Hidden Prey

talk, that he is from Russia. So Anton locks the door and turns out the lights and they go in the back and when Anton turns around, this man has a gun. He makes Anton throw a rope over a beam and put it around his neck, and then he makes him stand up on a six-pack of beer bottles—beer bottles! Anton says, ‘No!’ and the man shoots him in the ear, and Anton must stand on the beer bottles. The man wants everybody’s name, but Anton, he tells him nothing. He says he knows no names. The man says he will leave him on the beer bottles. Anton says he knows no names. And then, the man has a radio and he hears the police are coming and he kicks the beer bottles out and Anton is hanging by the neck and the man goes running out, and another man comes in and lifts up Anton and then the police come and cut the rope and they take him to the hospital . . .”
    She started weeping again and finally Svoboda said, “He never saw the guy with the gun before?”
    “No. Never.”
    “It all comes back to the fuckin’ Russians,” Leon Witold said. “We never should have met with that guy. I hope to hell nobody here had anything to do with that murder down in Duluth.” His eyes scanned across the room and stuck for a moment on Grandpa Walther.
    “Don’t be stupid,” Nancy Witold Spencer said. “We’re not operators. It must be from Russia, somehow.”
    “She’s right,” Rick Svoboda said. “There’s something going on in Russia that we don’t know about. The first guy didn’t even know for sure who we were, how many there were, who the families were.”
    “He knew about me,” Grandpa Walther said.
    “You’re the only one,” Svoboda said. “The question is, how did this second man get to Anton? Why didn’t they go back to Grandpa?”
    “Maybe they will.” Leon Witold said.
    Marsha Spivak opened her mouth to say something, but Grandpa jumped in: “We’ve been thinking about this,” Grandpa said, “And we dohave an answer, Carl and I. There was a story in the newspaper about the Russian killed in Duluth, this accident, this . . .”
    “Wasn’t no accident,” Leon Witold snorted.
    “Whatever it was,” Grandpa said impatiently. “Moshalov, Oleshev, whatever his name is, is killed. We know he did not come from an official office: he was working outside the apparat. So the apparat sends its own investigator, this Rusian policewoman. I believe she must have a shadow. The story said the state police, and the Duluth police, were cooperating with the Russian. If they went to Anton, and he told them nothing, then maybe the Russian shadow went to Anton to see if Russian interrogation might work.”
    “Anton tells them nothing,” said Marsha Spivak.
    Grandpa turned to her. “Did the police say who this other guy is, who helped Anton?”
    Carol Spivak shook her head, answering for her mother. “No. They won’t release his name because the crazy man is still on the loose. They say he was walking past the back of the business when the crazy man came running out the back, and he saw Anton hanging there, and he ran in and lifted him and then the police came.”
    Carl frowned: “That’s sounds weird.”
    Grandpa Walther nodded: “We should all ask. We should all listen. People will be talking.”
    “The main problem, as I see it, is that we have cops all over the place, asking questions. Probably the FBI and the CIA, too,” Rick Svoboda said. “They have Anton’s name, and they must suspect something. First there’s the meeting, then the Russian gets killed, then Anton gets hanged. We have to believe that they will come after him.”
    “He will say nothing,” Marsha Spivak said vehemently. Her son and daughter nodded, but Janet Svoboda said, “What if this shadow, whoever he is, catches one of you and . . . you know. What if they catch Carol, and then they call Anton and say, ‘We’ll cut her throat if you don’t answer.’ You think Anton wouldn’t answer to save his daughter’s life?”
    They had nothing to say about that, and Carol Spivak lightly pinched her Adam’s apple with two fingers, as if closing a cut.
     
    W ANDA W ITOLD SAID , “The big question now is, what do we do? We have no contact with Russia, everybody was swept away. We thought it was done.”
    “It’s not done,” Grandpa insisted. “How many times do I have to tell you, the party is . . .”
    “Not time to argue about that,” Janet Svoboda said, cutting him off. “What do we do? Do we just sit?”
    “We