Would this work for him? Rostov was doubtful. Too many people. But he’d check it out. It wasn’t the best opportunity. But it was an opportunity.
Rostov, who wore the ski mask rolled up into a normal-looking stocking cap, stepped inside the restaurant. He sat at the counter and ordered coffee. Before it came, he rose and went into a back corridor, where the restrooms were located. He went inside, coughed hard for thirty seconds, regarded the paper towel, then pitched it out and returned to the corridor.
He found something else too. An unlocked door, leading to the cellar. He supposed restaurant supplies were stored down there and employees might come down at any minute. Everyone, though, seemed busy in the kitchen.
The only question was: Would the kid pee after lunch?
Nothing to do but wait and see.
He returned to the counter and sipped his coffee while the boy ate his sandwich, examining his phone’s screen—maybe texting, or wasting time with Facebook or some kind of nonsense like that. Kirtan signaled for the waitress. Oh, please, don’t have dessert.
But, no, he wanted the check. He paid.
Rostov drained his coffee and again used his napkin to inconspicuously wipe the cup. He pushed it aside and the waitress swept the chipped ceramic away. He left her a five.
Well, Kirtan? Bodily functions calling?
Yes, they were! The kuritsa pulled on his jacket and walked down the corridor to the restrooms.
This was, yes, a risk. But sometimes your mind clicks and it snaps and you do things a sane man—even a killer—wouldn’t do.
Gone to the stone…
More often than not his madness worked to his advantage. That should be a lesson for everyone, Rostov sometimes thought.
As the boy walked inside the bathroom Rostov waited in the corridor near the cellar door.
His back was to the men’s room. After three or four minutes, he heard the door open and glanced at Kirtan, exiting. The boy said, “Excuse me, sir,” and Rostov turned, smiling, glanced around to make sure there was no one to see and with a short but fierce blow punched the boy directly in the throat. As he started to drop, Rostov caught him, pulled open the cellar door and shoved him down the rubber-treaded stairs headfirst.
It was a noisy tumble and Rostov turned to see if anyone had heard.
No. People eating, people talking, people examining cell phones.
The Russian slipped inside, onto the top step of the stairs, closed the door behind him and, pulling out the razor knife, started down into the cool, dim cellar.
*
Sachs was leaving her mother’s house, where she’d spent the night—in her childhood bedroom—when her phone trilled.
She dropped into the driver’s seat of her Torino and hit Answer.
“Rodney.”
A senior detective in the NYPD’s Computer Crimes Unit, Rodney Szarnek was a curious creature. The man, of ambiguous age but probably thirties, loved code, hacks, algorithms, boxes (the term for computers) and all things digital. He also mainlined rock music at illegal decibels. She heard Led Zeppelin pounding away in his office.
“Amelia. I called Lincoln and told him we had a break. He said to call you directly. You’re closer to where you have to be.”
“And where do I have to be?”
“Queens.”
“And why?”
“Remember we got a warrant and the provider coughed up Patel’s cell phone records?”
“Right.”
“I finally pieced together his calling patterns: his sister, other diamond merchants, overseas numbers—South Africa and Botswana—presumably for diamond orders. No calls to anybody with initials of VL. But there were a dozen calls in the past month to and from a Deepro Lahori.”
“Okay.”
“I did some homework. Actually a lot of homework. The last name—the L—intrigued me. Was that half of VL? I think so. Deepro’s son—apparently a diamond cutter—is named Vimal. Hold on, Amelia. I love this riff.”
She heard an electric guitar shred. She yawned.
“Could you hear it? You want me to replay it?”
“Rodney.”
“Okay. Just asking. I got a DMV picture. Just sending it now. Check your texts.”
Her phone dinged and she was looking at Vimal Lahori’s driver’s license photo. The image could easily have been that of the young man exiting the site of the killing through the loading dock on Saturday.
The address on the license was 4388 Monroe Street in Jackson Heights. A half hour away.
“Thanks, Rodney.”
“Disclaimer alert: Can’t say he’s your boy, not for certain.”
Only one way to find out…
Chapter 32
Monroe Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, was one of those spots that could not decide if it wanted gentrification or just to be left alone.
To be comfortable, to be quiet, to exist the way it had existed for fifty or maybe a hundred years. Who knew? Workers in small factories and warehouses and on jobsites lived here. Some white-collar entry-level kids in advertising, brokerage houses, publishing, fashion. And then the artists.
At the moment, on the street, near where Vimal Lahori lived, only a few people were outside on the sidewalk. One woman, in a black quilted coat and beret, was trailing behind a small dog on one of those retractable leashes, which was getting quite the workout because a series of suicidal squirrels waited until the last minute to zip away from the energetic canine.
A boy on a bicycle, maybe playing hooky. It was a school day, it was early afternoon.
A businesswoman in a raincoat and silly rain hat—clear plastic, like a bonnet, printed with yellow daisies.
Everyone moved quickly, presumably because of the damp, pasty chill.
But these fuckers didn’t have it so bad.
Moscow this time of year was a hundred times worse.
Thinking of his home city, Vladimir Rostov decided that this neighborhood of New York was much like the Barrikadnaya area northwest of Moscow; it differed only in that here the homes were single-family row houses. In Moscow—ach, in every Russian city—people lived in apartment buildings, towering, stolid and forever gloomy, the color of Stalin’s uniform.
Rostov had parked his Toyota up the street and was standing by a tree—the dark trunk, obscuring, he hoped, his dark jacket—and studying the modest home of Vimal Lahori and his family.
Rostov was proud of his detective work. Kirtan had come through—the boy with the crushed larynx and, it turned out, a broken wrist from the stairway tumble, so sorry, kuritsa. After the fall, Rostov had dragged the choking boy into the corner of the basement, behind an oil tank, pungent with the eye-stinging fumes from spilled fuel for the furnace. The ancient heater muttered softly, as flames roiled inside, and the two men—one on the floor, one crouching over him—were bathed in heat.
The boy couldn’t talk, of course, which made the process of extracting information a bit more complicated. But the silver lining was that he also wouldn’t be able to scream in pain and that had been the more important factor at the moment.
Rostov had pushed the blade from the utility knife, and tears began streaming in earnest from Kirtan’s eyes, leaving glossy tracks on his matte-olive skin. He’d shaken his head no, no, no. He’d mouthed something else as well, perhaps explaining—trying to explain—to Rostov that he had little to give him. Rostov had then noticed the boy wore a pinkie ring, gold with a diamond in it. It was one of those showy, pointless pieces. Diamonds only come alive when light bombards them from all sides and enters the facets on the girdle, the pavilion and crown. In a pinkie ring, made for uncultured businessmen, the diamond is cut very shallow and surrounded by metal, with no opportunity to breathe. Pinkie rings invariably contain inferior stones.
A waste of a noble diamond.
Rostov had smiled and turned his attention to the boy’s finger once more, caressing it. Kirtan tried to pull away. Useless. More caressing with the razor.
“No, no, baby kuritsa, don’t bother, no.”
It had taken only two brief cuts on the left-hand finger pads for the kid to jot down Vimal Lahori’s name and address with his right. A bit more information and Kirtan’s lunch hour—and his life—had come to a quick end.