36
A Trip South—Alas, Not to Sunshine!
Now what?” Petra said.
The backseat hadn’t been designed for four. None of us could maneuver well, and I wasn’t happy at the possibilities this gave the thugs when they regained their equilibrium. I told Marty to pull over and let me put Petra into a taxi home. If we had more violence tonight, or the police caught up with us, I didn’t want her involved, anyway.
We were just a few blocks from the heart of the restaurant scene, where taxis were plentiful. My abdomen was so sore that it was painful to climb down from the pickup and hard to walk, but I made it to the curb, flagged a cab, got my cousin tucked away. I gave her a twenty and told her to get home to bed, to call me in the morning before she tried to go to the office.
I climbed into the front seat next to Marty. “Who are you, by the way? And how did you guys show up like that?”
“Marty Jepson,” Tim said for him. “He was a Marine staff sergeant in Iraq. He’s one of the gang who Chad and me met at the VA. I texted Marty as soon as Petra and me left you, and he was at Plotzky’s, so he hustled over to help out.”
“Bless you, Staff Sergeant. Was that you who shot out the Mercedes’ tires?”
“Yes, ma’am. Tim here thought the guy who was passed out back there by the L might have a gun, so I crawled over and found it and shot into the rims—fastest way to deflate tires. What do you want me to do with these bastards, pardon my French?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to drive them down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan, give them to Detective Finchley, see what he can pin on them. They must have records for extortion or murder or something.”
The men began spewing invectives, curses in two languages. If their English was any guide, they didn’t think much of me in Ukrainian, either.
“On the other hand,” I said, “if we learned a couple of things from them, like why they thought I had a piece of interesting property, and why Anton Kystarnik is interested in whatever it is, we might let them go off into the night.”
“We can’t interrogate them here,” Tim objected. “There are people all over the place. Besides, the cops might find us.”
“Where do you want to go, ma’am?” Jepson asked.
I thought of Mexico City—sunshine, sleep—but I told him to head toward South Chicago, the poverty-stricken corner of the Southeast Side where I grew up. “We can talk on the way.”
I turned painfully in the seat to look at the captives in the back. “Which one of you is Ludwig?” I asked.
“Bitch, we don’t tell you nothing.”
“Want me to hit them?” Tim asked. “They have a few punches coming, judging from how they were roughing you up.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said. “We know what they are—creeps who work for Anton Kystarnik—and we know their names are Ludwig and Konstantin. Now, which one of you is which?”
They stared at me, sullen, silent.
“Okay,” I said, “just so we can call you something, you, by the window, you’re Konstantin, and your pal is Ludwig. We can find you easily enough if we need you again. Go on over to Lake Shore Drive, Marty, and head south.”
A cell phone rang in Ludwig’s pocket, and he reached for it. Tim knocked his hand away, and we listened to the phone ringing. Konstantin’s phone started next, a sound like a buzz saw.
“What does Anton think I have?” I asked over the ringing.
“We tell you nothing . . . You or your boy toys, you dried-up cougar!”
“A dried-up cougar? Is that a step up from a bitch or a step down?” I wondered. “Anyway, so far you and your pal are oh for nothing, so let me explain where we’re going.”
We had reached Lake Shore Drive and were heading south, passing the enormous exhibition halls that made up McCormick Place. “You know those high-rise projects the city’s been tearing down? They were home to old-line gangs like the Vice Lords. The city’s relocated a lot of the residents to South Chicago, and the gangs who are coming in have unsettled all the power relationships on the Southeast Side. It’s not a good place for strangers, especially white strangers, to wander around after dark.”
All the time I was talking, both their cell phones kept sounding. I wondered if Anton was trying to reach them, trying to find out if they’d killed me.
“When we get to Ninety-first Street,” I said, “take a right. We’ll drop these creeps off at Houston—that’s where I grew up. Ludwig and Konstantin can see who will drive them north again. Maybe they can flash a bankroll and hire a ride. But maybe that wouldn’t be so smart. Because a bankroll—”
“We don’t know.” That was Ludwig. “Rodney, he calls us, texts us, tells us we are looking for you. Someone is tracking your GPS in your phone. They—”
“Shut up!” Konstantin cried.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and removed the battery. We’d reached the north end of Hyde Park, the toney neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Barack Obama has his home. If someone was tracking my GPS, with any luck they wouldn’t have a tail in place already.
“Tim,” I said. “Just in case Anton cares enough about these two to track them, pull out their cell phones and remove the batteries.”
I covered the pair with my gun, while Tim carefully stuck an arm across each man and found their phones. We were riding close to the lake now, close enough to see the desolate, ice-covered surface stretch to the horizon under the pale starlight.
“You guys were at the nightclub last night,” I said. “What did Anton Kystarnik hear me say, or where did he see me go, that has him so interested in me?”
“We not knowing,” the talkative thug said. “We following orders only.”
“Order followers—the lowest of the low.” I turned around to face front. “Let’s get this pond scum down to South Chicago and go home. I’ve had it.”
“I can pull over, ma’am,” Staff Sergeant Jepson said. “Tim and me, we can beat the truth out of them.”
I thought of Anton’s threat to me, that he could torture me into talking. “You can beat them into saying something,” I said, “but who knows if it will be the truth? Let’s just drop them in the middle of Latin Kings turf. Let them get home as best they can.”
I switched on the radio and stumbled on Nina Simone covering “Strange Fruit.” Her voice, pausing on the beat, cracking, brought a heart-wrenching vividness to the lyrics.
Outside the truck’s dirty windows, the lake had disappeared. The expressway had ended; we were on city streets. We passed shabby houses and boarded-over apartment buildings, the ominous empty lots of a neighborhood that had gone past decay into ruin. Jepson hit a hidden pothole, and we bounced so hard that I couldn’t hold back a cry of pain as my abdomen shook. In the backseat, our duo conferred in Ukrainian.
Finally, Konstantin said, his voice sullen, “We telling what we are knowing.”
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, Nina Simone was singing.
“And what are you knowing?” I asked. “About the Body Artist, or why Anton doesn’t care about her website anymore, or about what he thinks I have?”
“Anton, he says you have special papers, but we not knowing what they are. We knowing only about Body Artist.”
Jepson kept driving, following Route 41 as it twisted past the weed-filled land where U.S. Steel used to operate. I turned off the radio.
“So . . . tell me about the Body Artist.”
“Everyone is paying attention to Anton. The police, the FBI, everyone. Anton can’t move, we can’t move, without the police, the FBI, the Secret Service, moving with us.
“How did he manage it tonight?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s always a way. With Owen.” He pronounced it O-ven. “We switch cars—back, forth, back, forth—until we know we’re clear. But Anton knows they are also watching computer, e-mail, telephone. So he talks to Rodney. And Rodney paints Anton’s words on the Body Artist. And then all our friends overseas can read Anton’s wishes.”
It took Konstantin a few minutes to explain the system, and he wasn’t clear on all the terminology. He was one of Anton’s pit bulls, not part of the decision-making inner circle, so he could only repeat what he’d overheard when he’d been bodyguarding Anton and Rodney.
Basically, it seemed that Rodney had been using the Body Artist to signal Anton’s offshore money-laundering partners. The letters Rodney painted stood for countries—Lichtenstein, Cayman, sometimes Belize—wherever Anton kept accounts. He opened and closed them frequently, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the Secret Service. From what Ludwig could recount, it sounded as though one string of the numbers painted by Rodney stood for banking sort codes; the other string probably represented the password for a given account. Simple, easy for anyone to pick up on the World Wide Web, and hard to prove what it was or that Anton was masterminding it.
“So then that stupid bitch, she is shutting her site, and Anton is crazy. Team members are calling from Switzerland, from the Caymans, from the Middle East, they’re saying the accounts are in a mess. All because of her. And you. We saw you helping her leave the club.”
“If you saw that, then you saw her knock me away and tear off into the night. I have no idea where she is.”
“Maybe,” Konstantin said. “Maybe not. Only suddenly tonight, Anton, he calls us, saying the website isn’t important now. Only you, and the papers you are stealing, these, we need to get back.”
They had no more idea what papers Anton was hunting than I did. I asked them a dozen different ways, but they were thugs, not thinkers. Anton talked in front of them, but not about what he was looking for.
If it was Karen Buckley’s computer they wanted, I wondered why they hadn’t taken it last night when they attacked the club. But, of course, the cops had arrived, it hadn’t been possible. Maybe Anton had headed to the boarded-up club tonight. Maybe they got there just as we were leaving and followed us. But a computer wasn’t paper, and Anton had very specifically been looking for papers.
I was too tired to think clearly. I told Marty to turn around, drop the thugs near McCormick Place, and get the rest of us home for the night.