At the other end of the casket he cut a much larger opening with a hole saw. There he welded the brass bushing to attach a four-inch exhaust line. Now the gray PVC pipe stuck out of the ground in the middle of the dirt field like a solitary sapling. Its end curved down like an umbrella handle. It was the sort of thing used at a landfill to vent the methane gas that built up underground.
So the girl would get a steady supply of fresh air, which was more than his father had when he’d been trapped in the coal mine in Tomsk.
As a young boy, Dragomir used to enjoy watching his father and the other miners ride backward in the mantrip, descending hundreds of meters into the depths. Dragomir was forever asking to ride too, but his father always refused.
Each night his father came home caked in black dust so thick you could see only his eyes. His coughing kept Dragomir up many a night. He spat black and left the sputum floating in the toilet bowl.
Coal mining, he told once told Dragomir, was the only job where you had to dig your own grave.
Dragomir listened, rapt, to his father’s grim tales. How he’d seen a roof bolter come down on a friend of his and crush his face. Or watched a guy cut in half by the coal car. Someone was once caught between the drums of the coal crusher and smashed into pieces between its teeth.
His mother, Dusya, raged at his father for filling a young boy’s head with such frightening stories. But Dragomir always wanted to hear more.
The bedtime stories stopped when Dragomir was almost ten.
A knock at the door to their communal apartment in the middle of the night. His mother’s high thin scream.
She brought him to the mine to join the crowds gathered there, pleading for any sort of news, even bad news.
He was fascinated. He wanted to know what had happened, but no one would tell him. He overheard only fragments. Something about how the miners had accidentally dug into an abandoned, flooded shaft. How the water rushed in and trapped them like rats.
But Dragomir wanted to know more. His thirst was unslakable. He wanted details.
He imagined his father and the other men, dozens or even hundreds of them, struggling to keep their heads above the rising black water, fighting over a few inches of air space that dwindled by the minute. He imagined them grappling in the black water, pushing each other’s heads down into the water, old friends and even brothers, trying to survive a few minutes longer, all the while knowing that none of them would ever come out.
He wanted to know what it felt like to realize with absolute certainty that you were about to die and to be powerless to do anything about it. His mind returned to this again and again, the way a child fingers a wound. He was fascinated by the unknown, lured to what repelled others, because it allowed him to draw close to his father, to know what his father knew in those last moments of his life.
He’d always felt cheated somehow not to have witnessed the last seconds of his father’s life.
All he had was his imagination.
THE DAMNED dog would not stop barking. Now he could hear it pawing at the screen door out back. He looked out a window and saw a dirt-covered mongrel, leaping and snarling at the screen. Feral, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure.
He opened the wooden door, his Wasp gas injection knife at the ready, his new toy. Just the screen between him and the cur.
Startled, the dog backed away, bared its teeth, gave a low snarl.
He called to it softly in Russian, “Here, pooch,” and opened the screen door. The dog lunged at him, and he plunged the blade into the beast’s abdomen.
With his thumb he slid the button to shoot out a frozen basketball of compressed air.
The explosion was instantaneous and satisfying, but he realized at once he’d done it wrong. He was spattered by the animal’s viscera, red and glistening, slimy scraps of skin and fur, a rainburst of offal.
Once in a while he did make mistakes. Next time he would make sure to plunge the knife in to the hilt before flicking the gas release.
It took him half an hour to sweep the ruined carcass into a trash bag and haul it into the woods to be buried later, and then hose down the blood-slick porch and screen door.
He took a shower in the small pre-fab fiberglass stall on the second floor and got into clean jeans and a flannel shirt, and then he heard the doorbell ring. He looked out the bedroom window, saw a Lexus SUV parked in the dirt road out front. He put on a baseball cap, backward, to conceal the tattoo, and casually came down the stairs and opened the front door.
“Sorry to disturb you,” said a middle-aged man with no chin and thick wire-rim glasses. “My dog ran off and I was wondering if you might have seen it.”
“Dog?” Dragomir said through the front screen.
“Oh, now, where’s my manners,” the man said. “I’m Sam Dupuis, from across the road.”
Then the man paused expectantly.
“Andros,” Dragomir said. “Caretaker.”
Andros was a Polish name, but it also sounded Greek.
“Good to know you, Andros,” the neighbor said. “I thought I saw Hercules run down your driveway, but maybe I was wrong.”
“Very sorry,” Dragomir said with a smile. “Wish I could help. Hope you find him soon.”
45.
I found Diana in a break room, sitting by herself, the Boston Globe spread out on a round table before her. It didn’t look like she’d cracked it, though. The sections were arrayed but unopened. She was just waiting.
“Your coffee,” she said, holding out a cup. “Walk with me.”
I followed her out. “They found Alexa’s purse under his bed,” she said. “He’d taken all her cash but was probably afraid to use her credit cards. The stolen Jaguar was found in a Tufts University garage.”
“That give up any location information?”
“It’s too old to have air bags let alone a nav system. But they did find trace quantities of a white powder.”
“Coke?”
“Burundanga powder. It’s an extract of the borrachio plant-also known as Colombian devil’s breath. A naturally occurring source of scopolamine.”
“An herbal date-rape drug.”
She nodded. “I’ve heard that half the admissions to Bogotá’s emergency rooms are caused by burundanga. Criminals spike their victims’ drinks with the stuff at nightclubs and brothels. It’s tasteless, odorless, and water-soluble. And it turns the victims into zombies, basically. Lucid, but totally submissive. A complete loss of will. So their victims will do what they’re told-they’ll withdraw cash from their ATMs and hand it over without arguing. And when it wears off, they have no recollection of what happened.”
On the way to the stairs we passed the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, the guy with the long gray hair and the expensive suit. Black curly chest hair sprouted out of his open shirt collar. He was walking briskly but seemed lost in thought, his head down.
As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Any phone records in his apartment, cell phone records, any of that stuff?”
“They’ve collected everything and they’re working it. Nothing so far.”
As she opened the door to the seventh floor, I stopped. “Wasn’t that guy wearing a tie?”
She looked at me in the dim light of the stairwell, then whirled around, and we went back down the stairs at a fairly good clip.
When we reached the interview room where I’d talked to Perreira, Diana opened the door, and she gasped.
I can’t say I was entirely surprised by what I saw, but it was grotesque all the same.
Mauricio Perreira’s body was twisted unnaturally, his face horribly contorted, frozen in a silent, agonized shriek. His lips were blue and his eyes bulged, the sclera mottled with blood from the burst capillaries. The classic signs of petechial hemorrhaging.