The Right Hand (10 page)

When he heard his uncle’s heavy footsteps lift from the deck onto the dock, he started the count, but every minute burned away as hot and slow as roasting embers. He could feel his heart racing and he tried his best to calm it, but that only made the beating worse. He couldn’t sit still for the full hour. After twenty-seven minutes, when it felt as if the walls of his cabin were going to press him flat, he stuck his head out of the hatch and looked around. The sun was down and the docks appeared empty. Laughter drifted over from somewhere to his left, and the sound buoyed him. He breathed once, choked down a stomach spasm, and made his move.

No one stopped him.

The street at the end of the dock twisted up toward an old mission and was lined with souvenir shops. Christmas lights blinked over the shop fronts, and multicolored flags and pennants crisscrossed above the street. Was it Christmas already? Had it passed? He couldn’t remember.

His legs felt wobbly and the horizon seemed to roll as if the earth were made of water. He didn’t know if that was from being at sea for so long or from his heart exploding inside his chest. A screen door slammed to his right and he jumped. A couple stumbled out, hands all over each other, but the man was too tall to be his uncle. Some kids a little older than him moved his way, kicking a soccer ball, and they stared at him as if  he were in an aquarium. One called to him in a language he didn’t understand. The smile on the kid’s face conveyed the opposite of what that expression generally intends.

Clay turned on his heels just as a pair of military police officers stepped out of an apartment doorway. The kid said something to him again and took a step forward, holding his hands up while his friends laughed.

Clay shook his head and hurried over to the officers.

“You must help me.”

The first officer stepped aside so his partner could stoop down. The man had soft eyes and a kind face. “English?” he asked gently.

“American.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Yes…I—”

“What’re you doing there?” Uncle Bobby’s voice erupted just behind him. Clay catapulted behind the officers, tucking in behind their legs.

“This boy is yours?”

“I’m his uncle. We’re Americans.”

Clay could see his chance evaporating. He made a decision to lay everything on the table. “He kidnapped me! He beats me! Look! Look!”

Clay pulled up his shirt and showed the purple bruises in clear relief against his skin. The kind officer ran his fingers over the splotches, then wheeled on his uncle.

“This is a serious thing.”

His uncle’s nostrils flared and he glared fire at the boy.
Just walk away,
Clay thought.
Just walk away and sail away and leave me here. I’m not worth the trouble.

A kind of grudging resolve replaced the anger on his uncle’s face. He reached into his back pocket, fished out his wallet, and withdrew a fistful of bills.

“All right, Officers. Sorry to inconvenience you. Here’s a bonus to the Federale fund.” He thrust the bills forward while Clay watched, his stomach lurching. The two officers stared at the proffered bills but didn’t take them. Clay’s uncle sighed, licked his thumb, and counted out five more bills. This time he pressed them into the kind-looking officer’s hand. His fingers then circled Clay’s small wrist and jerked him away from the apartment’s stoop, back toward the dock. Clay dug his heels in like a dog fighting a leash.

“No!” he screamed, and reached back for the Brazilian officers, but they stood there dumb, immobile. With every bit of his strength, Clay wrenched his wrist down, freeing himself. Surprised, he spun like a top and began to run for the streets.

He made it only two steps before he felt the wind knocked out of his stomach as a foot flew out of nowhere to catch him flush in the gut. He crumpled over from the kick as the kind-faced police officer pulled his foot back. Then he felt himself picked up by the collar and handed back over to his uncle, who nodded appreciatively.

That was the day Clay learned that all men had a price, some cheaper than others. It was a lesson he would keep at the forefront of his mind until he was dead.

They dumped the car for a truck and the truck for a van as they headed west. She slept most of the first day, and he preferred it that way. Sleeping meant not talking, and not talking meant he could keep on thinking of her as an object. He had sacked the pantry of a tiny restaurant on the outskirts of Khabarovsk and taken cans of beans and boxes of crackers from the backs of shelves. The theft would go unnoticed, at least for a little while. Russian agents would be scouring all the police reports around Vladivostok for any signs of the fugitives. He hoped they would believe he’d keep heading east, catch a freighter over to Japan, out of the country, as soon as he had the girl. Instead, he followed a northern route through Siberia, swinging up through the plains, though not so high up as to hit snow.

He looked over and the girl was staring at him. He grimaced, looked away, and when he looked again, she was still watching his face. If she weren’t so goddamn stunning, this would be—

“You never told me your name,” she said.

He ran through the checklist of his thoughts—
Don’t tell her, use a cover name
—and then, for some reason he couldn’t explain, crossed them off and said, “Austin.”

She repeated it, and it sounded funny in her pronunciation. For the first time, a smile broke across her face and lit up the car. He was glad he had told her his name.

“Have you been to Los Angeles?” she asked.

He thought the question funny but didn’t want to embarrass her. “Once or twice.”

“It is my dream to go there.”

“You want to be discovered?”

“Discovered?”

“Act in movies?”

“Oh, no. I have no talent for it. I want to see Mickey Mouse.”

“Ahhh…”

“Do you think they will let me do that?”

A twinge of pain rippled through Clay, but he kept it off his face. “I’m sure they will.”

She folded her hands in her lap, pleased. “Are there many Hungarians in Los Angeles?”

“There are many everything there.”

She laughed. “When you came through the door, I thought you were the most frightening man I’d ever seen. I am pleased to know you are funny.”

He should just stop, stop talking, stop engaging, and drive on, keep the conversation short, trifling, but he seemed powerless to check himself. The snowball was already rolling downhill, and an avalanche seemed inevitable. What was it about this girl?

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“Wife?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“It is forbidden?”

“It’s just too hard in this line of work. I have to…” He searched for the correct Russian term. “Keep secrets? Leave for a new destination at any time. Sometimes for months…​years. It would be difficult…very difficult for a wife. It would be unfair of me to put anyone through that. Selfish, yes?”

She nodded. “I would like to be married someday. There was a boy on my street named Jani I thought would marry me.”

“Yes?”

“His parents moved away. I don’t know where they went. One day he was my neighbor and the next he was gone. It was a long time ago.” She wiped her hands on her pants leg as though she were wiping away the memory.

“I’m sure you’ll find many willing suitors in California.”

“I’ll have to learn English.”

“Yes.”

“Can you teach me?”

“I don’t—”

“How do you say
chicken
?”

He laughed. “Why
chicken
?”

“I like chicken.”

He told her how to say it in English and she did her best to repeat it.

A new thought occurred to him. What if she was on to him, had observed his change in demeanor and concluded he was not willing to help her anymore? What if this conversation in the car was an act, a way to humanize her in his mind, a way to get him to connect with her, care for her? Was she that calculating? Was it an innate survival mechanism? That smile? The warmth, the honesty of her voice? The sensitivity in her eyes?

My God,
he thought.
If this is all a scheme, it’s working
.

“What did you hear?”

Her smile faded. “Hear?”

“The Kremlin official. Your employer. Benidrov. What did he tell you that put you in so much danger?”

She turned her eyes to the window. A vast plain stretched out to the horizon. Theirs was the only vehicle for twenty miles in either direction.

Her voice cracked as she spoke. “He told me so many things that didn’t make sense—names, people, departments within the government—I had never heard of them. It was all meaningless to me. It was all so stupid. Meaningless and stupid. I didn’t ask him to tell me these things.”

“If it was all meaningless, why did you run?”

“He frightened me. He would say things.” She lowered her voice to imitate him. “‘You don’t understand what I’m telling you, my little flower, and that is good. If you did I’d have to pluck out all your petals.’ Every day, he’d say this to me. Vomit out his nonsense and then brag about me not knowing what he was saying while threatening me at the same time. The tension built and built until I couldn’t take it anymore. How he learned I knew Russian I don’t know, but he came home and tried to strangle me. But he couldn’t even do that right. I managed to get my knee into him and ran off with nothing but the clothes on my back. I heard he killed himself after that. I knew I had to disappear, but all I can tell you is I don’t remember anything he told me. Not one word of it.”

She was lying about the last part. He could tell by the way her eyes darted down and to the left—a giveaway so common it was referred to as the Liar’s Look at Langley. So she did remember something Benidrov had told her, but Clay knew better than to press right now. She was frightened and vulnerable and defensive, and if he played this poorly, she might retreat.

“I said it before. It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”

“Yes. You said it. And I wish to believe it. But if I hadn’t run to David, if I had just vanished, then he would still be alive.”

“And you’d be dead and they still would have targeted your family because they would want to be sure you hadn’t told them anything.” He could see on her face that she hadn’t thought of that. “You did the right thing under extraordinary pressure.”

She nodded and then, as if to reassure herself, nodded again. “Thank you.”

“Thank me when you’re at Disneyland.”

“I will.”

She grinned and turned again to the window. A few minutes later, he heard her breathing grow steady as she drifted to sleep.

What does she know?
he thought.
What’s important enough that they sent an army to kill her?

The sun dropped behind them, and only the hum of the van’s engine kept his thoughts company.

I
T WAS
dumb and it was dangerous and it was so unlike Clay’s modus operandi as to have no precedent. There would be no ledger for this side excursion; he couldn’t think in those terms, because he knew it would bankrupt the mission ten times over.

They would be watching her, he was sure of it, and that made the stop ridiculous. Still, Marika had asked him if a visit would be possible, had said that the woman had offered them a chance for a meal and a bath before they ventured into Moscow, and it was the urgency of the way she asked that pierced his defenses. The woman was named Natasha Chkeidze and had been a maid in Benidrov’s house at the same time that Marika had worked as a nanny. Natasha had selflessly harbored Marika in those first twenty-four hours when the young woman fled—she had given Marika money and food and bought her some clothes, and if she was alive and unharmed, she had most certainly withstood FSB interrogation in the aftermath of Benidrov’s suicide. Marika owed her life to this woman and wanted to thank her. Clay and she understood it would be Marika’s last chance to do so, though they expected it to be for different reasons.

Natasha lived in a twenty-story apartment building in a southeastern suburb of Moscow near the Promzona metro station. This section of the city was mostly industrial, and the citizens who lived here weren’t quite as prosperous as the ones in the southwest, near the university.

Clay parked in a garage two blocks away.

“Wait here. Don’t leave the car. Keep your head down. I’ll be back in two hours.”

“And if you don’t return?”

“Then get yourself to the US embassy any way you can, understand?”

She nodded.

He took the full two hours. She looked as relieved to see him as if he had just saved her from drowning.

“The building looks clear. If FSB visited your friend, it was a while ago and they didn’t leave a permanent surveillance team to watch the building. They didn’t know we’d come to Moscow. They have to believe we’re out of the country, so we have surprise on our side, too. On top of all that, it’s a dumb move for us to make, and I don’t think they’re expecting me to make a dumb move.”

“So dumb is good?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. Come…let’s make this quick.”

“She’s there? My friend?”

“Yeah. I saw her check her mail and return to her apartment.”

Clay helped Marika out of the van and they crossed a congested street to enter an alley. The smog was as thick as fog here. No wonder so many people living in this city had bronchial asthma.

“We go in the back and up the service elevator. If I catch wind of anything odd, I yank you out of there and you follow as fast as those legs will carry you, yes? No good-byes, no hugs, no tears…we run for the car and don’t look back.”

“I understand. And thank you. I promise not to burden you for much longer.”

“What makes you think stopping at your friend’s apartment in the middle of a national manhunt is a burden?”

She punched Clay in the shoulder playfully, and he feigned a wince. It was good to see her act like a teenager instead of a woman who had seen and heard too much over the last month. They approached the building, and Clay swept the alley with practiced eyes. Nothing. If someone was watching, then they were better at this than him.

The pair of fugitives popped inside a brown steel door that led to the building’s furnace room. Six old-fashioned boilers with Cyrillic lettering made a hissing sound as they passed.

They forwent the elevator for the stairs and soon stood outside Natasha’s seventh-floor apartment door. Marika balled a fist, but Clay stayed her hand, then easily picked the lock, allowing them both to slip inside. They could hear chopping in the kitchen; it sounded like someone dicing a vegetable on a cutting board.

“Natasha?” Marika called softly, and the dicing immediately stopped.

Clay’s antennae went up and he tensed but didn’t pull out his weapon. The last thing he needed was a hysterical woman screaming her head off in a cramped apartment.

Natasha appeared in the kitchen entrance, her hair covered in a scarf, her cheeks red and her eyes already wet.

“Marika? Is it really you,
solnyshko
?” She looked back and forth between them as if she thought she might be having a hallucination.

“Yes, it’s me.” The large woman opened her arms and Marika bounded across the distance between them, burying herself in the woman’s ample bosom.

“Shhh. Shhh,
solnyshko
. Shhh, little sun. It’s all right,” the woman cooed, and Clay realized Marika was sobbing. He excused himself and headed to the bathroom, leaving Marika to explain who he was. He’d seen more emotion over the last few weeks than he had in the previous few years. He didn’t need to see any more.

They sipped black tea in glass mugs while Marika laid out the events that had led her back to Moscow. Natasha patted her knee and refilled her mug when the level of the tea neared the bottom. The woman could make damn good tea, Clay had to admit.

When Marika concluded her tale, Natasha clucked and said, “When masters are fighting, the servants’ forelocks are creaking.” Marika nodded, but Clay could tell she didn’t quite understand the expression.

“It’s an old Russian proverb…it means when powerful people fight, it is the commoners who suffer.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” Marika offered to her friend.

“You must stay the night,” Natasha insisted.

Clay began to protest, but the big woman would not be dissuaded. “Look at you two. You both look like you haven’t slept in months. Your eyes are as red as the devil. And you smell like a barn. Bathe, then sleep, then be on your way.”

“Please,” Marika importuned softly, afraid of his answer.

Clay shook his head but was surprised to hear himself say, “Okay.”

He grew older and the beatings worsened. His uncle was like a lion that worries about a cub growing strong enough to challenge him so wounds it while he can.

He hectored Clay constantly, the criticisms and jabs becoming so commonplace as to fail to even register. The boy didn’t respond, didn’t give his uncle further provocation.

At first, he started swimming just to get away. An hour in the water meant an hour alone, no voices, no complaints, no pain. He waited until Uncle Bobby had drunk himself absent, then stripped down, lowered the ladder, looped a line to his ankle, and dove in, no matter where they were or what the ocean was like. It was dark and dangerous and lonely and empty and he could easily have been swept away from the boat, but the truth was, he didn’t care. If he died, he died. If the ocean took him, then so be it. There were times when he felt like pulling free the tether, spreading his arms and just fading to the bottom. His uncle would wake from his stupor and call out and there would be no one to answer, and he would shout more loudly, more angrily, and only then would he realize the kid was gone, baby, gone. Or maybe Clay should cut himself and dangle from the line like chum and wait for something large and massive to strike him. What would he feel in that last moment? Pain? Or relief? Instead, he just drifted, weightless, and opened his mind, cleared his mind, and found what all humans seek, even young men: peace. He grew more empowered as his body grew stronger, and his stays in the water lasted longer and longer, until he was swimming twenty minutes, thirty, an hour. Once, he did dive in without the rope linking him back to the boat, and he was shocked at how quickly the distance widened between them. He’d been in the water for less than a minute and the boat seemed a mile away. His heart raced and panic filled his head. A new feeling spread over him, one he didn’t know he possessed: strength. He kicked and dug his hands into the ocean and ignored the current, ignored the salt spray licking his face, ignored the wall of blackness that seemed to cover the ocean surface like a blanket each time a wave rolled between him and the boat. He was tired, he was out of oxygen, but he found that strength growing deep inside him, and before he knew it, he was at the ladder again, standing in the vastness with no one to acknowledge his accomplishment. His uncle hadn’t stirred.

And that was when his idea metastasized.

It didn’t happen often in open water, but occasionally they would pass another boat. Not a tanker or an enormous cruise ship, but a trawler or a sailboat or a touring yacht like theirs. The boats would pass in the night and sometimes the other vessel would flash a floodlight, but Clay’s uncle was always too far in his cups to respond. Clay didn’t know when the next opportunity would present itself, so he waited and watched the horizon.

Four months later, four months of nothing but emptiness and his uncle’s fists and swimming in the darkness with the taste of salt on his lips, in his nostrils, and he saw it. He was nearly asleep, just about to head below deck to his cabin, when he saw a light on the horizon. His pulse quickened and he was suddenly as alert as if he’d stuck his finger in a socket. He kept watching—maybe the ship was going to veer in the wrong direction; maybe its trajectory would take it too far away. The wind was picking up, too; perhaps the sea would grow too choppy. As he watched, though, the light steadily grew larger. He found a pair of binoculars and could just make out the vague outline of a yacht, bow pointed his way.

He looked over at his uncle, snoring steadily in a hammock he’d stretched out on the deck, an empty bottle of whiskey curled under his elbow. Clay’s breath quickened, like a sprinter psyching himself up before the starter’s pistol fires. Could he do this?

The light kept coming. It was do it now or wait for another opportunity, and who knew when that would present itself? He had to act; he had to do this now.

He stole one more look at the yacht’s light, and yes, it would pass within a couple of miles of their position, he was sure of it, and before his doubts could paralyze him, he sprang for the hatch and practically fell down the steps.

He passed his cabin without looking inside; the room held no fuzzy feelings for him. Instead, he put his shoulder into the door of his uncle’s cabin, and on the second thrust, it gave. Breathing hard, eyes raking the bed, the desk, the shelves, he stepped inside and moved toward a jar. The top wouldn’t open without popping a couple of latches, but he was too worked up, too pressed for time, so he smashed the jar on the floor, then snatched up the cash lying among the shards. There must’ve been five hundred dollars there in various denominations. He didn’t know if he’d need money, but he was thinking clearly enough to know that it might help him in a bind.

As he was reaching for the last twenty-dollar bill, he heard a rustling at the door.

“Whatchoo—whatchoo doin’?” His uncle blinked at him in a stupor, like a man waking in a front yard he doesn’t recognize. Clay had panic written all over his face, and it seemed to knock some sobriety into his uncle’s eyes.

The boy put his head down and decided to charge past, hoping Uncle Bobby’s reflexes would be too diminished to stop him, and he had almost made it, had almost sidestepped his uncle cleanly, when he felt cold fingers close around his elbow.

“Whattiz this?”

Clay tried to wrestle his arm free, but Uncle Bobby held him in an iron grip. “Y’anssser me!” he slurred. Then his eyes lighted on the money in Clay’s hands….

“Let go.”

“You wuz robbing me.”

“Let go!”

But Bobby’s nostrils flared and his eyes disappeared into slits and he shoved Clay back hard across the galley, slamming the boy into the unyielding cabinet.

The boat,
Clay thought.
The boat
.

He tried to get up, but Uncle Bobby stumbled toward him, crossing the distance in two steps. Clay kicked out with his foot, and if Bobby hadn’t been drunk the kick might not have made a dent, but it caught Bobby’s foot just as the heel was coming down and Bobby slipped and fell back against the oven, banging his head.

Clay stood up. Bobby didn’t move. He had to step over his uncle to get to the hatch, but as he crossed, Bobby grabbed his leg, and he was still strong enough to heave the boy across the galley floor. Clay slid headfirst into the bilge room door, which smashed open from the momentum.

Clay’s head felt as if someone had stuck pins in it, and he blinked blood out of his eye to see Bobby trying to rise to his feet, moving as slowly and gracelessly as a walrus. The smell of gas from the bilge hit Clay’s nostrils and gave him an idea. A ludicrous idea, but he couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t think of consequences, as those two words echoed like a mantra in his ears…
the boat, the boat, the boat
.

He reached over and pulled the feed line out of the engine so that fuel flowed from the stripped black hose. It splattered over him, but he didn’t care. He lurched up quickly and dashed back to the counter, bumping into Uncle Bobby as he did, which sent Bobby flopping onto his face. Clay flipped open the first cabinet drawer and rummaged quickly until his hands found what he was looking for, a weathered box of kitchen matches.

He backed up until his feet were near the ladder leading up to the deck. The yacht would be passing soon. He shook out a matchstick. When he struck the match, it flared, and for just a moment, he saw his uncle turn his head to look up at him from his hands and knees. What is it about fire on the tip of a match that gives us pause?

Clay returned his uncle’s hard-eyed stare, threw the match toward the bilge room, and flew up the ladder. He heard the sound of the engine blowing, felt heat on the back of his neck, but he was too focused on the horizon to flinch. The yellow light was still there, glowing ever closer. Clay stripped off his shirt and his shorts, hurried quickly to the rail near the bow, snatched up a life jacket, and prepared to dive into the black water. As his legs crouched to jump, he was thrown off-balance by a hand once again seizing his arm.

Bobby’s face was black, the skin on one side melted, stringy. The flames rose out of the cabin behind him and shone a bright orange in the darkness.

“You were going to kill me.” He said it almost to himself, as if he were having trouble believing such a thing. Then his face twisted into an evil so stark naked that, for the first time in a long time, it truly terrified the boy. Clay reacted instinctively, throwing a punch with his free hand right into the throat of his tormentor. It was the first time he’d ever fought back, and the blow startled Uncle Bobby more than it stung him, but it was enough that he spilled backward, letting go of Clay’s arm—but not before jerking him back onto the deck. Even untrained in close-quarters fighting, Clay knew he had Uncle Bobby off-balance, so he kicked him in the side and sent him flopping ass-over-teakettle onto his back like a bluegill pulled into the boat. The fire hit the reserve tank and it blew. The boat lurched up and then back down again as its stern started to take on water. Clay pirouetted and ran for the bow. Uncle Bobby flipped out a hand and caught him in the ankle, a lucky lurch, which caused Clay’s two feet to bang together, and he stumbled, lost his footing, and knocked his knee into the step leading to the rail. Bobby tried to rise to his feet, the flames whipping behind him, the boat capsizing. He looked like a devil,
the
devil, his mouth twisted, his teeth bared, his hands clenched, his eyes red. Clay snuck a quick glance over his shoulder and saw that yellow light, now less than a mile away and coming closer. He looked back at his uncle and knew he couldn’t just jump off, leave him to drown. No, that wouldn’t be enough.