“Getting his new toy,” Zula said.
“His snowboard?”
“Assault rifle.”
“I have lost connection to Wallace!” Ivanov said. “Wallace? WALLACE!”
“Peter? PETER!” Wallace shouted.
“Who is there?” Ivanov wanted to know. “I hear female voice sayink holy shit.” Then he switched to Russian.
Peter had got the safe open, revealing the assault rifle in question: the only thing he owned on which he had spent more time shopping than the snowboard. It had every kind of cool dingus hanging off it that money could buy: laser sight, folding bipod, and stuff of which Zula did not know the name.
Wallace said, “Peter. The gun. In other circumstances, maybe. These guys here, down on the street? You might have a chance. Local guys. Nobodies. But.” He waved the phone around. “He’s brought Sokolov with him.” As if this were totally conclusive.
“Who the fuck is Sokolov?” Peter wanted to know.
“A bad person to get into a gunfight with. Close the safe. Take it easy.”
Peter hesitated. On the speakerphone, Ivanov had escalated to shouting in Russian.
“I’m dead,” Wallace said. “I’m a dead man, Peter. You and Zula might live through this. If you close that safe.”
Peter seemingly couldn’t move.
Zula walked over to him. Her intention, in doing so, was to close the safe before anything crazy happened. But when she got there, she found herself taking a good long look at the assault rifle.
She knew how to use it better than Peter did.
On the speakerphone, the one called Sokolov began to speak in Russian. In contrast to Ivanov, he had all the emotional range of an air traffic controller.
“Zula?” Wallace asked, in a quiet voice.
Down in the bay, the voice of Sokolov was coming out of someone’s phone. Feet began to pound up the steps.
“Clips,” Peter said. “I don’t have any clips loaded. Just loose cartridges. Remember?”
“Well then,” Zula said, and slammed the door.
They turned to see a great big potato of a shaven-headed man reaching the top of the steps. He swiveled his head to take a census of the people in the room: Peter and Zula, then Wallace. Then his head snapped back to Peter and Zula as he took in the detail of the gun safe. The look on his face might have been comical in some other circumstances. Zula displayed the palms of her hands and, after a moment, so did Peter. They moved away from the gun safe. The big man hustled over and checked its door and verified that it was locked. He muttered something and they heard it echo, an instant later, on Wallace’s speakerphone.
Wallace unmuted it. “I am sorry, Mr. Ivanov,” he said. “We had a little argument.”
“Makink me nervous.”
“Nothing to be nervous about, sir.”
“This can’t just be about the credit card numbers,” Peter said. “No one would charter a private jet just because you lied to them in an email about when the credit card numbers would be available.”
“You’re right,” Wallace said. “It’s not just about the credit card numbers.”
“What’s it about then?”
“Larger issues raised by last night’s events.”
“Such as?”
“The integrity and security of all the other files that were on my laptop.”
“What kind of files were those?”
“It’s unbelievably fucking stupid for you to ask,” Wallace pointed out.
“Explanation is comink,” said Ivanov. “We are here.”
Zula stepped closer to one of the windows in the front of the building and saw a black town car pulling up.
Two men who had been loitering outside approached the car and opened its back doors.
From the passenger side emerged a stout man in a dinner jacket. From behind the driver emerged a lithe man in pajamas, a leather jacket thrown over the pajama top. Both had phones pressed to their heads, which they now, in perfect synchrony, folded shut and pocketed.
One of the two loiterers escorted the new arrivals to Peter’s front door. This opened into a corridor leading back to the groundfloor bay where the cars were parked.
The other loiterer was clad only in jeans and a T-shirt, which made him underdressed for the weather. He went over to a beat-up old van parked in front of the building. He opened the rear cargo doors, leaned in, and then heaved a long object onto his shoulder. He backed away and kicked the van’s doors shut. The object on his shoulder was a box about four feet in length and maybe a foot square, bearing the logo of the big home improvement store down the street, and labeled CONTRACTOR’S PLASTIC 6 MIL POLYETHYLENE SHEETING. He carried it into the bay and pulled the front door closed behind him.
THE MAN IN the pajamas came up the stairs first and spent a few moments strolling around the room looking at everything and everyone. “Vwallace,” he said to Wallace.
“Sokolov,” Wallace said in return.
From the way that Wallace had spoken of him, Zula had half expected Sokolov to be eight feet tall and carrying a chainsaw. She was pretty certain, though, that he was not carrying any weapons at all. He was wiry, looking perhaps like a shooting guard for the Red Army basketball team. His thinness made it easy to underestimate his age, which was probably in the middle forties. He had sandy hair with traces of gray. It looked as if it had been buzz cut about six months ago and little tended since then. His chin was stubbled, but he didn’t naturally grow whiskers on his cheeks. He had a big nose and a big Adam’s apple and large eyes whose color was difficult to pin down, as it depended on what he was looking at. When he looked at Zula, they were blue and showed no trace of personal connection, as if viewing her through a one-way mirror. Same with Peter. He went into the bathroom and looked behind the door. He checked the closets. He looked behind sofas and under beds. He found the door that led into the adjoining unit where Peter had been hanging sheetrock. He disappeared into it for a few moments, then emerged and said a word in Russian.
The word must have meant “all clear” because the man in the dinner jacket now came up the steps. Right behind him was the T-shirted man who had fetched the roll of plastic from the back of the van. After looking around the place, paying special attention to the vacant unit, Ivanov said something to this man that caused him to turn around and go back downstairs.
Ivanov was blue-eyed but his hair was dark, made darker yet by some sort of pomade or oil that he had used to slick it back from his forehead, which was an impressive round dome. His complexion was pale but flushed by the chilly air outside. Over his dinner jacket he was wearing a black overcoat well tailored to his frame, which, to put it charitably, was stocky. But he moved well, and Zula got the idea that he could have given a good account of himself in a hockey brawl. Probably had done so, many times, when younger, and prided himself on it. He paid considerably more notice to Peter and Zula than Sokolov had done. Wallace he almost ignored, as if keeping the speakerphone off the floor had been the most useful thing that the Scotsman could possibly achieve today. He sized Peter up and shook his hand. Over Zula, he made a bit of a fuss, because he was that kind of guy. It didn’t matter why he was here, what sort of business he had come to transact. Women just had to be treated in an altogether different way from men; the presence of a single woman in the room changed everything. He kissed her hand. He apologized for the trouble. He exclaimed over her beauty. He insisted that she make herself comfortable. He inquired, several times, whether the temperature in the room was not too chilly for a “beautiful African” and whether he might send one of his minions out to fetch her some hot coffee. All of this with meaningful glances at Peter, whose manners came off quite poorly by comparison.
The man in the T-shirt came up the stairs with the box of contractor plastic on his shoulder. Behind him was
