Burn Artist

Chapter 6

The better part of any operation like this was surveillance. Surveillance is time-consuming and requires an earnest wetworker to be well prepared. Coffee is mandatory, as are binoculars, a notepad or tape recorder, and a hospital bedpan: the kind with the long neck and water-tight screw-on cap. All that coffee has to go somewhere, and I assure you that there is nothing worse than being six hours into a twelve-hour surveillance gig and knocking your improperly capped bedpan onto the floor of your car.

This job wasn’t likely to take twelve hours, but we stocked up just in case. Early Monday afternoon, Vassily and I rented a car under fake names with a fake credit card, a Town car with tinted windows and a low profile. Then, we headed for Maslak’s office.

CelTech was based out of an office two streets across from the Columbia University Medical Center. The building looked like a sapling struggling in the shade of a giant tree: or in this case, the monolithic parking garage just behind the building. We cruised down 163rd, looking out over the beige cube dug into its pit, but it was still a little early for the workers to be leaving.

I sucked on a tooth as I slowed for traffic. The street was one-way, narrowed by solid lines of parked cars to either side. “You know what he looks like, don’t you?”

“Yeah. White, five-foot eight. Trim build, dark hair, short beard. Ivy League cut, square face. He looks Hungarian to me, drives a black luxury sedan.” Vassily was in the back, watching the rear windows while I focused on the road.

“Which only narrows it to around eighty percent of all cars up and down this street,” I replied. “I really hope he doesn’t park in that multistory jungle we passed on the way here.

“Well NOW he has.” Vassily rolled his eyes. “Good one, Alexi. You jinxed us.”

“I can avert the jinx with a sacrifice,” I replied. “But the ritual has very particular requirements. For one thing, the sacrifice must be a smart-mouthed hohol—”[18]

“Hey! Fuck you!”

“- And he must be defenestrated at high speed on a New York City highway,” I continued, turning the corner. We had to go around again until we found a spot to set up.

“God, I hate you so much.”

“I know you do.” I eyed the huge parking garage on the way past it again. “You don’t have his home address? I know that neither Nicolai or Rodion do.”

“Nah. He gave an address, but Nic says he went to check it out and Maslak doesn’t live there. Makes sense to me… would you give your address out to people like us?”

“An excellent point.”

It was just after five when the first wave of staff poured out through the gate. We were able to mount a search while waiting for people to load into their cars and pull out onto the street. I finally grabbed a spot not too far down, and we began the anxious game of trying to spot our man in among the spreading streams of people.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long. I was keeping an eye forward and to my right, but it was Vassily who hissed with recognition. I turned around and followed his pointing finger as a knot of suits clambered up the stairs from building to gate, chatting and smoking. The man matching Maslak’s description was among them. He was a waspish, shrewd looking yuppie with a side-part and a suit which looked too expensive for his dowdy workplace. He also had the mannerisms of a nervous squirrel in the company of hawks: three larger, swarthy men who hung back at the fence line to finish their cigarettes.

“Hey, wait. Holy shit.” Vassily peered through the grayish window film, brow furrowed. “I know that guy.”

“Who? What?” I squinted, trying to see if I recognized any of his coworkers.

“That big guy, the fat one with the comb over. Fuck, what’s his name… it’s Acardi, Accorso, something like that. He’s a Mafia headhunter. Works for John Manelli’s crew over in New Jersey.”

There were five Italian Families that ruled the north-eastern United States. The Manellis were a subfamily of the Scappeti Mafia, a blue-collar industrial mob based in Newark. There’d been a hundred and sixty-one murders in 1981 in that city: The Manelli Crew had been responsible for quite a few of them. I frowned. “Last I heard, Don Scappeti and Rod had an agreement. They buy our gasoline.”

“Yeah. A couple million dollars’ worth of gas.” Vassily’s tone was dark as we watched Maslak shake hands with the capo[19] and his men and then stalk off down the street. Our mark was headed toward Fort Washington Avenue, and the Central Parking garage. “Go out there, man. Go follow him and make sure he’s going where we want him to go. I’ll drive around the block.”

“Good plan.” I waited, tense and wary, until I saw the three goons head for their cars. Feigning calm, I opened the door and got out, brushing down my shirt. Vassily scrambled over the seat and plopped down behind the wheel. I set off after Maslak at a purposeful walk while Vassily pulled out of our bay and out onto the street, cutting off a car that had been trying to creep past us.

Fortunately, I passed well in a crowd of suits. Neatly dressed and self-contained, I pretended to pay attention to a pager as I followed the man around the corner, all too aware that wherever there was Mafia, there was Mafia security. Manelli’s men were watching this street. If they were protecting Maslak, they knew that Rodion and the Yaroshenko Organization would be out for him. I could almost smell the garlic on the wind.

Sure enough, Maslak went into the shade of the garage jungle. Built to serve the hospital and the many smaller laboratories clustered around it, it was reminiscent of the concrete sarcophagus that the Soviet government was currently building around the ruins of Chernobyl. I followed him in, keeping a bead on him while I waited for Vassily to catch up. Every second that passed, every moment we headed deeper in the building and closer to the stairwell, the more tension gathered in my shoulders. It was an eternity before the town car rolled past, Vassily concealed by the tinted windows. Maslak turned a corner, and I took the chance to throw open the door and jump in.

“Where’d he go?” Vassily craned his head, rolling forward.

“Left,” I grunted. “If he goes upstairs, I’ll get out again.”

Vassily sped up and hauled the wheel left, pitching me against the door. A car screeched to a halt to avoid broadsiding us, honking loudly.

“What are you doing?” I righted myself, resisting the urge to grab the wheel.

“I’m trying to follow him!”

“Do you want to play the Soviet national anthem out the window while we do it?” I leaned around him catching glimpses of Maslak weaving through the lines of cars. He crossed the next aisle, then the next… and then got his keys out, twirling them around his finger has he closed in on a black Renault.

“There we go. Get the plate!” Vassily’s voice rose in excitement as we slowed to a creep, as if searching for a spot.

It was my turn to roll my eyes. “You are the worst kind of desk jockey. I already have the plate, Vassily.”

“Write it down!”

“I don’t need to write it down.” I watched as the man pointed something with his hand, and the car flashed its lights and chirped. He had some kind of new electronic entry system, one that didn’t require a keypad on the door. It probably worked with radio waves. Interesting.

We circled around, and then followed him at a distance out into the nightmare that was Manhattan rush-hour. While we were stuck in gridlock with every other poor schmuck on the road, Vassily and I took the opportunity to change seats. It was well understood that I was the better driver, and tailing marks was an art form.

It took us nearly an hour and a half to drive eleven miles. By mile nine, Vassily began to grimace and glance out the window. “We’re headed to that Battery Park development area. If this guy lives where I think he might live, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get him at home, Lexi.”

“Why?” My focus was on the road. Even with air con, the sun through the windshield had turned my gloves into a sauna. As traffic thinned out and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, we were able to pick up some speed.

“This guy’s New Money, and he’s still pretty young.” Vassily rapped his fingers against the door, frowning. “He wants the best of everything, right? The Concrete Club owns some of the biggest apartment towers near Battery Park and Wall Street. And who runs that?”

“The Mafia. But he might not be going home at all,” I said.

“On a Thursday night?”

“Well, I don’t know. Don’t yuppies all go to each other’s apartments and eat sushi on Thursdays?”

Unfortunately, Vassily’s hunch was right. Maslak turned right at the World Trade Center, then left onto South End Avenue to pull up in front of a sectioned off apartment complex with its own boom gates, skywalk, and three skyscrapers’ worth of luxury housing. Ruefully, I watched the black Renault disappear into the dark maw of an underground parking garage. An attended parking garage. We cruised on by and found a place to park down the road, crestfallen.

An apartment complex like this meant security, and it meant cameras: lots of cameras. It didn’t make the job impossible, but it definitely made it harder. I could take out cameras easily enough – electronics don’t really like magical resonance – but not a whole building’s worth. There’d be a trail of fuzzy video. Talented mediums working with forensic videographers would possibly be able to extract the ghostly images of my passing. Besides that, if Maslak could afford a five thousand dollar-a-month apartment, what kind of magical security was he able to contract? And where was he getting the money?

“What are you thinking, Alexi?” Vassily said. “My guess is we pretend to be contractors or pizza boys or something, and go up there and beat the piss out of him.”

“No, no.” I shook my head, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel and staring at the dash as I thought. “No, Rodion wants something more dramatic than that. I’m going to have to do it alone, and I’m going to have to do it tonight… but I have an idea.”