“Right now all’s I got is the cross.”
“That’s a sucky deal, man.”
“It’s the only deal I got if you want that cross in Kirill’s house by Saturday night.”
“Bring the doctor, then.”
I glanced at Dre, who stared at me with wide eyes and a childlike giddiness that I assumed was pharmaceutically generated.
“Who says I even know where he is?”
Yefim sighed. “You too smart not to know we know more than we say we know.”
It took me a second to catch up to that sentence. “We?”
“Me,” he said. “Pavel. We. You part of something, my friend, something you not supposed to understand yet.”
“Really?”
“True. I’m playing her game, you play mine. Bring doctor.”
“Why?”
“I want to deliver message to him in person.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “Not so sure I like that.”
“Don’t worry, guy, I’m not going to hurt him. I need him. I just want to tell him personally how much I would like to see him back on the job. You bring him.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Ho-kay,” Yefim said. “I see you soon.” He hung up.
Dre returned the cross to its hiding place beneath his pullover but not before I got a look at it. If I’d passed it in an antique shop, I would have guessed the price at fifty dollars, no more. It was black onyx, fashioned in the Russian Orthodox style, with Latin inscriptions carved into the top and bottom of the face. In the center was etched another cross along with a spear and a sponge above a small rise that I presumed represented Golgotha.
“Doesn’t seem worth a bunch of dead people through the ages, does it?” Dre said before slipping it under his collar.
“Most of the things that people kill for don’t.”
“To the assholes doing the killing they do.”
I held out my hand. “Why don’t you give it to me?”
He gave me a smile that was all teeth. “Fuck you.”
“No, really.”
“No, really.” He bugged his eyes at me.
“Seriously,” I said. “I’ll take it and I’ll do the swap. No need for you to risk your ass out there with these kinds of people. It’s not your thing, Dre.”
His smile widened. “You might have everyone else buying your good-guy bullshit, but you’re no different than anyone else. You get a chance to hold this in your hand? This artifact worth, I dunno, what van Goghs are worth? You’ll
“So, why don’t you?”
“What?”
“Steal it and fence it?”
“Because I don’t know any fences, man. I’m a pill-popping degenerate gambler, I’m not fucking Val Kilmer in
“Uh, okay.”
“Your aw-shucks shtick doesn’t fool me.”
“Apparently not,” I said. “Darn. Let me ask you-why does Yefim seem to know everything about us right now but yet he somehow can’t find us?”
“What does he know about us?”
“He knows we’re together. He even made a reference to this being Amanda’s game, and all of us caught playing it.”
“And you doubt that?”
An hour later, we set out for the Comcast Center at Great Woods in Mansfield. As we walked out to Dre’s Saab, he removed the key from his key chain and handed it to me.
“It’s your car,” I said.
“Given my substance abuse issues, do you really want me behind the wheel?”
I drove the Saab. Dre rode shotgun and stared dreamily out the window.
“You’re not on just booze,” I said.
He turned his head. “I took a couple Xanax. You know…” He looked back out the window.
“A couple? Or three?”
“Three, actually, yeah. And a Paxil.”
“So pills and liquor, that’s your prescription for dealing with the Russian mob.”
“It’s brought me this far,” he said and dangled the photo fob of Claire in front of his blurry eyes.
“Why the hell do you have a picture of the kid?” I said.
He looked over at me. “Because I love her, man.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “Or something like love.”
Half a minute later, he was snoring.
It’s rare you deal with any KIND of illegal swap where the party with the power doesn’t change the meeting place at the last minute. It tends to root out the threat of law enforcement surveillance, because it’s hard to set up audio bugs on the fly, and teams of black-clad federal agents weighted down with boom mikes, recorder bags, and infrared telephoto lenses are easier to spot when they’re scrambling around in the background.
So, I assumed Yefim would call to change the meet at the last minute, but I still wanted to get a lay of the land in case he didn’t. I’d been to the Comcast Center at least two dozen times in my life. It was an outdoor amphitheater cut into the woods of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’d seen Bowie open for Nine Inch Nails there. I’d seen Springsteen and Radiohead. A year back, I saw the National open for Green Day and thought I’d died and gone to alt-rock heaven. Which is to say, I knew the layout pretty well. The amphitheater was a bowl with a long, high slope running down to it, and lower, wider slopes curving around in gradual swirls, so that if you continued to walk in a circle one way, you would eventually run out of road at the amphitheater itself. And if you walked in a circle the other way, you would eventually reach the parking lot. They set up the T-shirt kiosks on these slopes alongside the beer booths and the booths for cotton candy, baked pretzels, and foot-long hot dogs.
Dre and I walked around for a bit as a hesitant snow fell in the gathering dusk. Flakes appeared in the darkening air like fireflies, then melted on contact with whatever they touched-a wooden booth, the ground, my nose. At one of the wooden booths near a stand of turnstiles, I looked right and left and realized Dre was no longer with me. I turned back and walked up one slope and then down another, following my faint footsteps on the dampening pavement. I saw where his broke off and I used the last one I could make out as an arrow. I was walking past the VIP box seats toward the stage when my phone rang.
“Hello.”
It was Amanda. “Where are you guys?”
“One could ask you the same thing.”
