Tarzan Abramowitz stopped the blue Camaro and opened up the stockroom door. A moment later, he half- shoved, half-carried Bert inside.
With his ankles tied the old man had to hop and shuffle. He hopped close to where Sam sat, mouth taped, wrists bound, pants stained. Their eyes met, Sam's soupy and facetious, Bert's vigilant and sly. A century and a half of life between them, and neither had any idea what to say or do.
Markov and Cherkassky wandered in. Cherkassky blinked around the ranks of cardboard boxes, the prodigious piles of shirts. Thinking aloud, he said, "Here they will search, find ikons, paintings, cash. These things we must let them find."
No one else was thinking of those things. Tarzan Abramowitz had reached into his pocket and produced a folding knife.
Unhurriedly, he opened it. The blade was long and slender, a filleting shape, with just a hint of an Arabian curve; it caught glare from the one bare hanging bulb and sprayed it back around the room. The music kept pounding, drum machines ruthless in their chattering.
The young man in suspenders clutched the handle of the knife and approached Sam Katz with the dispassion of a farmer moving toward a heifer or a suckling pig.
Bert, immobile, watched him for an instant, and there stampeded through his mind a lifetime's worth of playground bullies; he somehow found the archaic courage of the stronger kid trying to protect the weaker, and without deciding he hopped between the killer and his victim, making short and shallow leaps as though he was racing in a potato sack.
Abramowitz seemed amused by the absurd and gallant gesture. He snickered as, with one huge and hairy arm, he slammed Bert across the chest and shoved the old mobster aside. Bert went down like a toppled statue, his fleshless hips bouncing and scraping along the splintery floor. He groaned just once and then he lay there as the murderer turned his attention back to Sam. Bert found to his horror that he could not avert his eyes.
He watched as the assassin closed the distance to his prey. Saw the unpanicked sorrow in Sam's eyes as the killer grabbed him by the jaw. Almost gently, with a bizarre solicitousness, an art, like a barber preparing to trim behind an ear, Abramowitz turned Sam's head. Skin stretched across the neck, grew translucent above the blue and tired artery that carried blood to his flagging brain. Giving in to naked fear at last, Sam tried to cry out, his voice buzzed like a piteous kazoo behind the duct tape. Abramowitz changed the cant of his blade so that light flashed on the ceiling, shifted his stance like a hitter at the plate, and cocked his elbow high.
And Ivan Cherkassky, calmly and without hurry, said, "No. Wait."
Tarzan turned to look at him, still holding Sam's face, still wrenching the old man's jaw. Sam's eyes had lost the horizontal, they swam like the eyes of someone who was seasick.
"Blood on floor, no good," Cherkassky said. "Blood on floor ruins everything."
Tarzan was jumpy and unconsummated. His hand was sweaty around the knife. "Strangle 'em?" he suggested.
Cherkassky pulled his lumpy face, considered. Strangling was better. But then he shook his head. People thrashed, lost skin and hair while getting strangled. Skin and hair were bad things for the FBI to find. "We do the others first," he said. "Afterward we take these people somewhere else."
Abramowitz scowled, blew out a stale breath and, like a turned-down lover, reluctantly released Sam's face. It took a long time for Sam to straighten out his neck.
"This brave one," Cherkassky went on, pointing at the supine, panting Bert, "tape his hands, his mouth."
Bert rolled onto his side and protested that. He was a dead man; he felt he had a right to. There were things he wanted Sam to know. "Let us talk at least," he said. He gestured vaguely toward the thumping madhouse music. "No one's gonna hear."
Ivan Cherkassky, paranoid and brutal but not without respect for the obligations of a boss, pursed his lips and shrugged. He said to Tarzan, "Only do his hands."
He himself went up to Sam and pulled the silver adhesive off his face. It came away with a sound like ripping canvas and left a gray-white residue behind. He looked at Sam's cracked lips and withered gums, and shook his head. "Weak old men," he said. "Almost I am sorry."
Chapter 51
On Key Haven, Lieutenant Gary Stubbs unholstered his revolver as he slipped out of his unmarked car to approach the tiled house. Sweat prickled his neck; hot sun dried the sweat and left a paste of oily salt behind.
His partner covered him as he took low and furtive steps along the driveway, then flattened himself against the mosaic frame of the kicked-in door. His gun was propped against his breastbone, pointing at his chin. Hot tiles pressed against his back. He summoned nerve and stillness and listened hard.