No Way Back (22 page)

“In a minute,” I say, taking off my suitcoat, draping it over a chair. Then I shuck the shoulder holster, loosen my tie, take a Coke from the frigibar, and lie down next to her, flat on my back.

“Minute’s up, Prentice,” she says. “I’m waiting.”

I try a little imitation of Tchitcherine, in Russian, which is at least good enough to get her smiling. “Oh, they always pull that stunt,” she says when I get to the price increase, the Tchitch concession. “How’d Kim take it?”

“About as gracefully as he could, I guess. Have the impression he doesn’t give a damn, just looked stern and bargained a bit for face. He wants the item very badly, and very fast, so he can get the hell out of here. Or it seemed so to me.”

“Very likely.” She stretches. “And?”

I tell her it’s a no-go on an exchange in Kim’s suite. It’s going to be at the PrimorEx building. Her reaction surprises me.

“Ah, the generals overreached themselves on that venture. They’re assuming they’ll have a going concern for some time to come,” she says. “Better and better.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, never mind. Just a thought. Main thing is, that building isn’t very hard. It’s actually better for us there than anyplace else would be.”

“You want to clarify that for me?”

“No. Take it on faith. Now, when?”

“Day after tomorrow, five-thirty.”

“Brilliant!”

“There’s kind of a dissonance here, Nadya,” I say. “We’re doing a seven-point-five-million deal in the generals’ lair, and you think that’s brilliant?”

“Oh, relax, Terry darling. It’s too complicated for a girl as weary as I am to explain just now. I will sometime. For the moment I’ll just say the threat level is quite low in this arrangement.”

“Okay. But isn’t seven point five a hell of a lot for some software?”

A Cheshire smile. “Ah, figured that one out all on your own, did you? Bright boy, Terry. My one true love.”

SONNY COMES INTO MY ROOM EARLY NEXT AFTERNOON
lugging a black hard-sider bigger than a carry-on and smaller than a suitcase. The bed squeaks when he drops the thing on it.

“Excuse me, Mistah Prentice. Mistah Kim, he got this little quirk. He don’t like to watch what I gotta do,” he says, popping the latches. I figure he’s got all kinds of tools for mayhem inside. I don’t get up from my chair, where I’m drinking a Coke, gazing idly out over Vlad. But I hear, as Sonny bends over his case, the familiar crisp riffling of banded stacks of bills. I can’t believe it.

“Cash! You’re doing a seven-point-five-million deal in fucking cash, man? That’s insane. That’s begging someone to rob you.”

“Think I like this?” Sonny says. “Fucking Russkis, they still in the stone age, like some fellas in New Guinea. Everywhere else we go, even little places in Cambodia, Indonesia, we just plug in laptop and they watch while we make wire transfer. Takes about two
minutes, not a dollar changes hands, just numbers move from one account to another.

“Russkis!” Sonny starts to spit, restrains himself. “They never heard of offshore accounts in Caymans, Bahamas, wherever. They don’t believe all we gotta do is type in code and numbers, and millions go from Busan to wherever they want. Nah, they gotta see money, feel the bills, count ’em. Ignorance. So I gotta carry this thing to some meeting, waste time watching Russkis count. Feel like I’m carrying a big grenade with the pin already pulled.”

“Yeah, well stay away from me, then. Jesus! Stateside, I’ve seen drug dealers still in their twenties, never even graduated high school, take wire transfers.”

“You a long way from home of the free, land of the brave, Mistah Prentice. Like I tell you once before.”

“No shit. But I’m learning. Now I understand why you were so damn nervous.” Cash raises the possibility of a rip by about a couple hundred percent, minimum. Now I’m getting nervous. I feel like the stakes just redlined, and I never saw it coming.

“Hunh,” Sonny says. “Why you think I tell you I’m carrying six extra clips for my Uzis?”

“No choice? No other way?”

“Cash only way with fuckin’ Russkis, Mistah Prentice.”

I walk over, take a look at the case, watch Sonny’s thick fingers riffling tight bundles of hundreds. The bills aren’t green.

“What’s this? Why not dollars?” I ask.

“Nobody out here takes hundred-dollar bills anymore, even stone-age Russkis,” Sonny says. “These days, fifty-fifty chance any U.S. hundred made in North Korea. Government there, they got great counterfeiters. Use those fake hundreds to buy this, buy that. Fuckers buy
too much, people find out they got paid funny money. So now, euros only. North Koreans haven’t figured out how to make good euros. Yet.”

Getting a fresh bad vibe here. Nobody ever got capped during a wire-transfer deal, as far as I know. Maybe sometime later, usually for cause. But at least not during it. Kill a client who just made an electronic transfer? No, better not. Maybe the transfer will invalidate or something, anything like that happens. Or maybe there’ll somehow be a clear trail back to the hitters. Cash? Cash puts whack ideas into people’s heads.

Pretty soon I’m almost unaware of Sonny’s presense. That’s a good sign; it means his particular signal is benign. I start to empty my mind, systematically. Get it clear, get it into combat mode, a state in which the cerebral idles in neutral while the honed reflexes and deep muscle memory embedded by years of training and action shift into high, take care of business all on their own.

I scarcely notice when Sonny finishes, goes back to Kim’s suite. I’m about halfway to where I want to be when Nadya cards my lock with her magic wafer, slips in, starts chattering. She’s still playing hooker, right down to the fishnet stockings.

Christ! What am I doing? I realize I’ve started way too early, which is maybe the dumbest thing you can do. Have to stop my process now, at about half-cock. The meet’s twenty-four hours off. Best to go straight to condition one, cocked and locked, an hour or less before. Don’t want to walk around being an AD about to happen. Like some jittery rookie. That cash surprise rattled me in ways it never should have. I know better than to react that way. What’s wrong with me? Getting old? Getting scared?

Or maybe it’s that something still won’t shake down
to any sort of sense. No matter how I figure, even factoring in market ignorance, the price will not click as a match to product value.

Nadya doesn’t appear to read any of this. She takes my Coke bottle, drains what’s left. “Well, I do feel somewhat recovered from last night’s ordeal,” she says. The first of her words that actually register meaning as I pull out of my distanced, distracted state.

“Sure. A good sleep usually does the job. Dream of me, maybe?”

“No! When I took off that damned bra, chips worth far more than I lost at the card table fell out. Made an enormous profit! I fell asleep to the image of a lovely sable hat I might buy.”

I laugh. “You on some kind of mood medication? Should you be? Because trying to ride with you is like being on a roller coaster.”

“Fine one to talk, you are. One moment there’s about a mile of dark emptiness behind your eyes, no Terry anywhere, and the next you’re right up front.”

Guess she did catch something when she first walked in. Need to divert her. But she makes another swerve.

“I have a few errands to run. Care to come along? It may well be your only chance to have a close look at lovely Vlad. Walking tour. Images for your memory book, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t keep that sort of thing. Never collect souvenirs, even mental ones. But I wouldn’t mind getting out and about. Feeling pretty cooped.”

We step out into a gray afternoon, high swept clouds, that devious breeze with teeth. Clears my head, though. Nadya brushes off a couple of taxi hustlers with some crisp invective that leaves them looking sulky. We go along Semenovskaya Street awhile, cut down to the main drag, Svetlanskaya Street. There’s a stretch there where
the luxe shops cluster, though you have to peer in to see what’s on offer, since no retailers seem to believe in big display windows. Hardly worth the effort: imports, the same overpriced international brands, nominally Italian and French, you see in every Asian city with enough business visitors and new local money to support boutique-size operations.

“YSL, Valentino, Gucci Gucci Gucci, and Cardin everything,” Nadya says. “Hard to believe people actually pay to be seen in such rubbish.”

“No pride. Shocking.”

“No taste is more like it. Simply some twisted notions of status.”

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask whose fishnets you’re wearing. Love the little rhinestone action around the ankles. YSL?”

“Ya ya ya, you yomp.” She elbows me.

We head deeper into the city, which means toward the waterfront. The luxe shops give way real fast to purely local commerce, the buildings’ maintenance levels decline: rust streaks from rain gutters on peeling stucco, windows that haven’t been washed in months. Streets are crowded, Russian faces predominate. Stern, sour, sullen mainly. And alone. But there’s lots of Koreans and Chinese walking in small tight groups, chatting and laughing.

Pretty grim, pretty shabby, most of it. But no worse, I guess, then some Rust Belt cities I’ve passed through—Gary, Indiana, maybe. Or North Philly. Shit, Detroit. Detroit’s worse. Here, bright new Audis, BMWs, Mercs almost outnumber the old Ladas and hard-used Toyotas and Nissans clogging the streets.

“Where’s all the German metal come from?” I ask.

“Certainly not from your friendly local dealer, you may be sure of that,” Nadya says. “No such thing in
Russia. These are all stolen in Western Europe, shipped east. Poland’s the main entrepot.”

“The what?”

“Oh, staging area? Very porous border, you see. Likewise the Polish-Russian. Small gratuities to the guards instead of valid bill of sale, title, and registration. All the new-money people—mafia, government, barely legal businessfolk—have to have their German car. Mark of status they can’t seem to resist. And since the trade is a national conspiracy, no risk at all. Another little gratuity duly registers them legally here.”

“So everybody’s happy.”

“Except the West Europe insurance companies. They’re bloody furious at the losses. Costs ’em millions to reimburse the victimized owners. Who, being sensible burghers, have insured themselves to the hilt.”

“Sounds like a beautiful example of the free-enterprise system working as it should. Exactly what you Washington cold warriors hoped would happen with Russia.”

“Excuse me, but I was only starting middle school when the Cold War ended. Just a green girl. Hardly one of that superannuated crowd. Even Westley, old as he is, is a rather junior member.”

Somewhere along the way I lose my back-bearings to the Hyundai. All I know is we’re in a neighborhood where out-of-towners are seldom seem. I draw a few long looks. Overdressed, I suppose. Damned cashmere overcoat, Church’s wing tips. Nadya’s errands turn out to be just a weird shopping trip. No sable hat, for sure. Some small six-volt batteries and lengths of thin insulated wire in one place, duct tape and epoxy in another, a couple two-liter plastic jugs and an egg timer in a tiny housewares shop, a kilo of nails in a carpentry place, a little soldering iron and flux in an electrics hobby shop.
A kilo of modeling clay at an art supplier’s. Three strings of heavy piano wire at a musical-instrument place. Maybe fifty meters of braided nylon rope from a chandler’s.

“All you need’s some Semtex, or good fertilizer, and you could make yourself a suicide bomber with all this stuff,” I say.

“Hardly the type, as you ought to know quite well, Terry,” she says. “Just odds and ends for little art projects. I do conceptual constructions. But I doubt you’d know what they are.”

“Generally fuzzy-headed little robots that take half a step, fall over, and whirr, right?” Like she has time for her hobby now.

“To the unschooled eye, that might be the vague impression.”

We seem to have circumnavigated a small section of downtown Vlad, because all at once we emerge onto what must be the rattail of Svetlanskaya Street. It broadens, becomes more built-up, more trafficked as we move toward the Square of the Fighters for the Soviet Power in the Far East, a couple of klicks off; can’t see the square, just the top half of the White House. It’s not much past four yet, but street lights are starting to flick on here and there. Maybe half are on strike or something. The air’s going blue, an early dusk. Pedestrians seem to be walking slightly faster, yet shop lights cast yellow rectangles on the gray concrete sidewalk. No storekeepers are shutting up, pulling down their steel shutters.

We walk on a few hundred meters. More and more people heading purposefully somewhere: home, dinner, an appointment, whatever. Nobody ever looks at other passersby here, nobody ever makes eye contact.

Don’t know what the trigger is, but suddenly I’ve got the feeling.

“You strapped?” I ask Nadya.

“Pardon me?”

“Carrying,” I say. “A weapon.”

“Oh,” she laughs. “Yet another of your colorful idioms, Terry. Yes. My usual, SIG 239.”

“Do not use it.”

“On what?”

“The car that’s been trailing us for the last few blocks. Don’t look around,” I say. “And see what’s coming down the hill? Christ, the mutts might as well wear big name tags:
HELLO, I’M IVAN AND I’M A THUG.
”

“Mutts?”

“Two guys, a hundred meters up. Usual uniform: black watch caps, black leather jackets, black pants, black boots. Fucking idiots.”

“Reckon they want people to know they’re thugs, don’t you?” Nadya says.

“Sure, intimidation factor. Could be more subtle about what they’re up to right now, though.”

“Which is?”

“Got us in a sandwich. If something starts, I’ll take care of them. You watch the car. For Christ’s sake do not use your tool unless whoever’s in the car acts bad.”

“I had no such intention, naturally.”

They close on us. “Don’t stop,” I say to Nadya in loud English as they block us. We side-step, so do they. One asks Nadya for a light, waving a cigarette. Even as she reaches into her purse, the other says in Russian, “Foreigner? Got yourself a rich foreigner, baby. Good. We’ll see how rich.”

Nadya says the Russki equivalent of “Fuck off.” Her guy laughs, my Ivan moves in close, lets me see the blade of a knife half-hidden in a big hand. They’ve clearly got ideas.

I don’t wait. Spread my arms, say, “Let’s tango,
shorty.” The Ivan, who’s at least four inches taller and about twice as broad as me, reads that as an invitation to edge even closer, starts to reach for my pockets. Eyes follow hand. Perfect. Perfectly stupid.

Tensing every muscle from the backs of my thighs on up for maximum leverage, I head-butt the fuck, hear the satisfying crunch as the bridge of his nose fractures, splinters. He reels, both hands moving involuntarily to his nose, which is streaming blood like a faucet. It looks almost black in this light. I stay on him, two-knuckle lefts and rights slamming deep into his diaphragm. He doubles, gasping desperately, and as his head comes down my right knee comes up faster, thudding into his chin like a hammer, snapping his neck back. He goes down.

It’s all so fast, a huge adrenaline rush turbocharging my moves. I spin to take down the guy on Nadya. But he’s rolling on the sidewalk, rubbing his eyes and wailing. What? Then I see Nadya slip a small can of pepper spray back into her purse. There’s a loud squeal of rubber on concrete as the tail car peels away. My Ivan’s straining to rise to his hands and knees. I move to kick his lights out, but Nadya grabs my arm.

“Darling, this seems such a bad neighborhood,” she says. “Don’t you think it would be wise for us to leave? Rather quickly?”

It’s weird. Where’d all the people go? How come cars don’t slow down to look, but accelerate hard instead? Hand still on my arm, Nadya leads me in a fast walk to the first side street we hit, then down a long alley. We come out on a street I don’t recognize.

In short order, she’s waved down a car. Most cars in Vlad are potential taxis, if you offer the right fare. Nadya makes a rapid negotiation with the driver of an old tan Lada. During the five-minute ride she composes herself—not that this seems necessary, since she’s been
calmer than I have. When we walk into the Hyundai lobby, she’s got her big smile on, arm through mine, keeps the pose until we get inside my room.