But locating Dmitry Nazarov six years later hadn’t been easy. Turns out that mafiya kingpins don’t have websites. Eventually she located an address for the Nazarov Companies in Braintree and a phone number that rang and rang and was never answered.
Now she waited, uneasily, occasionally looking at her phone. Six minutes went by before someone appeared, a guy in his early twenties with a bodybuilder’s physique, wearing a gray suit, open collar, no tie. He approached Juliana and said, like a haughty salesman, “Yes?”
Juliana fixed the man with her “objection overruled” stare. “I’m here to see Mr. Nazarov.”
“Who?”
“Dmitry Nazarov. Tell him it’s Judge Juliana Brody. He knows who I am.”
The young guy stared malevolently. After a while he turned and left.
He emerged about two minutes later, and now he was fawning. “Please to come with me, Your Honor,” he said with an awkward smile. “Mr. Nazarov is very happy to see you.”
He led her along a corridor and then down a hall that ended in a set of double swinging doors that opened into a large, raw space — a big open area with bare concrete floors, steel girders, and a lot of exposed pipes. It looked as though they’d just stopped building the interior. Standing at a steel desk in the middle of the space was a stocky man wearing a black-and-white bowling shirt.
Dmitry Nazarov was wagging his index finger at someone, a young Asian woman with chunky glasses. “No, you see, we bring these two lots together, with the entrances on these two blocks, here and here, and triple the revenue! Crunch the numbers, you see!” He looked up, pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and he saw her. His face shone. He suddenly extended his hands in the air, like a papal benediction. As he came toward her, he said, “Your Honor, it is my honor!” He laughed, delighted to have cracked a sort of joke. “A jurist of your eminence. To what do I owe this great pleasure?”
The woman with the chunky glasses left the room. Juliana sat in a chair next to Nazarov’s desk and said, “You once told me that—”
“Yes, that wish to be granted. Of course. I swore this on my babushka’s grave. Anything that’s within my power.” He placed a palm on his chest. “Is a burden to carry a debt. A relief, always, to pay it off. Tell me, Your Honor, what can I do?” He was beaming, like a child who’d just been given a puppy.
When she told him, his smile became a rictus of horror. He looked, Juliana thought, like a child whose puppy had just been run over.
She turned her Lexus left onto Granite Street and looped around to 93 North, the artery that went straight through Boston, thirteen miles of highway. Four lanes of traffic headed north. Traffic was light. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun.
She glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if she noticed anyone, any vehicle that seemed to be following. She saw a white car behind her, a Dodge, that she thought she’d seen in the Braintree office park. She saw the car’s snout, its aggressive grille.
It was traveling a little close.
Then the white Dodge changed lanes and came up on her left, far too close. She accelerated, and the white Dodge accelerated, and then she felt a heavy thud, heard a sickening metallic crunch.
The Dodge had crashed into her.
In panic mode now, she swerved away, to the right, setting off car horns, nearly colliding with a blue Toyota. But the Dodge had moved lanes and was immediately on her left, again, and moving in closer.
She accelerated even faster, and now the Dodge had pulled up even with her, on her left, and far too close. She swerved her SUV one more lane, into the rightmost lane, but the white Dodge followed her over.
The car was trying to force her off the road.
Another loud crunch. The Dodge had driven right into her again. She swung the wheel hard right, away, into the breakdown lane, and the Dodge was on her again, and she spun harder to the right. With a shrieking of steel, she’d smashed into the steel guardrails, sparks flying, and she slammed on the brakes. A loud squeal and car horns blaring all around, and she came to an abrupt stop.
The white Dodge sped away.
She keyed off the ignition, sat there, breathing hard, trying to steady her heart rate.
Then a beat-up red pickup truck pulled up ahead of her and also came to a stop, its emergency lights flashing. A large guy with long blond hair and a big potbelly, in his thirties or early forties, got out, wearing an old Carhartt work jacket and a “Make America Great Again” hat. He came over to her.
“Hey, lady, you okay?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” She was out of breath.
“Looked like that guy cut you off. I saw that! I mean, what the hell?”
“Unbelievable.” She was jittery with adrenaline, which had now flooded her system. Her heart juddered, and her face felt hot.
“You want me to call the cops? Call you an ambulance?”
Shaking her head, she said, “Don’t bother. No need.” The last thing she wanted was to be entangled with the police. She knew there was damage to the vehicle, but from where she sat she couldn’t really get a sense of how bad it was. Not without getting out of the car. Which she didn’t want to do, not in the middle of traffic where there was no shoulder and cars passing by all the time now.
“But thank you so much,” she said.
After another minute or so she’d calmed down enough to start the car back up, and she was on her way home.
72
She was driving on Beacon Street, a mile or so from home, when she pulled up to a traffic light and stopped. Glancing at the sidewalk, she saw a man sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. Something about the man — she looked more closely. If Calvin were still alive, that’s what he would have looked like.
In her frayed, sleep-deprived state, she remembered their last argument, couldn’t turn her mind away. He’d been hitting her up for money, something he did more and more often. She was finishing law school, living at home with her parents. He was living with his girlfriend, freeloading. She said something about what a mess he was making of his life.
He lashed back, talked about what phonies Mom and Dad were. At least they weren’t home to hear his rant. She said something about how he wasn’t too proud to take the checks Mom was always writing him. He’d even wheedled her into taking out a second mortgage, and when Dad found out, he practically exploded. And yet he couldn’t be bothered to visit her when she was in the hospital with the mastectomy. “Not once,” she said. “Not once. You take her money, and yet you couldn’t be bothered to visit.”
“So what? I was touring. And she’s fine. She’s fine. I don’t hear Mom complaining.”
“Oh, playing at Miller’s Ale House in Scituate is touring? You’re unbelievable. You damage people, Calvin. You damage the people who love you, and you don’t even know it.”
He was wearing a filthy pair of jeans and his crappy leather motorcycle jacket that gave off that skunky pot smell. She looked with sadness at his bitten-down fingernails, one with a death’s head on it that his girlfriend had painted with black and white enamel.
If she squinted she could see him as the bouncing eighth grader who led the lacrosse team to victory in the all-district tournament, hoisted up by his teammates to ride their shoulders as they whooped their elation. Neither Mom nor Dad could make it, but Juliana watched it all with a wide smile that seemed to own her face.
But if she squinted again at his once-handsome face, now bloated, she could almost see him as the middle-aged barfly he was on track to be.