He looks at his watch.
– Good. He will be taking tea. There is a cafe below his office. The Moscow. He takes tea there. Do not go to his office. Go to the cafe. If you walk to him very quickly, talking to him. Saying you are sorry to be early. If you do this and move quickly, you can shoot him in the face. I have seen it. It will work.
– He’ll have bodyguards.
– Yes.
– They’ll kill me.
– They will kill you, or we will kill you. Someone will kill you, yes. Either way, Tetka Anna maybe will be able to sleep.
He peels the cellophane from a fresh pack of cigarettes.
– And we will not have to go to Oregon.
It’s a long drive. Every bump hurts. I think about a town on the Oregon coast. A place we used to go when I was a kid. We’d go up every summer. There was a campground near the beach. We’d bring the dog we had when I was a little kid. We’d go to the beach and watch the dog chase the waves. I stopped going when I was in high school. Summertime, there was always a baseball camp, always something more important. But my folks went without me. And they always talked about how they’d like to retire there one day.
We stop at the intersection of Brighton Beach Ave. and Brighton Road. Adam hands me a paper bag with a gun and a handful of bullets inside. I get out of the car. And then they drive away.
I heft the paper bag. That was smart of them, giving me the empty gun. If it had been loaded I would have shot them.
IT’S ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL day at the beach, just after twelve and the coastal haze is burning off. I walk the two blocks to the boardwalk. Right there, where the street dead-ends into the boardwalk, is a place called the Smoothie Cafe. My stomach rumbles, reminding me I’ve not eaten since the dogs I had at last night’s ball game. I walk past the cafe and up the steps to the boardwalk.
The Brighton Towers, a sixties-styled modern apartment building, rises above me on my right. American flags dangle from several of the balconies. Coney and the ballpark are off in that direction. The Cyclones have a day game. Miguel and Jay will be there. Batting practice is probably ending. I would have liked to see Miguel play again. He’s good at the game. I look the other way.
I can see the colored awnings of the four or five Russian cafes that cluster together about a quarter mile away. The beach is just starting to fill. People walk past me, across the boardwalk and down to the sand. They carry their blankets and coolers and umbrellas toward the water, their children running ahead of them. I go to one of the benches that face the sea, walking past an older Russian couple reclining on beach lounges, little squares of white cardboard tucked under the bridges of their sunglasses to protect their noses from the sun.
I sit on a bench.
I want to lie down on this bench. I want to pull my jacket and my shirt open and feel the sun on my skin. I want to find a bag of ice and lay here with it sitting on my face. I want to sweat and feel the poison leaching from my body. Instead, I open the paper bag.
There’s the gun and five bullets. The gun is a Norinco. It’s a mass-produced Chinese knockoff of a 1911 Browning. It’s a very bad gun. It is legendary for both its inaccuracy and its utter lack of reliability. Anything over five yards is long range for this gun. Walk right up to someone, stick it against their heart, and there’s still a good chance you’ll miss. That’s if you can get the thing to fire without jamming. I put my hands in the bag, eject the clip and snap the rounds into place.
I look to my left and catch the Russian woman with the square of cardboard on her nose looking at me. She quickly turns her face back toward the water. She’s wondering what I’m doing with my hands in the bag. She’s wondering if I’m fiddling with my lunch. The bag is in my lap; maybe she’s wondering if there’s a hole cut in the bottom of the bag so I can play with myself while I look at the girls on the beach. If only.
I push the clip back. It clicks, but when I turn the gun over it drops right out. I push it in again, hear the click, give it another tap, and hear another click. It stays in this time. I point the gun down and work the slide, chambering a round. It’s sticky, but the bullet seats itself without going off. So that’s something. I flick the safety up and down several times, making sure it doesn’t have a nasty habit of flicking itself off. It seems OK. I take a look at the woman. She snaps her head back to the ocean again. I stand up, turn my back to her, and, as I walk around the bench, I take the gun out of the bag, tuck it into my waistband, and pull my jacket over it. I drop the empty bag into a trash can.
I start walking toward the cafes.
I’m holding the jacket closed over the gun. I have to do this because I can barely button the jacket over my fat gut. If I walk up to David with the jacket buttoned over the gun, he and his bodyguards will see the huge bulge it makes. Why’d they have to give me such a big gun? Something smaller I could have carried in my pocket.
I walk past a big concrete shelter: open on all four sides, stone tables with chessboards set into the tops, wood benches. A few people play, moving their pieces around the boards. One man reads a book patiently as he waits for his opponent to finish studying the game and make his move. I keep walking.
I’m trying to come up with a plan. It’s hard because I’ve never really planned to kill someone. The people I’ve killed on my own, it always just happened. The ones I killed for David, Branko always made the plan, explaining to me carefully why he had set things just so, preparing me for when I would do this on my own. And here I am on my own, but this is not the way anyone planned it.
I’ve passed the Brighton Playground. The first cafe is just ahead. It’s the Volno Cafe, a blue awning with yellow letters, a handful of people at the tables. A gull screams overhead.
I can walk up to him with my right hand out, ready to shake. It will give me an excuse to get very close. But I’ll have to shoot with my left hand.
There are a few apartment buildings before the next cafe. I walk past a Parks Department “comfort station.” The smell of urinal cakes is blown toward me.
The Cafe Tatiana is next, a blue awning with silver letters. The same tables, same people, the same signs with Russian letters. What do they call that? Cyrillic?
I can pull the gun with my right hand as I walk to the table, start shooting from several feet away, hope the bullets don’t go awry, hope the terrible gun doesn’t jam.
Right next to the Cafe Tatiana is the Tatiana Restaurant. One imagines a dispute between former business partners. A dispute that ended in an act of spite as one of them bought the space next to the original and opened a place with a nearly identical name. A very Russian strategy, meant to drive the former partner not so much out of business as out of his mind. Beyond them is the Winter Garden. And pinched-in before that, the Moscow Cafe.
I slide the jacket from my right shoulder. With a bit of maneuvering I’m able to take it off while keeping the gun concealed, then slip the gun into my left hand, the jacket draped over it. It’s already a hot day, I can feel the sweat in my pits dribbling down my sides. It will make sense that I have the jacket off. If only the gun weren’t so big.
I’m walking past the Tatiana Restaurant, the one I fancy was opened by the spiteful partner. I see again those fluorescent green and orange napkins blossoming from the water glasses on the tables. They remind me of caution signs. Markers warning of some peril in the road ahead.
Such a big fucking gun. Don’t they know a small gun will kill just as well from two feet as a big gun will?
I see the red awning of the Moscow Cafe. It is the smallest of the cafes, only five or six tables on the boardwalk, a few more inside, and a short bar. Above it, where it abuts the Winter Garden, I can see the little corner turret window of David’s office. His castle keep. Laundry lines are strung between the buildings behind the Moscow. Someone has a window garden of nothing but sun-flowers.
I look at my left hand and forearm, draped under the jacket. The huge gun makes that arm look nearly a foot longer than my other one. Maybe I can walk up to David and tell him what has happened. Maybe he will be grateful. He will send people to protect my parents from Adam and Martin. I’m in front of the Moscow.
I see David.
He’s alone.
There are no bodyguards anywhere. He’s alone. I look around for some sign of Adam or Martin. I can’t see them.
There are no bodyguards. I can do it. I can kill David. And Adam and Martin? Without bodyguards to take
