Orest Stelmach - The Boy from Reactor 4

VICTOR HELPED STEFAN move the bodies into a closet until he could dispose of them the way they disposed of all the bad meat at the deli.

“You’re the best chess player the world never knew,” Stefan said.

“No. The best chess player the world never knew died in Chernobyl village last week. Did your men have any problem getting into my apartment?”

“No. No problem.”

“How is she?”

“The maiden and the dove, the dove and the maiden.” Stefan sighed with uncharacteristic delight. “They look at home on my living room wall. I love them so.”

“Of course you do. You have one hundred thousand reasons to love them. Have you heard from my—have you heard from Tara? Did she get the money you wired for me?”

“She did. She is good. She’s still hiding in upstate New York. You should call her and tell her to come home. Your word was good, Victor. Misha will never harm her again.”

“No,” Victor said, remembering the moment when Kirilo killed him. “No, he won’t. But first, we have to take care of business. You’re going to have to dispose of the two inside the meat locker, too.”

“What about Johnny Tanner?”

“No, no. A man does not survive in America by killing officers of the court. Send him out to me while you take care of Kirilo’s two men in the meat locker. I’ll make sure he understands that he was never here, that a dozen people will swear we were playing chess in the park all morning, and that no one in this neighborhood ever saw him, even if they did. He’ll listen. He’s a survivor. Look at him. He’s from the streets. He won’t risk his life or Nadia’s.”

Thirty seconds later, Johnny Tanner emerged from the freezer, shirt and suit jacket in hand, looking surprisingly composed. Stefan remained inside and closed the door behind him. While Johnny Tanner dressed, Victor explained the reality of life to him, in accordance with what he’d told Stefan. A cell phone in one of the lawyer’s pockets vibrated twice before Victor finished.

“Do we understand each other?” Victor said.

“I don’t know,” Johnny Tanner said as he straightened his tie. “If any harm comes to Nadia, I’m going to find you and square it, and if I don’t, I got friends who will. So you tell me. Do we understand each other?”

His cell phone vibrated again.

Victor waved his gun at Johnny’s pants pocket. “Is someone calling you?”

“No. Voice mail.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let’s hear your voice mail. Maybe a mutual friend of ours left you a message. Let’s hear what she has to say.”

AS SOON AS Nadia entered the Underground, she didn’t have to wonder anymore if anyone had found the body of the man who was shot before her eyes. There, at a small table, reading a Ukrainian newspaper and looking decidedly alive and healthy, sat Yuri Banya, the man who’d pretended to be Max Milan.

Yuri said to Nadia, “I’m not surprised to see you. We knew you’d figure it all out eventually.”

“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve,” Nadia said. The scene that had started it all flashed in her mind. Banya. A gunshot. A big old American sedan. “I haven’t figured anything out. I thought you were dead. But you’re alive.”

“Yes. Last I checked.”

“And looking none the worse for wear.”

“Thank the Lord.”

“In fact, you don’t look like a man who cheated death… How many days ago was it? Seventeen? No, eighteen. You don’t look like a man who spent eighteen days in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest.”

His eyes twinkled. “I’ve always been a fast healer.”

“I’m looking for a boy. My nephew—”

“Adam,” Yuri said. “You’re looking for Adam. He’s here.”

“He is? Where? Is he okay?”

“Yes. He’s fine. He’s using the bathroom in back. Maria is fixing him a sandwich and some borscht. He’ll be out in a minute. Have a seat, please.” Yuri gestured with his hand toward a chair.

Nadia glanced at the chair and spotted Adam’s knapsack and bag against the wall beyond it. A wave of relief washed over her. Instead of sitting, though, she remained standing. Something Yuri had said sounded wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it hit her.

“You said, ‘We knew you’d figure it out.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

Feet shuffled. A curtain parted. A tall, gangly man with a round face and a shock of red hair came into the room. He stopped beside Yuri, bowed, and smiled.

“Good morning, Nadia,” he said, as though they were friends.

Nadia mumbled a greeting in return. She didn’t recognize him, but something about him looked disturbingly familiar. She’d seen that shock of hair somewhere before. It was the stuff of nightmares, the kind that caused her to wake up in the middle of the night elated that she’d only been dreaming. Except in this case, he’d been all too real…

“The big old American sedan,” Nadia said. “You were the shooter. The supposed shooter, I should say.”

“This is my old friend,” Yuri said, “Simon Stanislavski.”

“Blanks,” Simon said. “I was shooting blanks.”

“Why?” Nadia said.

“We had to motivate you,” Yuri said.

“Excuse me?” Nadia said.

“We had to motivate you to go to Kyiv,” Yuri said. “If there wasn’t the promise of untold millions, whether in cash or from the sale of a formula, would you have gone to Kyiv?”

“What?” Nadia said.

Yuri said, “If you got letters in November and January, the way your mother did, and learned your long-lost uncle was alive, a long-lost uncle who was the most notorious thief and con man the country ever knew, would you have packed your bags and gone just because he asked you to?”

Nadia tried to process everything they were saying and form a logical conclusion, but her brain didn’t seem to want to go there.

“Damian sent letters to your mother in November of last year and in January. He was honest. He said he was dying and he had a boy, a good boy, for whom he wanted a better life. Your mother never answered. It was no surprise. Damian was a thief. People thought he was long dead. And who wants a boy from Chernobyl?”

“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said.

“So he wrote a third letter. This time he talked about having some information that could change the fate of the free world. And he asked us to lure you in. To lure you into the con.”

“We were members of his crew in Kyiv back in the day,” Simon said.

Yuri said, “We’re two of the three who got away.”

Nadia collapsed into a chair. She stared at the geometric pattern of the wood grain in the table. The pattern seemed to be moving in a circle for her benefit.

“You’re saying that everything that happened on Seventh Street was an act,” she said. “A ruse just to pull me in. You said, ‘The sale of a formula.’ Not the formula. A formula. Which suggests there is no real formula. That it was all just a sick game of some kind. That everything I went through was for nothing. For nothing at all.”

The men exchanged gratified looks with each other and turned to Nadia.

“No,” Yuri said. “Not for nothing. It was most definitely for something. It was for someone .”

“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said. He stepped over to the bar and reached up into a storage rack for glasses.

“What?” Nadia said.

“No one wants a boy from the Zone,” Simon said.