David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN? DO YOU THINK I’M NAÏVE?”

“I’m just asking questions.”

“The law firm was legit. I checked the Web site. Called the office.”

“Talk to anyone?”

Pause. Realization dawning. “Yes.”

“A receptionist and a recording?”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SUGGESTING?”

“You were conned, I’m afraid.”

“BULLSHIT. I checked the Web site. Here.” She went to her desk, typed on the keyboard, and swiveled the flat screen toward me. “Look.”

“It’s a Web site, all right, hosted somewhere in Eastern Europe.”

“HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

“I get paid to know. You describe your brother’s office to them?”

“NO! I told you. Why would I do that?”

“Because they asked.”

Her face turned bright red. The decibels jumped. “GET OUT! I’m calling Sebastian right now.”

“Call ahead.”

I sat still while she played the bluff as long as she could, all the way through ten digits of the phone number, before she replaced the receiver. She moved papers around the desk, struggling to keep her temper under control. I’d stepped over the line, a couple of lines—I probably shouldn’t have stopped for the vodka—but I didn’t care. Three head cases and a death sentence in one day was too much.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Have you lent your brother Thomas money?”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“He spends like a drunken sailor. Your words, not mine. Have you lent him any money?”

“No.”

“How about your husband? Would he?”

“No, of course not.”

“Would you know?”

“YES, GODDAMMIT, OF COURSE I WOULD KNOW. WHY WOULDN’T I KNOW?”

She shoved more papers. She looked at all four flat screens and clicked her computer mouse. “I’ve got eighty-five new e-mails…”

Once again, the subject of Walter Coryell hit a nervous nerve. This time, with his wife. It might have been her confrontational attitude, it might have been because she was married to the guy, but this time I didn’t back off.

“Did the people who came to see you talk to your husband?”

She stopped shoving papers and thought for a moment. The first time she’d taken time to think since I arrived. “Walter’s very busy. He’s got his own company—highly successful. He’s out of town right now. He travels a lot on business.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Is this really important?”

“Why didn’t you attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you and your husband attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What’s that have to do with this?”

“Just a question.”

“I have work to do.” She grabbed her computer mouse and shoved it across the desk. The phone rang.

“That’s your conference call,” Sheila said through the door.

Julia Leitz reached for the phone and stopped and looked at me. I waited while it rang.

“I have to take this call.”

“Saved by the bell.”

“What the hell does that mean? I have to take this call.”

I stood. “I’m sure the whole damned deal depends on it.”

Third Avenue was quieter now. The cold air felt good. I was annoyed with myself. Julia Leitz got under my skin. The whole family pissed me off. I felt sympathy for Jonathan Stern, not necessarily a sympathetic guy. How did levelheaded, smiling Jenny Leitz put up with this lot? How would she manage when her illness really took hold? I would have locked them all in a single Lubyanka cell and thrown away the key.

I looked around for Tan Coat, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he hadn’t guessed my destination—or was learning better technique. I flipped a mental coin. Heads—find a quiet tavern. Tails—skip the tavern, go home, eat a Spartan dinner, and go to bed. Plenty to look into in the morning. In my mind’s eye, the coin landed on the sidewalk, rolled along a crease in the concrete and disappeared into a sewer drain. On par with the rest of the day.

Bar and dinner could wait. I walked to Grand Central, rode the Lexington Avenue Express between Fourteenth and Fifty-ninth Streets a few times to give Tan Coat a chance to show himself. When he didn’t, I switched at Fifty-ninth to the N to Queens. The first stop across the river put me at Queensboro Plaza. I walked a few minutes to the block of Twenty-second Street between Fortieth and Forty-first avenues, the headquarters of YouGoHere.com, Walter Coryell’s company.

An empty commercial block in an empty commercial neighborhood. Five-story brick and concrete buildings on one side held warehouses, electricians, cabinet makers, a lighting manufacturer, and more than a few empty spaces for rent. The single- and double-height structures opposite were home to an auto repair shop, a refrigeration company, a metal fabricator, and one small apartment conversion, if the satellite TV dishes outside three of six windows were any indication. No delis, restaurants, or bars, unless you counted the “gentlemen’s club” near the subway offering the opportunity of meet one of Tiger Woods’s mistresses up close and personal. Hardly a service industry neighborhood. Definitely not a successful dot-com neighborhood.

Number 40-28 stood midblock and won the contest for most peeling paint and FOR RENT signs. Roman numerals on the concrete cornice broadcast the date of construction as MDCCCVII—a few years after the classical era. The door was steel with a small, reinforced glass window. Empty tiled vestibule behind. An intercom by the door had a dozen buzzers with yellowed signs. The only one ending in “.com” was YOUGOHERE. I pushed it and got no response. I pushed again with the same result. The elevator at the far end of the vestibule opened, and a middle-aged black guy with a graying mustache pushed open the front door.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m looking for the guy at YouGoHere, supposed to meet him at seven thirty.” I guessed at the time.

“Good luck to you, man. Ain’t never seen that dude. Go on up and take a look, that’s what you want.”

I thanked him as he walked into the night.

A slow elevator with a worn-out cab deposited me on the third floor at the head of a short cinderblock corridor with four steel doors. Three had signs. None said YouGoHere. The unlabeled door was sandwiched between the elevator and a space labeled GROARK CUSTOM FRAMERS. I knocked. No answer. I tried the other three with the same result. My watch said 7:55. The hell with it.

Back downstairs, I crossed the street to see if there were lights in any of the windows. None. A wasted trip, but hadn’t I expected that?

I remembered a first-rate Italian restaurant, another old-style New York institution, a half-dozen blocks away. I’d been taken there a few years before and thought more than once about returning. The tug of a vodka martini and a good Bolognese sauce was setting up another mental coin toss when headlights turned into the block. Instinct pushed me into a dark doorway. The lights swept the parked cars, and motion caught my eye—a head ducking, a moment too late, behind the windshield of a Chevy sedan. Could have been a trick of the lights, but I stepped farther back into the darkness. No way Tan Coat could have followed me here—and certainly not in a car. A black Cadillac Escalade rolled to a stop outside number 12. The driver kept the engine running. Nobody got out. I didn’t move.

Five minutes passed. Then another five.

My muscles started to ache mildly, but waiting is an acquired skill, one I’d learned, along with every other Russian, as a kid. No more movement from the car down the block.