking phone. Sincerely
Yefim.
Dre took another hit from his flask. “You’re like a fifteen-year-old girl with that thing.”
“Yeah, well, you’d know all about that.”
My phone rang again. I got off the couch and walked out to the front porch. Amanda was right—from here, you could hear the brook gurgle.
“Hello.”
“Hello, my good guy. What you do with the Hummer?”
“I drove it over to the stadium and left it there.”
“Ha. That’s a good one. Maybe I see Belichick driving it one day in his hoodie.”
In spite of myself, I smiled.
“What’s up, Yefim?”
“Where you at, my friend?”
“Around. Why?”
“I thought maybe we could talk. Maybe we could help each other out here.”
“How’d you get my phone number?”
He laughed, a deep, long belly chuckle. “You know what day it is?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“It is Thursday, yes, my friend. And Friday is a big day.”
“Because you wanted Kenny and Helene to find you something by Friday.”
I could hear the snort through the phone. “Kenny and Helene couldn’t find a chicken in the chicken soup, my man. But you? I look in your eyes after I shoot that faggot car and I see you’re afraid—you’d be one icy fucker if you weren’t—but I also see you’re curious. You sitting there thinking, If this crazy Mordovian don’t pull this trigger, I’ve got to know why he points it at me in the first place. I see that in your eyes, man. I see it. You a type.”
“Yeah, what type?”
“The type keep coming. What’s that saying about size of the dog?”
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s—”
“The size of the fight in the little dog. Yeah.”
“Close enough.”
“So, I’ve got to figure you already know where this crazy Amanda is.”
“What makes you think she’s crazy?”
“She stole from us. That makes her fucking cuckoo clock, man. And if you don’t know where she is, I bet a bag of mice you’re close.”
“A bag of mice?”
“Old Mordovian expression.”
“Ah.”
“So where’s she at, my friend?”
“Let me ask you something first.”
“Shoot straight away.”
“What does she have that you want so bad?”
“You playing with me, guy?”
“No.”
“Making fun of Yefim?”
“Definitely not.”
“Then why you ask such a asshole-stupid question like that? You know what we want.”
“I honestly do not. I know you want Amanda and I know—”
“We don’t want Amanda, man. We want what she took. Kirill looks bad, man. He looks like he can’t find one little girl stole his property? The Chechens up the block? They’re starting to laugh, guy. We probably have to kill a few just to close their mouths, not have to look at their rotting fucking teeth.”
“So, what—?”
“The fucking baby! And the fucking cross! I need both. If that stupid card-junkie piece-of-shit doctor goes back to work and can find me another baby, I’ll give that one to Kirill, he won’t know the difference. But if I don’t have that cross and
some
baby by this weekend? It’s going to be a fucking bloodbath, guy.”
“And you’ll give me Sophie in exchange?”
“No, I won’t fucking give you Sophie. We’re not let’s-make-it-a-deal here. Yefim say he wants the baby and the cross, you bring me the baby and the cross. Otherwise, they sell this soup in the little towns along the Black Sea? Only get it in these little towns. It comes in a red can. Parts of you will be in those cans. Parts of your family too, guy.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute. The heel of my hand had turned dark red from clenching the phone and my pinkie had gone numb.
“You still there, my main man?”
“Go fuck yourself, Yefim.”
He gave that a low, soft laugh. “No. I fuck you, man. I fuck you and your wife and your little girl in Savannah.”
I looked out on the road. The tar was very black. It matched the tree trunks by the church. The clouds had dropped down the mountain and hovered just above the telephone wires that stretched the length of the road. The air was damp.
“You don’t think we watch you?” Yefim said. “You don’t think we have friends in Savannah? We have friends everywhere, guy. And, yeah, you got that big crazy Polack protecting your little girl so we lose a couple of guys taking them out. But that’s okay—we get more guys.”
I stood on the porch looking out on the road. When I spoke, the words came out clipped and harder than I intended. “Tell me about this cross.”
“The cross,” Yefim said, “is the Belarus Cross. It go back a thousand years, man. Some people call it the Varangian Cross, other people, they call it the Yaroslav Cross, but I always like Belarus Cross. No price on this thing, man. Prince Yaroslav, he pay the Varangians with this cross to kill his brother Boris in the unification war back in, like, 1010 or 1011. But then he miss the cross so much, after he become ruler of all Kievan Rus, he send some other Varangians against the first Varangians, and they kill them, bring the cross back to him. It was in the czar’s pocket back in ’17 when they put him against that basement wall and,
boom,
blow his brains out. Trotsky had it in Mexico with him when they ice-axed his head. That cross get around, man. Now Kirill get it, and he’s showing it off at party on Saturday. All the big fish be there, man. Real gangsta. And he need that cross.”