Twenty-Six
I back the truck out of the garage and into a full-scale blizzard, the thick snow blowing horizontally and piling up against everything in its path. Though I slept for several hours, I don’t feel rested at all.
I make it all the way to the Manhattan Bridge without seeing a single other vehicle, the big tires leaving deep, wide tracks in the snow. As I drive across the East River, I can see that the bottom half of Manhattan is dark. There are no overhead lines in Manhattan to be pulled down by trees or ice, and it’s an unusually large area for a routine outage, so most likely it’s a blown transformer, not from the snow but from flooding. The blizzard struck land during the full moon at an incoming tide. Tomorrow they’ll call it a freak event; a ‘once in a century storm’ that hits every few years. Sara would have blamed it all on my truck.
I coast down the Manhattan Bridge’s lower roadway, leaving the truck in neutral and feathering the brakes lightly, and then onto Bowery, engaging the transmission and turning off at Hester Street. I take side streets the rest of the way, heading north and west through Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho and Tribeca, turning up Greenwich Avenue around 20 minutes later. Jane was right. No snowplows. No cars, and with this much wind, not even pedestrians.
Visibility is little more than 10 feet as I drive up 14th street in the pitch-black night. The snow is at least a foot and a half deep, but the truck holds steady. I turn at 9th Avenue and drive south for a few blocks, and then loop back around to 10th Street and head north, rolling past the address Rastov gave me at the cabin.
The building is an old standalone three-story brick building, with a garage and loading bay on the first floor, one of the few remaining beef companies in an area once dominated by slaughterhouses. The second floor could be an apartment, or more likely an office for the business downstairs. It’s impossible to tell from outside in the dark. The third floor, however, has curtains.
I park the truck around the corner in an alley next to the adjacent building. Covered in snow, the Dodge can easily pass for a commercial vehicle, and even if there were patrols looking for me, it would be covered soon enough. I get my bag from the cargo area, along with two of the mason jars and the gun I took from Rico, and make my way back to the short brick building.
There are old vent-style windows on the first floor, and vertical sliders on the second and third. I walk around the back of the building to the opposite alley, the wind and snow cutting visibility down to near zero now. It’s little better in the alley, but I still have to hug the wall and lean forward against the wind.
After walking against the length of the wall, I hit an iron drainpipe coming from the roof. I could climb it, but then I have no idea what’s on the roof, or how sturdy the rusted supports are, or whether I can even make it to the top, so I circle the building again.
The residential entrance is a single door a few feet north of the loading bay, an imposing, fortified steel door with a round buzzer and an encased metal frame to discourage pry-bars. I might be able to get at it with the sledgehammer, but it would take too much time, and would be very loud. Same problem with the lower windows; the glass in each small panel contains shatterproof wire mesh. I’m not sure the noise would even matter out here, muffled by the snow, but I decide to keep looking anyway.
20 minutes later, I am back in the alley climbing up the 4-inch drainpipe, the handles of my duffel bag wrapped around my ankle and dragging against the wall beneath me. I creep up slowly like an inchworm, contracting and stretching, inch by inch, with the bag dragging two feet below. My hands go numb halfway up, but I keep climbing. I pass two windows, completely dark and out of reach, before levering myself over the ledge and rolling into the deep snow on the roof. I lay there for several minutes, staring up at the swirling snow, my chest heaving for air.
I catch my breath and start to rise up, but the wind is much stronger up here, forcing me to crouch down and walk slowly. Eight or nine yards away there’s another steel door set into a wall beneath what looks like gravity-fed water tower, a huge, metal cylinder around 40 feet high, perched atop a wooden structure that looks like something out of a farm back home.
I creep up to the door, spreading my weight as evenly as possible and approaching with the pry-bar. The door is flush set and fortified like the one in the first floor entrance. I don’t see any other access point on the roof, nor is there a fire escape leading back down to the third floor windows.
I press the light on my LED watch. It is just after four. Shielding the beam with my hands, I shine my flashlight on the base of the tower. Standard 4 X 4 structure, with four newer looking 2 x 4 planks wedged diagonally between the surface of the roof and the curved wall of the water cylinder itself for additional support. I stare up at the old tower, my eyes squinting in the snow.
I loosen the base of one of the diagonal support beams with the pry-bar, detaching it from the roof and walking sideways with it until the other end breaks free from where it’s attached to the cylinder itself, maybe eight feet up. I repeat the process for the remaining three supporting planks, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Even with the gale-force winds, the tower does not move. The supports were probably just added in response to a code violation. I walk around the entire tower again, pushing my weight against the four support beams, but the tower doesn’t budge in any direction.
I return to the south side of the tower where I first started, locating my duffel bag now covered in fresh snow. I reach down into the bag, remove the long fire-ax, and walk back to the first support, which faces towards the center of the roof. I swing the ax against the interior side of the wooden beam so it buckles away from the tower, arranging my body under the center so I can quickly back away as the tower falls forward. The original wood is old and soft. After four long, slow swings, the bottom half of the 4 x 4 support falls away, leaving the remaining three wooden legs hanging in mid-air.
The tower still doesn’t move. I look up at the water cylinder, high up in the blizzard on three legs like a mythical, defiant creature, the top barely visible in the swirling snow. I have a momentary, irrational urge to climb the thing, to climb to the top and keep climbing into the snow.
I walk around to the rear side again and lean against the base structure of the tower once again, pushing up and against the corner, and I can feel it give slightly, swaying a half-inch or so. I pull back on the structure and push again, rocking the tower on its three remaining wooden supports, the wind helping it forward. Push, pull, push, pull. The tower swings back and forth, at least three feet each way, before the second supporting beam in the front buckles and the tower lurches forward.
The metal cylinder crashes down on the center of the roof, falling all the way through and collapsing a large section of the roof and the floors beneath, the entire supporting structure of the water tower dragged down through the hole behind it like a tail.
Twenty-Seven
I crouch-walk around to the front of the hole, dragging the duffel bag behind me, and drop down onto the second floor, landing on a wooden floor in a hallway covered with several feet of water sloshing around and looking for a way down and out. I wade through the hallway towards a single door barely visible at the end.
As soon as I open the door, I feel the impact in my upper chest, the force of the hit propelling me backwards and slamming me against the debris from the collapsed roof.
The figure walks through the door holding a small gun and instantly I know it’s him, his eyes wide open and smiling. He looks even older in person, but his face that same wild cruelty I saw in the video as he raped my sister. Crooked teeth. Dead, brown eyes. Stained, silk pajamas.
“You’re the brother,” he says, standing above me pointing a gun towards my face.
I don’t answer. My chest feels like it’s on fire as I slide down into the water rushing across the hallway floor.
“I almost don’t want to shoot you again,” he says, swirling the gun around in circles as if he’s stirring a pot. “You saw how much I liked your sister, poor thing, and I can almost admire you,” he says, glancing up at the hole in the roof. “But family is a difficult thing, trust me…I know.”
“Where is she?” I say, struggling to get the words out, my chest feeling like it was crushed with a hammer.
“My sons are morons,” he says, waving the gun from side to side now. “Both of them, I know. Your sister, too. They step in it, we clean it up. You and I, Mr. Leon. You and I. We’re the cleaners. We’re the real necessities. He seems to not even notice the hole in the roof, or the water pouring down through it.”
“Where?” I ask again.
“It was that damn cop. Had a thing for Vicky’s wife…ah…your sister, whatever the fuck her name is, or was. You know they didn’t have a warrant? I had it all covered.” The Bear steps around me, standing at my feet, lifting his head towards the hole in the roof, and closing his eyes as the snowflakes land on his face.
“I can’t do business without rules, no different than the police, although not entirely the same either. Rastov?”
“Dead,” I say, pulling my body upright and wall-walking to a standing position.
He tracks my movement closely with the gun, the smile gone from his face.
“Dead,” I say again.
“Well, as I said, a moron. I figured as much. But you can’t choose family.”
“Where’s Lily?”
“Pretty cheap, I guess you know now, to buy a cop, eh? I own quite a few, as you’ve miraculously discovered. My little pets. By the way, I never knew you could break a safe like that,” he says. “It was very interesting. We had a camera on you the whole time, streaming right into my living room.” He glances up at the roof briefly, and then lowers his gaze back to me. “Yes. Very interesting.”
“Where’s my sister!” I scream out.
“Where are the contents of my safe?”
“Everywhere,” I say.
“No matter, Mr. Leon. You can publish them in the New York Times, for all I care, and I will still never see a day in prison. For all your success, you Americans still don’t have the slightest understanding of how America works.”
“I’m not American,” I say.
“No, you wouldn’t be now, would you,” he says, his lips curling into a snarl.
“Lily,” I say again.
“Yes, back to the girl. Well. Leon. You know what happens when you’re transporting, say, I don’t know, tomatoes?”
A large beam from the roof falls behind him, crashing on the wooden floor, but he doesn’t flinch, continuing to speak as if nothing had happened, “and someone drops a box, and a tomato falls onto the floor and it splatters?”
I say nothing, my body shivering violently from my soaked clothes. I unzip my wool coat and let it fall to my feet on the floor, landing in a black, wet pile. My t-shirt is covered in blood, but the cold does help a little.
“Breakage,” he says, walking towards me. “We call it breakage.” Another beam falls behind him, dragging a chunk of the ceiling with it.
“So, particularly and precisely,” he says, still waving the gun, “I don’t know where your sister is, any more than I’d know where the guts of the tomato would have been tracked to. Do you understand?”
“Someone must know,” I say.
“Yes. Someone knows. She herself knows. But she’s not telling little brother, eh?”
I don’t catch what he says next. As his lips are moving, I feel the floor of the building shift a little bit, causing a slight rumble. He looks up at the falling roof and instinctively raises both hands to protect his head, still holding the gun but no longer pointing it at me.
As the roof comes crashing down, I push off the wall with my foot, charging into him and forgetting that the duffel bag is still wrapped around my ankle. The bag catches and I veer off to the side, leaping into him and just missing the largest part of the collapsing roof, and we both fall over the edge together, crashing through the both floors and onto the concrete floor below. I cover up and roll into a fetal position as the roof crashes over both of us.
I don’t know if it’s age, or genetics, or just desperation, but my body takes the fall better than his does. I roll onto my knees and take the gun from his clenched hand, struggling to get back my feet. I stand above him and put the gun in my pocket. I take the flashlight from my side pants pocket and switch it on, but the lens is smashed from the fall. I shake it a few times, but clearly, it is not going to work.
As I’m turning towards a table to look for another flashlight I feel his hands on my neck, his slight weight pushing me towards the table, the wound in my chest burning hot. It occurs to me that I’ve never thought of any downside to being deaf before, but having a murderous Russian criminal sneaking up on me, even an old weak soaking wet one, could certainly be the first.
He realizes his hands are not strong enough to strangle me, or my neck just too wide for a decent grip, so he lowers one hand to look for the gun. My hand closes on a curved metal hook of some sort lying on the table. As his hand reaches the grip of the gun, I drive my left elbow hard backwards against his forehead, pushing off the table and spinning around and sinking the hook deep into his shoulder. He falls against the wall and stares down at the hook.
I walk back to the center of the room and find my duffel bag where we’d first fallen. I reach inside and grab one of the mason jars, removing the Zippo from my front pocket lighting the rope wick and pausing as it catches before throwing it up to the door where I first saw him. Where he lives. Where he sleeps. I want the whole place to burn.
I want it all to burn.
Twenty-Eight
The sounds I cannot hear: The whistle of the hammer as it arcs through the air. The wailing of pain and the begging of The Bear. The dripping of blood from thawing meat onto the wet concrete floor. The beautifully crude threats.
My own hideous voice.
I drag The Bear into a walk-in freezer by the hook sunk through his shoulder and toss him into a corner on the floor. When I reenter the freezer, dragging the oak table behind me, The Bear is hard at work on the hook, trying to muscle it out, but it’s sunken deep through the tendons. Hope is adrenaline, fear masks pain, begging helps no one.
I yank him up by the hook and then hold his hands outstretched, one at a time, as I nail his wrists to the table with railroad spikes. I put all of my 240 pounds behind the hammer, but even so, it takes several swings. His body shakes, the nails sink further into the wood, his face is pain; he screams, but I cannot hear.
The building above burns a deep blue hue with my smuggled-in accelerants.
The sound of the hammer into The Bear. The pain in his eyes. I have never seen so much hatred. It is beautiful to me, to reach this center, this uncomplicated base, to disassemble the past and honor a new history. It is another film, also homemade and rough, an overlay, an epilogue. The Bear is broken but I have spared his face, and to see those eyes, that is what I needed; to see his hatred flow into me, my own eyes sucking down the scum like bathtub drains. His life whirls into me and I taste the fear, the hope, the sharp sting of adrenalin pumping and the reeking muck of despair. His pain soothes me…a slow, thick poison. We will all die.
I know it now; I am a broken man. I always was. I imagine Lily watching me, Lily keeping score, making lists, balancing all. As a child from far away, she was the queen, even more so than her mother. But she didn’t survive. The world was not as we had imagined, not even close. The world is a cruel, bastard place, Lily cold and lost somewhere, me hot and bleeding and swinging my hammer. Life as it is, not as we wish it to be.
The sounds I cannot hear: The laughter of the watchers. The groan of my sister as The Bear cums inside of her, pulling her hair until the roots bleed. The Bear screams and shits himself inside of the dark freezer. Lily’s wailing and cursing and crying. I scream at The Bear with all my mighty, damaged voice, swinging the hammer at his ruined hands, hands that will never again touch anyone. Lily at the end, beaten and pissed on and begging to die.
Lily is dead. I am dead. It will never be enough.
I remove the stack of photos from my wallet that I’d printed at the Internet café a lifetime ago and place them face down on the table in front of The Bear. I draw an ‘X’ on the back of the first photo and turn it over, laying it close to the pulp of his ruined hands.
The Bear offers me anything I want. An animal can feel pain but cannot describe or transmit it adequately. The bear both is and is not an animal. I lack hearing, so the bear cannot transmit his experience to me unless I choose to see it. His pain is not my pain, but mine is very much his. I swing the hammer into his unhooked shoulder, and then I draw another ‘X’ and flip another photo.
His lips move, and I understand what he wants to know. 5 photos.
In my notepad, I write; you are a rapist fucking pig. I put the paper into the gristle of his hands and swing the hammer against metal hook again. It’s a sound I can feel.
Anything, The Bear mouths. He is sweating in the cold air of the freezer. Crying. Bleeding.
In my pad, I write: I want my sister back. I swing the hammer claw-side first into his mouth and leave it there. His body shakes and twitches.
I turn over his photo and write one last note, tearing it off slowly and holding it in front of his face, the handle of the hammer protruding from his jaw like a tusk. You are number four. There are a few seconds of space as the information stirs into him and I watch as he deflates, the skin on his face sagging like a used condom. He knows what I know.
I turn over the last photo for him. I turn it slowly and carefully, sliding it towards him. Victor, his one good son, his outside accomplishment, his college boy, the one who tried to fuck him and they fucked my sister instead.
I remove another Mason jar from my bag, unscrewing the metal top and letting the thick fluid flow onto his lap. I wipe my hands carefully and light a kitchen match, holding it in front of his face for a few seconds as it catches fully. He doesn’t try to blow it out. He doesn’t beg me to stop. He just stares at the match as the flame catches, and I drop it onto his lap.
The Bear shakes so hard from the pain that one of his arms rips from the table, leaving a skewer of meat and tendon on the metal spike. I lean into his ear, taking in his sweet reek and the rot of his bowels and, in my own hideous voice, I say:
“Wait for me.”
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