David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“Okay, I guess.” He plopped on a striped couch. “To tell you the truth, I have no idea.”

“You’re going through a rough patch.”

“Yeah. What about Irina?”

“She’s run away, like I said. You heard about her stepfather, yesterday?”

He nodded. “It’s my fault.”

“I don’t know that. I want to hear your story.”

His hand sliced through the air. Tough kid. Or kid trying to play tough. “What else do you know about Irina?”

I settled in on an upholstered chair across from the sofa. “She took off right after the shooting, like she was waiting for a chance to run. She withdrew eight thousand dollars, went to Gibbet, and picked up her car. I think she had a destination in mind. I think you might know where it is. She doesn’t believe this—she thinks she’s smarter than he is—but if Karp, the assassin, finds her before I do, he’ll snap her in half like a little bird. I like his chances a lot better than hers. Any idea where she went?”

He put his head in his hands and said nothing.

“Andras—you can help her.”

“It’s all my fault.”

I had no patience for that self-pitying refrain, but I backed off to give him a chance to think.

“Tell me about the Players? Your idea?”

He shook his head. “It just happened, you know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He shook his head again. “I can’t explain. It just kind of happened.”

I’d thought, perhaps, the events of the last few days would have been traumatic enough to make him want to talk. He wasn’t ready. Part me, the Cheka part, said sweat him, punish him, the kid was guilty, a child-criminal, criminal first. Would’ve worked, more than likely. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe we’d get to that. But not yet.

“How long ago? When did it start?”

He shrugged. “Few years.”

“Why? How? Who rented the place above the liquor store?”

He shrugged again. “We all did.”

“We?”

“Yeah. We.”

“Who’s we?”

“You already know that. If you don’t, then…”

The kid was thinking.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d you do it?”

“We had our reasons.”

“Had or have?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just asking if the reasons are past or present? You want to tell me about them?”

He shook his head.

“You know we’re going to get there sooner or later, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure I should be talking to you. I think I should call my dad.”

“Go ahead.”

He didn’t move. Neither did I.

“You ever think you’d end up here?” I asked. “A spot like this, looking at options, or absence of options? In a box?”

He took a minute before he shook his head, no. The first positive sign since I arrived.

“Life works like that. You think you control it, to the extent you think about it at all, then fate intervenes, shit happens, shit multiplies, and here you are. I’m not sure you know half your own story. Want to hear it?”

He paused, then nodded. He didn’t look happy. I wouldn’t have either.

I took him through the whole tale. The bug on his father’s computers. The interviews with his aunts and uncles. The junkies at the Black Horse. I skimmed over uncles Walter and Thomas for the moment, we’d come back to them. It took maybe half an hour.

“You tricked your uncle. You used Irina’s—Salomé’s—e-mail to set up the date at the Black Horse. She found out and followed you there. You weren’t expecting her, you were waiting for him. He didn’t show. You didn’t know he’d been busted with a kid in his car a hundred miles away.”

“That’s what you were talking about Saturday? When you said rape?”

“Rockville, Connecticut, is where it happened.”

“How do you…?”

“Know what I know? I have lots of sources. Your friend Foos helped.”

I retraced the ground we’d covered in the car—I wasn’t sure how much had sunk in—I figured the repetition wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t interrupt. He stayed head down, then stood and walked around the room, looking here and there, but seeing little. He returned to the couch where he curled up in a fetal position. He made me feel worse than a Cheka interrogator. Every piece of information I flung inflicted pain.

I wound down the story. He was in tears. Tough kid evaporated. This was a family matter, except the failings of the family had let others in, to take advantage. Thousands of kids victimized in the pictures and videos Walter Coryell and the BEC enabled. I couldn’t rectify that, but I couldn’t let it go on either.

“You know where this is going, don’t you?” I asked.

He shook his head, still crying.

“Sure you do—Uncle Walter.”

“What about him?”

I took out the note from Thomas Leitz’s locker and put it on the coffee table in front of him.

“I’m sorry, Andras, you have to believe that. This is from your sister.”

He unwound himself slowly. It took a minute or two for curiosity to win out over self-pity. At least that was my unkind perspective.

He unfolded the paper and read it. He crushed the note and dropped it as if it burned his fingers. He cried loud, hard enough to shake the walls of the hotel.

“OH, NO, JESUS GOD. I DIDN’T… I COULDN’T…”

“Walter was the bad guy. He caused this. Do you understand that?”

He curled up again, shaking his head.

“Andras?”

“Leave me alone.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

He shook his head.

“It’s his. He’s the reason you’ve done everything you’ve done. The reason you all have. You’ve got to acknowledge that.”

No response.

“Andras?”

“I need… I need some time… alone.” The voice was below a whisper.

I didn’t like that idea, but I didn’t see any way around it, if I wanted to stay on his side.

“Okay.”

He got to his feet and wandered aimlessly off toward one of the bedrooms. I started to follow, to see where he was going. He closed the door in my face.

I went back to my chair. The family had delivered nothing but trouble since I’d met them, each member finding a deeper mine to dig. The note on the table looked up at me. The key, I’d told Andras, not sure I was right, until he reacted. None of us can make excuses for abuse, especially of a child. But all too often we seem able to find an excuse for covering it up. For all the right reasons, we tell ourselves, oblivious to the magnification of the crime.

My cell phone buzzed.

Victoria said, “Turbo, where are you?”

“Can’t say.”

“Can you talk?

“A little.”

“I’m outside your office. I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m… I’m having a hard time reconciling all the conflicting things that are going on.”

“And I don’t make it any easier.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. But…”

“I know. I’m sorry too.”

“Will you be back?”

“Not sure when. I’m trying to find the girl before Nosferatu does.”

“That what Batkin wanted?”

“Yes. But I’d be doing it anyway.”

“He still your client?”

“Not voluntarily. I tried to walk away.”

“I don’t understand.”

Beria was sitting in a chintz-covered chair.

How are you going to explain that, smart guy?

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. If you’re asking whether I still feel any obligation to him, the answer is no.”

Beria frowned at that.

Victoria hesitated a moment. “I thought about what you said. There are things you should know.”

“About Konychev?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t, on the phone.”