“I meant about the money.”
“I know. Get up.”
He stood. Behind him, Louis was checking the interior of the Chevy. He found a little H&K P7 in the glove compartment, and a Benelli M1 tactical shotgun with a pistol grip stock and clickadjustable military ghost wing sights in a flip compartment under the rear seat. Again, he emptied both, then opened the back of the Chevy, wiped his prints from them, and stuck them under the gray lining in the trunk.
“Go back to Boston,” I said. “We’re all done here.”
“And what do I tell my bosses?” said the Russian. “Someone must answer for what happened to Demarcian. It has caused many problems for us.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
He sighed deeply. “Can I put my hands down now?” he asked. “Slowly,” I said. He let his hands drop, then bent down to help his companion to his feet. The back of the bald man’s head was wet with blood. The redhead took in Louis for the first time. They exchanged nods of professional respect. Louis removed a pristine white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to the Russian.
“For your friend’s head,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“You know what blat means?” said Louis.
“Sure,” said the Russian.
“Well, my friend here has major blat. You be sure to tell your bosses that.”
The Russian nodded again. The bald man climbed gingerly into the passenger seat and rested his left cheek against the cool leather, his eyes closed. His colleague turned back to me.
“Good-bye, volk,” he said. “Until we meet again.”
He climbed into the Chevy, then began to reverse it down the drive, Louis keeping pace with him all the way, the Glock never wavering. I went back to my Mustang and moved it out of the way, then watched the Chevy head toward Route 1, Louis beside me.
“Ukrainians,” he said. “Maybe Georgians. Not Chechens.”
“Is that good?”
He shrugged. It seemed to be contagious. “They all bad,” he said. “Chechens just real bad.”
“The redhead didn’t seem like a foot soldier.”
“Underboss. Means they real pissed about Demarcian.”
“He doesn’t seem worth that kind of effort.”
“They lose business. Cops start tracing their clients, ask questions about pictures of children. Can’t let it slide.”
But he seemed to be holding something back.
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Feels off. I’ll ask around, see what I hear.”
“Will they be back?”
“Uh-huh. Might help if we found Merrick first, buy us a little influence.”
“I’m not going to give them Merrick.”
“Might not have a choice.” He started to walk back to the house.
“What does ‘blat’ mean?” I asked.
“Connections,” he replied. “And not the legal kind.”
“And ‘volk’?”
“It’s slang, word for a cop or an investigator. Kind of a compliment.” He put his gun back in its shoulder holster. “It means ‘wolf.’”
Chapter XXIX
W e drove north to Jackman late that afternoon, through Shawmut and Hinckley and Skowhegan, through Solon and Bingham, Moscow and Caratunk, past places without names and names without places, the road following the bends and curves of the Kennebec, the banks lined with bare trees, the forest floor brilliant with their lost foliage. Gradually, the nature of the forest began to change as the evergreens raised their spires, dark against the dying light as winter winds whispered of the promise of snow. And as the cold began to bite, the woods would grow ever quieter as animals retreated into hibernation and even birds grew torpid to preserve their energy. We were following the route that Arnold took on his expedition up the Kennebec to Quebec. His force of twelve hundred men marched from Cambridge to Newburyport, then took to the river on transports, navigating the crooked channel of the Kennebec as far as Gardinerstown. From there, they transferred to light bateaux, more than two hundred of them, each capable of holding six or seven men along with their provisions and baggage, perhaps four hundred pounds of weight in all. They were built hastily and from green lumber by Reuben Colburn at Gardinerstown, and they quickly began to leak and fall to pieces, ruining the troops’ supplies of powder, bread, and flour. Three companies were sent ahead under Daniel Morgan to the Great Carrying Place between the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, the others following slowly behind, using ox teams borrowed from settlers to move the bateaux around the impassable falls above Fort Western, hoisting them up the steep, icy banks at Skowhegan Falls, most of the men reduced to walking in order to ease the burden on the boats until they came at last to the twelve low, marshy miles of the Great Carrying Place. The soldiers sank into deep, green moss that looked firm from a distance but proved treacherous underfoot, a kind of calenture on land, so that the madness suffered by sailors too long at sea, who hallucinated dry earth where there was no earth and drowned beneath the waves when they jumped, found its echo in ground that was soft and yielding as water. They stumbled on logs and fell in creeks, and in time they cleared a road in order to travel, so that for many years the path they took could be traced by the difference in the color of the foliage on either side of the route.
I was struck by a sense of landscape layered upon landscape, past upon present. These rivers and forests were inseparable from their history; the distinction between what was now and what had gone before was fragile here. It was a place where the ghosts of dead soldiers passed through forests and over streams that had changed little in the intervening years, a place where family names had remained unaltered, where people still owned the land that their great-grandfathers had bought with gold and silver coin, a place where old sins persisted, for great change had not come to wash away the memory of them.
So this was the land traversed by Arnold’s army, the soldiers equipped with rifles, axes, and long knives. Now other bands of armed men moved through this landscape, adding their clamor to the creeping silence of winter, holding it at bay with the roar of their guns and the growl of the trucks and quads that carried them into the wilderness. The woods were alive with orange-clad fools, businessmen from Massachusetts and New York taking a break from the golf course to blast at moose and bear and buck, guided by locals who were grateful for the money the outsiders spent yet remained resentful of the fact that they needed it to survive. We made but one stop along the way, at a house that was little more than a shack, three or four rooms in all, its windows unwashed and the interior hidden by cheap drapes. The yard was overgrown. A garage door gaped open, revealing rusted tools and stacks of firewood. There was no car, because one of the conditions of Mason Dubus’s parole was that he was not permitted to drive a vehicle.
Louis waited outside. I think, perhaps, that he would have found Dubus’s company intolerable, for Dubus was a man like those who had abused Louis’s beloved Angel, and it was Louis’s greatest regret that he had never been given the opportunity to punish those who had scarred his lover’s soul. So he leaned against the car and watched silently as the door was opened slightly, a chain securing it, and a man’s face appeared. His skin was yellow and his eyes were rheumy. His one visible hand shook with uncontrollable tremors.
“Yes?” he said, and his voice was surprisingly firm.
“Mr. Dubus, my name’s Charlie Parker. I think someone called to let you know I might want to speak with you.”
The eyes narrowed. “Maybe. You got some, whatchacallit, ID? A license or something?”
I showed him my PI’s license. He took it from me and held it close to his face, examining each and every word upon it, then handed it back to me. He looked beyond me to where Louis was standing.
“Who’s the other fella?”
“He’s a friend.”
“He’s gonna catch cold out there. He’s welcome to come in, if he chooses.”
“I think he’d prefer to wait where he is.”
“Well, it’s his call. Don’t say I didn’t offer.”