Harlan Coben 3 Novel Collection Page 45

  I looked up. “On the phone you said you’d thought I’d call.”

  “If you hadn’t, I would have called you today.”

  “To warn me?”

  “Yes.”

  “So,” I said, “they must have something.”

  The big man did not reply. I watched his face. And it was as if my entire world, everything I grew up believing, slowly shifted.

  “Was he KGB, Sosh?” I asked.

  “It was a long time ago,” Sosh said.

  “Does that mean yes?”

  Sosh smiled slowly. “You don’t understand how it was.”

  “And again I say: Does that mean yes?”

  “No, Pavel. But your father…maybe he was supposed to be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Do you know how I came to this country?”

  “You worked for a travel company.”

  “It was the Soviet Union, Pavel. There were no companies. InTourist was run by the government. Everything was run by the government. Do you understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “So when the Soviet government had a chance to send someone to live in New York City, do you think they sent the man who was most competent in booking vacations? Or do you think they sent someone who might help them in other ways?”

  I thought about the size of his hands. I thought about his strength. “So you were KGB?”

  “I was a colonel in the military. We didn’t call it KGB. But yes, I guess you would call me”—he made quote marks with his fingers—“‘a spy.’ I would meet with American officials. I would try to bribe them. People always think we learn important things—things that can change the balance of power. That’s such nonsense. We learned nothing relevant. Not ever. And the American spies? They never learned anything about us either. We passed nonsense from side to side. It was a silly game.”

  “And my father?”

  “The Soviet government let him out. Your Jewish friends think that they applied enough pressure. But please. Did a bunch of Jews in a synagogue really think they could pressure a government that answered to no one? It’s almost funny when you think about it.”

  “So you’re saying…?”

  “I’m just telling you how it was. Did your father promise he would help the regime? Of course. But it was just to get out. It’s complicated, Pavel. You can’t imagine what it was like for him. Your father was a good doctor and a better man. The government made up charges that he committed medical malpractice. They took away his license. Then your grandmother and grandfather…my God, Natasha’s wonderful parents…you’re too young to remember—”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Do you?”

  I wondered if I really did. I have that image of my grandfather, my Popi, and the shock of white hair and maybe his boisterous laugh, and my grandmother, my Noni, gently scolding him. But I was three when they were taken away. Did I really remember them, or has that old photo I still keep out come to life? Was it a real memory or something I’d created from my mother’s stories?

  “Your grandparents were intellectuals—university professors. Your grandfather headed the history department. Your grandmother was a brilliant mathematician. You know this, yes?”

  I nodded. “My mother said she learned more from the debates at the dinner table than at school.”

  Sosh smiled. “Probably true. The most brilliant academics sought out your grandparents. But, of course, that drew the attention of the government. They were labeled radicals. They were considered dangerous. Do you remember when they were arrested?”

  “I remember,” I said, “the aftermath.”

  He closed his eyes for a long second. “What it did to your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Natasha was never the same. You understand that?”

  “I do.”

  “So here he was, your father. He had lost so much—his career, his reputation, his license and now your mother’s parents. And suddenly, down like he was, the government gave your father a way out. A chance for a fresh start.”

  “A life in the USA.”

  “Yes.”

  “And all he had to do was spy?”

  Sosh waved a dismissive hand in my direction. “Don’t you get it? It was a big game. What could a man like your father learn? Even if he tried—which he didn’t. What could he tell them?”

  “And my mother?”

  “Natasha was just a woman to them. The government cared nothing for the woman. She was a problem for a while. Like I said, her parents, your grandparents, were radicals in their eyes. You say you remembered when they were taken?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Your grandparents formed a group, trying to get the human rights abuses out to the public. They were making headway until a traitor turned them in. The agents came at night.”

  He stopped.

  “What?” I said.

  “This isn’t easy to talk about. What happened to them.”

  I shrugged. “You can’t hurt them now.”

  He did not reply.

  “What happened, Sosh?”

  “They were sent to a gulag—a work camp. The conditions were terrible. Your grandparents were not young. You know how it ended?”

  “They died,” I said.

  Sosh turned away from me then. He moved over to the window. He had a great view of the Hudson. There were two mega–cruise ships in port. You could turn to the left and even see the Statue of Liberty. Manhattan is so small, eight miles from end to end, and like with Sosh, you just always feels its power.

  “Sosh?”

  When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Do you know how they died?”

  “Like you said before. The conditions were terrible. My grandfather had a heart condition.”

  He still hadn’t turned toward me. “The government wouldn’t treat him. Wouldn’t even give him his medicine. He was dead within three months.”

  I waited.

  “So what aren’t you telling me, Sosh?”

  “Do you know what happened to your grandmother?”

  “I know what my mother told me.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Noni got sick too. With her husband gone, her heart sorta gave out. You hear about it all the time in long-term couples. One dies, then the other gives up.”

  He said nothing.

  “Sosh?”

  “In a sense,” he said, “I guess that was true.”

  “In a sense?”

  Sosh kept his eyes on whatever was out the window. “Your grandmother committed suicide.”

  My body stiffened. I started shaking my head.

  “She hung herself with a sheet.”

  I just sat there. I thought of that picture of my Noni. I thought of that knowing smile. I thought of the stories my mother told me about her, about her sharp mind and sharper tongue. Suicide.

  “Did my mother know?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She never told me.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have either.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I need you to see how it was. Your mother was a beautiful woman. So lovely and delicate. Your father adored her. But when her parents were taken and then, well, put to death really, she was never the same. You sensed it, yes? A melancholy there? Even before your sister.”

  I said nothing, but I had indeed sensed it.

  “I guess I wanted you to know how it was,” he said. “For your mother. So maybe you’d understand more.”

  “Sosh?”

  He waited. He still had not turned from the window.

  “Do you know where my mother is?”

  The big man didn’t answer for a long time.

  “Sosh?”

  “I used to know,” he said. “When she first ran away.”

  I swallowed. “Where did she go?”

  “Natasha went home.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She ran back to Russia.
”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t blame her, Pavel.”

  “I don’t. I want to know why.”

  “You can run away from your home like they did. You try to change. You hate your government but never your people. Your homeland is your homeland. Always.”

  He turned to me. Our eyes locked.

  “And that’s why she ran?”

  He just stood there.

  “That was her reasoning?” I said, almost shouting. I felt something in my blood tick. “Because her homeland was always her homeland?”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “No, Sosh, I’m listening. Your homeland is your homeland. That’s a load of crap. How about your family is your family? How about your husband is your husband—or more to the point, how about your son is your son?”

  He did not reply.

  “What about us, Sosh? What about me and Dad?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you, Pavel.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “No.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It is.”

  “But you could find her, couldn’t you?”

  He didn’t nod but he didn’t shake his head either.

  “You have a child,” Sosh said to me. “You have a good career.”

  “So?”

  “So this is all so long ago. The past is for the dead, Pavel. You don’t want to bring the dead back. You want to bury them and move on.”

  “My mother isn’t dead,” I said. “Is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So why are you talking about the dead? And Sosh? While we’re talking about the dead, here’s one more thing to chew over”—I couldn’t stop myself, so I just said it—“I’m not even sure my sister is dead anymore.”

  I expected to see shock on his face. I didn’t. He barely seemed surprised.

  “To you,” he said.

  “To me, what?”

  “To you,” he said, “they should both be dead.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I SHOOK OFF UNCLE SOSH’S WORDS AND HEADED BACK through the Lincoln Tunnel. I needed to focus on two things and two things only: Focus One, convict those two damned sons of bitches who had raped Chamique Johnson. And Focus Two, find out where the hell Gil Perez had been for the past twenty years.

  I checked the address Detective York had given me for the witness/girlfriend. Raya Singh worked at an Indian restaurant called Curry Up and Wait. I hate pun titles. Or do I love them? Let’s go with love.

  I was on my way.

  I still had the picture of my father in the front seat. I didn’t much worry about those KGB allegations. I had almost expected it after my conversation with Sosh. But now I read the index card again:

  THE FIRST SKELETON

  The First. That again implied that more would be coming. Clearly Monsieur Jenrette, probably with financial help from Marantz, was sparing no expense. If they found out about those old accusations against my father—more than twenty-five years old now—they were clearly desperate and hungry.

  What would they find?

  I was not a bad guy. But I wasn’t perfect either. No one was. They would find something. They would blow it out of proportion. It could seriously damage JaneCare, my reputation, my political ambition—but then again Chamique had skeletons too. I had convinced her to take them all out and show them to the world.

  Could I ask less of myself?

  When I arrived at the Indian restaurant, I threw the car into Park and turned off the ignition. I was not in my jurisdiction, but I didn’t think that would matter much. I took a look out the car window, thought again about that skeleton and called Loren Muse. When she answered I identified myself and said, “I may have a small problem.”

  “What’s that?” Muse asked.

  “Jenrette’s father is coming after me.”

  “How?”

  “He’s digging into my past.”

  “Will he find anything?”

  “You dig into anybody’s past,” I said, “you find something.”

  “Not mine,” she said.

  “Really? How about those dead bodies in Reno?”

  “Cleared of all charges.”

  “Great, terrific.”

  “I’m just playing with you, Cope. Making a funny.”

  “You’re hilarious, Muse. Your comic timing. It’s pro-like.”

  “Okay, cut to the chase then. What do you need from me?”

  “You’re friends with some of the local private eyes, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Call around. See if you can find out who’s on me.”

  “Okay, I’m on it.”

  “Muse?”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t a priority. If the manpower isn’t there, don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s there, Cope. Like I said, I’m on it.”

  “How do you think we did today?”

  “It was a good day for the good guys,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But probably not good enough.”

  “Cal and Jim?”

  “I’m in the mood to gun down every man with those names.”

  “Get on it,” I said and hung up.

  In terms of interior decorating, Indian restaurants seem to break down into two categories—very dark and very bright. This one was bright and colorful in the pseudostyle of a Hindu temple, albeit a really cheesy one. There were faux-mosaic and lit-up statues of Ganesh and other deities with which I am wholly unfamiliar. The waitresses were costumed in belly-revealing aqua; the outfits reminded me of what the evil sister wore on I Dream of Jeannie.

  We all hold on to our stereotypes, but the whole scene looked as if a Bollywood musical number were about to break out. I try to have an appreciation for various foreign cultures, but no matter how hard I try, I detest the music they play in Indian restaurants. Right now it sounded like a sitar was torturing a cat.

  The hostess frowned when I entered. “How many?” she asked.

  “I’m not here to eat,” I said.

  She just waited.

  “Is Raya Singh here?”

  “Who?”

  I repeated the name.

  “I don’t…oh, wait, she’s the new girl.” She folded her arms across her chest and said nothing.

  “Is she here?” I said.

  “Who wants to know?”

  I did the eyebrow arch. I wasn’t good with it. I was going for rakish but it always came out more like constipation. “The President of the United States.”

  “Huh?”

  I handed her a business card. She read it and then surprised me by shouting out, “Raya! Raya Singh!”

  Raya Singh stepped forward and I stepped back. She was younger than I’d expected, early twenties, and absolutely stunning. The first thing you noticed—couldn’t help but notice in that aqua getup—was that Raya Singh had more curves than seemed anatomically possible. She stood still but it looked as though she were moving. Her hair was tousled and black and begged to be touched. Her skin was more gold than brown and she had almond eyes that a man could slip into and never find his way back out.

  “Raya Singh?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Paul Copeland. I’m the prosecutor for Essex County in New Jersey. Could we talk a moment?”

  “Is this about the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then of course.”

  Her voice was polished with a hint of a New England–boarding-school accent that shouted refinement over geographical locale. I was trying not to stare. She saw that and smiled a little. I don’t want to sound like some kind of pervert because it wasn’t like that. Female beauty gets to me. I don’t think I’m alone in that. It gets to me like a work of art gets to me. It gets to me like a Rembrandt or Michelangelo. It gets to me like night views of Paris or when the sun rises on the Grand Canyon or sets in the turquoise of an Arizona sky. My thoughts were not illic
it. They were, I self-rationalized, rather artistic.

  She led me outside onto the street, where it was quieter. She wrapped her arms around herself as though she were cold. The move, like pretty much every move she made, was nearly a double entendre. Probably couldn’t help it. Everything about her made you think about moonlit skies and four-poster beds—and that, I guess, shoots down my “rather artistic” reasoning. I was tempted to offer her my coat or something, but it wasn’t cold at all. Oh, and I wasn’t wearing a coat.

  “Do you know a man named Manolo Santiago?” I asked.

  “He was murdered,” she said.

  Her voice had a strange lilt to it, as if she were reading for a part.

  “But you knew him?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “Our relationship,” she said, “was platonic.”

  My eyes moved to the pavement and then across the street. Better. I didn’t really care so much about the murder or who had committed it. I cared about finding out about Manolo Santiago.

  “Do you know where Mr. Santiago lived?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  “He approached me on the street.”

  “Just like that? He just walked up to you on the street?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “He asked me if I would like to grab a cup of coffee.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes.”

  I risked another look at her. Beautiful. That aqua against the dark skin…total killer. “Do you always do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Meet a stranger and accept his invitation to grab coffee with him?”

  That seemed to amuse her. “Do I need to justify my behavior to you, Mr. Copeland?”

  “No.”

  She said nothing.

  I said, “We need to learn more about Mr. Santiago.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Manolo Santiago was an alias. I’m trying to find out his real name, for one thing.”

  “I wouldn’t know it.”

  “At the risk of overstepping my bounds,” I said, “I’m having trouble understanding.”

  “Understanding what?”

  “Men must hit on you all the time,” I said.

  The smile was crooked and knowing. “That’s very flattering, Mr. Copeland, thank you.”