Tea Leafing: A Novel (30 page)

“Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Gio.”

“Have you ever seen
these before?” Gio held up his fingers trapped in the multicolored woven straw
and looked at her with the innocence of a child. Sam felt a pang of guilt as
she snatched two bags from the shrinking pile and turned back toward the door.

“I’ll be back in a sec,
Gio. We can talk about it then.”

Hustling along the
balcony, she was relieved to see the doorway leading to the stairwell was
almost pitch black.

“Grace!” she hissed.

Grace’s blonde head
bobbed out of the shadow behind a big ficus plant.

“Say a quick prayer
that Mary Jane killed the stairwell lights.” Grace pressed the release bar on
the door before Sam had a chance to respond.

CHAPTER 70

Tanya pictured herself
walking into an elegantly appointed old stone building, with a warm cherry wood
interior and overstuffed leather scattered artfully in seating groups around
Persian rugs. She imagined beautiful blonde tellers named Inge and Gretchen
attending to her every whim, responding in perfect, but accented English.
The Helvetia branch, into which she strode, on the Albisriederplatz
in Zurich was not that.

It was plain. If there
were a design school called Homely American Rural Midwest, this would be it.
Various shades of gray and beige in uncomfortable fabrics and wall treatments
were accented with industrial strength fluorescent bulbs. Washed-out looking
tellers were propped behind a glass partition on stools that must have been new
sometime during the Carter administration.

Striding across the
small lobby, Tanya smoothed the moustache and beard she’d purchased at an
upscale shop in Atlanta prior to her trip. The beard tapered down to a frizzy
point just above her collarbones, now hidden by a starched men’s button down.
She had spent her life playing one role or another and had become adept at
assuming identities. She’d played the role of a boy as a child, then of a woman
as an adult.

Spirit gum and careful
placement of single strands of beard hair had been judiciously placed to cover
her femininely arched eyebrows, giving her a much more masculine appearance.
The beard covered her lack of Adam’s apple, which had long ago been surgically
shaved. A neat black turban covered her head. Her single-breasted, tailored
black suit was the finest money could buy.
The small breasts
she had grown on hormones were held down by tightly wrapped Ace bandages
.
She was conscious of controlling her gait in a perfectly ordinary masculine
stride. She had always been liberal with sun block. Since she was a
light-skinned black woman with aquiline features, her complexion passed for
evenly tanned rather than black.

Sliding the passport
and credentials from the inside breast pocket of her suit jacket, she
approached the counter. Mindful of her angles, she did her best to obscure her
face from the four security cameras monitoring the room.

Looking up at the
stranger, the teller delivered her standard greeting in a flat monotone,
“Grüezi. Redet sie Schweizerdeutsch?”

Tanya shook her head.
“Russisch?”

“Nei. Hochdeutsch?”

Shaking her head again,
Tanya pressed on praying that English would be the common language. “Englisch?”

“Ja.” The teller gave a
bored nod. “Ouat can I do to you today?”

Staying in character,
Tanya tucked the slaughtered English in the back of her mind for a chuckle
later. In her best Russian accent, she played the game. Sliding a small index
card across the counter, she said “I conzolidate deez accounts. Written to ze
left are account numberz and on right is what to leave in account. All else
must go into account at bottom.” She tapped her finger on the card for effect.

A total of four Swiss
accounts had been located. In addition there were several more in Moscow they
wouldn’t attempt to touch. Since Tanya was heading to Switzerland to pick up
money for her operation, it seemed only natural that she might be able to help
with a few little transactions the girls needed to have taken care of. Because
it appeared as though money moved quickly through Fedya’s accounts, they were
unsure as to how much would be in any account at any given time. Ping-Pong wire
transfers between Moscow, Zurich, Atlanta, Medellin, Kabul, Tokyo, and several
other cities made it difficult to figure out who had what.

“Identification,
bitte.” The clerk delivered her lines in a clipped tone without looking up
while she shuffled through a rack of paper slips in triplicate, searching for
the required materials.

Tanya slid the passport
under the teller window glass.

Flipping it open, the
teller read the name: “Fyodor Il’yavitch Patrushev?”

CHAPTER 71

The portly homeless
woman pushed her shopping cart along the cracked sidewalks of Piedmont Avenue.
Although the neighborhood was in the heart of an upscale neighborhood known as
Buckhead, the
area through which she meandered was commonly
inhabited by the homeless
. Away from the expensive homes, which were
tucked neatly along tree-lined streets, this stretch of Piedmont was filled with
strip malls, businesses, and a nearby transit station.

Her shopping cart
overflowed with black trash bags, presumably filled with cans she could turn in
for cash at the recycling plant. A few personal possessions dotted the bottom
of the cart in a colorful mess. She wore several layers of clothing. Since she
lacked a dresser or closet in which to keep her things, she wore them all at
once. It was her clothing, and her bed. It also didn’t hurt that the layers
kept the chill of the winter air at bay.

Head down as if
studying the sidewalk beneath her feet, she muttered obscenities to herself.
Passers-by averted their gaze for fear she might want to start a conversation,
or worse, let loose with a verbal assault. She melted into the urban backdrop.
Woven into the very fabric of the city, wandering unseen as the homeless often
do, she was one of the invisible people.

CHAPTER 72

The match makes a graceful arch to the floor,

And time stands still as I turn for the door

Hearing the click of
the door open without the shock of blinding fluorescent lights, Sam and Grace
exhaled.

“Two minutes, twenty
seconds. Don’t forget my shoes in the office. I’ll load the stairwell.”

Slipping back along the
balcony, Sam entered the office for a second time. The only illumination was
the glow from Gio’s laptop and the digital bath of light from the wall of
monitors.

“Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Gio.”

“Do you know what these
are?” Gio held up his fingers again for Sam to see.

“No babe, whatchya got
there?”

“Dunno, but they’re
tricky.” Gio’s focus had shifted back to the finger cuffs, but with the
short-term memory issues, he wasn’t getting much done in the way of problem
solving.

Sam was relieved to see
that he was as docile as they’d hoped.

The walkie-talkie on
Gio’s desk cleared its throat and delivered the message that Pietra had just
entered the building.

Sam froze.

Gio cocked his head and
blinked. “Oh, I think my ma’s here.”

Flying across the
office, she checked the lock on the door closest to the elevators. A quick
glance through the wall of windows reminded Sam that the club was pitch black.
Pietra could have been walking up the staircase and no one would have been the
wiser.

Sam snatched the two
remaining bags and bolted for Grace.

Remembering the shoes
when she hit the door, she doubled back and looped her fingers through the
straps.

I make my escape with the greatest of ease,

And safe in the darkness, drop to my knees

Sam cleared the length
of the hallway in four seconds flat. Adrenaline made the two thirty-pound bags
seem weightless. Skidding around the ficus and onto the landing of the open
stairwell doorway, she narrowly avoided knocking Grace down the steps.

Grace’s head snapped
around, sensing danger.

“Fucking Pietra!” Sam
hissed, breathless.

Like a deer in
headlights, Grace’s reaction was the same as Sam’s had been. She froze.

“We’re into the
instrumental, there’s only a minute forty left.”

Grace looked at the
pile of bags
laying
at their feet, then back at Sam.

“Where?”

“She wasn’t to the
floor yet when I left the office.”

“What do we do?”

Sam looked at Grace for
what seemed like too long, “Go back to the office and start the cover-up, and
I’ll get these,” she said, gesturing to the bags.

“You go to the office.
I can’t take Gio. Please, Sam?”

Grace was already
reaching for the neck of one of the garbage bags.

Descending the stairs
two by two, Sam popped the door to the outside open and fresh air streamed in
with the sound of traffic and a distant train.

Reaching down, she
nabbed a medium sized Victoria’s Secret bag that had been placed just outside
the door, at the top of a small flight of concrete steps, which led to a set of
dumpsters. Turning, Sam sprinted back up the steps stopping half way.

“Grace,” she whispered
loudly.

Turning, Grace looked
up at her.

“We forgot about Max.
Keep an eye on him if you can.”

Before Grace could
respond, Sam was up the stairs and through the open doorway into the club.

Grace pulled the door
closed, almost. In the stairwell, she needed what little ambient light she
could get from the interior of the club.

Making her way down the
staircase, she gripped the metal railing with her free hand and dragged her
quarry to the bottom of the flight.

CHAPTER 73

The drab teller studied
the photo momentarily before shifting her eyes back to the man standing before
her. Tanya couldn’t tell whether the woman’s scrutiny was real or just an act
for the security cameras all around.

Her eyes slipped back
to the handcrafted passport Sam had given her just two days earlier.

“Amerikanisch?”

“Ja. I leev in Atlanta,
Georgia sometime.”

The teller nodded and
directed her attention back to the passport. Tanya began to feel the prickly
heat of nerves stinging her palms. Trying not to seem antsy, she reasoned with
herself that the tellers back home lingered over I.D. in the same fashion.
Squinching her toes in her shoes, she tried to release the nervous energy now
flooding her body.

The teller began
punching numbers into the keyboard of her computer with her right hand while
her left hand and eyes stayed focused on the card Tanya had provided. After
what seemed like three minutes of nonstop clicking, the teller turned to the
monitor. Hand poised unmoving over the keyboard, the teller stared at the
screen. Tanya waited, and watched the reflection of the green glow in the banker’s
glasses.

Several moments passed
before the woman sprang back to life.
More clicking and
studying.
Clicking and studying.
The only
indication that the task was progressing were
the slow
movement of fingers down the card Tanya had provided.

Slipping a sheet into a
franking machine, a series of numbers were imprinted on the face of each. This
ritual was repeated on four separate sheets. Papers were shuffled. Duplicates
were removed, then tapped end-up on the counter for alignment and slipped into
a drawer by the teller’s hip. More shuffling and sorting before the teller sat
with a neatly stacked pile of paper to the left of the keyboard. Turning to a
wall-mounted phone to the right of her station, she punched in two numbers and
spoke in low tones to whoever was on the other end. Hanging up, the teller
resumed her study of the passport and papers.

“Prooblemz?”

The teller’s attention
lazily, shifted back to Tanya. “No Herr Patrushev. For dees size transwer da
bank managheir must sign eet.”

Tanya nodded, wondering
exactly what sums the transfers involved. The girls had specified the amounts
to be left in the accounts. But since the information they’d pulled from Gio’s
hard drive was now several weeks old, they had no idea how much money was
sitting in the accounts at present.

The clock ticked.

After what seemed like
five minutes, a woman approached Tanya from behind and smiled at the teller.

“Mr. Patrushev?”

Tanya turned and nodded
at the woman.

“Dees way, bitte.” She
accepted the slips of paper and credentials from the teller before turning and
waddling a path across the floor like a mother duck.

Tanya fell into step
and followed her behind a cheap partition into a cubicle. Tanya had noticed the
orthopedic shoes at the end of her tree trunk ankles. She readied herself to
turn on the charm.

Extending her hand, she
flashed a formal, tight-lipped smile. “Heidi Donders, please to meet you.”

“Pleaze, call me
Fedya.” Tanya took her hand and flashed a warm smile.

Heidi seemed to soften
a bit and Tanya thought she caught a slight blush. Gesturing to two
uncomfortable looking chairs positioned on the customer’s side, Heidi moved
behind the desk.

Tanya gestured back to
Heidi’s chair “Ladies furzt, please.”

Another blushed smile
and some shuffling got Heidi into her adjustable, swiveling office chair.
Flipping through the paperwork with unmanicured hands, Heidi tried to focus on
the task instead of the tall, handsome man in front of her.