Don't Leave Me (10 page)

“He does not act as we did,” Steven Kovak said. “He does not think things through.”

“It’s America,” Zepkic said. “It corrupts everything, but nothing so much as clear thinking. Do you know this is not taught even in the universities?”

The two men sat on a bench near the waterfall at Disney’s California Adventure. The sound of these waters always comforted Kovak. It reminded him of some of his happiest days, as a boy with his father at the Sopotnica falls in Serbia.

It also masked talk should anyone want to listen in on his conversations.

Kovak said, “I pray on my knees each day, but I find no peace where my son is concerned.”

“What is it they say here?
Kids today.
”

Kovak was glad he had one friend in whom to confide. He could tell Zepkic anything. They had killed men, women, and children together, and such bonds were not lightly broken. Zepkic was very much like the bear-shaped rock that overlooked them—strong, dependable.

“I was in the shop the other day,” Zepkic said. “A young girl walked in. She was a pretty thing. If I had been twenty-one and living in Vienna, I would have asked her to go to the opera with me. I would have spent all my wages to buy her flowers and a bottle of champagne and for the tickets to the opera. That was how pretty she was. But when she opened her mouth, the worst sound came out. A high pitched whine, a nasal abomination, and every other word from her was
like.
'Like, do you have any, like, old vinyl records? My boyfriend like, likes them.’ This is the youth of America.”

Kovak appreciated his friend’s desire to lighten the subject. But it would not lighten. “One day soon he will kill recklessly,” Kovak said. “That could be the end of everything. Yet I would like him to have what I have built. I will not live forever.”

“And who would want to?” Zepkic put his beefy hand on Kovak’s shoulder, a hand Kovak had seen choke the life out of an Albanian soldier in half a minute.

“Dragoslav is not ready, and I fear he never will be,” said Kovak. “He is like his mother that way. She was headstrong.”

“He will have advisors. You are well served by your men. You have chosen wisely.”

“I sometimes wish one of them was my blood.”

“Vaso?”

Kovak nodded.

“It goes well, the trade?” Zepkic himself was a dealer in antiques, freelance assassins, and false identities. Such as Steven Kovak’s.

“I have concerns with distribution,” Kovak said. “These American white boys are soft. I prefer them to the blacks and browns and yellows. They are more easily controlled. But they think they are cowboys. Outside of that, the enterprise has a solid foundation. I want to keep myself at the top, for strategy. I need to stay out of distribution and finance. I’ve got good talent in place. I’ve read all of Peter Drucker now, and am confident of the long term. The only thing that could go wrong is internal, some failure or treachery on the inside.”

Kovak stopped when he saw a man and woman walking by. The woman was pushing a stroller. The father was holding the hand of a boy of perhaps five years. A Mickey Mouse balloon was tied to the boy’s wrist by a ribbon. Kovak recalled the rough hand of his own father, held when he was that little boy’s age. His father had taken him to the circus in Budapest. He had paid for that by selling several farming tools.

“You look tired, my friend,” Zepkic said.

Kovak shook his head. “What do you think God requires of us?”

“What he has always required.”

“And what is that?”

“To survive,” Zepkic said. “Now come, let’s go have something very sweet to eat.”