CHAPTER 17 #2
"Bag it," I tell the broken-nose man. He bags the fragment, labels it, tucks it into the office safe with the burner phones and the cash and the documents nobody has ever asked to see.
I walk out into the cold. Forty-fourth Drive. Eight in the morning. The sky over Long Island City is the gray of a paper hospital towel. I light a cigarette I have been pretending not to carry. Two pulls. I crush it on the wall. Three would be a habit. Two is medicine.
Kostya pulls up at nine in the black Mercedes. He stays behind the wheel and nods through the windshield. I nod back. The back seat is empty; Elena is staying at the suite this morning because Nikolai wants her where Beatriz can be the eyes I cannot be. Good. Krasivaya. I would like her here.
I would like her at the break-room table with her cardigan over the back of the other chair and the medallion at her sternum where I could see it. I would also like to be twenty-eight and not thirty-six. The world is not what I would like.
Eleven o'clock comes. Twelve.
At twelve-thirty-five the Murmansk man knocks on the office door upstairs while I am leaning on the desk with the burner pressed to my ear.
Two knocks slow, one knock fast, a pause.
The knock he uses when he has seen something I would also like to see.
I cut the call. I follow him out onto the mezzanine.
He points with his chin toward the office window that looks south down Forty-fourth Drive.
A gray Crown Victoria. Parked at the curb.
Engine off. Driver in the seat, no passenger, both hands on the wheel at ten and two like the man learned to drive in 1992 and never updated.
Gray suit at the collar. Brown hair short.
Two-day stubble. A steno notebook on the dashboard.
His gaze goes through our door, which is worse.
A man at a door is manageable; a man already inside the idea of one is not.
Half a block south. Plate is New York, government series. Fuck.
"He is at the curb," Kostya says behind me, and I did not hear him come in. "Gray suit."
"How long?"
"Twelve minutes. He arrived at twelve twenty-three. He has not touched the radio. He has not gotten out."
"He is taking pictures."
"He is. He took one at twelve thirty-four. Through the windshield. I saw the flash of the screen."
"Rourke."
"Stefan's notes say Rourke. Brown hair. Six-foot. Gray suit. Wedding ring. " Kostya has watched him from the brownstone curb three times this month. "I'll handle the trash."
"Hold. " I keep my eyes on the window. Suka.
Fourteen months of the Bureau on this redhead and the Bureau has followed his blood trail to my door at twelve-thirty-five on a Tuesday in October.
The redhead is upstairs asleep. The bullet is in the office safe.
The bay floor is clean. The vecuronium is sealed in the Pelican.
Every fucking thing I would not like a federal agent to look at is exactly where it should be.
I take six breaths through my nose. I turn the ring on my thumb three times.
Yuri. That is all. One beat. The hospital would not take a Volkov.
I have spent twenty years building a bay that takes everyone.
There is a man asleep on my couch who is alive because of that.
There is a federal agent at my curb who would like to put me in a small room because of the same thing.
Both are true. I am, today, the man who can hold both.
A federal agent who wants only a photograph parks where no one can see him. Rourke parks where I have to see him. That is the move. His target is the route. He wants us changing it on camera, proving it exists.
No warrant, then. If he had one, the door would already be opening with men behind it and blue windbreakers in the bay.
No warrant means an AUSA told him no or told him not yet.
No warrant means he needs chain, witness, movement.
The redhead upstairs. The bullet in the safe.
The drug count in Stefan’s ledger. Elena walking out of this building if he can make her name line up with the photograph.
He looks bored behind the wheel. That is his discipline. I respect it, which makes me dislike him more.
"Pakhan," I say to the burner I have not yet put down. "Federal at the kerb. Gray suit. Same one Stefan flagged Tuesday. He sees nothing. I see him. We watch."
Nikolai is silent for two beats breaths.
"Watch," he says. "Do not approach. Stefan?"
"Stefan I will call next."
"Call him."
"Brother."
"Watch, Alexei. Not today."
I cut the call.
"Eyes on him from the office window. Not the door.
Not the alley. If he gets out, you log every step.
If he leaves, you log the time. If he eats anything from his glove box, you log what.
" Kostya nods. He sits at the desk, takes off his leather driver's gloves and lays them palm-down on the blotter, fingers aligned, and watches Rourke through the office window with the bored, alert face of a man who has watched men through windows since he was twenty-two.
I go down to the break room because I am not the man who sits in an office.
The break room is the size of a confessional and the window is painted black on the outside the way every break-room window in a Volkov garage has been painted black since 1996.
Kostya has left me a paper bag on the table.
Cold pirozhki. Beef and onion. From the place on Brighton Beach Avenue under the awning.
I eat one standing up because I have not eaten since yesterday.
The dough is sweet, the meat dark. The second one I eat in the chair facing the door.
I do not flip the chair around. I am a doctor in a break room, eating lunch, on a Tuesday afternoon, in a garage I own, with a federal agent at the curb and a man with a fresh dressing on his shoulder asleep upstairs and a fragment of a Glock-fired hollowpoint in a safe and a woman whose name I will not say aloud awake at the suite under the hospital with the espresso machine she has not learned to clean — krasivaya.
The third pirozhok I do not eat. I fold the bag down and lay it on the table because I have, today, suddenly, no appetite.
I think of Yuri once. Just once. I owe him that and no more in this room.