David Duffy - Last to Fold

The FBI man took a long look around the manor hall room. “Nice shack,” he said as he pushed Mulholland toward the elevator.

I stayed in my spot, waiting for the inevitable, thinking I’d gladly change places with Mulholland if it got me out of here. She turned toward the library and froze when her eyes got around to me. Twenty-plus years hadn’t changed her at all.

It’s a little-known fact, because it’s such a little-known country, but Lithuania produces way more than its share of the world’s most beautiful women. Polina was Exhibit A, maybe even more beautiful because she was a Russian-Lithuanian mix. Tall, blond, and slender in a pale violet sleeveless dress, tucked at the waist, that set off her eyes, which were deep indigo. Red lips that didn’t need the gloss she’d applied. Hair, cut to look like it hadn’t been touched, fell well below her shoulders. They were square, her back straight, and her legs ended up near her neck. White skin, the hue and texture of a marble sculpture, with the features to match, like the sculptures of goddesses in the museum across Fifth Avenue. In another time or place she might have been named Hera, Aphrodite, or Athena and tormented the souls of ancient man. I’d experienced the torment firsthand. I knew for a fact she was twenty years younger than her husband.

Her stare intensified as she made sure she was seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing. I had to hand it to her as well—two life-changing shocks in as many minutes, and she barely blinked.

“Hello, Polya,” I said.

“What the fuck do you want here, you loathsome shit?” she said in Russian. One question answered—the years hadn’t softened her temper or tempered her language. The wounds of the Great Disintegration, as I’ve come to think of it, still festered.

“I’ll let Bernie explain,” I said in English. “You might believe him.” I switched to Russian. “I’ll tell you this much—had I known you were here, I wouldn’t have come. You can bet whatever happiness we had on that.”

She stayed with Russian. “There was no happiness, you prick, just a long string of lies. You’re lying now. Get out! Get away from me!”

The strain was beginning to show. I went back to English. “You both have a lot to do. I’ll be on my way.”

I crossed the hall and called the elevator. I could feel her eyes burning into my back. Bernie swung back and forth between the two of us, one of the few times I’d seen him unsure of how to proceed. I felt bad about leaving him to explain, but he got paid a lot of money to deal with difficult situations. I turned around in the elevator as the door closed. She was still glowering. If she’d had anything in her hands, she would have thrown it.

The uniformed driver didn’t say a word as he took me to the lobby.

Outside, it was easily over ninety. Waves of heat rose from the asphalt, shimmering in the sunlight. A mime worked the thin crowd on the museum’s steps, but he was hot, too, and his heart wasn’t in it. I had time before I needed to move my car, so I took off my jacket and walked into Central Park. The flowering trees were over for the season, but everything was in full leaf, which made it feel a little cooler. Mulholland paid a fortune to live across the street from one of New York’s great treasures, yet he closed himself off from its beauty. He’d never spent a winter in northern Siberia, where cold and dark stretch on so long you wonder if the sun will ever rise again.

I sat on the wall behind the museum and stretched my arms and legs while I watched a few masochistic joggers on Park Drive and contemplated fate and irony. Russians have a great appreciation for the latter, one reason we haven’t given up entirely on the former, with everything our history has served up. I would’ve paid a good part of Mulholland’s fee to know what the woman calling herself Felix Mulholland was telling Bernie, perhaps this very minute, and what Bernie was telling her—especially if he was respecting his client’s restriction. I’d have given more to know what she was doing here in New York, other than apparently being married to Mulholland, but I didn’t have to pay for that. I could get a pretty good idea by the time I returned to the office.

The more immediate question was whether I’d go forward with the assignment, if I was allowed to. Try as I might, I felt only a little sympathy for Mulholland. He was a loan shark and a bully. But how much of that assessment was now tinged by… by what—jealousy? That wasn’t right. Not after everything that happened, not after all these years. What then? Envy? No—I’d done my time. Polina wasn’t wholly responsible for the Disintegration—I played my part, too—but I wouldn’t want to go through that again. Maybe just good old suspicion. Was I being set up? If so, why? By whom? And to what end, after all these years? Polina and I had twisted pasts—jointly and each on his or her own. We weren’t the only people tied up in them. She could be an instrument of someone else as easily as she could be acting on her own. There were plenty of scenarios. I couldn’t see one that made sense, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

First step—more information. I took out my cell phone and punched in a number. A machine answered with no message, just the electronic beep. “You won’t like this, but I can explain. Wake up the Basilisk. Mulholland, yes, that Mulholland, Rory P., and his wife, Felicity, known as Felix, although that’s not her real name, and their daughter, Eva. Also a woman named Polina Barsukova. You’ll be pleased to hear the man himself is on his way to the Tombs as I speak. Back in an hour.”

A pretty girl smiled at me as she ran by. Her tanned torso was shiny-wet and her athletic bra soaked with sweat, but she breathed easily and kept up a quick pace. Women fall into two camps, pretty evenly divided, on the subject of men with shaved heads like mine. Yea or nay—no one is ambivalent. My hair, which was once bushy and black, started to fall out when I was in my late twenties, probably the result of malnourishment when I was young. That’s what I blame any malady on—a time when I was powerless to control my life, which I go to extremes to do now. Rather than watch the thatch thin and recede, I shaved my scalp. I have no idea what would grow back if I stopped. The rest of me is in good shape, although I work hard to keep it that way. I tell myself I can make up for a half-starved youth with an overexercised middle age. I’m not thin—“stocky” would be the newspaper description—but I don’t carry any extra weight on my six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame. Staying in shape is one of my vanities, and one payoff is having your work appreciated by a good-looking babe on a hot summer day. There was a time when one of them was the woman now calling herself Felix Mulholland.

When I got back to my car, four teenaged boys were eying it appreciatively from the sidewalk. I grinned at them as I unlocked the door, and they grinned back, elbowing each other and pointing, before heading off to wherever they were going. I got in, undid the roof latches, and pushed the button to retract the top. The thirty-year-old engine started on the turn of the key. I closed the door. The Potemkin was ready to cast off.

The car gets a lot of attention. A bright red Cadillac Eldorado, built in 1975, the last year before emission controls, it has a white ragtop, red leather interior, and the largest V8 Detroit ever squeezed into a production-line chassis. It puts out 365 horses at 4,400 RPM. Gas mileage approaches single digits, but I don’t drive that much, so I tell myself that my carbon footprint is still smaller than most SUV owners’.

I love the Eldo because of its size and swagger. America’s persona at the height of the Cold War, when Nixon and Brezhnev tried to one-up each other in the eyes of the rest of the world and demonstrate that their system was the Chosen One. The Eldo was one way America stated, with emphasis, We are winning. I was on the other side at the time, a sworn enemy of the Main Adversary and everything it stood for, but I had been captivated by the pure ostentation of the car ever since I first saw its picture in a magazine. Then, as now, I’m easily intrigued by things American.