A glance at his watch-8:00 p.m.-and he scribbled a hasty response and flashed it to her. "Going nuts, I hope." After days of corresponding like this they had finally mastered the awkward art of balancing two conversations at once-inane verbal ramblings to mollify their listeners while they scrawled brief messages back and forth. It was tedious and slow, and absolutely necessary. They chatted in English and they wrote in Russian.
"Why didn't we buy a bigger place?!!!!" she scribbled back. "It's closing in on me, Alex. I can barely breathe."
Alex wrote, "At least the company's better in here than out there." Who knew how many Mafiya thugs were prowling nearby, trying their damnedest to collect the bounty? Volevodz knew their address-they had to assume he had somehow passed it along to the cabal in Moscow. So the thugs now had a firm fix on their location and Alex was sure they were huddled somewhere nearby, waiting. Going outside was out of the question. The first few days they had tried to suppress their terror, to find ways to cope with their anxiety and rearrange and repair their living conditions. Day three Elena had gone on a mad hunt for electronic bugs. She discovered six. They suspected there were more, plenty more, and they were right.
On day four, they agreed upon a strategy-they would work overtime to appear like they were going through the motions of a normal life, battling boredom, praying, and waiting for MP to whip a legal rabbit out of his hat and end this miserable nightmare.
They weren't fooling themselves, though. MP was a gnat battling giants. This was way over his head-over any lawyer's head, probably. At any moment, the people outside would become tired of this, and the next hammer would fall. And Alex, ever the clearheaded businessman, was sure things would become worse, whatever that meant.
With each succeeding day, the situation became more intolerable. Elena tried reading, watching TV, meditating-nothing worked. Nothing. Alex walked endlessly around the apartment, doing laps and searching for a solution. He thought best on his feet, and was wearing out shoe leather to find a way out of this.
They had no money. They were trapped inside this building. Unable to escape. Unable to communicate with anybody outside without the mice listening in. If there was a way out, it was up to them to find it. Alex patted Elena's knee and wrote, "Time for the bedroom."
They got up and together made the short trek down the hall. Alex loaded the tape they had produced the first night, carefully and quietly inserted it into the cassette player, then cranked the volume knob to maximum. He said to Elena, "Get your clothes off. I'm in the mood again." Neither of them had been in anything close to the mood since the visit from Agent Hanrahan with the terrifying news about all the bugs and the thugs waiting outside to kill them.
The idea that their every word was being overheard was sickening.
Elena kicked off her shoes, flung them hard against the wall, and made a point to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, with an accompanying groan from the springs. She opened the nightly banter. "You're always in the mood."
"And you're always beautiful."
"You're insatiable."
"And you're a doll." Then, "Take off your blouse."
"You first, with the shirt… that's it. Now the pants."
They went back and forth, trying their best to make the listeners gag, then Alex sat heavily on the bed, right beside her.
They stared at each other a moment. Without another word, Alex pushed start and the tape kicked in. The sounds of the two of them sexually mauling each other shot full-blast into the listening devices.
They had nearly killed each other producing that tape.
Elena leaned close to Alex and whispered, "How many more days do you think we have?"
"One… twenty. Who knows?"
"What are they waiting for?"
"For us to break. Or run out of money and start starving."
"Why? What do they hope to gain?"
"They want us desperate. They have our money, and they've made us too terrified to step outside. It's a box, and the only way out is to accept their condition. A one-way trip to Russia."
"Maybe we should try to just make a run for it."
"How?"
"Disguise ourselves. Sneak out. Early in the morning when they're tired and their senses are dull. Create a diversion of some kind." She pecked him on the cheek, then pulled back. "You pulled it off in Budapest. We'll do it again."
"And go where, Elena? They have our passports."
"Montana, Idaho, Nevada. I'm past caring, Alex. A town in the middle of nowhere. Hot, cold, dry, wet, it no longer matters. Someplace small, neglected. America has millions of illegal immigrants. We'll live in the underground economy, find a way to blend in."
"I'll open a lawn service, and you'll be a maid. Is that the idea?"
"We'll be alive, Alex. And free."
He leaned over and touched her shoulder. "Listen to me. All of those millions of illegal immigrants don't have the FBI hunting them. The FBI doesn't know their names, doesn't have their physical descriptions, and could care less about them. We'd be looking over our shoulder every day. One day we'd wake up to a bunch of men in gray suits."
"But I'm tired of sitting here, waiting."
"Well, I have an idea."
"I'm willing to try anything.
"Unfortunately, it will take time."
"How much time?"
"Probably a lot. Probably too much. It's a complete gamble, anyway, an outside shot with a million things that can go wrong."
She stared up at the ceiling. "A million things can go wrong here. Tell me about it."
They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched the volume and napped. One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.
Nicky had a modest, not overly prosperous operation in Chicago run by a half-crazy, doped-out boss who put up the hunter-killer team, along with five of his own people, in a cramped, run-down rowhouse in one of the most crime-infested sections of the South Side. He called it a safehouse. It was barely a house, and anything but safe. Black and Hispanic gangs roamed the surrounding streets at will. They did not particularly cater to these Russians who were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to muscle into the local action.
The rowhouse quickly became a prison, a quite miserable one. The gangs were large, mean, and tough. A tiny bodega was positioned on a corner across the street. They hung there, blacks and spics in variously colored bandanas, mixing freely together, never less than fifteen of them. They sipped from canned beers, rapped back and forth, shared menthols, and glowered at the rowhouse across the street. They seemed to be honoring a local cease-fire among themselves, a temporary alliance against a common foe. For decades, they had battled and scrapped with one another for these streets-every inch of concrete, every crackhouse and whore's corner was a victory, paid in blood. No way were they going to let these Ivan-come-latelys have a piece of the action. At night they sometimes sprayed the rowhouse with bullets. They scattered when the cops arrived, only to reappear the instant the last blue suit departed. Once, a pair of Molotov cocktails sailed through the windows.
The Russians slept on the floors, and crawled on their bellies every time they passed a window. A stack of portable fire extinguishers was stored in the kitchen. First aid kits were in every room in the house.
Katya and her crew ventured outside as infrequently as possible. Two left on a grocery run one night and never returned. They may have fled. Nobody blamed them.
A few weeks later, a box with four ears was left on the doorstep. They studied the shriveled things and debated at length, but nobody could be entirely certain they belonged to Dmitri and Josef. Dmitri did in fact have two earrings. And okay, yes, Josef's ears were sort of large and floppy; but no one knew for sure.