“I don’t think about it.”
She smiled. “Sure you do.”
I let myself back into the HOUSE and found Dre plopped on the couch watching The View, Babs and the girls chatting about global warming with Al Gore. The nitwit blonde with the concentration-camp collarbones asked him to explain a study she’d read that linked global warming to cow flatulence. Al smiled and looked like he’d rather be getting a colonoscopy during a root canal. My cell phone vibrated-the restricted number again.
“It’s Yefim,” I said.
Dre sat up. “I have it.”
“What?”
“The cross.” He grinned like a little boy. He reached under the collars of his pullover and the henley beneath it. He pulled out a leather cord hung around his neck. A cross dangled from it, thick and black. “I gots it, baby. You tell Yefim-”
I held up a finger to him and answered the phone.
“Hello, Patrick, you hump.”
I smiled. “Hello, Yefim.”
“You like? I used ‘hump’ for you.”
“I like.”
“You got my cross, man?”
It hung against Dre’s upper chest. It was black and the size of my hand.
“I have your cross.”
Dre gave me a double thumbs-up and another idiotic grin.
“We meet, then. Go to Great Woods.”
“What?”
“Great Woods, man. The Tweeter Center. Oh, hang on.” I heard him place his hand over the phone and speak to someone. “I been told it’s not called Great Woods or the Tweeter Center no more. It’s called-what? Hang on, Patrick.”
“The Comcast Center,” I said.
“It’s called the Comcast Center,” Yefim said. “You know it, right?”
“I know it. It’s closed now. Off-season.”
“Which is why nobody will be around to bother us, man. Go to the east gate. You’ll find a way in. Meet me by the main stage.”
“When?”
“Four hours. You bring the cross.”
“You bring Sophie.”
“You bring baby, too?”
“Right now all’s I got is the cross.”
“That’s a sucky deal, man.”
“It’s the only deal I got if you want that cross in Kirill’s house by Saturday night.”
“Bring the doctor, then.”
I glanced at Dre, who stared at me with wide eyes and a childlike giddiness that I assumed was pharmaceutically generated.
“Who says I even know where he is?”
Yefim sighed. “You too smart not to know we know more than we say we know.”
It took me a second to catch up to that sentence. “We?”
“Me,” he said. “Pavel. We. You part of something, my friend, something you not supposed to understand yet.”
“Really?”
“True. I’m playing her game, you play mine. Bring doctor.”
“Why?”
“I want to deliver message to him in person.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “Not so sure I like that.”
“Don’t worry, guy, I’m not going to hurt him. I need him. I just want to tell him personally how much I would like to see him back on the job. You bring him.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Ho-kay,” Yefim said. “I see you soon.” He hung up.
Dre returned the cross to its hiding place beneath his pullover but not before I got a look at it. If I’d passed it in an antique shop, I would have guessed the price at fifty dollars, no more. It was black onyx, fashioned in the Russian Orthodox style, with Latin inscriptions carved into the top and bottom of the face. In the center was etched another cross along with a spear and a sponge above a small rise that I presumed represented Golgotha.
“Doesn’t seem worth a bunch of dead people through the ages, does it?” Dre said before slipping it under his collar.
“Most of the things that people kill for don’t.”
“To the assholes doing the killing they do.”
I held out my hand. “Why don’t you give it to me?”
He gave me a smile that was all teeth. “Fuck you.”
“No, really.”
“No, really.” He bugged his eyes at me.
“Seriously,” I said. “I’ll take it and I’ll do the swap. No need for you to risk your ass out there with these kinds of people. It’s not your thing, Dre.”
His smile widened. “You might have everyone else buying your good-guy bullshit, but you’re no different than anyone else. You get a chance to hold this in your hand? This artifact worth, I dunno, what van Goghs are worth? You’ll think about doing the right thing, but then you’ll just keep driving until you can find someone to fence it.”
“So, why don’t you?”
“What?”
“Steal it and fence it?”
“Because I don’t know any fences, man. I’m a pill-popping degenerate gambler, I’m not fucking Val Kilmer in Heat . The first person I trusted to help me move this would shoot me in the back of the head as soon as I turned my back. You, though, you do know fences, I bet, and you do know people you can trust in the criminal world. You’d be halfway to Mexico with this thing if you could.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Your aw-shucks shtick doesn’t fool me.”
“Apparently not,” I said. “Darn. Let me ask you-why does Yefim seem to know everything about us right now but yet he somehow can’t find us?”
“What does he know about us?”
“He knows we’re together. He even made a reference to this being Amanda’s game, and all of us caught playing it.”
“And you doubt that?”
An hour later, we set out for the Comcast Center at Great Woods in Mansfield. As we walked out to Dre’s Saab, he removed the key from his key chain and handed it to me.
“It’s your car,” I said.
“Given my substance abuse issues, do you really want me behind the wheel?”
I drove the Saab. Dre rode shotgun and stared dreamily out the window.
“You’re not on just booze,” I said.
He turned his head. “I took a couple Xanax. You know…” He looked back out the window.
“A couple? Or three?”
“Three, actually, yeah. And a Paxil.”
“So pills and liquor, that’s your prescription for dealing with the Russian mob.”
“It’s brought me this far,” he said and dangled the photo fob of Claire in front of his blurry eyes.
“Why the hell do you have a picture of the kid?” I said.
He looked over at me. “Because I love her, man.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “Or something like love.”
Half a minute later, he was snoring.
It’s rare you deal with any KIND of illegal swap where the party with the power doesn’t change the meeting place at the last minute. It tends to root out the threat of law enforcement surveillance, because it’s hard to set up audio bugs on the fly, and teams of black-clad federal agents weighted down with boom mikes, recorder bags, and infrared telephoto lenses are easier to spot when they’re scrambling around in the background.
So, I assumed Yefim would call to change the meet at the last minute, but I still wanted to get a lay of the land in case he didn’t. I’d been to the Comcast Center at least two dozen times in my life. It was an outdoor amphitheater cut into the woods of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’d seen Bowie open for Nine Inch Nails there. I’d seen Springsteen and Radiohead. A year back, I saw the National open for Green Day and thought I’d died and gone to alt-rock heaven. Which is to say, I knew the layout pretty well. The amphitheater was a bowl with a long, high slope running down to it, and lower, wider slopes curving around in gradual swirls, so that if you continued to walk in a circle one way, you would eventually run out of road at the amphitheater itself. And if you walked in a circle the other way, you would eventually reach the parking lot. They set up the T-shirt kiosks on these slopes alongside the beer booths and the booths for cotton candy, baked pretzels, and foot-long hot dogs.