Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“Evidently not.”

“TJ called earlier. But that’s not important. Matt, Kenan Khoury just called. You have to call him right away. He said it’s really urgent.”

“He did?”

“He said life or death, and probably death. I don’t know what that means, but he sounded serious.”

I called right away, and Kenan said, “Matt, thank God. Don’t go nowhere, I got my brother on the other line. You’re at home, right? Okay, stay on the line, I’ll be with you in a second.” There was a click, and then a minute or so later there was another click and he was back. “He’s on his way,” he said. “He’s coming over to your hotel, he’ll be right out in front.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“With Petey? Nothing, he’s fine. He’s gonna bring you out to Brighton Beach. Nobody’s got time to dick around with the subway today.”

“What’s in Brighton Beach?”

“A whole lot of Russians,” he said. “How do I put this? One of ’em just called to say he’s going through business difficulties similar to what I went through.”

That could only mean one thing, but I wanted to make sure.

“His wife?”

“Worse. I gotta go, I’ll meet you there.”

Late in September Elaine and I had spent an idyllic afternoon in Brighton Beach. We rode the Q train to the end of the line and walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, browsing in the produce markets, window-shopping, then exploring the side streets with their modest frame houses and a network of back streets, little walks and alleys and paths and ways. The bulk of the population consisted of Russian Jews, many of them very recent arrivals, and the neighborhood had felt extremely foreign while remaining quintessentially New York. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, then walked on the boardwalk clear to Coney Island, watching people hardier than ourselves bobbing in the ocean. Then we spent an hour at the Aquarium, and then we went home.

If we had passed Yuri Landau in the street that day I don’t suppose we’d have looked at him twice. He would have looked at home there, as he must have once looked in the streets of Kiev or Odessa. He was a big man, broad in the chest, with a face that might have served as the model for an idealized worker in one of those murals from the days of Socialist Realism. A broad forehead, high cheekbones, sharply angled facial planes, and a prominent jaw. His hair was a medium brown, and lank; he was given to tossing his head to get his hair out of his face.

He was in his late forties, and he had been in America for ten years. He’d come over with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Ludmilla. He’d done some sort of black-market trading in the Soviet Union, and in Brooklyn he gravitated easily into various marginal enterprises, and before long began trafficking in narcotics. He had done well, but then it is a business in which nobody breaks even. If you don’t get killed or imprisoned, you generally do very well.

Four years ago his wife had been diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy had kept her alive for two and a half years. She had hoped to live to see her daughter graduate from intermediate school, but she died in the fall. Ludmilla, who now called herself Lucia, had graduated in the spring, and was now a member of the freshman class of Chichester Academy, a small private high school for girls located in Brooklyn Heights. The tuition was high, but so were the academic requirements, and Chichester had an excellent record at placing its graduates in Ivy League colleges, as well as women’s colleges like Bryn Mawr and Smith.

When he’d started calling people in the business to warn them about the possibility of kidnapping, Kenan had very nearly not called Yuri Landau. They were not close, they barely knew each other, but more to the point Kenan saw Landau as invulnerable. The man’s wife was already dead.

He hadn’t even thought about the daughter. Still, he’d made the call, and Landau had taken it as confirmation of a course of action he had adopted when he’d first sent Lucia off to Chichester. Instead of letting her take subways or buses, he’d arranged to have a car service pick her up every morning at seven-thirty and collect her in front of Chichester every afternoon at a quarter to three. If she wanted to go to a friend’s house the car service would take her there, and she was instructed to call them when she wanted to come home. If she wanted to go anywhere in the neighborhood, she usually took the dog with her. The dog was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and actually very gentle, but looked ferocious enough to constitute a powerful deterrent.

Early that afternoon, the telephone rang in the office of Chichester Academy. A well-spoken gentleman explained that he was an assistant to Mr. Landau and was requesting that the school dismiss Ludmilla half an hour early because of a family emergency. “I’ve made arrangements with the car service,” he assured the woman to whom he spoke, “and they’ll have a vehicle waiting in front of the school at two-fifteen, although it probably will not be the car and driver she had this morning.” And, he added, if there were any questions she was not to call Mr. Landau’s residence; instead she could reach him, Mr. Pettibone, at a number he would give her now.

She didn’t have to call the number, because there was no problem following his request. She summoned Lucia (no one at school knew her as Ludmilla) to the office and told her she would be dismissed early. At ten minutes after two the woman looked out the window and saw that a dark green truck or van was parked directly in front of the school’s entrance on Pineapple Street. It was quite unlike the late-model GM sedans that normally brought the girl in the morning and took her away in the afternoon, but it was clearly the right vehicle. The car service’s name and address was plainly visible in white letters on its side. Chaverim Livery Service, with an address on Ocean Avenue. And the driver, who walked around the truck so that he could hold the door for Lucia, wore a blue blazer the way they always did, and had one of those caps.

For her part, Lucia got into the van without hesitation. The driver closed the door, walked around the vehicle, got behind the wheel, and drove to the corner of Willow Street, at which point the woman stopped watching.

At a quarter to three the rest of the school was dismissed, and a few minutes later Lucia’s regular driver showed up in the gray Oldsmobile Regency Brougham in which he had driven Lucia to school that morning. He waited patiently at the curb, knowing that Lucia was routinely as much as fifteen minutes late leaving the building. He would have waited that long and longer without complaint, but one of Lucia’s classmates recognized him and told him he must have made a mistake. “Because she was dismissed early,” she said. “She got picked up like half an hour ago.”

“Come on,” he said, thinking she was playing a joke on him.

“It’s true! Her father called the office and one of your cars already came and picked her up. Ask Miss Severance if you don’t believe me.”

The driver did not go in and confirm this with Miss Severance; if he had, that woman would almost certainly have called the Landau residence, and, quite possibly, the police. Instead he used his own car radio to call his dispatcher on Ocean Avenue and ask him what the hell was going on. “If she needed an early pickup,” he said, “then you coulda sent me. Or if you can’t get me, at least tell me to skip my regular pickup.”

The dispatcher, of course, didn’t know what the driver was talking about. When she got the gist of it she figured out the only thing that made sense to her, that for some reason Landau had called another car service. She might have let it go at that. Maybe all their lines had been busy, maybe he’d been in a rush, maybe he’d picked the child up himself and hadn’t been able to call off the scheduled car. But something evidently bothered her, because she looked up Yuri Landau’s number and called him.