In a room off the bridge, Arian Dragusha prepared a pot of oatmeal. He had brought the steel-cut oats with him, in a Ziploc bag in his pocket, not trusting the Mazeppa to stock his brand.
He mixed water and oats, then set the pot on the stove, stirring with a long spoon. At the other end of the room, Kyle Ridley sat at a small table with a checkered vinyl tablecloth, waiting restlessly for her money.
The young were always impatient. As a young man, he too had been in a hurry to obtain the things he wanted. From the start, he had been indifferent to the methods he used or the victims he left in his trail. He had been ruthless, desperate, driven by the urgency of one who had known hunger and privation. He had scratched and clawed, had bared his teeth at all those who opposed him, and had not hesitated to kill. Ujku, they called him, as if he were something inhuman. He hadn’t minded. He had liked the name and reputation he had won.
In his middle years, having acquired his hoard of treasure, he had settled in for a long period of watchfulness, knowing that what he had taken from others could all too easily be taken from him. To win one’s fortune, he had discovered, was not so difficult. To preserve it against the jackals and carrion birds—that was a harder task. He had passed the prime of his life in constant vigilance, a sentry in a tower, defending the ramparts, repelling all attacks.
Curiously, he did not make much use of his money. He lived modestly. He never traveled. It had been many years since there had been a woman in his life. He supported only such charitable causes as were necessary to maintain his respectability in the community. To him, money was not to spend but to have. He liked the thought of it, the sheer fact of its existence. He liked to read the columns of figures. Sometimes he visualized them as he nodded off to sleep.
It was a warm and comforting feeling to have money. Without it, a man was as naked and unprotected as a beast in the wild. An old man was a frail creature, one who felt the cold too readily. Money was his only buffer against the vast incalculable cruelty of the world.
The mixture in the pot steamed and bubbled as it thickened into a glutinous sludge. Arian ate oatmeal three times a day, and he always prepared it himself.
He detested the stuff. It was peasant fare, flavorless and cheap. But he knew his stomach would rebel at more sumptuous nourishment. A little coffee he could tolerate—he liked to sip a good macchiato—and some fresh fruit and boiled potatoes, but little else. His digestion was failing. Everything was failing. His hands shook. His eyes were dim. He wore two hearing aids. Sometimes to his great shame he soiled himself. He forgot things, very recent things, and yet he remembered the days of his youth with arresting clarity. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a stranger’s face, wrinkled, age-spotted, sagging.
Still he hung on to life, even if it was a life he despised, the life of a half-crippled old man slurping porridge from a bowl. The Wolf was elderly and lame, but not helpless, and he would lead his pack until the end.
He poured out the oatmeal, placed the bowl on the table, and sat, shoulders hunched, head lowered. For a long time his only action was the slow rise and fall of the arm holding the spoon.
Across from him, Kyle adjusted the newsboy cap at different angles, studying her reflection in the table’s stainless steel surface. She seemed amused by the sight, smiling as if at a private joke.
At length Arian finished his oatmeal, pushing the bowl aside. “Now I guess you want your pay.”
Kyle nodded. Her cool gaze never left his face.
“Is a lot of money. Much cash.”
“So?”
“Lot of money,” Arian said again.
“Perhaps you’re thinking you could put me in the container with Parker and keep the cash.”
“Me? How could I think a thing so unworthy?” He spoke the words lightly, smiling his cold lupine smile.
“You know you can’t. Not if you want Parker’s trail to dead-end in Hawaii, as we discussed.”
“Yes, your clever plan. Your blonde wig and stolen identity.”
“A hundred grand is a bargain for an airtight alibi. You don’t want the police sniffing around your crew. Someone may talk.”
“As I have said, a smart girl.”
“Am I getting my money or not?”
He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “You get it.”
Cane in hand, he tapped his way to a footlocker. He opened the padlock and retrieved a briefcase. It had two latches, each secured by a separate combination lock. He undid the latches one at a time.
It was impossible ever to take too many precautions against betrayal and theft. Enemies were everywhere. Never could he be complacent, never could he let down his guard. Even his detestable oatmeal could be prepared by nobody but himself.
“You are wise,” he told Kyle Ridley as he snapped open the valise, “to trust no one. Even as a child I knew this.” He unzipped the lining to expose bricks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in rubber bands. “I grew up under Hoxha, the dictator, a monster. Spies and informers in every village. They would tell on you to the secret police for anything you said or did, or for no reason at all. Then you were never seen again.”
The girl did not appear to be listening. She stared at the bricks of cash as he stacked them neatly on a counter. Five bricks, ten thousand dollars apiece, to be added to the $50,000 he had already paid.
“Persons of your age,” he went on, indulging in his reminiscences though he knew she cared nothing for them, “have no memory of communism. To you it is ancient history, eh? But I lived it.” He spoke with a survivor’s pride. “I escaped when I was seventeen, on a fishing boat that carried me to Corfu, across twenty miles of open water. I paid the smugglers all the money I had, money I had earned in many dangerous ways. Even so, it was understood that if a patrol boat gave chase, I would be thrown overboard. This was a risk I accepted.” He added with a shrug, “I cannot swim.”
He picked up the first of the five bricks but deliberately delayed handing it over. He enjoyed the feel of the thick slab of bills in his grasp.
“From Kassiopi in Corfu I went west across the island, then over to Italy. In Genoa I booked passage on a cargo ship—a humble vessel, not so grand as the Mazeppa. To pay my way, I swabbed decks, scrubbed toilets. On my eighteenth birthday I arrived in New York. I knew no English, had no money, no family in America, no future. Yet here I stand.”
She held out her hand. Grudgingly he surrendered the first wad of cash. She stuffed it too eagerly into her purse.
“You did not carry a handbag before,” he said, noticing it for the first time.
“It’s hers. Parker’s.”
“Oh.” He chuckled. “Looting her body before she is even dead.”
“I need to pass for her, don’t I? The hat is hers, too. Stylish, huh? You know, if it was 1932.”
He handed over a second brick of cash. “You got to know her, I think?”
“Only a little.”
“Why did she not kill Shaban?”
“She’s trying to reform.” The girl said it with contempt.
Arian thought he understood Kyle Ridley very well. His grandson, on the other hand, would understand Bonnie Parker much better.
“Is not easy,” he said, giving her the third brick, “to reform. Those in our business—we must kill and keep on killing, until we die. Is no other way.”
Kyle pushed the money deeper into the purse. “I suppose she’s finding that out.”
“It does not trouble you to betray her to me?”
“Why should it? You do what you have to do. It’s all about looking out for number one.”
“Ah. Yes. I know this expression. A very American attitude.”
As for himself, he cared not at all about Parker’s fate, or what agonies she would suffer in the hold. There was an unlimited quantity of pain in the world. Any pain he contributed was no more than a raindrop in the sea.
He surrendered the last two bricks. “There it is,” he said. “The balance of your payment. The deposit, you have obtained already. Perhaps you have it with you.”
She smiled. “No such luck. It’s someplace secure.”
Arian nodded. “Most prudent,” he said mildly.
He did not need to trick her into revealing the money’s whereabouts. He knew very well where it was. On the day of their last meeting, his man Raco had been tasked with following her. Raco had seen Kyle Ridley go into a bank and rent a safe deposit box.
Naturally the girl had suspected nothing. Such was the way of youth. So cynical, and yet so trusting.
He closed the briefcase and replaced it in the locker. “You will get all this contraband onto the airplane without trouble, I am sure.”
“I’ve smuggled kilos of heroin. I can handle wads of cash.”
He had no doubt of it. “You will use Newark Airport?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“But wherever you depart from, you will drive her Jeep there, and leave it in long-term parking.”
“Of course. As we discussed. Don’t worry about it.”
Arian nodded. He was not worried.
He accompanied her out of the side room, onto the bridge. It was a long narrow space like a railroad car—but this railroad car was on the seventh story of a tower, its wide windows offering panoramic views of the freighter’s bow and stern. So different from the freighter that had brought him to America, so modern and computerized, and yet, standing here, he might have been on that other ship, a boy of almost eighteen, breathing the briny wind.
He passed the conning station, the ship’s wheel nestled amid rows of mysterious consoles, a bewildering technological array. In a far corner, a man with a white streak in his beard stood studying a chart. Otherwise the bridge was empty.
Arian moved carefully, with the slow shuffle of age. The girl took quicker steps, eager to be going now that she had her windfall.
At the door to the bridge wing on the port side, he stopped. “You do not need an old man to slow you down,” he said graciously. “I will linger here and watch as the last containers are loaded. You take your money and enjoy your new life.”
Kyle pulled the purse closer to her body, an unconscious protective gesture, like a mother cradling her child. “Say hello to Shaban for me. And say good-bye.”
He did not find this amusing. It was not a fit subject for humor. Still, he said nothing, merely bade her a wordless farewell with a courtly half-bow.
She left the bridge, heading for the central stairway that would take her down to the deck six floors below. He stepped out onto the wing, an unroofed deck high above the water, and through narrowed eyes he watched her go.
Her plan to impersonate Parker was a good one. But she had failed to take into consideration two things. First, Arian Dragusha was not concerned with the police. He owned too many of them. Anyway, without Parker’s body they could prove nothing—and her body would vanish into the ocean four thousand miles from here, with all identifying features removed.
And second, Kyle Ridley had betrayed Parker to save herself. Surely she could betray Arian Dragusha no less easily. She believed, after all, only in looking out for number one.
Glancing back into the bridge, Arian curled a finger in a silent summons to the bearded man.
“Xhaxhi?” Raco Prifti approached with a quick step.
“You recognized the girl who just left?”
“Po, Xhaxhi. Do I follow her again?”
“Is not necessary. I know where she will go. To the same bank she visited last time. It will open at eight thirty on a Saturday. You will be there.”
“Unë kuptoj.” I understand.
“She will retrieve the contents of her safe deposit box. She will drive off in Parker’s Jeep. Probably she will go directly to an airport.”
“Yes?”
“At your first opportunity, kill her.” Arian shut his eyes as his long-fingered hands curled slowly into claws. “And bring me back my money.”