Critical Space (42 page)

"You want a
Sparbuch
account," she told me. "It's a passbook account, but anonymous. You'll need to find a willing Austrian national to set it up."

I said that I didn't think it would be a problem, then went upstairs to shower and pack my bag. Dan arrived while I was getting dressed, the four guards he'd promised in tow, all of them smaller and younger-looking versions of himself. I immediately recognized two of the faces from the Brighton Beach restaurant, though it took a little longer before I could place the other two. They were the ones who had held me outside of Katrina's room at the brothel. All of them came armed, pistols and rifles, and all of them spoke fluent English, with accents ranging from almost negligible to nearly impenetrable. It made giving them their marching orders interesting. Natalie gave them the rundown of the location, broke them up into shifts, and put them to work guarding the house and the perimeter.

While she was briefing the guards, a car pulled up to the gate. The doctor Dan had located was in his early fifties with watery and bloodshot eyes, white and thin like a distance runner or a junkie. He never gave his name and never asked any of us for ours, and he brought two bags with him, and I searched them both before letting him into the house. Aside from medical tools he had a small pharmacy in one of the bags. The other held a variety of braces and equipment for making casts.

Alena had come to watch Natalie's briefing, and when I came in with the doctor, she moved to the guest room on the ground floor for his exam. I put Dan on the door and followed them in, watching while the doctor asked Alena to lie on the bed. She removed her pants and lay back, and the doctor pulled the gauze from her shin and began poking and prodding from her foot to about midway up her thigh. He asked her a few questions about range of motion and sensation. A couple of times his fingers dug into her skin, and she winced, but never made any sound.

After twenty minutes he was ready to diagnose, and it wasn't good.

"Without an X ray I can't be sure. You've shattered the two bones that run from your knee to your foot, and while the splinters have been removed, the bones aren't knitting. I don't know who the butcher was who practiced his needlepoint on your leg, darling, but if I were you I'd ask for my money back. Not even counting the tib-fib clusterfuck in there, the muscle damage is tremendous. That you've got any sensation in your left foot at all is surprising as hell, and that you're not screaming in constant agony is truly amazing. I've seen members of the New York Jets crying like babies with injuries less severe than this."

"Is there anything you can do?" I asked, not liking his mirth.

"Surgery, but that's not my arena. You want someone to get in there and clean the thing up, maybe replace the bone with a rod. That's all speculative, though. Like I said, I'd need to see an X ray to be sure what is going on in there."

"If I have surgery will I get my leg back?" Alena asked.

"Probably not. There's nerve damage as well as muscle trauma. With extensive physical therapy you could put some weight on the leg, but it will never be able to hold you again. You're looking at needing a crutch or a cane for the rest of your life, toots."

"You've got a great bedside manner, doc," I said.

He turned to me, wiping at his eyes. "Hey, chew me, smartass. I'm here because the ugly Russian outside gave me two grand to drive up to Mahwah, and he promised me another three when I left. This lady's lower leg has been mangled, and from what I can see that's because she got it shot up. So it looks to me like you're illegals or criminals or something I don't even want to know about. You get her to a surgeon, they can maybe do something for her. Otherwise, the leg stays useless."

Alena propped herself up on her elbows and muttered something in Russian.

"What
can
you do, doctor?" I asked.

"I can put a brace on the knee to help immobilize the lower leg, that should help with some of the pain. And I can hook her up with some Percodan or another pain reliever of her choice."

"I'll take the brace," she said. "You can keep the drugs. You'll probably get more use out of them."

"No argument there." He dug into the bag that held the braces, selected one and eyeballed Alena's knee. Then he discarded it and pulled another one out, this one longer, and began strapping it to her leg. She swore once as he was tightening the straps, and when he was done she had a combination of metal and rubber running from her ankle to above her knee.

"She's going to need some help getting her pants back on," the doctor told me, closing his bags. "You kids have fun, now. Where's Ugly with my dough?"

I led him from the room and told Dan to see him the rest of the way out. Dan nodded and glanced back at where Alena was sitting up on the bed and asked her something in Russian. She responded tartly. Dan nodded again, rested his big hand on the doctor's shoulder, and left.

When Alena was up, she put tentative weight on her left foot, and it didn't look like much at all, but just that action made her suck a sharp breath and brought water into her eyes. I handed her one of her crutches, then held the door for her while she limped out of the room and back to the stairs.

"Time me," she said, and started up.

It took her fifty-six seconds. Instead of being pleased, she scowled all the way back into her room, where she settled into a chair and stared out the window.

"I should go with you."

"No, you really shouldn't," I said. "Aside from the injury, it would just leave you more exposed."

She nodded grudgingly. "When you get the money at the bank, leave yourself at least fifty thousand to travel on. Withdraw ten thousand in Swiss francs before you leave."

"I will."

"The rest you can exchange in England."

"I will."

"The cache near Kent, that one should be safe, although the papers there will be useless to you. The one in Geneva is good, too. I don't have anything in Austria."

"It's all right, Alena, I'll be fine."

She didn't speak for a couple minutes, and I saw her hands turn to fists, balling tighter and tighter until the blood had run from her fingers, turning them the color of white chalk. "I hate this. I hate my leg. I hate this brace. I hate this house. I hate this view, that doctor."

"If this works you won't be here much longer."

"You are certain Moore will help you? Even after what happened to Ainsley-Hunter?"

"Moore owes me."

She gave me a serious appraisal. "If you find Oxford's banker, you will have to be savage, Atticus. You will have to hurt him. Not permanently, perhaps, but enough so that he will fear you."

"I thought I'd leave a clue of some sort," I said. "One of the false names, something Oxford could work with."

She looked appalled at the suggestion. "No, no, no. When you have the banker, when you are finished, you must threaten his life, you must say something like, 'if you talk, the only part of your body they will ever find is your tongue,' something like that. You must say it like you mean it."

"What if he believes me?"

"It doesn't matter. You will be the devil he doesn't know. Oxford is the devil he does. And I assure you, he is more afraid of Oxford, has feared him more completely and for longer than he will fear you. Their entire relationship is founded on two things: fear and greed. So far, greed has held the higher ground. You must play on the fear, and by threatening his life, he will not even consider that you are manipulating him. He will believe that he is being brave, that Oxford will reward him for his courage and loyalty."

"You think it's a he?"

"Almost positive," Alena said. "Most of them are."

"I should be back in a week."

"I shall be here," she said sourly.

Early in the afternoon, Dan drove me into Manhattan in the Kompressor and waited while I handled the money at the Credit Suisse branch off Madison Avenue. I presented myself as Paul Lieberg with the papers to prove it, and the woman behind the desk went from pleasant to solicitous when she ran my name through the computer. Of the two hundred thousand Alena had transferred, I put a hundred thousand in a cashier's check made out to a name Dan had given me in the car, another fifty in a check made out to Jessica Bethier. I took the remaining fifty thousand in cash. As instructed, I withdrew ten of it in Swiss francs, then another ten in pounds.

Back at the car I handed Dan the two checks, telling him that the smaller one was to go to Natasha. We parted company, me carrying my bag and he pulling back into traffic.

My watch said it was eight minutes to two, and that meant I had over five hours until I needed to catch the plane, more than enough time to do the thing I'd been considering doing since I'd returned to New York three days earlier. It was a risky, if not an outright stupid, thing, and if I'd told Alena or Natalie where I wanted to go and who I wanted to see, both would have gone through the roof.

I did it anyway, though, catching one of the Lexington line trains down to Astor Place. I came back aboveground beside the giant Starbucks and walked over to Broadway, heading south a couple blocks and then west, until I was on the campus of NYU. I found the dormitory I wanted, debated about using the intercom to call up, and was spared the trouble when a knot of girls emerged. I went through as the door swung shut behind them, and took the elevator up to the sixth floor.

The door to her room was decorated with all sorts of paper, postcard reprints of classic movie posters and a bumper sticker ordering me to question authority. At the center was an eight-by-five piece of paper that had been run through a printer. It read K.C. & ERIKA and THIS HAD BETTER BE
good!

The door was open, so I didn't need to knock. I stuck my head in, and saw her seated at a desk, typing furiously on a laptop. She had a cigarette going, too.

"Can I come in?" I asked.

Erika turned in the chair before I'd finished speaking, yelped, yanked the cigarette from her mouth, and jumped up and ran to me, into a hug that nearly put me back into the hall. She also nearly put the cigarette out in my neck.

"What the hell kept you?" she demanded, her face in my chest. Then she let me go and stepped back and asked it again.

"Let's go somewhere and talk."

"K.C.'s not here, she's at her playwriting class, you can come in."

"Let me buy you coffee."

Erika opened her mouth to invite me in again, and in the process introduced me to the fact that she'd gotten her tongue pierced at some point in the past few months. Without another word she turned back to her desk, saved the document she'd been working on, and set the computer to shut down. Then she grabbed her black leather biker's jacket, the one Bridgett and I had bought her over the holidays the previous year, and joined me out in the hall.

We were silent in the elevator and out of the building, and when we hit the street, she zipped up her jacket and asked, "Now?"

"Not yet," I said.

"There's a place on Christopher with good Java, big fucking cups. You need a crane to lift them."

"Lead on."

She did, with me walking beside her, and after another block and a half, she asked again. "Now?"

"Now," I said, and she threw her arms around my chest and squeezed me tight, and I returned the hug just as fiercely.

"I am so fucking angry at you," she told my chest.

"So am I," I said. "You started smoking."

Erika pulled back and punched me lightly in the chest. "Not the same! Not the same at all!"

"And you got your tongue pierced."

"And you got rid of the glasses and grew a dead animal on your face. Oh, excuse me, that's a
beard,
my mistake."

"I'm in disguise."

"As what, a pimp?"

"That's cold. I don't look like a pimp."

"I don't know what you look like." She moved her head back, as if trying to adjust the focus on me. "Well, shit. Bridgett said you'd gone..."

"Diesel," I said.

"No, not diesel -- crazy. You don't look crazy."

"Us lunatics seldom do."

"You gonna tell me where you've been?"

"I'm going to tell you everything," I said.

Erika listened to me holding her cup of coffee, which, though big, did not require a crane. She held the cup in front of her the way Tibetan monks hold their prayer bowls, her blue eyes intent on my face as I spoke. Her hair had been its natural dirty blond the last time I'd seen her, but she'd since dyed it a matte black that matched her jacket. As ever, her hair hung long on the left side of her face, concealing the ear that had been mutilated by a man with a knife four years earlier.

She looked different to me, no longer the teenager who'd come into my home years ago, pulling chaos in her wake. She was nineteen now, a young woman and, to my eyes, coming of age very nicely. I was so glad to be with her I didn't even give her grief when she set the cup down and lit herself another cigarette.

After I'd finished she started giggling, and then she started laughing, and then she choked on the smoke she'd inhaled and coughed. Then she laughed some more.

"Only you," she said. "Only you would go away as someone's prisoner and come back as that same person's knight in shining armor."

"It's a unique gift," I admitted.

"Bridgett's right, you are
totally
mad."

"When'd she talk to you?"

"Yesterday, we had lunch at Anglers and Writers. She says she doesn't want anything to do with you. I asked if she meant until this was over or forever or what, and she said she didn't know."

"Bridgett's got her reasons, and they're good ones. I understand why she's angry."

"I think she's overreacting."

That surprised me. "Really?"

"Yeah, really. Last year she pulled the vanishing act on all of us, remember? And when you found her --
you
-- she was strung out on smack and sitting in her own shit. You took her home, you cleaned her up, you watched her back when she got into the heavy stuff. I think she owes you the same courtesy here."