Orest Stelmach - The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

“So what did you do?”

“What do you think? If it’s not for Nadia, I’m not here. So I did what I had to do to protect her.”

“Which was?”

“I followed the instructions. A man picked me up in a boat at South Street Seaport. It was starting to get dark. He looked like a fisherman. He took me to an island nearby. From the angle of his approach, it looked about one and a half kilometers long, half a kilometer wide.”

“And this was Hart Island.”

Bobby nodded. “I didn’t know what it was called until I got to prison. People talk about it here. The fisherman dropped me off at one end of the island. He gave me an envelope. Said everything would be explained in the envelope. Then he took off.”

“He have a Russian accent, this fisherman?”

“No. He was American. He looked like a random guy. Someone for hire.”

“What was in the envelope?”

“A letter. It said, ‘Welcome to Hart Island, the forbidden burial ground of New York City. In the daytime, it’s off limits to everyone except the prisoners who do the burials. In the nighttime, it’s off limits to everyone. It’s a place New Yorkers can’t visit without special permission. It’s a place no one likes to talk about. Sound familiar?’ Then he told me who he was. That he’d had me in his sights, that he’d missed, and that as a result I’d killed his mother. He said only one of us was going to leave the island alive. The one who survived was to bury the other in one of the mass graves in the potter’s field. He said he was arriving at the southern end of the island at that very moment, and by the time I read his signature the game had begun.”

“And the boat’s gone by now, right?”

“One of them is.”

“What does that mean? There was more than one?”

Bobby shrugged. “As soon as I read the note, I knew Valentin had to have a boat waiting. Whether he had a man with him or not, I wasn’t sure. I was guessing not, that he was doing this alone. Out of some Cossack sense of honor, and to keep his witnesses to a minimum. But there was no way he was waiting to call someone to come pick him up if he managed to kill me. He wasn’t going to put his fate in someone else’s hands. And he wasn’t going to risk any delay. I knew I wouldn’t have. I knew there had to be a boat.”

Bobby’s father had been a notorious con man, famous for his misdirection. If plotting was genetic, the kid had inherited his father’s insight into human behavior.

“You had to be suspicious when you came?” Johnny said. “Did you bring any weapons? Anything at all to protect yourself?”

“I had my screwdriver and my flashlight. I always carried my screwdriver and my flashlight. And I brought a bat. A baseball bat. Louisville Slugger.”

“Better than nothing,” Johnny said.

“I wouldn’t have known how to get a gun if I wanted one. It didn’t matter. I don’t like guns.”

“So you’re alone on an island with a guy intent on killing you. He has a high powered rifle and a hunting knife. You have a screwdriver and a bat. You have no way of leaving the island except swimming. Are you a good swimmer?”

“I don’t know how to swim. The end of the island where I got dropped off was open fields. There were a couple of monuments, but mostly it was one huge field. It turned out this is the northern end. They started the cemetery there, and they’re working their way south as they run out of room. There aren’t any headstones. Just mass, unmarked graves. But when I looked north I could see buildings and trees. And so I understood right away. I’d landed in an open field with no cover, while he was starting out with places to hide. To survive, I had to even the playing field. To even the playing field, I had to use the only advantage I had.”

“Which was?”

“Speed. My father once told me that most people are right handed, so when there’s a choice to be made between a left and right entrance—say, to a cinema—seventy percent of people choose the right one. Valentine’s right was my left. So I ran up the far right side of the island as fast as I could. There was a tree line and some buildings in the center of the island. I ran toward some brick buildings. I ran for about half a mile. Maybe a little more. Two and a half minutes, maybe a little less. There was no way Valentine could have been moving as quickly. No way. I knew that.”

“The only question was whether he was playing the game fair or not.”

“It didn’t matter. I needed to run for cover no matter what. There’s a main road that goes up and down the middle of the island. Then there’s a web of abandoned streets around. Grass growing through cracks. Just like the Zone. The first building I ran into must have been a place where they stored records. There were stacks of files. All over the place. Thousands of them. The second one was a chapel. The third one was a shoe factory. That’s where I hid.”

“In a shoe factory?”

“That’s what I thought it was. Turns out it was part of a woman’s psychiatric hospital. Something to keep them occupied while they did their treatment. There was a huge room filled with shoes. Huge. Every color and type of woman’s shoe you could imagine. They were piled more than a meter high. I took off my left basketball shoe and buried it in the pile far away from the door. And I put it in a place where it would have lined up if a person was hiding under the shoes.”

“That’s why you were wearing one shoe when you showed up at the police station.”

Bobby nodded. “I waited outside along the north side of the building, back against the wall. I could see north, east, and west. There was no way he could approach me without my seeing him. Unless he went into the building coming from the south.”

“And you’d hear him coming.”

“I did hear him coming. Once he went inside I could hear him moving through the shot-out window. The room with the shoes was at the back of the building. Once he was halfway in the building, I knew he’d go through the rest of it. And I knew once he saw the man’s shoe sticking out he’d spend some time lining up his shot. Then he’d have to plow his way through the shoes to see if he’d killed me. So I slipped away really quiet.”

“Slipped away? Slipped away to where?”

“The southern end of the island. My mission was to get past him and stay out of his line of fire. If I got past him, then I could use my speed to get to his boat.”

“And he had a boat?”

“Yes. A little power boat. He had it tied to a fence post on the south end shore. I took it to South Street Seaport. It had a glove box. Like a car. In the glove box was the rental agreement for the boat.”

“Which had his name and address.”

“It did. I took the subway to the Meatpacking District where he lives. What I’d done by escaping from Hart Island was give myself the element of surprise. And the last thing Valentine would be expecting was to run into me on the way home. So I found his apartment. I waited in a dumpster in an alley on a street that was the shortest route from the subway. Odds were high he’d have to pass it on the way home from the subway.”

“What if he’d taken a cab?”

“Then I would have been out of luck that night. But eventually he would have passed that dumpster. And I’m patient. I learned patience in the Zone, especially the night with the hunters. Eventually I would have gotten my chance. But I got lucky. He took the subway that night. It’s what I would have done. A cab leaves a trail. And he already did that with the two boat rentals.”

“And then what?”

“I surprised him. He had just enough time to pull his knife out to defend himself but then I tackled him. I used my screwdriver and that was it.”