Hidden Prey
I’ll talk to you in the morning. Don’t do anything before then.”
“What time in the morning?”
“I’ll call you before nine.”
“All right. But listen, Andy: people are being killed. I don’t much give a shit about spies or anything you guys deal with, but I get a little pissed when people are being murdered and I can’t stop it. So . . . come up with something. Or I will.”
“Take it easy, okay? Take it easy. I’ll call before nine o’clock.”
10
S VOBODA ’ S B AKERY IN downtown Hibbing had a U-shaped glassed-in counter with the cash register at the bottom of the U. If a customer wanted bread, which was kept in the case to the left of the cash register, he had to walk between fifteen running feet of glazed, frosted, powdered, and jelly doughnuts, cherry, apple, and blueberry popovers, poppy-seed kolaches, six kinds of Danish including prune, apple, and apricot, and a variety of strudels, cakes, jelly rolls, and cookies.
Two small bathroom-style exhaust fans, mounted in the corners of the wall behind the cash register, blew odors from the ovens into the sales space, a mixture of yeast, dough, spice, and just a touch of sea salt. Few customers made it back to the street without a load of extra calories.
L EON W ITOLD AND his wife, Wanda, arrived two minutes after the bakery opened at six in the morning. Karen Svoboda, thestay-at-home daughter, was standing at the cash register and tipped her head toward the back. The Witolds nodded at her and went on past the cash register, through the preparation and oven rooms, down a short corridor past the single rest room to a small employees’ lounge. The lounge was a cube with yellowed walls and a flaking ceiling, furnished with three tippy plastic-topped tables, a dozen folding chairs from Wal-Mart, and an E-Z clean vinyl floor. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, disinfectant, and warm cookies.
Rick Svoboda, a round-faced man with steel gray hair, was pushing chairs around. When the Witolds walked in, he said, his eyes downcast, worried, “Hi, guys.”
“You know what it’s about?” Leon Witold asked. Leon was an accountant, a tall, thin-lipped, thin-faced man with overgrown eyebrows.
“Something serious,” Svoboda said. “Marsha Spivak called last night and said Anton was in the hospital. Somebody tried to hang him—and she thinks it’s the Russians.”
“Oh my God,” Wanda said. The blood had drained from her narrow face, and she pushed a knuckle against her teeth. “Hanged him?” she breathed.
“He’s not dead, but the cops are all over the place,” said Svoboda. There were footsteps in the hallway outside, and Grandpa Walther was in the doorway, ancient, shaking a little, his eyes blue as the sky. Then Grandma appeared, in a wheelchair pushed by their grandson, Carl.
Svoboda looked at Carl and then Grandpa, who said, “He’s been in for five years. I’ve been teaching him for more than twelve.”
“Aw, boy. Does Jan know?” Svoboda kept his eyes on Carl, who looked back with the flat stare of a garter snake.
“No. She turns her back on us, so we tell her nothing,” Grandpa said.
“Carl’s her kid,” Svoboda said.
“I’m in,” Carl said. “I don’t care what Mom thinks.”
“I’m not sure what the others will say,” Leon Witold said.
“It doesn’t matter what they say,” Grandpa said. His voice had anedge of the Stalin steel. “He is in. He knows our story. He knows enough to send every one of us to prison. Some of us were younger than he is, when we got in. He’s our future, and he’s in.”
Svoboda rubbed his face. “Oh, brother. I thought it would stop with us.”
“Never stop,” Grandpa said. “We have a duty.”
M ORE PEOPLE : Marsha Spivak, Anton’s wife, a heavyset woman with a hound-dog face, a babushka over her hair, the woman who raised the alarm.
“Good to see you, good to see you,” she said. “My Anton is terrible hurt, terrible hurt . . .” She’d been born in the United States, but somehow managed a middle-European accent. She’d been to church already, not to Mass, just inside the door to dab her forehead with holy water and to say a prayer for Anton. She was a Communist, all right, but of the practical sort, the just-in-case kind, who had no personal problem with Jesus.
Janet Svoboda, as round faced as her husband, blond, with a long nose that looked a little like one of her bagel sticks, came in with a pot of coffee and a tray of
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