Текст книги "The Devil's Garden"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

FIFTY

For Detective Desiree Powell it was a long shot. She hated long shots. If all her players were still in New York City, it would only leave five boroughs, hundreds of neighborhoods, tens of thousands of streets, and a hundred thousand buildings to search. Not to mention the world that existed underground – subways, basements, tunnels, catacombs. So she made a command decision. She had to put herself and her team somewhere.

This was why she made the big money, just enough to keep her in subway tokens and Jimmy Choo knock-offs.

She parked at the corner of Steinway Street and 21st Avenue, scanned the block, the long row of red-brick row houses, the small stores interspersed between, each with a colorful sign trumpeting their wares and services. There was a drama unfolding in each one of them, she thought, life-altering comedies and tragedies and farces that, to the outside world, would proceed unexamined, unknown. Until some unexpected horror descended, and they called the police.

Was the theater of Michael Roman’s tragedy unfolding in one of these buildings? Or had the curtain already fallen?

She shifted in her seat. Her ribs were getting worse. She had taken six Tylenol already. She would need the hard stuff before the day was over.

When she looked in her side-mirror she saw Fontova come running up, out of breath. Bracing herself against a fresh sword of agony, Powell opened the door, gently slid out of the car.

“You hear about the two cops on Roosevelt?” Fontova asked.

An “officer needs assistance” call had gone out over the radio twenty minutes ago. Powell had not heard the details. “What about them?”

Fontova bent over, catching his wind. Sufficiently recovered, he continued. “Uniformed officer was directing traffic around an accident on 98th Street. A car stalled, and when they were just about to push it, a guy jumped out a car behind the stalled car. He pulled a knife and cut two cops.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Both are on the way to the hospital. One of the officers got a shot off, but he missed.”

“They have the cutter?”

Fontova shook his head. “Took off. There’s a BOLO on the vehicle and the doer. White male, thirties, tall. Driving a black H2.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

“It gets better.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

Fontova reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, took out the composite sketch of the man who had broken into the Arsenault house.

“You’re shitting me,” Powell said.

“Not,” Fontova said. “And two witnesses put a woman and a little blond girl in the H2 with the cutter. And dig this.”

Powell just listened.

“The stalled car was a blue Ford Contour.”

Powell’s head began to spin. “Our BOLO? The one Michael Roman drove away from that motel?”

“Yep. Other wits said they saw another man and another little girl running from the scene.”

“Did we get a description on the man?”

“Not a good one.”

“Got to be Roman, right?”

“This is what I’m thinking.”

“What happened to the car?”

“The 114 has it. Still on the scene.”

Powell glanced down the road, towards Ditmars Boulevard, back at her partner.

“Where?”

He thumbed over his shoulder. “Two blocks up. They also found an H2 behind a building off Lefferts.”

“This is the center of the world today.”

Fontova nodded.

Powell closed her eyes for a moment, began to connect the dots. A few moments later she opened her cellphone, called it in. They would set up a perimeter.

THIS SECTION OF Queens, near Astoria Park, was made up of row houses and small retail establishments. There was a large contingent of Greek immigrants in the neighborhood, but over the years Italians, Poles, and eastern European immigrants had moved into the area, and their influence could be seen on the variety of awnings and flags and stores.

By the time Powell and Fontova pulled onto the block there were a half-dozen sector cars in position, a dozen or so uniformed officers fanning out. They began to knock on doors, talk to people on the street. Powell and Fontova split up. It was a warm, early evening, and the sidewalks were congested.

Powell did her best to keep up with Marco Fontova and the rest of the team, but she knew she would be lagging far behind. The first person she talked to was a man standing in front of a pager store. Black, sixties, salt-and-pepper goatee, silver hoops in both ears. He may have been a player once, right around when the Chi-Lites had hits.

“How you doing?” Powell asked.

The man looked her up and down, smiled lasciviously. Real dreamboat. Powell wanted to shoot him in the ribs, see how he liked it.

“It’s all good, baby,” the man said.

Powell no longer had her badge, but she did have her NYPD ID. She took it out and clipped it to her pocket. Suddenly, it was no good, baby. The man was now afflicted with blindness, deafness, muteness, and amnesia. Powell asked the questions anyway, moved on.

The sixth time was a charm. A pair of skateboard rats, skinny white kids, about fourteen, idling in front of a corner smoothie shop. One had on a T-shirt that read Alien Workshop. The other wore a lime-green Mizuno bicycle jersey. Powell held forth a photograph of Michael Roman.

“Have either of you seen this man?”

They both looked at the photo. “Hard to say,” said lime green.

“He might be with a girl,” Powell said. “A little blond girl.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Alien Workshop said. “He just ran by here a little while ago.” He squinted at the photo. “He’s a lot older than that, though.”

“Which way?”

He pointed toward the park.

“The little girl was with him?”

“Yeah.”

Powell got on her two-way, dispatched four officers to Astoria Park. She continued down the street, each step a fresh stiletto in her side. She walked past bagel shops, unisex salons, an open fruit-and-vegetable stand, past a trade fair, a laundromat. The massive police presence in the neighborhood had drawn attention, but it had not shut down commerce.

Between 32nd and 33rd Streets, about a block from the Astoria Ditmars subway stop, Powell stopped. Two reasons. The fact that she couldn’t walk anymore was the main. The other was that something was nagging her, besides her aching torso, something that walked the edge of her recall like a rearranged melody. She stood on the street, scanning the buildings, the windows, the people. She had walked a beat on these streets a long time ago, an area that stretched from the park all the way to Steinway, back in the day when community policing meant shoe leather and Pepsodent.

Across the street was a Greek travel agency, a Jackson Hewitt office, a nail salon.

What the hell was nagging her about this stretch of Ditmars?

She held her ID high, limped across the street. Thankfully, traffic slowed. Some people actually came to a full stop.

Powell walked into the nail salon. A girl behind the counter looked up from a magazine.

“Help you?”

The girl was about twenty, with blunt-cut, multicolored hair, a set of dazzlingly bright spangled nails. There were no customers in the shop.

“Have you got Internet access?” Powell asked.

Nothing. Powell tapped the ID on her chest. The girl looked from the ID to Powell’s eyes. Powell asked again, this time speaking a little more slowly, enunciating every word.

“Have . . . you . . . got . . . Internet access?”

Now the girl looked at her as if she were from another planet. Maybe the Alien Workshop. “Of course.” She turned the LCD monitor on the counter to face Powell, then slid the keyboard and mouse forward.

“Have you got a stool, something I can sit on?”

Another pause. Powell was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of drug-induced time delay in here, one caused by a long-term exposure to nail-salon chemicals. The girl caught on, slid off her stool, picked it up, and walked it around the counter.

“Thank you,” Powell said. She eased onto the stool, opened a web browser. She searched again for the New York article on Michael Roman. Her eyes blazed down the page. She found the paragraph she had been looking for, and finally located the itch. She got on her two-way, raising Fontova. A few minutes later he walked into the nail shop. By that time, Powell had navigated to an overhead map of the surrounding ten-block area.

Powell briefed her partner. Fontova looked at the map.

“Okay,” Powell began. “We have the initial crime scene here.” She put a virtual pushpin in the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office. “We have the Ford Contour last seen in Roman’s possession here, which is also where our cutter attacked two police officers. And lastly we find the H2 in which our alleged psycho made his temporary escape abandoned here.”

Powell leaned back, looked at the locations. “Now, I love this part of the city. Don’t get me wrong. But what the fuck is so special about Astoria, and especially this here little slice of heaven around Ditmars?”

She slipped a dollar into Fontova’s hand. He took it without comment.

“I don’t know.”

“I think I do.”

Powell maximized the other browser window, the one displaying the New York article. She pointed to the screen, at the paragraph that mentioned Michael Roman’s childhood, about how his parents were murdered in their place of business, a place called the Pikk Street Bakery, a place that Michael Roman and his wife had purchased a few years earlier.

A place located at 64 Ditmars Boulevard.

FIFTY-ONE

The old feelings rushed over him in a dizzying flourish. It wasn’t just a remembrance of his time spent here, a recollection of carefree childhood, a home movie unspooling in his mind, but rather a feeling that he was once again nine years old, still running down this hallway to help his father accept deliveries of flour and sugar, large boxes of bottled molasses, dried fruits and fresh-roasted nuts. The aroma of just-baked bread still lived in the air.

Since the Pikk Street Bakery had closed only a few retail tenants had tried to make a go of the space. Michael knew that, for a short while, a company offering orthotic and prosthetic services rented the first floor. After that, a natural foods store. Neither enterprise flourished.

The back hallway was just as Michael remembered it, its hardwood flooring worn in the center, a pair of Sixties-era light fixtures overhead. He proceeded down the hallway by feel, hugging the wall. A nail protruding from the plaster caught his sweatshirt, tearing the fabric, scratching his skin.

When he reached the doorway before the front room he stopped. He tried to calm himself, quiet his breathing. He slowly peered around the corner, into the room that once held the bakery’s office. As a child he had been forbidden to play in this room, only entering when his mother was doing the books, the mysterious paperwork that seemed to hold adults in its dark thrall once a month. He recalled once being punished for leaving a lemon ice to melt on the desk. Now the room was musty, abandoned. In the dim light he could make out shapes. A pair of dun-colored file cabinets, an old metal desk on its side, a pair of packing crates.

He continued a few feet down the hallway into the front room. When they purchased the building, Abby visited with the realtor, and told Michael that the previous tenants had removed most of their furniture, had even made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning. Michael looked across the room. The front windows were soaped, making the translucent light otherworldly. Dust motes hazed the room.

Michael eased his way up the steps, each tread echoing that horrible day, the dry wood protesting his presence, the sounds and smells vaulting him back in time. He could all but hear the noise of firecrackers going off in the street outside, some of them, he learned, the sounds of the gunfire that had shattered his family.

He reached the top of the stairs, looked down the hallway. The door to the bathroom had been removed. Scant light came in through the barred window. He turned to his parents’ bedroom. He recalled the day his father and Solomon painted the room, a hot summer day in July, the sound of a Mets game in the background, fading in and out on old transistor radio. Solomon had gotten drunk that Sunday afternoon, and rolled paint over half the window before Peeter had been able to stop him. The glazing was still flecked with blue.

Sweat slid down Michael’s back, his skin pimpled with gooseflesh. The air was close and damp and silent. He crossed the hallway to the space that was once his bedroom. He pushed open the door, the old hinge giving a squeal of complaint. He could not believe how small the room was, how it had, at one time, in the fictional world of his child’s mind, been his tundra, his castle, his western plains, his fathomless ocean. There was no bed, no dresser, no chair. Against one wall were a pair of cardboard boxes, coated with years of filth.

He closed his eyes, recalled the moment – seven o’clock exactly, the time the bakery closed. He had had nightmares about the scenario for years, had even felt a pang of terror at the times when he happened to glance at a clock at exactly seven. In his dreams he saw shadows on the walls, heard footsteps. It all coalesced at this moment. The horror in his closet, the two men who had killed his mother and father, the man who now had his wife and daughter.

Michael stopped, opened his eyes, and suddenly realized it was not a dream. The footsteps were real. He felt the slight buckle of the floorboards, the change in the air, and knew that someone was right behind him. Before he could take the gun from his pocket, a shadow filled the room.

Mischa, he heard his mother say. Ta tuleb.

Then there was fire inside his head, a supernova of orange and scarlet pain.

Then, nothing.

FIFTY-TWO

It took a while to realize where he was, when he was. Reality sifted back, laced with the thudding agony in his head.

When his eyes adjusted to the light, he took in the scene. He was in the front room of the bakery, sitting in a chair, next to Abby. In front of them was one of the small wooden café tables that used to be near the window of the bakery. Michael could see some of the names still carved into the surface.

On the table was a gun.

Emily sat on the other side of the room, the side on which the three counters of the bakery once were. The glass cases were long gone, but the two large ovens still stood against the back wall. Next to them were dismantled tables, chairs, bookshelves. There was no electricity, no overhead fixtures, but in the thin light slicing through the grimed front windows, Michael could see his daughter clearly. She was perched on a dusty pillow, one of three.

Michael turned to Abby. Her hands were taped behind her, around a copper water pipe bolted to the wall. Her eyes were wide, terrified. She had a gag stuffed in her mouth. Michael’s hands were handcuffed in front of him, but he was not otherwise restrained in any way.

A moment later Aleks emerged from the shadows. He stood behind Emily. “You’ve interrupted my plans,” he said.

Michael eyed the weapon on the table. He shifted himself in the chair, opened his mouth to speak, but found that the words would not come. If he’d ever needed a closing argument it was now.

“The police are already at my house,” Michael said. “You can’t possibly get away with this. They’ll figure it out. They’ll be here.”

“They are already here.” Aleks reached into his pocket, pulled something out, threw it on the floor in front of Michael and Abby. It was a gold detective badge. Powell’s shield. “Where is Marya?”

“I can’t tell you,” Michael said.

In an instant Aleks was across the room, the folds of his leather coat snapping in the still air. “Where is she?” He pulled Abby’s head back, put the knife to her throat.

“Wait!”

Aleks said nothing, did not take the blade from Abby’s throat. His eyes had morphed from a pale blue to almost black.

“She’s . . . she’s with a friend,” Michael said.

“Where?”

“It’s not far.”

“Where?”

“I’ll tell you. Just please . . .”

After a long moment, Aleks withdrew the knife. He reached into his pocket, took out a cellphone. He handed it to Michael. “I want you to call this friend. Put it on speakerphone. I want to hear my daughter’s voice.”

Michael took the phone in his shackled hands, dialed Solomon’s number. When it began to ring, Michael put it on speaker. In a moment, Solomon answered.

“It’s Mischa,” Michael said. “Everything’s fine, onu. It’s all over.”

Solomon said nothing.

“Can you put Charlotte on?”

Again, a hesitation. Then, Michael heard Solomon’s show, shambling footsteps. A few seconds later: “Daddy?”

At the sound of Charlotte’s voice, Michael saw Emily pick up her head. She still looked to be under some sort of spell, but the sound of her sister’s voice brought her to the moment.

“Yes, honey. It’s me. Mommy’s here, too.”

“Hi, Mommy.”

Abby began to cry.

“Are you coming to get me?” Charlotte asked.

“Soon. We’ll be there really soon. Can you put Onu Solomon back on the phone, please?”

Michael heard the transfer.

“Mischa,” Solomon said. “You are coming to collect her?”

Michael knew he had to give Solomon a heads up, but he didn’t know how to do it. Speaking in Estonian would not help.

“No,” Michael said. “I’m going to send someone.”

“Someone from your office?”

“No,” Michael said. He glanced at the gold badge on the floor. “A detective. A detective from Queens Homicide will be coming by to get her. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course,” Solomon said.

Aleks crossed the space, picked up the badge, put it in his pocket.

“His name is Detective Tarrasch,” Michael said.

Michael glanced at Aleks. He did not react to the name.

“I will be ready,” Solomon said.

I will be ready, Michael thought. Not I will be waiting. Solomon knew there was something wrong. Tarrasch was a chess term, a variation on the French Defense Solomon had taught Michael in the 1980s. If Michael knew Solomon, he knew that the old man was already preparing to send Charlotte to another location.

Before Michael could sign off, Aleks took the phone from his hands, closed it. He crossed the room, and began to put things into a shoulder bag.

Michael looked at Emily. With the index finger of her right hand, she touched the floor, and drew a straight line in the dust.

A FEW MILES AWAY, in a small house in Ozone Park, Charlotte Roman sat at the dining-room table, a fresh white sheet of typing paper in front of her, a rainbow of stubby crayons awaiting her muse. In the background, the television played Wheel of Fortune.

Charlotte surveyed the choices of colors. She picked up a black crayon and began to draw. At first she drew a long horizontal line across the bottom of the page, stretching from one edge to the other. She hesitated for a moment, then continued, drawing first the right side of what would be a rectangle, then the left. Finally, she began to complete the shape, carefully connecting the two sides at the top . . .

. . . CREATING THE RIDGE line of the roof, though Emily Abigail Roman was far too young to know what a ridge line was. To her it was just the top of the house. She ran her small finger through the dust, keeping the line as straight as possible. Underneath the ridge line she made two smaller rectangles, these of course being the windows. Each window had a cross in the center, which made four smaller windows. Beneath the windows . . .

. . . SHE DREW A pair of even smaller rectangles, wide and thin, which were flower boxes. Charlotte put down the black crayon and picked up the red one. It was almost halfway gone, but that was okay. Gripping the small crayon tightly, she made little red tulips in the flower boxes, three flowers in each. When she was satisfied, she picked up the green crayon, and filled in the stems and leaves. All that was left to do was the front door. She selected a brown crayon . . .

. . . AND MADE A doorway in the dust. With one final poke of her tiny finger, she made the doorknob. A door was useless without a doorknob. Emily Roman looked at her drawing. There was one last touch. She reached forward, and swirled her finger over the chimney. The last little curlicue was the smoke.

FIFTY-THREE

Aleks paced back and forth. He spoke rapidly, drifting from Estonian to Russian to English. He held his knife in his right hand, and as he turned he tapped it against his right leg, slicing the black leather of his coat. To Michael, who had seen his share of unhinged defendants, Aleks was coming apart.

ALEKS STOOD DIRECTLY in the front window, his back to the room.

“Things go full circle in this life, do they not, Michael Roman?”

Michael stole a glance at Abby. She was rocking back and forth, pulling on the pipes behind her.

“What do you mean?” Michael asked.

Aleks turned to face them. “This place. I can smell the yeast in the air. Once it is in the air, it never leaves, you know. I’ve heard of a bakery in Paris, a shop known for its sourdough breads, that has not used an active culture for more than a hundred years.” He turned to glance at Emily, back. “Do you think things remain? Things like energies, spirits?”

Michael knew he had to keep Aleks talking. “Maybe. I –”

“Were you here when it happened? Did you see it?”

Michael now knew what he was talking about. He was talking about the murder of Peeter and Johanna Roman. “No,” Michael said. “I didn’t see it.”

Aleks nodded. “I read about you. About the incident with the car bomb.”

Michael said nothing.

“You were supposed to die that day, yet you did not. Have you ever questioned this?”

Only every day since, Michael thought. “I don’t know,” he said, hoping to find some common ground with this madman. “Maybe I was destined for something else. Maybe something better.”

“Yes,” Aleks said. “Destiny.” He began to pace back and forth again, now behind Emily. Out of the corner of his eye Michael could see that Abby had begun to work the copper pipe from its mooring. “Tell me. When you were about to die, how did it feel?”

“It felt like nothing,” Michael said. “It happened too fast.”

“No,” Aleks said. “It is the longest moment of your life. It can last forever.”

Michael saw the pipe budge a little more, saw the duct tape on Abby’s wrists begin to fray. Aleks circled behind Emily.

“It was in a place not unlike this that it all began for me,” Aleks said. “I know the feeling. To be brought to the edge of the abyss, and to emerge unscathed. I do not think it was an accident that you came to care for Anna and Marya. I believe it was ordained. Now I must take them home.”

Before he could stop himself, Michael rose from the chair. The words just seemed to tumble out. “I won’t let you!”

Michael glanced again at Emily, at the drawing she had made in the dust. He could not make it out from where he was.

“You should know about their mother,” Aleks continued, moving closer to Emily. “A beautiful young girl. An ennustaja of magnificent power. Elena. She was merely a child when I first saw her. She was the spirit of the gray wolf.” Aleks pointed at the table in front of Michael. “There are two bullets in that weapon. I want you to pick it up.”

Michael froze. “No.”

“I want you to pick it up now!”

Slowly, Michael picked up the pistol. It felt heavy, leaden in his hand. Was it loaded? And if it was, why was Aleks doing this? Michael wondered if he could point it at Aleks, and pull the trigger.

No, he thought. He could not take the chance. Aleks was too close to Emily. “What do you want me to do?”

“There is only one choice. I am going to leave with my daughter, and I cannot take the risk that I will be stopped.”

Michael had no idea what the man meant by one choice. He remained silent.

“First, you will take the weapon, point it at Abigail’s head, and pull the trigger.”

Michael’s heart plunged. “What?”

“Then you will take your own life. You see, it will be seen as a murder/suicide, the logical actions of a man who killed the lawyer who illegally worked for him, then a young thug with whom he had done business. Not to mention the police detective who came to investigate. In your madness, seeing no way out, you brought your wife here, to the site of your life’s greatest tragedy, and took both your lives.”

Michael’s mind began to reel. Abby sobbed. “That’s . . . that’s not going to happen.”

Aleks crouched down behind Emily. “Maybe there is another choice for you.” He took one of the small, empty glass vials from the chain around his neck, placed it on the floor in front of Emily. He held the tip of the knife just inches from the back of the little girl’s head. “There are other ways for Anna to come with me.”

Abby screamed into the gag in her mouth. She began to rock back and forth violently, pulling on the pipe.

“We do not live in your world,” Aleks said, glancing at his knife. “These things cannot hurt us.”

“No.”

“The choice is between your life and Anna’s. What are you willing to do for her?”

“Don’t . . .” Michael lifted the pistol.

“Are you willing to trade your life for hers?”

“Stop!”

“Put the gun to Abigail’s head, Michael. If you love this child you will not hesitate.” He moved the knife even closer.

“Wait!” Michael screamed.

Emily looked up at him. In that moment Michael saw his daughter as a teenager, a young woman, an adult. It all came down to this moment.

“Make your choice now, Michael Roman,” Aleks said.

Michael knew what he had to do. Aleks was right. There really was no choice.