He’s right about one thing: she hates driving and isn’t happy to have to do it tonight. She never drove before she met him. He taught her himself, on long, empty stretches of Central Valley farm roads. Her car back home is a Honda Accord that she rarely drives farther than the grocery store. She dislikes the old Mercedes and has only driven it two or three times since they bought it.
That’s not why she looks troubled, though. When Richard was out there on the balcony with her brother, Monika addressed her in the Russian every schoolchild of their mutual vintage had to learn: “You know what I appreciate about you, Julisia? If you think I’m a fool, you conceal it beautifully.” Richard and Stefan returned before Julia managed to formulate a reply, which is fortunate. She doesn’t know how she might’ve responded. What can you say when another woman, who happens to be your brother’s wife, makes that kind of statement?
Anna, in contrast to her mother, could not possibly appear more radiant. Her golden hair brushes the shoulders of the white faux fur they bought her a few days ago at Macy’s, and her face is flushed with excitement. She raises one hand and points at the ceiling. “It’s her,” she tells him. “It’s like she’s following us everywhere we go.”
At first he doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about. Then he hears that unmistakable voice wafting from the restaurant sound system. “Well,” he says, “there are worse folks to be followed by than Miss Ella Fitzgerald.” He puts one arm around her shoulders and the other around her mother’s. Then he steers his family out the door.
When Bogdan climbs out of the car, more snow seeps into his shoes. Earlier, on their initial foray through the woods, his feet got soaked, and now his toes are numb. He has poor circulation anyway. “Let’s hear the sequence again,” he says.
Marek studies him across the roof. “Sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asks, holding up the bottle. “Just to steady your jangling nerves?”
The bottle is small, and in the dark it looks almost empty. Earlier, when his partner first produced it, Bogdan came close to punching him, his fist rising as though it had a mind of its own. All evening he’s been feeling like one of those drones the Americans are supposedly using. It seems as if some strange force has seized control of his body. “Give me the sequence,” he repeats. “If you don’t, you can count me out.”
“I already told you four times.”
“So tell me five.”
Marek screws the cap off and takes another sip. “Four . . . two . . . one . . . six. Satisfied?”
“Not really. I won’t be satisfied until I’m home in bed.” Saying even that much represents wishful thinking. He’ll never be satisfied again, whether they pull this off or not. Some places you can’t come back from, and he’s in one of them now.
“Time to do it.” Marek crams the bottle into his coat pocket, grabs a crowbar from the backseat, and slips on his mask. It’s black like Bogdan’s, except above the eye slits there’s an oddly shaped orange letter C and, next to that, the head of an orange bear.
Bogdan pulls on the balaclava and immediately begins to itch. His partner steps into the woods, and for the second time tonight he sets off behind him.
Marek made the proposal a couple of weeks ago, the day after their produce supplier notified them that their account would soon be suspended. He would have suggested it earlier, he said, but he wanted to wait until his cousin had been in Ireland a while, to keep suspicion from falling on him.
When he recovered from the shock, Bogdan said, “You think this guy’s smart enough to get rich but too fucking stupid to change the gate code after your cousin leaves to work in Ireland?”
“If somebody’s in Ireland, why worry? He can’t rob you from Dublin.”
“No, but he can tell somebody the code, and they can rob you.”
“He trusted my cousin.”
“Well, that’s an argument for his stupidity, I’ll grant you. But he was still smart enough to install a burglar alarm—and smart enough not to give your cousin the code for that.”
They were having this conversation in the meat locker, surrounded by carcasses suspended from hooks. Marek wore a bloodstained apron and was holding a cleaver. They’d had to let their butcher go last summer. “When the alarm’s triggered,” he said, “it sends a signal to the police station in Alwernia. We’re talking about a town with a population of less than four thousand. On a typical Friday night, there are two cops on duty, and it’s a safe bet at least one of them’s drunk. Anyhow, it’s nine kilometers away, on the other side of a mountain.”
“What about the neighbors?”
“There aren’t any. This guy bought everything nearby to guarantee his privacy.”
“And the safe? How much does it weigh?”
“It’s small, probably no more than forty kilos. You’re telling me two healthy guys can’t carry the damn thing a couple hundred meters?”
“I’m not healthy. I’ve got high blood pressure, and you’ve made it spike. Besides, you seem to be overlooking the guard dog.”
“It’s apparently pretty vicious,” Marek admitted, “but we’ll drug it. And you don’t need to worry that it’ll freeze to death, because it’s got a fully heated doghouse. That animal lives better than we do.”
He said absolutely not, hell no. Then he went home and found Krysia sitting at the kitchen table, and though her eyes were dry, he could see she’d been crying. The stove had just quit. She didn’t complain or level any accusations, didn’t tell him he was a loser or a fool, but the weight of their collapsed hopes was more than he could bear.
So now here he is, tromping through snowy woods right before Christmas. An hour or so ago, as they’d approached the back gate, the German shepherd had let out a growl that sounded like it was being amplified over a stadium PA and hurled himself at the gate so hard Bogdan thought it might rock off its hinges. The dog began to bark and snarl, and the noise continued even after Marek flung the medicated kielbasa over the wall. By the time they got back to the car, the barking had stopped. “Enjoy your dinner, you fucking Nazi,” Marek muttered. Out came the vodka.
Bogdan stumbles over a fallen limb and staggers into a tree, banging his shoulder. “Shit,” he groans.
“Quiet!”
“Quiet? You want me to be quiet?” He’s almost shouting. “It’d be smarter to make as much racket as we can. Because if that dog’s not out cold and we go through that gate, he may eat us for dessert.”
“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic.”
“Don’t you be so goddamn nonchalant.”
At the edge of the woods, they pause. The clouds have parted, and they can see the house better than before. The wall is blocking their view of the grounds and the bottom floor, but you can tell the place is huge. It’s got a couple of towers that make it look like something from the late Middle Ages or the Italian Renaissance, Bogdan isn’t sure which.
There’s plenty he doesn’t know. He used to read a good bit, mostly popular history, books about the Second World War, the settling of the American West, polar exploration, the lives of various kings, queens, kaisers, and czars. But these last few years he hasn’t read anything. He’s worked ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, and there’s nothing to show for it except unpaid bills, unrealized dreams.
Inside that house, if Marek’s cousin can be believed, stands a safe that always contains a couple hundred