Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Mila, go to wherever you go when you’re not riding my ass. Go on a vacation. I’ll either call you when this is all done or, if you don’t hear from me, you’ll know I’m dead. You don’t understand our situation. What it’s like to have a loved one taken and be at risk.’

She gave me a sad look. ‘No one could understand your unique pain.’ And something in the air shifted between us. ‘You asked me why there is a price on my head.’

‘I think it’s your endless charm and witty banter,’ I said.

She nodded toward the computer. ‘I wrote it down for you. You read it. Then you decide whether or not to trust me with your child’s life.’

63 Sam: This is what happened, this is how I came to be. – Mila Harp , Moldova

(My little town was named for a harp. Do you like that? But I do not play)

Three years ago. The children are done with their work and have escaped into the bright sunny afternoon; I mop up paint smears and bits of torn paper. The art supplies are a gift – from one of the families that runs Trans-Dniester, the sliver of Moldova that has declared itself free of the country. Aunt and Uncle say quietly at the Sunday lunch table that the whole region is ruled by crooks and outlaws. Not just crooked politicians but actual criminals – smugglers and Mafiya and drug lords who pour poisons west into Austria and Hungary and north to Moscow, Kiev and St Petersburg.

But let me be blunt: what do I care where the paints and papers come from? They are an extra to help my classroom. The children benefit and I don’t care if a Mafiya bought crayons to ease his conscience. The towns of northern Moldova can barely afford to heat the school in dismal winter; I won’t turn up my nose at free school supplies.

You are making a better Moldova, darling girl, Aunt tells me, and I want to shrug. No, I’m earning a paycheck and not having to be like my sister Nelly, casting her lot out into the distant world. I am a homebody who likes quiet.

After I gather up the scraps of supplies that can be used again, I take a rag and I dust the small TV, the old DVD player, the worn and loved books on the shelf. All again from the largesse of the criminal kings of Trans-Dniester, Uncle would say. But the machinery does not do evil and the books take no sides.

I dust and think Nelly would do a better job. Nelly the sunny one, Nelly the smiler, Nelly the adventurer. Nelly had shown me the brochure six months ago – the employment agency, based out of Bucharest in neighboring Romania, happy women in drab uniforms making military covers on hotel beds, serving food to smiling diners, filing papers behind a spotless desk with a computer resting on it, its plastics unyellowed by age.

‘See, they need secretaries and waitresses and maids and nannies,’ Nelly tells me. ‘You could get a job with a computer that’s new.’

I glanced at the marketing brochure. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. These places all look better, sunnier, more hopeful. ‘I don’t want to move to Italy or Turkey or Israel. I don’t speak their languages.’

‘But your English is good. They’ll always pay extra for English.’ Nelly bites the eraser on her pencil. ‘At a hotel I might meet a traveling businessmen from the West. Maybe America. A nice guy with a good job. Americans like eastern European girls. The supermodels have done at least that for us.’

‘Americans don’t talk to maids,’ I say. I better spoil her dreams right away, yes? That’s what a good sister does. I hand her back the brochure. A hot beat of fear probes my chest at the thought of Nelly hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, working a job that gives her no time to come home.

‘I could send money back to you and Aunt and Uncle,’ Nelly said.

‘No.’

‘Well, I am not asking for permission.’

‘Why start now?’ I say and do a sister’s roll of the eyes.

‘Natalia went to Turkey and got a good job. There are no jobs here.’

‘School teaching? Remember?’

‘You better teach them well because they’ll have to leave Moldova to get a job,’ Nelly said.

And three weeks later, Nelly is gone. Teary hugs at the train station. She is taking a train to Chisinau, then onto Bucharest. Then a plane to Tel Aviv.

‘I’ll write everyday,’ Nelly says, hugging Aunt and Uncle at once and looking over their heavy shoulders at me.

‘No you won’t,’ I say. Nelly has always been the crier, not me. I am not about to start. But my heart shreds so much it turns into confetti.

‘I will!’ Nelly promises. ‘I’ll be bored. And I’ll have to write to send you money.’

‘Borrow the traveling businessman’s BlackBerry,’ I joke. ‘And send us an email.’ I have seen BlackBerries in movies. No one in Harp owns one.

And then Nelly hugs me, smelling a bit of milk and goodbye cake, and is gone.

*

When I am done dusting the classroom I stop for a moment. The boys are playing football in the scrappy yard. My favorite student is the goalie. I watch the boys and remember playing on the scrubby grass with Nelly when they were young. Nelly complained I kicked the ball too hard, as though Nelly’s legs were fashioned from porcelain. I did kick the ball hard. I was a good athlete, one of the best at our school.

Nelly’s letters arrive regularly but there is no money in them, just brief words that she is well, in jagged handwriting that looks unhappy.

Nelly feels guilty about not sending money, I decide. But Nelly won’t say so.

The classroom door behind me opens. I don’t know the man standing there. He is tall, head shaved bald, a thick lacing of tattoo crawling out of the collar of his shirt. His eyes are brown and hard. He is the sort of man who makes you hold your breath for a moment. Not in a good, fluttering way.

He smiles. I know he is not a parent, not an administrator from the district. His clothes are too good, the suit Italian, the sweater underneath it silk, the watch ostentatious, a slash of steel on his gorilla’s wrist.

He calls my name, like a question. I nod a yes.

‘I’m a friend of Nelly’s,’ he says. ‘You can call me Vadim.’

And my teacher’s brain, used to the carefully built lies of children, notes he didn’t say it was his name. It was what I could call him. What has Nelly gotten herself into, I think. What trouble?

A feeling of dread pierces my stomach. Vadim smiles. He steps inside the classroom. He shuts the door. The click is like a hammer hitting me in the silence.

‘I bring you a message from Nelly,’ he says.

Oh. All right, I think. Maybe he works with her in Israel. Maybe she actually met a traveling businessman, and here he is.

He holds up a DVD. He walks to the old machine and presses the power button, turns on the television. He ejects the DVD that’s in there, a bootlegged PBS video with a bad Moldovan voiceover, a science show about the universe. I have been teaching the children about stars and planets. He glances at the bootleg, as if curious as to what useful lessons I might be teaching today’s children.

He slides his disc into the machine and presses Play.

I stand, pierced, as my sister’s face appears on the screen. Nelly is crying. Shivering. I have not seen Nelly cry this way since our parents died seven years ago. Her hair is different, dyed blonder, and bigger, as though a harsh wind has breathed it into place. A too-bright lipstick smears her mouth. Her eyes look dulled.

Nelly says my name like it’s a foreign word. Then, on the tape, I hear a deep voice. Vadim’s. Saying, ‘tell her what you wanted to say’.

‘I want to come home,’ Nelly says. ‘Help me come home.’

She’s been a problem, Vadim says, in the detached tone of a mechanic discussing a faulty carburetor or a leaking gas line. She’s a bit uglier than we thought she would be. The customers don’t like her, she’s not getting picked enough, she’s just sitting on the couch.