Read Online The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery - Free Book Online Page B

air.
    â€œAll right,” Petey says, “all right. Though we would be interested in going to Ukraine.”
    â€œWhy? It’s easier just to stay here.”
    â€œWe want to see what we’re getting into.”
    â€œYou mean you want to meet the Wolf?”
    â€œWell, yes.”
    â€œThere is almost no chance you’ll meet the Wolf.”
    â€œHave you ever met him?”
    â€œYes. Three times. It was a different person every time. You still want to go?”
    Petey nods. The restaurant owner shakes his head.
    â€œFine,” he says.
    They begin to go over details, of who Petey and Curly will be dealing with when they go, how to move money from place to place, from account to account. Indications of the restaurant owner’s seriousness. Petey and Curly are expecting more somehow, more of a show of being let into something, of being made members. It doesn’t come, and they should see that as their first warning that they don’t understand what they’re involving themselves in. But they don’t. Instead they’re off to Kiev within a month with a phone number the restaurant owner gives him. They’ll take care of you, the owner says, without a trace of warmth; it’s professionalism and nothing else.

 
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    Chapter 3
    Pete y and Curly fly into the airport outside of Kiev in the early morning. It’s a gray building, smaller than Petey thought it would be. Half the lightbulbs in the ceiling are out. Someone’s done up the signs for the customs lines in rainbow colors. Petey and Curly have to fill out a lot of forms for their belongings to get them into the country; if not for Curly, Petey’s not sure how he would have managed it. They pay a bribe. Then Curly calls the number the restaurant owner gave him from a pay phone, and they get picked up in a spiffy new black SUV with tinted windows. The driver looks and talks as if he’s been awake all night. They glide out of the airport parking lot and onto the highway. All around them are sedans with dull colors that rust has faded even more, minibuses with stained curtains hanging in the windows, their mufflers coughing out exhaust. They reach a stretch of road that shoots straight through forest, and the driver puts his foot on the gas, leaves it there until the car is going about a hundred miles an hour. Through the rearview mirror, Petey can tell the driver’s nodding off. Nobody says a word for a few minutes. They fly by the bus stations the Soviets built on both sides of the highway; it’s easy to think that whoever in the Politburo built them wanted to build villages and towns around them, too, but never got around to it. So there they sit, monuments to the insanity of central planning—or, I guess, if you’re a diehard Marxist, its unrealized potential, though there aren’t many of those left. The truth confounds both lessons anyway; sure enough, there are a couple people waiting at every other station, three men walking along a trail in the woods to reach another one. Where those people are coming from, where they’re going, what they’re doing getting on a bus on a highway in the middle of the woods, Petey can’t begin to guess. He’ll never get a grip on this place. Which is why, when it decides to take him out, he won’t see it coming.
    They’re still going a hundred miles an hour when they reach the giant sign welcoming them to the outskirts of Kiev. There’s a little more woods. What looks like a tiny village by the side of the highway, all white plaster walls and tile roofs. A man in a black leather jacket strolling down the dirt streets between them, waving to a woman with a headscarf and a brown coat. Then there’s a long, open field, and the city begins, the things the Soviet Union built. They pass by the outermost ring of apartment towers for what feels like miles of cold neon in the gray early morning while thousands of people wait for