he leaned back in his chair behind the battered steel desk.
“I have no idea, Mr. Ryan. I never heard of this Christopher Gage person. Perhaps the owner, but not me.”
“Can you at least tell me what the relationship is with Baltic General Services? What do you do for them?”
The big man shrugged. “What do we do for them? Nothing that I know of. But they have done a lot for us. A small pay raise for my employees, a new computer system that Mrs. Lewandowska is still trying to learn. A new soda machine in the break room.”
“And how is business?” Jack asked. “I noticed trucks in all the docking bays when we pulled up.”
“Business is good. Very good. But I don’t keep the financial records. That is information that only Mr. Stapinsky has.”
“Is he available to speak with?”
“Mr. Stapinsky lives in Kraków. His family is from that area. He owns businesses down there, and property.”
“Regarding business here, are there more trucks coming in? More shipments?”
Wilczek scratched the top of his head, thinking. “Yes. More trucks, more shipments. But different than before.”
“Different how?”
The springs in his chair squeaked like a rusted hinge as he stood. He snatched an industrial-sized folding box cutter from off his cluttered desk.
Jack imagined Wilczek lunging at him with that blade, a great slashing arc with his gorilla-length arm aimed right at his throat.
It was how Jack’s brain worked these days—or, more precisely, how it was trained by Ding and Clark. Always anticipate. Wilczek wouldn’t be an easy man to take down in any case, but with a blade he knew how to use? It would be hard to do without getting hurt.
Or, more likely, killed.
“Follow me, Mr. Ryan.”
* * *
—
The warehouse floor was stacked with pallets, neat and orderly, aligned with the loading bays. Forklifts ran in and out of the long trailers, carefully stacking the pallets. Other dockworkers rolled hand trucks filled with unpalletized boxes. The air stank of natural gas from the forklift engines and burnt hard rubber from their tires. The big steel forks rattled and clanged as they sped, empty, out of the trailers.
“You see?” Wilczek said, casting a wide arm at the floor. “All we get now is cheap Chinese crap. It is all part of this ‘New Silk Road’ business they keep talking about.”
Wilczek slashed away the plastic wrapping from a pallet with his razor-sharp box cutter, pulled off one of the boxes marked as radios and cut the tape on it, then pulled out a boxed radio. He pointed at the radio box with his razor blade. “See? Made in China. All of it. All of it!”
Wilczek barked an order to one of his men to repackage the radio, then led Jack and Liliana over to one of the open pallets close to the nearest door. The boxes were marked in combinations of English and Chinese, and sometimes Polish, French, or German. Two young men were stacking boxes from it onto heavy-duty hand trucks. They seemed to move a little faster as Wilczek approached. He growled something at them and the taller one answered back in a deferential tone as the other one sped off with his loaded hand truck toward the open maw of the forty-plus-foot-long trailer. The tall one loaded the last of his boxes onto his hand truck and sped away after his friend.
When they were out of earshot, Wilczek chuckled. “Ukrainians. Good boys. Hard workers.” He winked at Jack. “But you can’t tell them that or they won’t work as hard, eh?”
Jack glanced around the warehouse floor. He couldn’t read Chinese, but in English he read the contents: stacks of boom boxes, children’s bicycles, glassware, women’s shoes, hand tools, roofing nails.
A phone rang over the loudspeakers attached to the ceiling, and a moment later the receptionist’s voice barked over the warehouse speakers. Jack caught only the words Pan Kierownik!
“Excuse me, please. I must take a call. But please stop by my office on your way out.”
“We will,” Jack said.
As soon as Wilczek disappeared behind his office door, Jack said to Liliana, “You’re awfully quiet.”
“Are you finding what you’re looking for?”
Jack nodded toward one of the pallets still wrapped in plastic. “If I needed two hundred cordless jigsaws, then yeah, I’ve found it. Other than that? I’m confused.”
The two young Ukrainians were grunting and chatting as they stacked boxes in the back of the truck.
“I’m going to look around a little more,” Jack said.