Laughs at himself.
Still walks fast, though.
He sees his car.
Something’s different.
I had the window up.
Now it’s down.
Did I have it up?
He approaches the car from the blind spot just in case.
Pops his trunk with the fob.
A slate-gray Volkswagen Jetta slides by, the driver eyeing him suspiciously.
He waves without meaning to, an instinct.
Puts on his gun belt.
Feels better.
Looks in the window, sees nobody, relaxes a bit.
Sits down, a chill going through him.
Damn it’s cold in here, I was running the air but damn.
Freon leak or something?
He starts the car.
Cocks the mirror to look at himself, thinks he looks ridiculous in his badass shades.
Opens the glove box to put them away and get a piece of gum.
Sees it.
The antler.
He checks his windows and mirrors again to make sure there’s nobody near the car, then looks at it again.
It’s a goddamned antler, an antler from a young buck.
He nearly picks it up, then thinks about DNA and prints and decides not to touch it until he has a sandwich bag.
It really is cold in the car, cold enough to make him put the heat on.
He closes the glove box and drives off with his sunglasses on, chewing no gum.
65
The men in the slate-gray Volkswagen Jetta don’t talk much.
They are on their way to avenge Mikhail Dragomirov, whom Georgi believes was murdered by a female associate of one Andrew Blankenship, who lives on Willow Fork Road, but whose dwelling should be identified by a turquoise Mustang from the late sixties, what Americans of a certain age call a muscle car.
Sergei Alexandrovich Rozhkov doesn’t like this.
He doesn’t like Georgi, either.
Sergei is nearly seventy-seven, but still vigorous. Still dangerous. His son back in Brooklyn looks older than he does now, ever since the liver problems turned him the color of bad salmon.
Georgi is not his son.
Georgi is the nephew of an old friend, the kind of friend you do inconvenient things for.
Even when that friend is dead.
Georgi has stumbled into his midthirties, neither fully American nor truly Russian, too scared to join the mob, an honest citizen who doesn’t notice shit. The man they passed on the road was a policeman putting on a gun. Georgi looked at him obviously, drawing his attention. Getting his own face looked at. There would have been no room for such a man in the Odessa operation, but that was a long time ago now.
What’s more, he’s clearly in love with his estranged cousin, the niece, and wants to impress her by killing those who may or may not have killed Misha. The little niece believes it was this Blankenship, a man of small consequence, who killed Misha over a whore, and she won’t say how she knows this.
Sergei is all but sure Misha drowned.
It’s always this way. When we lose someone we love, we want a villain. What if the villain was the whiskey Misha was drinking and the currents in the lake? He should shoot a bottle of scotch, empty a clip into the lake, and go home.
Misha was a good man, strong at chess, a genius with numbers, but he comes from a degenerate tribe with their best days behind them. Everybody’s best days are behind them. The world has become a playground of idiots and zealots, where the ever-shrinking center of reasonable men must work harder and harder to keep the lights on and the bombs from going off.
Sergei wants to go back to Brooklyn and get out of this paradise of horseshit and apples where you must drive everywhere.
He misses the pastrami at the deli on the street full of Greeks.
Now they wind their way up Willow Fork Road, looking for a house that doesn’t seem to be there.
“This address she gave us is correct?”
Sergei speaks English because Georgi spends too long searching for his words in Russian and this is annoying.
Georgi answers him in Russian anyway.
“I don’t know. She says so, but his address is not listed. The Mustang is known; the… what is the word? sales record has been found. On the Internet. And this color, blue-green and bright.”
Sergei says the Russian word for turquoise.
Georgi switches to English.
“Yes, biryuzoviy. It’s an unusual color, and an unusual car. Look,” he says, showing him a cut-out page from an auto sales magazine, a 1968 Mustang circled in red pen, a tiny skull drawn badly near it.
“It’s a nice car,” Sergei says.
They come to the end of the road, execute a three-point turn, and go back.
And then, good luck!
The turquoise Mustang appears from a tree-hidden drive that seems to lead to no house; it has to be the same car. And it is a magnificent beast. It takes a right onto the road and tears out, using its big, Vietnam-era motor to vault down the winding road. The motor is louder than those in modern cars; it sounds powerful, like a predator. And classic. The man who owns such a car will be good with his hands, a good worker. It occurs to Sergei that he may like the man in the Mustang more than the nephew of his old associate.
But a promise is a promise.
They follow the Mustang out of Dog Neck Harbor all the way past Fair Haven, where it pulls off 104A and parks behind a barn that has been converted into an auto garage across the street from silos. North Star. Nice name.
The driver has already gone into the garage when they pull around.
“Remember,” Georgi says, “he has long black hair like an Indian and he is thin.”
“Am I a man you must say things twice to?”
“Sorry.”
“Let me see your gun.”
Georgi looks around, then removes his snub-nosed .38.
Sergei takes it from him, opens the cylinder, spins it, his heart gladdening at the sight of brass. Shell casings are his favorite jewelry.
“This is ready. Try not to shoot me.”
He now pulls out his own Makarov, flips down the safety, puts it back into his coat.
They get out.
Open the door, walk in like they know what they’re doing. Sneaking is for idiots; people who look as though they have a purpose rarely get questioned.
They find themselves in a back room, an employee room of sorts, where a number of heavily tattooed Mexicans sit around a table littered with tequila bottles and half-eaten plates smeared with brown and green sauces.
The place smells like chocolate, cinnamon, and garlic.
Now a voice behind them.
Mexican accent.
“Keep your hands out of your pockets.”
They do.
“Why were you following me?”
“I like Mustangs,” Sergei says. “I was hoping that one might be for sale. Is it?”
Chancho grunts.
The men at the table look at the Russians with eyes like brown stone. Several of them have their hands ominously under the table.
“Why were you coming in the back door to talk about buying a car?”
“That’s the way you came in. We wanted to talk to you.”
Chancho grunts.
Gonzo walks in, sees guns, puts his hands over his eyes like the see-no-evil monkey and walks briskly out.
“Why the pistolas? You know, it’s not nice to bring guns to the back door to ask about buying a car.”
“Please,” Georgi starts.
Sergei says, in Russian, “If you beg I will shoot you myself.”
Then, in English, “This was our mistake. I apologize for disturbing you. With your permission, we will leave now and we will not return.”