Now she had no poncho, no water, no fire, and no matches with which to light a new one.
And she had two days and two nights to go.
CHAPTER 11
I slept fitfully and woke up the next morning with that dread in the pit of my stomach, the one that reminds you something horrible is going on in your life even before you’re alert. Then I remembered my abduction, Donnie Angel’s champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and breaking his leg like a paint stick. My hunger pains vanished in a blink, and I found a moment of joy amidst the misery. If nothing else good came out of it, my current predicament was going to help me lose those last seven and a half pounds.
Even before downing the second of three glasses of wine the night before, I knew exactly what I was going to do next. I’d become a competent financial analyst because of my detailed approach to understanding a business and its financial statements. One of the ways I dissected a complex holding company with a myriad of subsidiaries was to draw a picture. It helped me visualize what was going on among the individual entities, if money was being borrowed or lent to support one at the cost of another, or if funds were being siphoned off at the top to pay the owners. I spent the morning visualizing my godfather’s life the same way, and plotting the course of my investigation. Then I placed a phone call to an old friend.
After lunch, I arranged for one of the doormen to walk me to my parking garage. His shift ended at 3:00 p.m., which worked out perfectly. I drove my usual route along the Hutchinson River Parkway, keeping a sharp eye on the rearview mirror, but darted onto I-684 at the last second. The entrance ramp twisted and turned onto a straightaway. I gunned the engine on my vintage Porsche 911 through the curve and then ducked into the right-hand lane and slowed down to fifty-five. Every single car passed me for the next ten miles. I didn’t recognize any of them, and I didn’t see anyone following me either.
Not that it mattered. By now it was early rush hour. Cars hugged each other’s bumpers while cruising at the speed limit. Donnie may have gotten away with lifting me off a dimly lit New York street at midnight, but he wasn’t going to be able to pull it off on the highway. The streets of Hartford would be an altogether different matter. It was going to be up to me to be prudent and cautious.
I knew he would be informed of my arrival because he somehow knew the details of the questions I’d asked Roxanne Stashinski at my godfather’s funeral reception. Word would get around that I was back. It was a small community, and people talked. There was always the possibility that Roxy herself had betrayed me to Donnie Angel, or gossiped innocently to someone about the questions I’d asked her. But I doubted it. She had no motive, and I’d known her my entire life. I trusted her as much as anyone outside my family, though that wasn’t saying all that much.
Roxy was my godfather’s niece. She was also my best friend growing up. We’d gone to summer PLAST camps together, and attended Ukrainian School at night until she quit after the seventh grade. Her mother had studied ballet and she’d inherited her long, lithe frame and feline features. As a kid, I’d wished I looked more like her, but mostly I wished I’d fit in as well. Everyone thought Roxy was cool, at Uke camps and at American school. It helped that she was thin and did the kinds of things cool girls did, like smoke cigarettes and experiment with drugs.
Her popularity with boys, in fact, was the beginning of the end of our childhood friendship. During our last PLAST camp together, she turned cold and stopped being friends with me. Something had changed but I didn’t know what, until I caught her giving a blow job to a sixteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn in the tall grass behind the propane tank. We were fourteen at the time.
Twenty years later she had the life every immigrant coveted for his child. She was married to a full-blooded Ukrainian and had two kids. He was a contractor, she was a homemaker, and when they went to church on Sunday, they were the envy of every parent whose children had either left or married outside the culture.
We’d rekindled our friendship five years ago when I’d married her brother.
I picked her up at a car wash two blocks away from the Ukrainian National Home, where she’d been cooking with the other Uke ladies in preparation for bingo night. She was frowning even before she pulled the passenger door open. She still sported killer legs in tight jeans but her face resembled a shrunken raisin. It reminded me of what some famous actress had once said: that as she aged, a woman had to decide whether to preserve her ass or her face. She couldn’t keep both. I guess that’s one of the things I’d always liked about Roxy. We were both flawed. Neither of us was pedestal material.
“The car wash? Really?” Roxy said.
“I’m sorry. I’ll explain. Get in. Quick.”
I looked around to see if my favorite van had arrived, or if a crazed man in cleats was running toward me with a mallet in his hands. Such was my state of mind since last night.
Roxy threw her bag in behind her and climbed in the car. She held what looked like a plate covered by a paper bag in her hands. The delicious smell of fried potatoes and onions hit me. I didn’t wait for her to put her seat belt on. Instead I slammed the car into first and took off.
“Hey,” Roxy said, her head snapping back from the torque. “What the…” She whipped her seat belt across her shoulder and snapped it in place. “I need to be back in an hour but you’re taking that way too seriously.”
I took off down Wethersfield Avenue and veered right onto Brown Street. The tires screeched. Roxy gripped the overhead handle. “What’s going on? Am I missing something?”
“Yeah.” I hammered the throttle. The engine sang and the car flew. “This morning when I called you. I didn’t tell you everything.”
I had told Roxy I was coming back to Hartford and that I needed to meet her. I hadn’t given her any details because I didn’t want to listen to her try to stop me. I also didn’t like the idea of speaking to anyone on the phone about what had happened to me or about my godfather’s death. If I were asking any questions about either subject, I wanted to be able to shine a flashlight in the other person’s eyes so I could see what was going on behind them.
I gave her an abbreviated version of the previous night’s events. She interrupted with a series of mild exclamations but otherwise listened until I was done.
“And that’s it?” Roxy said. “That’s everything?”
She asked the question in a tone that suggested I’d failed to mention something obvious. I quickly replayed what I’d told her in my mind.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s everything.”
“No. It’s not everything. What you haven’t told me yet is that you called the cops. If not last night then this morning. Tell me you called the cops, Diana.”
Diana was an anagram for Nadia. Roxy had figured it out during PLAST camp and decided it would be my nickname. I secretly loved it at the time. It made me feel popular and glamorous. It made me feel that I was more assimilated and American, which I wanted above everything else.
Now I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was a sweet reminder of the times Roxy had been nice to me when we were kids. On the other hand, I felt hopelessly unworthy of sharing the name of an immortal princess. The thing with nicknames, though, is that once they stick, there’s nothing you can do about them.
“No,” I said. “I did not go to the cops.”
“Why not?’
“That would be the wrong thing to do. Come on, Rox. You know that.”
“If you report it, they’ll arrest Donnie. They’ll get him off the street. Otherwise, that sick bastard is coming after you. You know that.”