Fidelity (17 page)

37

B
Y THE
end of February, over three months after Vadim's abduction, Kay and Andrew had crossed over that nebulous twenty-first-century divide between casually seeing each other and being in a relationship. Theirs was a discreet, almost old-fashioned sort of courtship. They ate at quiet restaurants with pleasant service, far away from the bustling crowds of Manhattan tourists. They shared quiet confidences in candlelit bars. They went to the movies or sometimes to galleries. Once, on a whim, they stopped in to see a musical but they left during the intermission, laughing and looking for a place to drink. She had yet to introduce him to her aunt and uncle, but the morning after having drinks with Alice she received a text reading, in all capital letters and with too many exclamation points:
MARRY HIM!!!!!!!
And if Kay wasn't quite ready to start shopping for rings, she had to admit that Andrew had become one of the few bright spots in that long, dreary winter.

It was a Tuesday much like other Tuesdays that winter, which was to say that when Kay left the office, night had long since fallen, leaving Manhattan in the grip of a dank, misty evening, the streets slick with black ice and the snow heavily leavened with grit. Her mind on Bureau matters, she neglected her due diligence, found herself ankle-deep in a puddle a block away
from Andrew's, used some epithets that she admitted were undeserving of her upbringing and occupation.

But she cheered up as soon as she saw him coming out of the foyer at something near to a jog, smiling and solicitous as ever. “Rough day?” he asked after they'd exchanged a kiss somewhere between comforting and passionate.

“The usual.”

“That bad? Somehow I had an inkling. Come on, Joo-won says he'll hold a table for us if we hurry.”

Joo-won ran Joo-won's, appropriately enough, a little hole-in-the-wall near Andrew's apartment that, to Kay's estimation, served just about the best Korean barbecue in the city. It wasn't until he'd suggested it that she remembered she hadn't eaten since breakfast, and then only a protein bar, and that her stomach was doing that thing stomachs do when they haven't been filled in a reasonable period of time. Andrew took her arm during the short walk over, and Kay found herself ignoring her wet shoes altogether.

Over a few glasses of
soju
and a platter of well-cooked meat, Kay felt the strain of the day slough off her. Andrew was good company as ever, charming and attentive. He had a rare talent for conversation, which made you feel comfortable opening up to him, no doubt part of what had made him such a skilled case officer. Kay found herself speaking of Christopher, or more accurately, of his absence—three months since she had sprung him from lockup on that horrible Thanksgiving evening—­despite two phone calls this week alone and a flurry of increasingly aggressive texts.

“Are you worried about him?”

“Always,” Kay admitted, smiling. “Though not any more than ever. This is true to pattern. He's ashamed about what happened over Thanksgiving and afterward. He feels humiliated, and he
feels like he's a burden. It'll probably be another three months before he forgets about it enough to let me see him.”

“So you help him and he bites your hand?”

“People are like that sometimes,” she admitted. “It's paradoxical, but people don't operate logically. He's punishing me for doing him a favor.”

Andrew shrugged. “If I were you, I'd enjoy the hiatus while it lasts.”

Kay laughed awkwardly. “There's more to him than I've made out. I'm not sure that I'm giving you the right impression of him. He's not all bad.”

“I haven't met him, so I can't say for certain, but I think probably you're giving me exactly the right impression of him—you just wish that that wasn't the case.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“He sounds like a parasite,” Andrew said. “I'm sorry, but that's the person you've described to me.”

“He's family,” Kay said, flatly and with some force, as if that were enough to end the conversation.

Andrew disagreed. “The one does not exclude the other. People take advantage of their family all the time, Kay. There are men who make entire lives out of it. Let's be honest: all of this kindness you've done him, has he ever reciprocated any of it? If you needed him, would he be there for you?”

“He would,” Kay affirmed. “I know he would.”

“And why are you so certain?”

“I just . . . am,” Kay said confidently, although she wasn't sure why exactly. “After our parents died, we were all each other had.”

“What about your aunt and your uncle?”

“They were great,” Kay said quickly. “They were . . . I'll never be able to repay what they did for me. Never. They weren't
blood. Christopher and I—we were all that was left. For the first year after we moved in with Uncle Luis, he slept in the same bed as me. Every night I used to have the most terrible nightmares, wake up shivering and choking, and he'd sit awake with me until I could fall back to sleep. We were all we had. You wouldn't understand,” she said finally, with more force than she intended.

“Because I didn't have anyone left?”

Kay turned her green eyes down to her plate. “I didn't mean that,” she said after a moment.

But when she looked up again, Andrew was smiling. “Yes you did. And you're probably right: I don't know what it was like to have that sort of support. It's no insult to recognize that as being the case, and it's not anything so terrible to say so. Honestly, I'm not sure that you were any better off.”

“You don't really mean that,” Kay said after a moment. Andrew spoke very rarely about his youth in an orphanage, and even then only to gloss over it as being not nearly as bad as people seemed to imagine.

“I think I do. Though of course you never really know. We only live our own lives; it's a difficult thing to make a comparison. Things weren't always easy in the orphanage, I suppose. You were . . . There were times . . . Well, sometimes I felt very much alone. I
was
very much alone. There was no one else there but me. I admit now, though, looking back on it, sometimes I just feel like I traded some solitude up front for an easier time of it as an adult. At least there's no one holding me back.”

“That's all people are?” Kay asked trying to maintain her good humor. “Things that hold you back?”

“Of course not,” Andrew said, reaching across the table and setting his hands on hers. His eyes were deep and dark and soothing. “That wasn't what I meant. Our choices define us, whether it's the people we care for or the causes we espouse. But
at least I know I've chosen those people and causes for appropriate reasons, and not just as vestiges of past history.”

“ ‘Past history'?”

“This sense of loyalty that you have towards . . . It's admirable. It's certainly understandable. But it's also misguided. Who are you loyal to? A brother you've seen a handful of times in five years, usually to hit you up for money or for some other assistance? No, you're loyal to the boy you used to know, a boy who helped you fall asleep when you were scared and sad, who made your tragedy a little easier to bear. That boy sounds like he was probably all right—but the man he turned into . . .” Andrew shrugged. “People don't stay the same, Kay, and neither do you. We weave in and out of each other's lives; we hold different positions and different levels of importance. Holding on to old loyalties, past affections—you might as well walk around in the same clothes you wore in high school.”

“So what are you saying? That people only matter insofar as they can help you? That you should toss them aside once they're no longer useful?”

“Isn't that how your brother treats you? Picks up the phone when he needs some money or some . . . extra-legal assistance, otherwise you've got no idea what's happening with him? Say you walked out of here and got hit by a car: Would he come visit you in the hospital? How would he even know about it, since he won't answer your phone calls?”

“You don't know my fucking brother,” Kay said hotly.

The curse wafted into the air, mixing with the acrid smell of kimchi and the cooking fat from the burner. Kay swallowed hard. Andrew smiled. “You're right,” he said. “I don't know Christopher, and it's really not my place to criticize. I'm sorry.”

“No, I'm sorry,” Kay answered after a long moment. “That was nasty. It's been a long day, I shouldn't have snapped at you.”

“Forget it,” Andrew responded, touching her knee softly under the table. “Chalk it up to the weather. Let me get the check and we can head home.”

Which in that moment seemed an appealing enough prospect to earn Kay's silence.

38

K
AY GOT
a call from Torres one miserable, slushy morning a few days after her date with Andrew, but she was too busy to answer, and when she tried him over her lunch hour he didn't pick up; and so they didn't manage to speak until Kay was back home from work, in her little one-bedroom apartment, making herself pasta with tomato sauce from a jar. A step up from packaged ramen, but that was as much as you could say for it. Kay could do a lot of things, but cooking would never be her strong suit.

“You too busy locking up spies to answer your phone?” he began with feigned gruffness.

“Today Jeffries and the head of the SVR had a boxing match determining the future of the free world,” she said. “So that took up a lot of our time.”

“Whole different world, counterintelligence,” Torres admitted. “Who won?”

“Jeffries on points,” Kay said, boiling water.

“Odds-on favorite.”

“I take it this isn't a friendly call.”

“Much as I love hearing that drawl of yours, no, it isn't. I heard back from my guy in Colombia about that thing you wanted to hear about.”

It was not lost on Kay that he had not called her “Ivy.” She steeled herself for unpleasantness. “And?”

“My guy, he says that your parents' file wasn't where it should have been. Wasn't with the rest of the murders. That was why it took him so long to find. Their state security had flagged it as suspicious; he had to spend a while snooping around for it.”

“Suspicious? Suspicious, like, how?”

“The way it was done, it didn't . . . didn't seem accidental. Some of the specifics . . .” He fell silent.

“I can take it, Torres. You don't need to worry about sparing my feelings.”

“Your father got two in the head. Some thug hoping to pull a watch off a couple of gringos—they might get scared or angry, pop off in the heat of the moment. Maybe, if they were really crazy or they were hopped up on something, they might have even managed to catch your mother with some flak. But two in the head? That's something that someone does to make sure of something.”

Kay's face was steady as the pulse of a corpse. “Indeed it is,” she said.

“You got any idea why someone would have wanted to have your father assassinated, Kay?”

The line went silent while Kay considered this question, mentally examining a number of different angles, dismissing them one after the next. Her parents had been doctors, do-gooders; there was no percentage that she could see in anyone deciding to kill them. It didn't make any sense—at least, not as far as Kay could figure it.

“How about the zero file?” she asked after a while, rather than answer Torres's question.

“I know a guy who might be able to get us a copy, but he's on temporary duty assignment, won't be available for a while yet. I'll get back in touch with him when he's in a position to help us.”

“Thanks,” Kay said blandly. “Thanks for everything. I appreciate it, Marc, I do. Really.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said; then, stopping her before she hung up, he added, “My guy down in Colombia, he's always been pretty solid. I mean, anyone can make a mistake, but he's always been pretty solid in my experience.”

“Yes,” Kay said flatly.

“If you need anything else,” Torres said, being deliberately oblique about what the “else” could be, “whatever it is, you get back in touch with me, OK? We'll figure out the way to play it.”

“You bet.”

“There's a bit too much of the loner in you for my liking. This isn't the Wild West, Kay. You're an FBI Agent; you have responsibilities. You took an oath. We're already stretching the bounds of protocol as it is here, stretching and more than stretching. You understand what I mean?”

“I'm sure that it's just a strange coincidence,” Kay said after a moment. “But if we find anything, I'll make sure to go through proper channels.”

“That's what we're here for,” Torres said, sounding relieved.

After she hung up the phone, Kay spent a moment thinking about the last things she had told Torres. The first had been an absolute lie. And as to the second . . .

39

F
OR TWO-BIT
thugs, for a-dime-a-dozen hoods, for men who had velvet pictures of Scarface hanging above their mantelpieces, Sergei and Vlad were almost trustworthy. Not trustworthy in the sense of being decent or honest, but trustworthy in the sense that if they told you they would be at a certain place at a certain time, they would most likely show up with some pretension of punctuality. It did not sound like much when you put it that way, but the truth was Tom had long since learned not to expect basic competence from anyone.

And they
were
competent: they could handle a situation without having their hand held every moment of every day. Given clear directions—frequent the bar where Christopher Malloy works, become friends, buy cocaine from him, suggest that you have avenues by which he might easily acquire larger amounts—they could be expected, generally speaking, to follow through. And they were big men, with thick shoulders and fat guts, and neither was unused to doing violence. This was not the first time that he had made use of them, of their connections to the New York–based Russian mob, large men in tracksuits eating caviar out at Brighton Beach, bringing in tens of millions a year in automatic weapons and sad-eyed foreign girls.

Although sometimes, Tom had to admit, this bare facade of competence was not enough to make up for how unpleasant he found their actual company to be.

“Is easy, bro,” Sergei said. He had already polished off two beers and a shot of vodka in the twenty minutes that they had been sitting at the bar, but he waved around for another. “Chris is your typical Brooklyn pretty boy, always looking for an easy out. We slip him the coke on retainer, we get a few of our boys to snatch it up from him . . .” Sergei rubbed his hands together. “Is easy.”

“Is not problem,” Vlad added.

“And Christopher . . . trusts you?” Tom asked, thinking as he said it that this Malloy would need to be very different from his sister to be capable of such mammoth foolishness.

“We are friends,” Sergei said, faintly offended. “He is fun guy, Christopher; we have good times together.”

“Good guy to get a drink with,” Vlad confirmed.

“Women love him,” Sergei added.

The irony seemed to be lost entirely on the two of them, but then, Tom suspected they did not know what irony was. Certainly it was not his place to explain it to them. “And these . . . other friends of yours. The ones who will make the snatch. They can be relied upon?”

The waitress came by with two more shots, swiftly made empty. “To stick up a hipster?” Sergei asked. “Yes, I think they can handle that.”

“To keep their mouths shut afterward.”

“Who will they tell?” Sergei asked. “What would they tell? They will sell the coke off and never think twice about the matter.”

“And what will Christopher do?”

“Piss his pants with fear,” Vlad said nastily.

“He will not be sprinting off to the cops, I can promise you that much. He will disappear on a fear bender for a few days, drink until he cannot stand, and then he will come to us desperate to explain his situation, begging us to take it easy on him. And then we will introduce him to you, Tom,” Sergei said knowingly. “And you will do with him whatever it is that you do.”

Most of the time Tom was a perfectly ordinary sort of fellow, running his little shop out near Brighton Beach. Occasionally, he was the head of a small cell of thugs responsible for taking care of various shady deals as directed by Pyotr or one of Pyotr's colleagues. Very occasionally Tom would be called upon to take care of some task that required one further level of removal from the “official” SVR, one more layer of covering. For these tasks he turned to what he thought of as his “collection”: members of that network of lowlifes, fixers, thugs and minor criminals whom he had cultivated over the course of his time in America. Sergei and Vlad were minor members of the feared Russian Mafia, as violent and brutal a branch of organized crime as existed in America, the sort of men who made the more famous Cosa Nostra seem like a class of kindergartners. Not full-fledged initiates; more like ­hangers-on, as expendable to the bosses as they were to Tom, looking to do something that might gain them some attention. Most likely they would both be dead before thirty—earlier if they met someone tougher or more brutal than they were; otherwise their drug use, heavy drinking and general foolishness would probably put them in a coffin. They were big men, ­dangerous-seeming, well practiced in violence. Compared to some of the SVR hitters he had known, they were fierce as little kittens, though both of them imagined they were some combination of Al Capone and Biggie Smalls.

“And what is it that you will do, exactly, Tom?” Vlad asked. Three drinks had done little to counteract the no doubt signif
icant quantity of cocaine that Vlad had snorted before coming to the meeting, and beneath the table his foot, clad in hideous off-white tennis shoes, tapped arrhythmically.

Sergei shot him a worried look, then turned fretful eyes back to Tom.

“Excuse me?” Tom asked quietly. It was one of his rules, one of the many little things he had picked up from watching how Pyotr handled himself: the nastier things start to turn, the softer and sweeter one ought to speak. “I am not sure I heard you.”

Somewhere in the mass of pink pulp that served Vlad as a brain, the dim realization that he had overstepped his bounds warred with his own implacable sense of arrogance, ending in some sort of stalemate. “I'm just wondering what part you will have in the operation,” he mumbled meaninglessly.

“Why, Vlad—do you have aspirations of moving up the ladder? Feel like taking on my job? Think that's something you can handle?”

“Nothing like that,” Sergei said. The brighter of the two, smart enough to recognize that Tom was a bad man to make angry, although you hardly needed to be a rocket scientist to put that together. “Vlad is just talking.”

“This is the problem with this country,” Tom said evenly. “Everyone talks. Talks all the time. Talks to make themselves feel strong and powerful, talks to make themselves feel important. Talks to impress pretty girls and strangers at bars. Talks and talks and talks.” Tom could feel himself getting angry, tamped down most of it but let enough leak out to bring Vlad and Sergei to a state of tension. “I have no use for a talker. I need thinkers and I need doers. There is no question that neither of you are the former: all that is left, should you wish to continue in my employment, is to show that you are the latter. And you show that by doing exactly what I tell you, exactly as I tell you to do it,
without ever asking any questions as to the why. And if you ever,
ever
speak to me disrespectfully again, Vlad, I am going to be forced to do something to remind you why I'm the one who gives orders in this operation and you're the one who follows them.”

Vlad opened his mouth to speak, to explain or excuse himself, but Sergei astutely and somewhat roughly elbowed him into silence.

“He is sorry, Tom,” Sergei added quickly. “You must forgive him: he does not know you like I do.”

It had been a long time since Tom had needed to get his hands dirty, years and years. There was some part of him that was happy to see his reputation hadn't entirely faded in that time, that he was still known as a man to fear. “Stick to the script and do not forget who wrote it,” Tom said, finishing off his can of beer and then crushing it in a fist the size of a cinder block. A bit too blunt for his tastes, but with men the likes of Sergei and Vlad one needed to eschew subtlety. “I want Christopher Malloy wrapped up in a neat little bundle, ready to be plucked up anytime I feel like doing so. Understood?”

“Is no problem, bro,” Vlad agreed quickly.

“Is no problem,” Sergei echoed.

“It had better not be,” Tom said, then left a C-note on the table and disappeared into the evening.