David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“I can’t leave here now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Your stubbornness is going to be the death of one of us.”

She hung up. More in frustration than anger this time, or so I hoped. She was trying, I wasn’t helping. That’s the way fate works. Beria smiled.

I picked up the note and pulled apart the crushed-up ball. I flattened it on the table. Daria Leitz’s tidy script reached through the years, grasping for vengeance.

If you want to know how this happened, ask Uncle Walter.

The first crash was a thudding bang, behind the bedroom door. The second was accompanied by breaking glass. The third, more glass.

Door locked. Another crash. More shattering glass.

I kicked the door. Once. Twice. Some give on the third try. The wood cracked on the fourth, and I hit it with my shoulder. It crashed open. Andras was climbing through the shattered window across the room. A blast of cold air blew through my clothes.

“ANDRAS!” I shouted.

He turned, just for a moment, enough for me to grab the leg that dangled inside the sill. I hung tight while I gathered my feet under me.

“ANDRAS!”

“LET ME GO!”

“NO! THAT’S NO ANSWER.”

He pulled hard, twisting and squirming. My grip slipped. I reached around his knee.

“LET ME GO!”

“NO!”

I got my legs underneath and pulled.

He wasn’t giving up. He grabbed the window frame for leverage. Blood splattered from his slashed hands.

Fuck this.

I locked my left hand on his knee and reached for his belt with my right. It closed around leather and denim. I braced my feet against the wall and yanked with everything I had. He fell back into the room on top of me.

“NO!” He was up in a flash clawing back for the window.

I caught the belt again and pulled him back. He fell to the floor. I rolled on top. He kept fighting. I rolled him over and struck him across the face.

“NO! LET ME GO. I DESERVE TO DIE.”

He kept squirming, but I was forty pounds heavier and spent more time in the gym. I got his arms to his sides and pinned them with my knees. His legs kept kicking but to little effect. The carpet was stained with blood. His hands looked badly cut. Not long before someone came to investigate. Robert Klein’s cover, flimsy to begin with, was blown.

The thrashing slowed. He was breathing heavily, strength spent. “You should… you should have let me jump.”

“No way.”

“Why?”

He was still thinking, and his thinking was still focused on him. What makes kids—adolescents—so goddamned confident the whole world revolves around them?

“I’ve already seen a lifetime of pointless deaths. We’ve got Irina to worry about, remember? I still need your help, for her.”

He stared up for a moment, some sense returning.

“Listen to me. We’re going to wash your hands. You’ve got glass in those cuts. Then we’re going to get help. You try one wrong move, you do one more stupid thing, I will knock you cold and leave you there, wherever there is. And that’ll be last call for Irina. You understand?”

He nodded. He was scared and in pain.

“Let’s go.”

The sink ran red as we flushed blood and glass. The palms were shredded. He was lucky not to have severed fingers. I wrapped his hands in towels and grabbed a couple extra for the road.

“Get your coat. We can’t stay here.”

“But…”

“Do as I say. You need medical attention. Move.”

He got a wool coat from the closet.

“Put your hands in the sleeves so they don’t show. We’re going downstairs, outside, turn right and right again on Sixty-first.”

A man in a black suit with a silver name tag came off the elevator as we got on.

“You hear anything unusual up here?” he asked. “Disturbance? Breaking glass?”

“Nope.” I pushed the button for the lobby.

“What room are you in?”

“Eight-fourteen.”

“Thanks.”

The man hurried down the hall. The door closed. We made it through the lobby. An empty cab cruised East Sixty-first Street, and I hailed it. There was no time to check for Nosferatu or anyone else. I gave the driver an address on East Seventh Street and worked my cell phone as we sped downtown. Andras slumped against the door and didn’t say a word.

“Lucky kid. He’s lost more blood than’s good for him, he’s got a dozen stitches in each hand, and he’s fortunate he’s still got hands to stitch. Looks like he crushed a beer bottle in each one and refused to let go.”

“Something like that,” I said.

Petro Lutsenko, M.D., said, “I know. Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask.”

He walked around his desk and sat across from me. A good looking forty-something man of Ukrainian descent with a large nose and smiling eyes, the looks a bit marred by a pair of unusually hairy ears. His father had been on the Cheka’s payroll for the occasional discreet medical repair when I was stationed here in the eighties. Petro had joined the old man’s practice, with his newly minted M.D. from NYU, and kept up the family tradition. For which he was well compensated. I’d been waiting a long hour while he treated Andras.

“All built into the fee,” I said.

“Speaking of which…”

“On its way here.”

“He’s resting and should keep resting for a day or two. I’ve given him a light painkiller and a sedative. I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics. What name…?”

“Warren Brandeis.”

He looked up from his pad. “Very funny.”

I shrugged. “Not my joke. It’s a real name.”

“If you say so.”

It was. One of Foos’s straw men. The actual Warren Brandeis must have had left-leaning lawyer parents, which hadn’t mattered much when he dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty-two. Foos had loaded a couple of bank accounts with twelve grand and given him three credit cards and a driver’s license, all of which were on the way to Lutsenko’s office along with a checkbook so I could pay the good doctor off. My picture was on the license. An SUV was waiting for Brandeis at Avis on East Eleventh Street. We were burning one of our better identities on Andras.

Foos arrived and exchanged small talk with Lutsenko, whom he likes well enough to use as his own internist, while I wrote out a thousand-dollar check on Brandeis’s account. Foos agreed to wait while I picked up the car. I trotted through the cold streets, checking my rear periodically, but saw nothing. To be sure, I took a subway to Grand Central, the shuttle across town, the Seventh Avenue IRT back downtown and a cab to East Eleventh Street. If Nosferatu was following, he’d need help not to have lost me. On the other hand, he could be waiting back at Lutsenko’s office.

I double-parked the Ford Explorer outside. The block was empty. Lutsenko brought Andras outside. His hands were wrapped in white gauze. He looked tired and unhappy. I got out and helped him into the car.

“You’re going to have to deal with Leitz,” I said to Foos.

He nodded. “Figured that.”

“He’s gonna be pissed. Tell him it’s for the kid’s own good. Putting him at the Regency was asking for trouble.”

“Figured that too. What do I say when he asks where he is now?”

“You don’t have any idea.”

“Has the benefit of being true. He might go to the police.”

“If he does, tell him the Post will be digging into Walter Coryell and Franklin Druce by morning.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Tell him I’ll be in touch.”

“That’ll make him feel much better.”

We got snarled in rush hour traffic. I kept an eye on the hundred cars behind me as they pushed and jostled for position on the way into the Holland Tunnel, where we’d all sit in place as the snake worked its way though its underground skin. If there was a tail, I had no way of spotting it, but I kept watch anyway. Andras leaned against his door, eyes closed. Traffic remained heavy along the turnpike extension until we reached the tolls at the junction of I-78. I took the interstate west thirty miles into New Jersey and switched for I-287 south. Another twenty miles and I exited with the neon sign for the Doubletree Hotel in sight. The hotel was close to the highway, surrounded by a few office parks and not much else. I bought a suite for the night, certainly less luxurious than the Regency, using my own name. We’d be gone before daybreak.