Part 9 (1/2)

ELEVEN.

The day after the Shelter Island trip, Wally woke up feeling more focused than ever. The quest to find her biological mother had begun with a sort of dreamy, fairy-tale quality to it, but that feeling had evaporated with the sight of the armed men in the Hatches' house, especially the one whose photograph was in the Brighton Beach file. He was the most dangerous man, someone whose very presence inspired terror. She suspected-no, felt certain-that she and that man had crossed paths for one simple reason: they were both searching for Yalena. Wally felt just as certain that if she did not find her mother before he did, then she would never find her at all.

Wally joined the others in the bank's employee break room, where they were drinking microwave hot cocoa and eating day-old bagels.

”I'm headed to the library,” she said. ”What Andrew Hatch said about 'Emerson' people ... I'm going to run that down, if I can.”

”We're kind of freaked out,” Ella confessed to Wally.

”There are guns in this now, Wally,” Jake said. ”You've run into some serious s.h.i.+t, whatever it is.”

”I know.”

”You're done with the Hatch brothers, right?” Tevin asked. ”You're not going back there?”

”For now I'm just going to try to figure out the Emerson thing,” Wally said, wondering if she had already taken the quest too far but knowing that if she gave it up, she would never forgive herself. ”I just have to keep moving forward. I'll catch up with you later.”

Wally threw her messenger bag over her shoulder and hurried out the bank's rear exit, through the narrow walkway to the street. There she took an extra look around to be sure she was not being observed; the encounter on Shelter Island had put her on alert. If she and those men really were both hunting the same person, they might cross paths again at any time. She scanned 87th Street, looking for anything unusual. As far as she could tell, her exit was safe, and she made her way east to Amsterdam Avenue and had just turned north when she heard footsteps behind her and turned to find Tevin standing there.

”You're okay alone?” he asked.

It was easy for Wally to see that he wanted her to invite him along, that he wanted her to need him. But it was more responsibility than she could handle for the moment.

”Thanks, Tev.” She gave him a smile. ”Yeah, I'm okay.”

He nodded, doing his best not to seem disappointed as he turned around and headed back in the direction of the bank.

The Internet access area of the library had twenty stations running, and Wally had to wait only ten minutes before one came open.

She took her coat off and logged on to her station, opening a search engine on the home page. She typed in the name Emerson just to see what would come up: more than four million hits. Wally thought for a moment, then entered both Emerson and Hatch. One hundred and forty thousand hits. She then entered three terms: Emerson, Hatch, and Russia. The hits on these terms were equally forbidding-several hundred. The first page of results began with a reference to Cabott Emerson III, former American amba.s.sador to the Soviet Union.

Wally pulled up Wikipedia and entered Emerson's name. The man's full biography came up, revealing that Emerson had served in the Soviet Union for almost twenty years and had been an advisor on Soviet affairs to four American presidents. He had died in the mid-seventies. At the end of the Wikipedia biography was a list of related hits on the search terms, and the third one caught Wally's eye: the Emerson School, named after Cabott Emerson III and located in Moscow.

Hadn't the Wall Street Journal article described Benjamin Hatch as ”a former teacher”? Wally did a basic Google search for the Emerson School and clicked on the first link. The Emerson School site came up on her screen but immediately presented Wally with a hurdle: the opening page was nothing more than a log-on screen, requesting a user name and pa.s.sword to gain access.

That was strange, Wally thought. The Internet site of most any school, especially a private one, would usually be the equivalent of an admissions brochure, featuring lots of information about faculty, curriculum, campus layout, and admissions procedures. The Emerson School offered nothing. A log-on screen was the equivalent of a sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY-NO TRESPa.s.sING. Wally tried another tack. She navigated back to Wikipedia and did a search for the Emerson School there. Here Wally had success: the article included a fairly long entry about the school, reviewing its history, the focus of its curriculum, exterior photos of the campus, and a list of notable alumni.

What Wally learned there explained the unfriendly reception at the school's own site. The Emerson School was a private, K12, American-run school in Moscow that was named after the distinguished American amba.s.sador and geared toward the needs of the Western diplomatic corps living full time in Russia. The student body consisted mostly of the children of diplomats and business executives from the United States and other Western countries; the security of students would be a priority.

Did Benjamin Hatch teach at the Emerson School during his time in Russia? Did Yalena Mayakova herself have some sort of connection to Emerson as well? If she did, then maybe her relations.h.i.+p with Benjamin Hatch had begun there. If so, maybe Benjamin Hatch had helped Yalena reach America. Maybe Wally's best chance for getting closer to her mother was to move backward instead of forward, to retrace Yalena's path to America as a way of finding out why she had left Russia and where she had eventually landed.

It was a lot of maybes. Wally didn't know for sure if learning more about the Emerson School would bring her closer to finding Yalena here in the States, but this string of possible relations.h.i.+ps-from Yalena to the Emerson School to Benjamin Hatch to America-was the only real lead she had. She needed access past the firewall of the Emerson School site.

Of the people in Wally's life, she knew only one who had the computer skills to penetrate a secure website; before he began his outlaw life on the street, Nick Pierce had been a computer sciences geek in his suburban New Jersey high school. Nick could help Wally; whether or not he would was another question. There was bad blood.

Wally tried a few of Nick's old squats on the Lower East Side but came up empty-two of them were boarded shut, and a third had been renovated from a thrashed old industrial storage s.p.a.ce into expensive loft apartments. She walked south on Avenue B and crossed East Houston toward the place that was her last best chance of finding Nick, the Ess.e.x Street subway station.

With each step Wally felt more anxious. If she did find Nick, he would almost definitely be doped up-by the time the crew had split from him, his habit had gotten completely out of control, and Wally had heard word on the street that he was still deep into the sickness. His mood would depend a lot on what he was using that day; crack, heroin, meth, and oxy were possibilities, plus anything else he could get his hands on.

Whichever way he was tweaked, Wally figured Nick would still be plenty angry with her. It had been Nick who had initiated Wally into the life of the streets, who had invited her into his crew and taught her much of what she used every day to survive. But in the end it was Wally who proved to be the stronger person.

The two of them had met a year and a half earlier, months before Wally left home. Wally and Darien, a girlfriend from school, had cut afternoon cla.s.ses and headed down to the area around NYU to check out some of the cool shops. They bought burritos from a food truck on Waverly and were eating them on a bench in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park when they were approached by Nick, who was pa.s.sing out flyers for a rave that night in Chinatown.

Nick Pierce was handsome back then, tall and lanky in a nice way, with untamed curly dark hair and playful green eyes. He wasn't even a year older than Wally, but he vibed a kind of easy confidence-and trouble-that was unlike anything Wally knew from the boys at her uptown prep school.

”Come rave tonight, ladies,” Nick said, handing Wally and Darien the flyers, ”and your worlds will be rocked.”

”Rocked how?” Wally said, not giving away any interest in him. ”We're gonna need specifics.”

”The specifics are that if my friends and I pa.s.s out five hundred of these ads, we get into the club for free.”

”And what happens inside?” Wally said.

”That depends,” he said, looking into her. ”What do you want?”

Hmm, thought Wally.

The girls never made it to the rave that night because Darien was, in Wally's opinion, chickens.h.i.+t. But from that day on Wally made regular trips to the parks-Was.h.i.+ngton Square or Tompkins Square-to meet up with Nick and his crew: Sophie, Jake, Ella, Tevin, and a rotating group of other strays. Hanging with her new friends was the opposite of being trapped at home with Claire-relaxed, fun, unstructured, and totally without judgment-and her decision to be with them was the first major choice Wally had ever made for herself. It felt good.

Within six months, Wally had left home to be on the street with the crew full time, and the exciting glow of her relations.h.i.+p with Nick lasted a month, maybe two. Then things went wrong.

Nick had always smoked a fair amount of weed, but at some point he had started doing meth-in secret from the crew-and almost overnight he was hard-core hooked. To pay for his fresh habit, Nick began putting the entire crew at risk-especially Sophie-by involving them in street scams and drug rip-offs that would eventually get them busted or worse.

Wally had stood by at first, watching what was going on but without the will to change it. She felt indebted to Nick for welcoming her into the crew and for her ”street” education, and at the time she was at least halfway in love with him. For a while those were good enough reasons to stay silent, but Wally had her limits. She reached a point where she even considered abandoning the crew and moving back home with Claire, but things turned out differently.

One afternoon, down in the Grand Central tunnels, Wally discovered Nick sharing a crack pipe with Ella and Jake, their first time doing anything harder than booze or weed. It was a perfect strategy for Nick: if other members of the crew were using with him, they would share his desperation for dope and would go along with his increasingly reckless schemes for making money.

Wally had gone ballistic. In her rage she actually attacked Nick physically and had kicked his a.s.s. Nick the half-gone doper had been no contest for angry Wally and her martial arts training, despite the size difference between them. Wally's defiance forced the rest of the crew to choose between her and Nick, and they didn't hesitate to follow Wally out the door.

”Get clean and you can come back with us,” Wally had said, her last words to Nick. Generous, she thought.

”f.u.c.k you, Wally,” Nick had answered, his lip bleeding and his ego crushed. ”You'll never make it.”

Those last words were spoken without conviction; it was obvious to Nick and everyone else what Wally was capable of, and she had proved it every day since then. With the exception of Sophie, Wally had kept the crew clean and safe, and she had long since forgotten the idea of returning to her life with Claire.

Wally made it down to the Ess.e.x Street subway platform and-when she was sure she wasn't being observed by any of the IRT employees-jumped off the south platform and hurried into the darkness of the abandoned trolley stop that had stood there empty for decades. The place was dark and filthy with grime, its corroded walls covered with generations of graffiti tags. The acrid smell of p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t and vomit hung thick and sweet in the air, and Wally had to suppress an urge to puke.

Wally pulled out a flashlight and made her way toward the old boiler room at the far end of the station. She now felt an eager little rush in her belly to go along with all the anxiety and had to admit to herself that despite the disgusting location she found herself in, part of her was actually looking forward to seeing Nick, to sharing with him her excitement over the search for Yalena. She knew she was being ridiculous, of course, but some part of her held on to the hope that he had managed to turn his life around, that she would miraculously find the old Nick waiting for her.

Wally entered the boiler room, and those foolish, delusional thoughts were chased away. Three or four burned-down candles dimly lit the squalid s.p.a.ce. Grimy old heating ducts covered the ceiling and walls, all of them rusted through. Four or five ratty and molded mattresses covered about half of the floor s.p.a.ce, surrounded by discarded needles and broken gla.s.s pipes. Two young girls in jeans and greasy down parkas were huddled together on one of the mattresses, asleep or drugged out or both, an old moving blanket wrapped around them against the cold air.

Nick was the only other person in the room, sitting upright on one of the mattresses with his back against one of the rotted ducts, smoking a cigarette. His frame was skeletal now, his hair cropped close and those green eyes sunk deep in a perpetual shadow. A ghostly post-binge aura hung off him.

Wally's heart sank at the sight.