“But we have the guns,” Benzetti said. He nodded to Rice. “Cuff her.”
Zelvas had a home gym in the bedroom, and Rice handcuffed Natalia’s slender right wrist to a two-hundred-pound barbell.
Benzetti reached into the safe and pulled out a black velvet bag. It had some heft to it—at least a couple of kilos. He wondered how many diamonds they could skim off without getting nailed. He dumped the contents on the bed.
No diamonds. Just cheese. A big fat wheel of cheese the size of a birthday cake.
Natalia let out a string of Russian curses.
“Calm the hell down,” Benzetti said.
She didn’t.
Rice grinned. “I don’t speak Russian, but I’m guessing she’s really pissed.”
Benzetti shrugged. “Hey, she was banging the ugliest guy on the Upper East Side, expecting diamonds, and all she got was a hunk of cheese. Hell, I’d be pissed, too.”
Chapter 9
The two cops left Natalia chained to the barbell and did a quick search of the apartment. After five minutes, Benzetti called it off. “If they’re not in the safe, they’re not here,” he said. “Which one of us breaks the bad news to Chukov?”
They flipped a coin and Benzetti lost. Jesus, he did not want to make this phone call.
Chukov was a two-hundred-fifty-pound powder keg with a half-inch fuse. Benzetti had once seen him smash a beer bottle and drive it into a man’s jaw for cheating at poker. And that was over a lousy hundred-dollar pot.
“Cheese?” Chukov screamed. “Cheese? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Benzetti could practically feel the enraged Cossack’s spittle through the cell phone. “No diamonds?” Chukov shouted.
“And no Zelvas,” Benzetti said.
“Zelvas is dead,” Chukov said.
“Zelvas is dead?” Benzetti repeated so that Rice could hear the news. “And you know that how? You’re sure of it?”
“He was stealing from us,” Chukov said. “I’m in charge of the Syndicate’s loss-prevention department. Ten minutes ago I got a confirmation call from the field that Zelvas’s thieving days are over.”
Benzetti breathed out in relief. “I’m impressed. Where did you find someone who could get the drop on Walter Zelvas? Never mind. Did your man in the field say anything about the diamonds?” Benzetti asked. “If they’re not here, I figure Zelvas took them with him.”
“If he did, our man didn’t see them,” Chukov said. “He barely had time to finish Zelvas off when a shitstorm of cops arrived. He was lucky to get away.”
“He never saw any diamonds?” Benzetti said.
“That’s what he told me. I really don’t know, but I want those diamonds back!” Chukov yelled.
“And so does somebody named Nathaniel Prince,” Benzetti said.
That seemed to get the Russian’s attention. “What do you know about Nathaniel Prince?”
“Is he your boss?”
“You and Rice work for me,” Chukov said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Actually, there is one other thing I need to know,” Benzetti said. “Who’s Natalia? She’s around five ten, dark hair, fantastic rack, a very pretty lady.”
“How do you know Natalia?” Chukov asked.
“We’ve got her handcuffed in Zelvas’s bedroom. She was opening his safe just as we got here.”
“Natalia is Prince’s girlfriend.”
“Prince’s girlfriend? She said she was Zelvas’s girlfriend.”
Chukov laughed. “She gets around.”
“What should we do with the lovely Natalia?”
“Two choices,” Chukov said. “You can uncuff her, apologize for not knowing who she is, and tell her you’re going to do all you can to get the diamonds back for Nathaniel Prince.”
“I’m not much for apologies. What’s my second choice?”
“Keep her cuffed, rip off her clothes, fuck the living shit out of her—and a few hours later, you’ll be happy but dead. Prince will kill you—gulag-style.”
Chapter 10
There’s something surreal about sitting in the back of a taxi with a bag full of diamonds. This can’t be happening to me, I kept telling myself. But it was. I only wished I could open the bag and make sure.
My benefactor from New Jersey didn’t even talk to me. He was on his cell with someone in Tokyo, hedging funds or whatever those investor guys do. I’m sure by the time he got to Ridgewood, he’d made more than enough to pay for the thousand-dollar cab ride.
The driver was chatty all the way downtown, filling me in on his own financial plans.
“I can be back at Grand Central in an hour. There’s gotta be hundreds of rich guys willing to pop big bucks to get home to the suburbs,” he said. “This is the kind of incredible night a cabbie waits for.”
So little time. So many desperate stranded souls to gouge. I smiled and hefted my medical bag. Who was I to judge?
He took me to the Emergency entrance at St. Vincent’s and left in a hurry. I walked the three blocks to my apartment, looking left, right, and behind me every step of the way.
My apartment is in a five-story brownstone, built back in the early twentieth century, when craftsmanship and integrity were still the hallmarks of the construction industry. The brick is so solid-looking that the tenants call it the Fortress.
I live on the top floor. There’s a closed-circuit TV system in the vestibule, and most nights I wave at the camera, and whoever sees me opens their door and gives me a “Hi, Matthew.”
But tonight I ran up the five flights, opened my door, double-locked it behind me, and exhaled. I hadn’t been arrested or killed and I still had the diamonds. I was safe. For now.
I always feel good about walking into my apartment, and tonight I felt even better. It’s hardly the biggest space in New York, but it feels homey. That’s because it’s wall-to-wall me. Literally. Every inch of wall space is covered with my paintings. I don’t know if I’m any good, but I like my stuff enough to want to look at it all the time.
My cat sauntered in. I got him at the shelter two years ago. He’s black and white, with about fifteen shades of gray. His name was Hooper when I adopted him, but I changed it to Hopper, after my favorite painter.
It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t come no matter what I call him.
“Look what Daddy brought home,” I said, showing him the bag of diamonds. He couldn’t have cared less, but I had been dying to show somebody.
“Well, you might not be interested, but I hear this stuff can be catnip for some women.”
I grabbed a beer from the fridge, sat down on the sofa, opened the bag, and let the diamonds trickle through my fingers. I was in I’m-Rich-Beyond-My-Wildest-Dreams euphoria when the doorbell rang.
Someone was coming for the diamonds! That had to be it. Shit!
I jumped up, sloshing beer on my pants, and headed for the cabinets where I store my paints, brushes, and a Beretta M9 semiautomatic. I’m an ex-Marine. Whoever was downstairs thought I was just an art student. Advantage: for me.
I gripped the gun and moved over to check the closed-circuit monitor. The cat, just as curious to see who was at my front door at ten minutes after midnight, followed me.
I looked at the screen and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Jeez, Hopper,” I said. “One of us is as nervous as a cat.”
Chapter 11
At the age of five I was given my first toy chest. It was a Marine Corps footlocker. While other kids got colorful wooden boxes with their favorite superhero or sports team logo painted on the front, my father decided I should have an olive-drab, steel-reinforced, double-padlock trunk emblazoned with SEMPER FI and steeped in his own personal military history.
I still have it. It’s bolted to my bedroom floor. I unlocked it and buried the medical bag with the diamonds under layers of old uniforms and a few souvenirs I brought home from Afghanistan. I shut the lid and made sure it was locked up tight.
Then I went back to the living room, tucked the
gun back in the art cabinet where it belonged, and opened the front door.
And there she was, wearing a dove-gray V-neck sweater that matched her eyes and a just-to-the-knees denim skirt that showed off her legs nicely. Katherine.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” I said. “Besides looking terrific, that is.”
She threw her arms around me. “Haven’t you heard? There was some kind of terrorist attack at Grand Central,” she said, kissing my cheeks, my neck, finally my lips. “I didn’t want to be alone tonight.”
“Good thinking,” I said, pressing her body against mine. “After the railroads, and maybe planes, the next logical terrorist target would be art professors.”
She stepped back. “Are you making fun of me, Matthew?”
“Never.”
“Will you watch out for me? Keep me company tonight?”
“Uh-huh.”
And I meant it. My mother raised me to be an artist, but my father trained me to protect the people I love. When I was growing up, he was more like a drill sergeant than a dad. Once when I was ten, we were hiking in Pike National Forest. One minute we were together and then suddenly he was gone, and I was all alone in the middle of the Colorado wilderness. I had nothing but a hunting knife. No food, no water, no compass. I knew we hadn’t separated by accident, either. This was a test. It took me thirty hours to pass it, but I finally found my way home.
I looked into Katherine’s eyes. Would I watch over her? Absolutely. I stroked her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips. Then my lips traced the same pattern. Eyelids, cheeks, mouth.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked when we stopped for a breath.
“Absolutely.”
“How did your pants get wet?” She lowered one hand and cupped it between my legs.
“Beer. An unfortunate accident.”
“You can’t be walking around all wet,” she said, unbuckling my belt. Then she unzipped my fly and helped me out of my pants.
The beer had soaked through to my boxers. “Wet also,” she said. “And hard, too.”
“Can’t imagine why,” I said.
Within seconds I was naked and then Katherine joined me. I lay on my back and Katherine straddled my hips. I thrust up into her, not hard but firm. She arched her back, dug her knees into my thighs, and pressed down against me. She slowly took in a breath, then just as slowly let it out. She did it again. And again.
The sound of Katherine about to reach a climax is the best part of making love for me, and as her breathing got more frenetic, I matched her until—
Our orgasms came in rolling waves, one after another, slowly subsiding until she let her body fall on top of mine. Then Katherine wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed her lips to my ear.
“I’m crazy in love with you,” she whispered.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Never thought I could love anybody like this. But here we are.”
We fell asleep like that.
Not a care in the world.
So incredibly naive.
Chapter 12
Vadim Chukov was a survivor. When a rival mob captured him, he managed to strangle his captors from the backseat of the car with their own handcuffs. When four prison guards beat him and locked him in solitary confinement, he escaped and lived to kill them and their families. Chukov had been stabbed four times, shot twice, and thrown off a speeding train. He’d be damned if he was going to die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
He sat naked on the ceramic tiles of the steam room, a towel across his lap. His cell phone and a bronchodilator inhaler lay on the towel. Lifelines both.
Chukov had discovered cigarettes when he was eleven years old. Yava, the full-flavored Russian cancer sticks that gave a young street enforcer for the Solntsevskaya Bratva swagger, status, and eventually COPD.
Thirty-five years later, he was a slave to the steam, breathing in the moist heat almost every day to help open his inflamed lungs.
Most of the steam rooms in the city were magnets for fags and yuppies, but the Russian and Turkish Baths on East 10th Street were old school. Real tile, not that fiberglass and acrylic shit they were putting in those new hybrid steam rooms. And no pretty boys. At least not at this hour of the morning. He had the steam room to himself.
Chukov’s body was short, thick, and covered with curly black hair and sixteen tattoos. The rose, the tiger, the skulls—every blue line on his body told his history in the Russian Mafia to anyone who knew how to read it.
The cell phone rang. He was waiting for some good news that he could give to Prince. This had better be it. It wasn’t.
“Where’s my money?” the voice on the other end said.
It was the Ghost.
“Where are my diamonds, you prick?” Chukov came back angrily.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Ghost said. “All I know is we had a deal. I kept my end of it, you didn’t. Walter Zelvas is dead. My money hasn’t been transferred to the Caymans.”
“Why do you think I hired you to terminate Zelvas?” Chukov said. “He was skimming diamonds from the Syndicate. The diamonds weren’t in his apartment, so he must have taken them with him. You were the last to see him alive.”
“And if I don’t get my money, I’ll be the last one to see you alive.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chukov said.
“It means look to your left.”
Chukov turned his head. There was a red dot on the wall. It moved up to the ceiling, made a few S turns, danced back to the wall, and then landed on his chest.
He had to clench his sphincter for fear of shitting right there.
“You’re here?” Chukov said. “How did you find me here? How did you get in?”
“It’s what I get paid to do, remember? So pay me.”
“Be reasonable,” Chukov said. “Give me time to recover the missing diamonds.”
“Not…my…problem,” the Ghost said.
The red dot moved slowly down Chukov’s body to the roll of a lifetime of overindulgence around his belly and finally came to rest on the inhaler that sat on his lap.
Chukov was sweating profusely, not all of it from the steam. “Please,” he said.
“Lift up your skirt,” the Ghost said.
“What?”
“The towel. Lift it up.”
Chukov had faced death before. He beat it every time, but not by cringing in fear.
He ripped the towel off and stood up. Naked. Proud. Defiant.
“Fuck you,” he bellowed. “Vadim Chukov bows to no man.”
The words echoed off the tile walls.
Chapter 13
“Where’d you do the seven?” the Ghost said.
“What?”
“I’m not interested in looking at your dick. I can read the tats. According to that star on your knee, you did seven years in prison. I asked you where.”
“Butyrka.” Chukov spat out the word. “Hellhole. I’d rather have gone to Siberia.”
“Put the towel back on and sit your fat ass down.”
Chukov wrapped the towel around his waist and sat. “If you can read tattoos, you know that the seven-pointed star on my knee means more than prison time.”
“I know. You’re a made man in the Russian Mafia.”
“I bow to no man.”
“I heard you the first time,” the Ghost said. “Were you a pakhan in the old country?”
Chukov inhaled deeply and filled his lungs with hot steam. “Nathaniel Prince was a pakhan. I’m a humble brigadier.”
“Brigadier, maybe,” the Ghost said. “But not so humble. Not if you choose to violate the Vorovskoy Zakon.”
Chukov exploded. “Bullshit. I have never violated the Thieves’ Code. I’ve been bound by it my entire life. Even in prison.”
“And I say you’ve desecrated rule number eighteen: Make good on promises given to other thieves.”
“That means nothing if you steal from me,” Chukov said.
r /> “I killed a man for you, but I didn’t steal,” the Ghost said.
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
“You have two choices, Brigadier Chukov,” the Ghost said. “You either take my word for it and live by the code, or you don’t believe me and die in five seconds.”
The red dot made little circles on Chukov’s chest.
“Pyat,” the Ghost said, counting backward in Russian, “chetirye…tri…dva…odeen.”
“I’ll pay, I’ll pay,” Chukov said.
“Kogda?”
“You speak Russian?” Chukov said.
“Just the basic stuff you need in my line of work,” the Ghost said. “Like please, thank you, and when can I expect my money?”
“I’ll transfer it immediately.”
The red dot disappeared from Chukov’s chest.
“Spasibo,” the Ghost said. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
“We’re not done,” Chukov said. “I have another job for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I accept that you didn’t take the diamonds,” Chukov said. “I want you to find out who did.”
“Then kill the mudak and return the diamonds to you,” the Ghost said. “Da?”
“Da,” Chukov said, followed by a wet, croupy laugh.
“I want double what you paid me for Zelvas.”
Chukov choked on his own laugh. “Double? Are you crazy?”
“It costs more when I have to figure out who the target is,” the Ghost said. “Plus, I figure getting back all those diamonds ought to be worth something to you.”
“Maybe ten percent more,” Chukov said.
“Double,” the Ghost said. “Take it or…”
The red dot reappeared on Chukov’s chest.
“…leave it.”
Chukov took it. “All right. I’ll pay double, but only if I get the diamonds back.”
“Then we’re in business again,” the Ghost said.
Chukov looked down at his chest, waiting for the red dot to disappear. It didn’t. “You can take the gun off me now,” he said.