Moonlight Mile

***

At the southwestern tip of the trailer park, someone had arranged a few benches and potted plants to create a sitting area. I walked over to it and took a bench. It wasn’t the rear patio at The Breakers or anything, but it wasn’t bad. That’s where Amanda found me. She handed me the car keys and a small plastic bag filled with ice. “Pavel put your DVD players in the back.”

“That’s one considerate Mordovian hit man.” I placed the ice over the center of my palm.

Amanda sat on the bench to my right and looked out at the river.

I reached across and placed the Suburban keys on the bench beside her. “I’m not driving back to the Berkshires.”

“No? What about your Blu-Rays?”

“Keep ’em,” I said. “Have a high-def fest.”

She nodded. “Thanks. How’re you going to get home?”

“If memory serves,” I said, “there’s a bus station on Spring Street, the other side of Route 1. I’ll take it to Forest Hills, catch the T to Logan, meet my family.”

“That’s a sound plan.”

“You?”

“Me?” She shrugged. She looked out at the river again for a bit.

After the silence had gone on too long, I asked, “Where’s Claire?”

She cocked her head back toward the Suburban. “Sophie’s got her.”

“Helene and Tadeo?”

“Last I saw Yefim, he was trying to get Tadeo to fork over extra cash for a pair of Mavi jeans. Tadeo’s still shaking, he’s all, ‘Just give me the fucking Levi’s, man,’ but Yefim’s like, ‘Why you wear Levi’s, guy? I thought you were classy.’ ”

“Helene?”

“He gave her a sweet pair of Made Wells. Didn’t even charge her.”

“No, I meant-is she still puking?”

“She stopped about five minutes ago. Another ten minutes, she’ll be good for the car.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the trailer. It looked pale and innocuous against the brown water and the blue sky. Across the river stood an Irish restaurant. I could see patrons eating lunch, staring blankly out the windows, no idea what lay inside that trailer, awaiting the chain saw.

I said, “So, that was…”

She followed my gaze. Her eyes were wide with what I’d guess was residual shock. She might have thought she knew what it was going to be like in there, but she really hadn’t. A strange, fractured half- smile/half-frown tugged the corners of her mouth. “Yeah, right?”

“You ever see anyone die before?”

She nodded. “Timur and Zippo.”

“So you’re no stranger to violent death.”

“No expert, either, but I guess these young eyes have seen a few things.”

I zipped my coat up an inch and raised the collar as late December drifted off the river and snaked into the trailer park. “How’d those young eyes feel when they saw Dre blow up in front of them?”

She remained very still, bent forward just a bit, elbows resting on her knees. “It was the key chain, right?”

“It was the key chain, yeah.”

“The idea of him, dead or alive, carrying a picture of my daughter in his pocket? It just didn’t sit right with me.” She shrugged. “Oops.”

“And you knew the Acela’s schedule, I’m sure, when you threw the cross back over the tracks.”

She laughed. “Are you serious? Whatever you think happened in those woods, do you honestly believe people walk around all conscious of their motives all the time? Life’s a lot more sideways than that. I had an impulse. I threw the cross. His dumb ass chased it. He died.”

“But why did you throw the cross?”

“He was talking about quitting drinking so he could be the man I needed. It was gross. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t need a man, so I just threw the damn cross.”

“Not bad for a story,” I said, “but it doesn’t answer the original question-why were we there in the first place? We weren’t trading anything for Sophie. Sophie wasn’t even in those woods that night.”

She remained unnaturally still. Eventually, she said, “Dre had to go. One way or the other, he’d served his purpose. If he’d just walked away, he’d still be alive.”

“You mean if he’d just walked away to anything but the path of a fucking Acela.”

“Yeah. That.”

“What if I’d been with Dre?”

“But you weren’t. That wasn’t accidental. Since the day Timur and Zippo died, and I ended up with Claire and the cross in my possession?” She shook her head slowly. “Nothing’s been accidental.”

“But if everything hadn’t gone according to plan?”

She turned her palms up on her knees. “But it did . Kirill never would have allowed himself to be led to a place like this if everything didn’t look perfectly logical in a very logically fucked-up way. Everybody had to play their parts to a T. In my experience, the only way that ever happens is when people don’t know they’re playing parts.”

“Like me.”

“Come on.” She chuckled. “You suspected . How many times did you ask why I’d made myself so easy to find? We had to make it easy-the combined intellect of Kenny, Helene, and Tadeo couldn’t solve a TV Guide crossword. I had to make sure the bread crumbs were croutons.”

“So how soon after Timur died did Yefim find you?”

“It took him about six hours.”

“And?”

“And I asked him how he felt about having a boss so sloppy he’d send a moron like Timur to pick up something as priceless as the Belarus Cross. That got the wheels turning pretty quick.”

“So the plan was always to make Kirill desperate enough and embarrassed enough that a palace coup would look inevitable from the outside.”

“We refined it as time wore on, but that was the general objective. I got the baby and Sophie, Yefim got everything else.”

“And what about Sophie? What happens next for her?”

“Well, rehab for starters. And then maybe we’ll go visit her mom.”

“You mean Elaine?”

She nodded. “That’s her mom. It’s all about nurture, Patrick, not nature.”

“And what about your nurturer?”

“Beatrice?” She smiled. “Of course, I’m going to see Bea. Not tomorrow, but soon. She’s got to meet her grandniece. Don’t you worry about Bea. She never has to worry about anything for the rest of her life. I’ve already got a lawyer working on Uncle Lionel’s early release.” She sat back. “They’re going to be fine.”

I watched her for a bit, this almost-seventeen-year-old going on, what, eighty?

“You feel remorse about any of this?”

“Would that help you sleep? To know I feel remorse?” Amanda pulled one leg up on the bench and propped her chin on her knee and peered across the space between us. “For the record, I don’t have a hard heart. I just have a hard heart for ass-holes. You want crocodile tears, I don’t have them. For who-for Kenny and his rape jacket? Dre and his baby mill? For Kirill and his psycho-bitch wife? For Timur and-”

“What about yourself?” I said.

“Huh?”

“Yourself,” I repeated.