North of Boston (18 page)

“Fuck!” he erupts. “Watch it, will you?” The CRV swerves sharply to the right and stops with a jolt. He's out the door, slams it behind him. I hear his voice raised in anger, then other slammed doors—one ahead, one behind the CRV.

If these were cops, I would have seen blue lights.

Wozniak falls silent. I hear no other voices. Then two more car doors slam. One ahead, one behind. In addition to Wozniak, it sounds like at least four men have stepped out of cars. My blood slows to a crawl. A low, droning voice speaks for a while, then stops.

“Fuck you,” Wozniak says, his voice carrying clearly in the cold air. Then his sharp footsteps are returning to the CRV.

The car is rocked by a heavy thud against the driver's door. Wozniak cries out. More thuds follow—thick, dull, rhythmic. I hear Wozniak's low groans. The blows, falling like rocks, follow him away from the car, until I can no longer hear them.

Sick with horror, I throw off the anorak and crawl into the driver's seat. The window beside me is spattered with blood. Wozniak has fallen to the ground in the middle of the road and is being kicked and beaten with pipes by three men who make a hunched circle around him, under a streetlamp that sheds a pallid light.

The CRV is still running. The headlights illuminate a black sedan not more than five feet off the front bumper, and a man in a down vest standing beside it.

Fuck. It's Oyster Man.

He doesn't see me. No one has seen me.

I shift into drive and jam the accelerator pedal to the floor.

The CRV crashes into the sedan, not a foot from where Johnny's standing. I'm slammed forward as the air bag inflates, hitting me in the chest and face, bouncing me back, breathless and stunned. I shift into reverse, stomp on the accelerator, and smash the car behind me.

I shift into drive, crash again. Can't see a thing with the air bag all around me, but it doesn't matter.

Shift into reverse, crash.

Shift, crash.

Shift—

Through the side window I see the thugs running to their cars before I manage to destroy them. I press the air bag down enough to see out a portion of the front windshield. Johnny isn't where he was. Before I can crash into the sedan again, it speeds off. The car behind the CRV swings out and follows it, passing a hairbreadth from Wozniak, curled like a fetus in the middle of the road.

I blink, draw a breath. I push the rest of the air bag out of the way and get out of the car. Wozniak's good arm reaches up, as if to hail a passing ship, and falls again. He rises on an elbow as I walk over, raises a ghoulish bloody face. “Who's that?”

“Pirio Kasparov.”

“Oh, you.” He's groping flat-palmed on the ground around him.

I pick his glasses off the pavement and put them in his hand. “Welcome to the land of second chances.”

He puts on the glasses and peers up at me. “Pirio Kasparov. Sure enough.”

I help him to his feet. One arm around my neck, he hobbles to the car and attempts to enter it on the driver's side.

“Oh, no. I've had enough of your driving.” I steer him around the front of the car, heading toward the passenger side.

He stops midway, looks at the considerable damage. “What the fuck did you do to my car?”

“Nothing a body shop won't fix.”

“Will it even fucking drive?”

“We'll see.”

It does drive, though haltingly. Part of the wheel well has collapsed onto the right front tire, so forward motion is retarded by the friction and accompanied by an unpleasant scraping sound as layers of rubber are peeled away. Also, a sort of whining shriek is coming from who knows where.

He starts giving me directions, presumably to his house. We bump along Summer Street, grind right onto Atlantic Ave, continue on Cross Street, hang a right onto Salem, and go six or seven blocks. The passable part of the road is narrow, the brick sidewalks are narrow, the brick town houses are narrow. Everything in the North End is narrow. We stop in front of number 180, just past the Old North Church. Parked cars are crammed end to end along one side of the one-way street, and anywhere else they can fit, except for in front of the church, which is a no-parking zone.

“The parking here is fucked,” Wozniak explains.

“You don't have to say
fuck
in every sentence, do you?”

“Sorry. I'm about to spit my teeth out.” He sticks a finger into his mouth, and it comes out bloody. He sighs. “I really don't feel like driving around looking for a space, so just pull in front of the church there and I'll risk getting a ticket. Who knows? I could get lucky. This time of night, it's a fifty-fifty chance, I'd say. What do you think?”

“Your call.”

He nods judiciously. “What the fuck were you doing out there anyway?”

“I was lying on the floor in the backseat of your car.”

He laughs maniacally. “Of course. Where else would you be?” He points behind him. “The church is back there on your right.”

I throw my arm over the seat and back up slowly because one of the wheels keeps making a loud weird clunking sound. “Do you know who those men were?”

“Not a clue.”

I step on the brake. “You mean you don't know who's trying to kill you?”

“No. Do you? Did you see them?”

My jaw clamps shut. I can't say his name: John Oster. He's still my friend, sort of. He was Ned's friend, definitely. And who, by the way, am I talking to? An insurance investigator named Wozniak? Better to play dumb. I don't think Johnny would have killed Wozniak anyway. He's a fisherman, not a killer. He and his boys finally caught up to the funeral crasher and were teaching him a lesson, Boston style. That's all it was, I think. But I don't know.

“Let's not hang out here in the middle of the street in front of the church, OK? I don't need the whole neighborhood knowing I'm about to park illegally,” Wozniak says.

“I think they're mostly asleep.”

“Ha. That's what you don't know about the North End. This town has eyes.”

I back into the space and shut off the car. He sighs with exhaustion, thanks me for driving, opens the door to get out.

“Wait. What about me?”

“You come, too.” He's smiling, his bloody teeth pink in the glow from the dashboard.

O
ne car pulled out behind me about a block away from Ocean Catch,” Larry Wozniak's impersonator says. “I don't know where the other one came from.”

He shuts off the tap at the kitchen sink. His mud-spattered glasses are on the counter. He's been splashing water over his face and neck for the last few minutes, washing off blood and dirt, soaking his T-shirt. At one point he stuck his whole head under the faucet, and some blood on his scalp rose and streamed through his ropy curls. Now his face is clean and chalky, except for a bruise sliced by a thin red cut that's blooming on his cheekbone. He's bent sideways a little, like a broken puppet. All the way from his car, along the sidewalk and up four (very narrow) flights of stairs to this apartment, he was hunched over, favoring the right side of his torso.

At this point in my life, no power on earth could turn me into a nurse. It's a well-established Kasparov trait. When I was a kid with a scrape or bruise—even, one time, a broken arm—Milosa would point out that the word
sympathy
is in the dictionary between
shit
and
syphilis
. When I reached my proud teenage years, I told him defiantly that I didn't see why a little sympathy should be so hard to come by. He looked at me as if I were a buzzing gnat and explained his position: “Emotion is like money. Once you spend it, it's gone. So don't waste your emotion on things that aren't worth it. A bruise heals, so what's to feel sorry for? A broken bone gets stronger. If someone hurts you deliberately, save up your self-pity and spend it on revenge.”

“
It
is not a bruise;
it
is
me
,” I told him, piping up.

This enraged him. “What? Who are you? Your flesh? Your tiny cut? Pah. Your body is nothing; it sickens and dies. If that is Pirio, I say good-bye to you now.” When he got like this, you had to keep your mouth closed and let him rant. He might go from Gogol to perestroika to the American stock market to a son-of-a-bitch mule-beating uncle named Lusvin whom he hated with all his might. It all proved his point somehow, though the point itself usually remained elusive. In any case, if you wanted a Band-Aid, you had to get it yourself. A lousy excuse for why I don't jump up to dab at Wozniak's cuts with rubbing alcohol or insist that we rush off to the emergency room to have his ribs x-rayed.

Wozniak rinses off his glasses and dries them with a towel, slides them onto his nose. He starts rubbing his damp hair with the towel, and sits across from me at a tiny white formica table pressed against the wall of a galley kitchen.

I ask if he knows any reason someone would want to hurt him.

He asks what I was doing in his car.

I remind him that I saved his life.

He sighs. “I came across evidence of a . . . let's say,
unusual
relationship between Ocean Catch and a Japanese wholesaler called Soga Fisheries.”

I tell him to go on.

“Ocean Catch used to sell its product all over the world, to whoever was the highest bidder. Then about three or four years ago, it started selling almost exclusively to Soga. Now about seventy-five percent of its catch—that's millions of pounds of fish each year—goes every week by air freight directly to Tokyo, packed in ice. Soga pays top dollar for it, well above market rate.”

“Sounds like a good deal for Ocean Catch.”

“It's more than that. The company was a few months away from bankruptcy when Soga stepped in. Basically, Soga's business prevented Ocean Catch from going under, and it's been single-handedly keeping the company alive since then.” Some of the color has come back to his face. He tosses the towel on the kitchen counter. “See, the entire groundfish industry has been shrinking steadily for the last decade or more, and in the last few years fish companies have been going out of business left and right. Ocean Catch was on the verge of cashing in its entire fleet to a federal buy-out program. But somehow, pretty quickly, the company got turned around and started operating in the black.”

“So maybe Ocean Catch is doing something else for Soga, besides supplying fish. Any idea what it could be?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out.”

He's got a perfect poker face: bland, inscrutable. But I'm pretty sure he knows more than he's saying, and if by some slim chance he doesn't, he soon will, because the flash drive containing both Hall's and Jacobsen's computer files is most likely still tucked in his pocket. This is as good a time as any to call his bluff.

“By the way, I know you don't work for Jackson Hartwell, and I'm pretty sure your name's not Larry Wozniak.”

He gives the casual half smile of someone who's been caught doing something that he thinks isn't so bad. “Sorry. Russell Parnell, journalist. Most people call me Parnell.”

“First a friend of the deceased, then an insurance man, now a journalist. I'd be crazy to believe anything you said. That counts for the
sorry
,
too. Which I'm pretty sure I've heard you say before.”

“Google me when you get home.”

“Will there be a picture?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“OK. So tell me how the
Sea Wolf
and Ned Rizzo fit into this business with Soga.”

“Rizzo worked almost exclusively on the
Sea Wolf
during the last few years. He and the same small crew used to go off on voyages, returning after two or three weeks with a fraction of the haul they should have brought back. Then he left the company unexpectedly, ended up dead in a freakish collision at sea, and the
Sea Wolf
returned to port right around that time with a cracked hull. Need me to connect the dots?”

“I told you the
Sea Wolf
wasn't the ship that hit us.”

His mouth purses with impatience, but he keeps it shut. There's a bit of dried blood at his right ear.

He still hasn't told me anything I didn't already know, but he hasn't said anything false either. I don't know if I should trust him. I get up from the table and go off in search of more information about the man who now says his name is Russell Parnell. The adjoining living area is dark, but the window shades are open. Looming outside, brilliantly lit by spotlights in this inky dead of night, the steeple of the Old North Church rises like a ghost of America's past. I switch on a gooseneck standing lamp. Blank walls, no coffee table, no television. Just a bookcase holding a lot of papers and about two dozen books. An Apple laptop open on a small desk, a dozen notecards scribbled on in big, rough handwriting. A cubist couch in urban black, probably from IKEA. Actually it looks like everything in this room came from IKEA. Instant apartment for small change. Two steps above transient, one step above college student.

I check out the books on his shelves:
Planet in the Balance
,
The Vanishing Arctic
,
Hiker's Guide to the White Mountains
,
The Elements of Style
,
La Cocina de Mama: the Great Home Cooking of Spain
. There's also a big glossy hardcover about whales lying flat on a shelf. The environmental books are persuasive, but the book that makes the strongest case for his not-evil character is
The Elements of Style
. What bad guy would give a shit about the difference between
which
and
that
? And the fact that he was just beaten pretty bad by Oyster Man and his morons does make me feel a little warmer toward him.

The shock of seeing Johnny tonight still hasn't left me. His snub-nosed profile and buzz cut, thick arms folded across his down vest, just above his bump of paunch. The cold-blooded way he merely watched, keeping his hands clean for the delicate work on his birdhouses.

Johnny didn't follow me to Ocean Catch tonight. The streets were so deserted at 2 a.m. that I would have seen a tail. And he was waiting outside the company parking lot, not where I left my car. He must have finally discovered the funeral crasher's address and had a few of his guys staking out the apartment. They followed him to Ocean Catch, where Johnny met them. Johnny was unwilling to enter the building when he saw the cleaning van. He waited on the street outside the gate, where he could track Parnell (I might as well call him that for now) leaving and ambush him.

Parnell—smaller, one-armed, nearsighted—is no match for John Oster. When he was talking just now, trying to act tough, I noticed that his voice was tinctured with the startled terror he's trying to suppress. I'm willing to bet that tonight's violent events are not a regular feature of the world he hails from. Which adds up to this: Whatever Johnny wants from the alleged journalist, he will eventually get.

When I glance back to the kitchen, where Parnell has started making coffee, compare his dead hand to his working one, and see the tension in his drained, pulpy face, some actual human sympathy starts bubbling under my crust.
Shit, syphilis,
I remind myself. But it doesn't work.

I go back to the kitchen and tell him everything I know. I explain the secret bonuses, the company's gift to Ned, and what I heard about the argument aboard the
Sea Wolf
between the captain and a Japanese fishmaster. Then I inform him that his chief assailant was a guy named John Oster, a good buddy of the deceased fisherman Ned Rizzo, and a longtime employee of Ocean Catch.

“How do you know?”

“Hard to mistake an old friend.”

He blinks. Not sure what to make of that.

“I'm not one of them, if that's what you're thinking.”

He spoons coffee into the coffeemaker while he mulls this over. Finally, he says, “I thought you might be one of them when we first met. You were on the
Molly Jones
when it went down, so you were obviously working with Rizzo to some extent. But when you were hitting me up for information in the café that day, I realized you actually didn't know that much.”

“So why don't you tell me what I don't know.”

“Look, it could be dangerous. These people . . . they're—”

“Come on. You think I don't know? I just watched what they did to you.”

He disappears into the living room, comes back with the glossy book about whales, and hands it to me. The cover photo is of a black whale rising majestically out of the ocean. The whale appears to be turning slightly in the air, showing its white underside. The crown of its massive, rectangular head is disfigured by dingy white and pale gray wattles that look like clustered barnacles or the scabrous growths of a strange disease. Not far from the corner of its fearsome maw, a tiny black eye is nestled in blubber.

“The North Atlantic right whale,” he says. “It was on the brink of extinction a decade ago, along with its cousin, the southern right whale. After the international ban on hunting, the southern right rebounded successfully, but the North Atlantic right hasn't come back at all. There are only about two hundred and seventy-five of them left in the world. They're closer to extinction now than they ever were.

“Some people think ship strikes are killing them as fast as they breed, which seems possible, since their migration routes directly cross the shipping lanes. But due to public pressure, traffic was rerouted a few degrees in the Bay of Fundy, where the whales live most of the year. Ship strikes were reduced significantly, but the population is still low.

“Now people think it might be fishing gear. We know the whales get caught in nets and lines because we can see the marks on the bodies of the ones that break away. Others may be drowning or dying of skin infections from the slices. There's a move to make fishing lines out of different, softer materials. But the truth is, no one really knows what's happening out there.”

He stares at me with dry eyes and pursed lips. The coffee's stopped percolating, but he doesn't make a move to serve it. I'm getting an idea of where he's headed, but it's hard to believe.

“Whale meat's a delicacy in Japan,” he says.

“But the
Sea Wolf
can't be taking that many whales, can it?”

“I have no idea how many whales would have to be killed to keep the population from rebounding. I don't even have any hard evidence that that's what's going on. But I suspected Ocean Catch and Soga were colluding somehow, and now I know I'm onto something.” He pulls out cups, milk, and sugar with jerky one-handed anger.

Suddenly I realize that he must be the one who broke into my apartment. He probably did it to download my hard drive like he did Hall's and Jacobsen's. While he was there, he must have tapped my phone as well. He no doubt heard the message Mrs. Smith left on my machine about the cleaning people at Ocean Catch. That's how he knew which night he could get into the offices easily, and why he still hasn't asked me how I ended up in his car. He knew I might be there, too, and was taking his chances on meeting me. But I doubt he knows that I was in Jacobsen's office, watching what he did.