To Ray Brewster she texted: north on 87, past Kingston 5 min ago.
She turned off the phone and she slid it into her boot.
The two men in the front seat, locked in their discussion, locked into their anger and mistrust, did not notice.
Braun drove aggressively and fast, and closed the distance between himself and Zviman’s car to ten miles. He glanced at the text message.
He was entirely sure of their destination. All stories, he thought, come back to their beginning, all circles must close.
85
Zviman opened his phone, as he had done every thirty minutes for the past two hours. He pressed a number. When Anna answered he said, ‘Pericles. Yes, all is well.’ He clicked shut the phone.
My fist slammed against him hard, then I grabbed his head and pounded it against the steering wheel.
Leonie screamed, ‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’
The BMW veered across its lanes, narrowly missing a semi that laid on its horn like a stuttering war cry. It is very hard to fight a man one-handed.
‘I know where we’re going,’ I yelled at her. ‘He can be our hostage to get the kids.’
Then she understood. Leonie snaked her arm around Zviman’s throat and levered back. He gagged and spat, arching in the seat. I hit the brake with my foot and levered up the parking brake. The BMW howled and bucked but we stopped. I took my good hand and pounded five blows into his sorry face. It felt good. He finally sagged, beaten, out.
‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ Leonie said. Panic jagged her voice.
‘Listen to me. I know where we’re going now. The company that was a front for the sisters, for the house in New Jersey. I looked them up. They owned another retreat off this highway, about five more miles up. That’s where we’re going. And now we can trade the kids for him.’
‘What if you’re wrong?’ Leonie said. ‘Oh, God. What if you’re wrong?’
I hauled the unconscious Zviman into the back seat. ‘Drive,’ I told Leonie. I accessed the Associated Languages School website. ‘North about four miles, then turn onto Mountain Bridge Road.’
‘If we drive up into a bunch of execs learning Spanish, I’m going to kill you, Sam.’ Her voice was a ragged, broken shock.
‘I’ll kill myself,’ I said.
86
Associated Languages School, near the Catskill Forest Preserve, New York
The building was a long, low affair, hidden in the dense growth of red cedars and sugar maples, with a curving gravel driveway before it. It looked like a grand mansion, one perhaps left over from the Catskills’ Borscht Belt days, a shrunken resort. A toy, ignored and misplaced in the heavy forest. The windows were boarded. The grass around the building needed cutting. Abandoned, like the house in New Jersey. Or, if not abandoned, then not in use to help tourists conjugate their French verbs or contract out to business employees who needed to master Spanish or Farsi in between shuffleboard and trout fishing.
‘What do we do?’ Leonie said as she pulled up to the shuttered house.
‘We trade him for the kids and we get the hell out of here.’
‘Sam… ’
‘We did what they wanted but we’re done playing by their rules,’ I said.
‘What about what he said… about you being some kind of project… ?’
‘Ignore him,’ I said.
No one emerged onto the porch.
I opened the car door, got out. Put both hands on Zviman’s head, one along the jaw, the other on the throat. ‘Honk the horn.’
Leonie hammered twice on the horn. It sliced through the hush of the woods.
A moment later the door opened. Anna Tremaine stepped out onto the porch. She wore a cream-colored T-shirt and green cargo pants. She was pale and did not look quite so confident as she had a million years ago in Las Vegas.
She held a gun in her hand.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We’re here to pick up our kids.’ My voice rose. I didn’t sound quite human.
‘So I see.’
‘Who else is inside, Anna?’
There were no other cars parked in the lot. She just stared at me.
I held Zviman up. ‘Answer me, or I break his neck.’
‘Let him go.’ Now she raised the gun. Toward Leonie.
‘No.’
‘I’ll shoot her.’
‘And I’ll snap his neck. Answer me. Who’s inside.’
‘No one.’ She could be lying. It’s what I would have said, if there was a full house of guards.
‘Okay, drop the gun.’
‘I don’t believe you can break his neck,’ she said. ‘With your arm in a cast.’
‘It’s all in the fingers and the biceps, baby, and those are working just fine.’ I strangled Zviman more than a little. He obligingly purpled and gagged for me. I thought about what he’d tried to do to Mila, and what he’d done to Nelly, and it took control not to crush the life out of him.
‘Okay, Sam, let’s talk.’
‘My friend already maimed the son of a bitch. I will be happy to finish him off.’
‘Please, Sam, let him go,’ Anna said. ‘Let’s all calm down and… ’
‘I am done negotiating with you!’ I screamed at her. I’m not sure I’d ever quite heard my voice sound this way. ‘This is what is happening. Either you drop that gun right now, or the next sound you hear is his vertebrae snapping. This! Is the extent. Of. Our. Talking!’
Then silence, the wind crying in the trees.
Anna’s gaze went to Zviman’s purpling face, and she dropped the gun. I doubted he would have done the same for her.
‘Leonie, go get it,’ I said.
Leonie hurried up to the porch. She took the gun, eased it away from Anna.
‘Okay, stay calm.’ Anna tried to smile at Leonie. ‘Leonie, I want you to know, I’ve taken good care of-’ and Leonie shot her, in the heart. A curl of smoke, a flower of blood on Anna’s T-shirt, and then she fell wordlessly.
Leonie ran inside the house.
Damn it. I hammered a fist into Zviman’s face and dropped him to the gravel. I tore into the house after her. The house was old, perhaps a grand country estate built back in the early 1900s. The entranceway was hardwoods, with a large staircase leading up to a mezzanine on the second floor. Sheets covered most but not all of the furniture. Leonie ran, searching, through the adjoining rooms: study, library, dining room, kitchen.
‘Leonie, come back here,’ I yelled at her. Hell, if Anna was lying, we could be gunned down. And she had the gun, not me.
‘Taylor!’ she screamed.
I lost her, then heard footsteps caroming up a flight of stairs I couldn’t see. I followed the noise through the kitchen. A bottle was warming on a stove. I saw a formula box on the kitchen island, the remains of a grown-up’s meal of steak, salad and French fries.
A couple of soiled bibs. A noise between grief and joy surged in my throat.
Beyond the main room of the kitchen was a servants’ staircase. She had already run up to the second floor.
‘Daniel!’ I screamed. Like he was going to answer. But my mind was shuttered or sharpened, I’m not sure which. On the second floor I saw a hallway of rooms, one of them open.
I ran into the doorway. Leonie, standing at a crib, picking up a baby, holding the child close to her shoulder in a mother’s embrace, nearly weeping in relief. I looked around the room.
There was only the one crib.
I bolted down the rest of the hallway, opening every door. Next was an empty bedroom, a woman’s clothes tossed on the foot of the bed. No crib. Anna’s room.
The next was another room, men’s clothes littering the floor. Where Zviman had stayed.
The other rooms were empty.
‘No, no!’ I screamed. ‘Daniel!’
I ran back to the first room. Leonie stood there, holding the baby, cradling its blond hair against her shirt.
Blond hair. I remembered the weathered picture, handled with love. The smiling dark-haired girl. Taylor was a bigger baby, and brown-haired.