“Is there anything you remember about her final days that you didn’t have a chance to tell me about when we first me? Anything that struck you as noteworthy upon further reflection?”
She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head and resumed drinking her tea.
The visit was the exact opposite of what I though it would be when she’d arrived. I sympathized with her and considered it a matter of honor to provide her with some comfort, especially given she’d come to see me of her own volition. But Simmy wasn’t paying me to be thoughtful with the victim’s mother.
The thought of Simmy brought to mind a second line of questioning, one that was of personal interest to me.
“Maria, may I ask you a question about Simmy?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Simmy?”
“Were you surprised when he called you to offer to help with the case?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because he has a big heart. And it’s just like him to do something like this for an old … an old friend, like me.”
“That means you stayed in touch all these years, right? I mean, if it wasn’t a surprise, you had to have some contact with him. It’s not as though he called you after twenty years and offered his services, is it?”
Maria considered the question, then began counting on her fingers. She seemed to lose track, gave me an apologetic look and repeated the process.
“Twenty-four,” she said.
“Twenty-four years?”
She smiled and nodded. “What a guy, huh?”
“So you didn’t stay in touch all these years?”
“Of course not. We went our separate ways. He got married, I got married. Once there are spouses, it’s very hard to maintain a friendship with someone that you were emotionally intimate with.”
“And yet you say weren’t surprised when he called? Twenty-four years later?”
Maria considered my question. “I guess you’re right, when I think about it from that perspective. But this wasn’t a Christmas holiday or a birthday, it was quite the opposite so I thought it was very sweet of him. George didn’t care for it, of course—Russian men are very possessive, even of their old wives. And as I said, it was just like Simmy to reach out to someone after all these years.”
“I understand,” I said. “Was there any other reason he might have reached out? To your knowledge?”
“Another reason?” She appeared baffled by the question. Then she brightened. “Oh, you mean do I think he missed me after all these years?”
“Well …”
“I’d love to say that I think that’s the case, but I’m not that delusional. Not anymore. Twenty years ago? Yes. Ten years ago? Maybe. It takes time to accept the ravages of age, vodka, and a slowing metabolism. Today? No. Give me self-awareness over delusion any day.”
I was left speechless, once again uncertain about Maria’s state of mind now that she sounded more in control of her faculties than most people I knew. I thought of myself yesterday, trying to remain in control of my thoughts while my assailants stripped my clothes from my body.
My eyes drifted to the picture she’d brought. I studied it again.
“Have you seen Sasha recently?” I said.
“He calls all the time to see how I am.”
“That’s nice.”
“As a matter-of-fact he called yesterday,” Maria said. “Said he was going away for a couple of nights to take his mind off things. Who can blame him? The poor boy, he loved Iskra so much. He called because he wanted to know if there was anything he could do for me. He’s hopeless, that Sasha, but he’s a good soul.”
She took a quick sip of tea.
“I’ve taken enough of your time. I should be going,” she said, and reached into her bag for her wallet
“No, no,” I said. “Please. It’s my pleasure.”
Maria thanked me and stood up. “I just wanted you to see this picture.” She took her folio but instead of putting the frame back inside, she slid it toward me. “You should keep it. I think it’s important … it’s important that you keep it.”
She spoke slowly, emphatically but most noteworthy was the magnitude of pain in her expression. I slid the picture toward myself, inspired by the resurrection of the possibility that it held a clue regarding Iskra’s murder, as did the inconsolable look in Maria’s face. She really had needed to tell me something, I realized, and she was doing so now.
My eyes fell on the young man in the photo once again.
“Where did you say Sasha was going?” I said.
Her eyes widened for no more than a split second, but it was enough to let me know that I was asking the right question.
“Bruges,” she said.
When the word escaped her lips, she closed her eyes and took a barely audible breath, the kind that sounded like relief.
She turned and left, but by then my mind was focused on Sasha’s choice of vacation destinations and his image in the picture. I studied him repeatedly. Then I looked at the Romanov family individually, and returned my attention to Sasha.
Then the truth hit me. The clue was right there in front of me all along from the moment Maria Romanova had handed me the picture, but I’d been preoccupied by the faces to see what really mattered.
I whipped out my cell phone and found Simmy’s private number. My means of stabilizing my mobile communications device echoed my discovery in the photograph.
It was all in the wrist.
CHAPTER 23
Simmy picked up on the third ring.
“I need your help and I need it now,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away and I knew why. I hadn’t started the conversation by trying to be clever. I was purposefully blunt and direct. Based on our experiences in Siberia tracking my cousin, I knew he’d read me correctly.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I need to get to Bruges now. I need someone serious to go with me. I’m not one hundred percent sure but I think it’s a matter of life and death.”
“Whose life and death?”
“The girl. Iskra’s lover. Sarah Dumont.”
This time there was a slightly longer pause.
“I’ll drive you myself,” he said. “No bodyguards. Just you and me. We’ll be less conspicuous.”
I’d never seen Simmy drive a car let alone travel without his bodyguards. “You know how to drive a car?”
He sighed. “I’ve driven in the 24 Hour Le Mans three times under a different name. In case you don’t know, that’s the most prestigious endurance race in the world.”
“That’s incredible … Wait, why under a different name?”
“To hide the results … Because I’m no good at it and I don’t want my weaknesses to give confidence to my adversaries … To protect my business and my ego … To serve my vanity as in all matters.”
His confession was so obviously real and true, no further words were needed.
“Where am I picking you up?” he said.
“At my hotel,” I said. “And I have another request, Simmy. But I’m hesitant because I don’t want to offend you.”
“When you put it like that, there’s not much chance I’ll say no, is there?”
“Bring the bodyguards,” I said, and hung up.
I wanted the bodyguards to accompany us because I could smell his testosterone over the phone. There was no reason to worry about being conspicuous. We were going to one and only one house and it was secluded. And I didn’t need Simmy to be my hero. I wanted us to survive the trip.
Afterwards, I called Sarah Dumont. She answered on the second ring. I identified myself and she sounded understandably surprised to hear from me.
We exchanged hellos.
“I don’t want to alarm you.” I said, “but I think the person who killed Iskra is coming to Bruges.”
“You know who killed her?” she said.
“Not for certain. But I think I do.”
S
he chuckled like a supervisor criticizing an overly confident subordinate. “You think you do?”
“Thinking usually precedes certainty. Yes, I think I do, and when I have this kind of conviction, I’m usually right. If I’m right, the killer is a very resourceful and dangerous person.”
“And you think the killer’s coming here? For what reason?”
I stayed quiet, knowing she’d answer her own question.
“To kill me, too?”
I remained mute.
“No one would dare try to kill me,” she said.
Sarah Dumont had seemed a bit entitled and aloof when I’d met her, but never this arrogant or delusional.
“Why wouldn’t anyone dare to kill you?” I said.
“Because … because I have the best security service in Amsterdam.” She sounded as though she’d searched for a convenient answer and found one at the last second.
“Are your men there now?” I said.
“Of course they’re here. If they weren’t here, they wouldn’t be the best service in Amsterdam, would they?”
“How many are there? Is it just the two men at the gate? Or is there a third one?”
She chuckled again. “Talking to you is like talking to my mirror. You’re a bit of a control freak, aren’t you? Now, are you going to answer my question or should I just hang up?”
I backtracked, remembered her question, and told her why I thought Iskra’s killer was going to try to kill her. In doing so, I identified the killer.
She didn’t chuckle this time. “You cannot be serious.”
“If talking to me is like talking to a mirror, do I even need to answer that?”
She considered my comment. “And you think he’s coming here today?”
“He may already be there. I think you should consider calling the police—”
“No police.”
Her firmness suggested she had other reasons she didn’t want the police involved. I wondered what they were.
“I won’t be intimidated on my own property,” she said. “I worked too hard for it. My father worked too hard for it. I have my security guards. There’s two of them. They’re trained. Highly trained. I’ll tell them what you told me.”
I told her I was on my way to Bruges and that I’d call when I got there. In the meantime, I asked her to call me if any visitors arrived, even if they were people she knew. She ended the call without promising to do so.
Simmy and his bodyguards met me in front of my hotel an hour later at 11:30 A.M. They came in two Mercedes Benz vehicles. One was the conservative-looking black sedan that I’d found waiting for me outside of jail. The other was a steroid-injected beast in gunmetal gray. The wheels filled their wells, the front bumper looked ravenous, and steam poured from four tail pipes in the rear.
Simmy arrived driving the latter.
“And you wanted to be less conspicuous?” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Simmy said. “This is a masquerade. A sports car disguised as a sedan. If I wasn’t behind the wheel, you wouldn’t have looked twice at this car.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Not an automobile enthusiast? How can that be when you drive that old 911?”
“I wasn’t talking about the car. I meant you’re right. This is a masquerade. It’s about a person pretending to be one thing but actually being another.”
I tried to enter Sarah Dumont’s address into Simmy’s navigation system, but her home had been built after the map in his system had been designed. Instead, I found the address for the City Center under tourist sites, entered it, and we took off for Bruges.
“Why are you driving yourself?” I said.
“Because I want to prove that I can still do the small things. That I can be a hands-on kind-of guy. Is it working?”
“You bet,” I said.
We stopped once to get gas, use the restrooms and buy food. I chose a protein bar, the bodyguards opted for ham and cheese sandwiches, and Simmy stuck with coffee. We hustled through our stop with a minimum of conversation and were back on the road in less than fifteen minutes. I called Sarah Dumont from the car after we left the rest stop. She’d warned the guards to be careful, told me to stop being paranoid, and once again hung up on me. We arrived in Bruges’ City Center in the early afternoon, covering the entire one hundred and fifty miles in less than three hours.
I’d taken the taxi to Sarah Dumont’s house twice, so I thought I’d have no problem navigating us to her house.
I was wrong.
I made two blunders, including sending us down a narrow one-way street. I could feel Simmy tense when he had to come to a stop, call his boys on the mobile phone, and tell them to back-up. There wasn’t enough room to execute a K-turn. He took a few audible breaths as though to calm himself down, but sounded serene as spring.
“What looks like a disaster is actually an opportunity,” he said, as he gunned the engine in reverse.
“It is?” I said.
“Certainly. It’s an opportunity for us to prove to ourselves that we’re mentally strong, that we’re invulnerable, and that we’re fully composed and prepared to capture this killer.”
I glanced at him twice to make sure some spirit hadn’t inhabited his body. “We are?”
“I know you’re just having fun with me when you say that. After all, you’re the warrior and I’m the spoiled rich man. Am I right?”
Once he’d backed out of the alley, he whipped the car around and passed the bodyguards.
I corrected my mistakes and got us to the familiar fork in the road.
“That way,” I said, pointing up the hill.
I dialed Sarah Dumont’s number to let her know we were a mile away. My call rolled over to voice mail. As I listened to her recorded message telling me to be sure I really needed to talk to her and only then to leave my name, number and a brief message, I suspected she’d recognized my digits and simply didn’t want to speak to me anymore.
But when the gate came into view I feared otherwise. I feared otherwise because there was no one in sight.
“Where are the guards?” Simmy said. “You said there’d be guards.”
“Maybe one of them is in the guardhouse. It’s kind of big. There might be a bathroom in there.”
Simmy called the bodyguards and barked some clipped instructions that consisted of the kind of shorthand people who work closely develop over time. I didn’t fully comprehend it all, but I knew they were going to check the guardhouse.
Simmy pulled up to the gate. The bodyguards turned their car around and backed-up with their trunk facing the house.
“What are they doing?” I said.
“Preparing for a quick departure, just in case. This way we’re ready to go in either direction. Just like American politics. In Russia it would be much easier. If you want to live, there is only one direction to go and that is forward. Outside of Russia, you can never be sure. Wait in the car.”
He exited the vehicle. I flung the door open and followed him to the guardhouse. Simmy stopped and glared at me but knew better than to waste his energy trying to stop me.
The forest obscured the sunlight from above. The glass house stood beyond the gate surrounded by trees. Both of Sarah Dumont’s cars were parked in front of the entrance in the same places, except their locations were reversed from the previous night. There was no sign of life. The entire property appeared to be taking a nap.
Inside the guardhouse, a tall chair faced the window with a view of the road. The chair was empty. A computer rested on a narrow desktop between the chair and the window. The monitor displayed an article written in Dutch and included a picture of two soccer players vying for the ball. Vanilla crème cookies spilled from an open bag onto the desk. Steam rose from a mug of coffee. Someone had been here a moment ago, I thought, but I didn’t share my observation with anyone for fear of making any unnecessary noise.
A door led to a back room. I could tell from the structure’s exterior dimensio
ns that the space was a small one, no bigger than a pantry or a small bathroom.
Simmy looked beyond me and nodded.
I turned. The bodyguards had arrived. One stood on my heels hulking over me like a giant human Pez dispenser ready to gobble me up. A glint of metal caught my eyes. I looked down and saw the stainless steel gun in his hand. The other bodyguard stood outside, scanning the house and the road. He held an assault rifle. It looked slick, terrifying and seductive.
It was when I turned back that I got the biggest shock of all.
Simmy was knocking on the door to the back room. His knock sounded like banging on a hollow drum because the door appeared to be a cheap empty shell. What astonished me was that his fingers were wrapped around his own gun.
No one answered. He glanced at me as he waited.
“You have a gun?” I said.
He answered me by holding my eyes for an extra second. Then he knocked once more, waited for a count of three, and grabbed the doorknob.
It rattled but didn’t turn completely. It was locked.
Simmy nodded at the bodyguard closest to him again. Then he stepped back toward me and let the bodyguard slide past us.
I leaned into his ear. “Why do you have a gun?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Because I’m prepared. Why don’t you have one?”
“Because I don’t want to shoot myself.”
He nodded. “I was with the military police in the army. You weren’t. With my men and me at your disposal your arsenal is complete. All is as it should be.”
The bodyguard rammed the door with his shoulder. The door frame cracked. He rammed it twice more.
The door caved in. The bodyguard stood in the doorway obscuring the interior of the room. Simmy stepped up beside him and looked inside.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, in a clipped and breathless manner.
The bodyguard thrust his gun into his left hand and stepped further into the room. When he bent over to check for pulses, Sarah Dumont’s guards were revealed.
They were both dead.
CHAPTER 24
The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls Page 17