Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  His last five years had been a more muted affair, though. Failures and disappointment had set in. No matter how many overtures he made, the Russian government refused to lift his arrest warrant. The newspaper he owned suffered losses as the Internet ate into the sales of the print edition to the point where he was forced to move the paper exclusively online and laid off more than two hundred staff to save money. His marriage to Cecily Harkingdale didn’t pan out the way he had hoped, and gossip about their extravagant, furniture-smashing fights about not producing an heir were covered all the way from the tabloids to Vanity Fair to Popbitch. His football team didn’t break out of a six-year rut of losing streaks and lackluster player acquisitions, and he considered selling it. The massive overheads of his sponsorships and his stock investments also incurred losses to the point where he was no longer a billionaire. There were reports that he was depressed, and no one rode that black dog like a Russian.

  “Reminds me more of Thomas Hardy,” I told Julia. “I used to teach my students The Mayor of Casterbridge for their GCSEs.”

  Then one day, six months ago, Mayakovsky died.

  The butler found him in the bath that morning, his head submerged under water for far too long and without a pulse. The autopsy concluded that he’d suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness. His high blood pressure and the various medications he was on didn’t help. His dreams of an English Happily Ever After turned out to be a chimera.

  TWO

  Do you think he really topped himself?” I asked.

  “It’s entirely possible,” Olivia said. “The thing about extremely rich men is that they become obsessed with their legacies, what they’re going to leave behind and all that. If he was looking at the loss of his power, status, and wealth, the sense that he was a failure in his twilight years, I wouldn’t put it past him to just bump himself off out of despair.”

  “And in the bath, no less, like a Roman emperor,” Mark said, ever amused.

  “Not exactly the same despair of a pensioner on a council estate who can’t afford to continue living because his benefits have been cut,” Cheryl said in one of her rare contributions to our office chatter.

  “The filthy rich have their own, more narcissistic versions of existential malaise and despair,” Mark said.

  “They really are an alien species,” I said, shaking my head. “Worthy of their own nature documentary.”

  Mayakovsky’s death was proving a huge inconvenience to his heirs and next of kin. It seemed he’d died intestate—that is, without a will. By law, his property should have gone to his spouse, so Cecily Harkingdale-Mayakovsky should have gotten it all, including the tens of millions of pounds’ worth of properties all over London.

  If you were wondering where we came in, chalk it up to David Okri.

  David might be Golden Sentinel’s lawyer, but he still kept in touch with his former colleagues at the practice where he had started out, and they used him as a contact when they needed the services of a prime private investigations firm like us. They happened to be Mayakovsky’s lawyers, and they’d always thought the Harkingdales were well dodgy. Mayakovsky’s lawyers were entering the discovery phase, taking inventory of his properties and assets while the Harkingdales were kicking up a fuss about getting what was their due as soon as possible. Cecily was merely the conduit through which they could claim all of Mayakovsky’s goodies. And they believed they were due everything he owned. This should be their payoff for putting up with him and his louche Russian ways when they let him into their pristine English family.

  Except there was the rather inconvenient matter that there was a will, after all. This threw the Harkingdales for a loop. Naturally, Mayakovsky had had a will drawn up years ago when he married Cecily, but it had been changed, revised, and redrawn over and over again, codicils added again and again to the point where the will was scrubbed and a new one was drawn up. The Harkingdales were insisting they get on with it and conduct a reading of the will, but there was another snag. They were surprised when Mayakovsky’s lawyer announced that weeks before his death, he had had another will made without their knowledge, so the one that favored the Harkingdales could no longer be considered valid. Now the Harkingdales were tearing their hair out because they didn’t know what was in the new will. The lawyers were insisting that Irina and Sacha should be present for the reading, which implied they were going to get a share of the estate.

  The problem here was that Irina and Sacha had gone missing. Poof. Vanished off the face of the Earth. Without them present, there could be no reading of the will, and the Harkingdales were in inheritance limbo, their own debts piling up while they waited.

  David told Roger that his old law firm wanted to hire us to find Irina and Sacha, and Roger, smelling money, power, and a chance to make friends and gather new gossip, readily agreed.

  And I was made primary.

  Julia still liked to see this as a kind of latter-day George Eliot novel where the Harkingdales accepted marriage to a dreaded foreigner, a former Communist no less, to keep the family financially afloat.

  “How they must have chafed at the thought of lying back and thinking of England as they let this Russian into their vaunted English household,” she said.

  I was no raving leftie, but even I could see the Harkingdales were just the type who would be the first to be lined up against the wall if the proletariat ever rose up and revolted. You could sense the resentful class privilege and entitlement wafting off of the family even from looking at photographs of them. It was just as well we didn’t have to come into any contact with them on this job. It was strictly research, paperwork, and basic old-fashioned footwork.

  THREE

  So far, so pedestrian,” I said. “Find someone. Straightforward enough.”

  “I suppose it’s a relief not to be dealing with cloak-and-dagger stuff,” said Julia.

  Once again, we had spoken too soon.

  “Dude,” Marcie said from her desk, looking up from Hello! magazine. “Mayakovsky used to be KGB. You might find out stuff you weren’t expecting.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s bloody spook shit here.”

  “Don’t rule it out.”

  Marcie, our resident American at Golden Sentinels, was in fact CIA, masquerading as a private investigator. You could say she was the real boss here, but Roger would take great offense at that. None of us believed she was just a former PR agent anymore. That was her cover, her legend as they called it. She was CIA through and through. If nothing else, she was Roger’s handler, giving him assignments to dole out to the rest of us under the guise of simple work for hire, when her own masters had some off-the-books assignments they didn’t want to be caught doing. The CIA was, after all, the Big Bad Boss of us all, no matter how much Marcie denied that and said we were merely contractors. Why else would she hang about here at the office instead of a desk in the bowels of the American Embassy? Granted, Golden Sentinels was a much nicer gaff. We could order sushi and Vietnamese for takeout and had better coffee, ergonomic chairs, and gossip, which Marcie thrived on.

  Roger liked to show he had more power than he really did, and then desperately scrambled to get as much as possible to make it true. Marcie was an expert at wielding power by pretending not to have any. And she had more than she ever let on. She knew never to overplay her hand.

  Of course I was terrified of her. She could disappear me with one phone call if she felt like it. I suppose I was lucky that she seemed to like me. Julia believed Marcie considered me her protégé, which was a mixed blessing even at the best of times.

  “Nope, this one’s nothing to do with me,” Marcie said, barely looking up from her yogurt. “Mayakovsky was never my assignment.”

  “So why are you bringing this up?” I asked.

  “I know you like things to be neat, Ravi, and I just want to remind you that when it comes to Russians, especially dead ex-KGB guys, it’s never going to be simple or clean.”

  “Thanks for
the warning.”

  “Dude, you’re my peeps. I would never screw you over.”

  . . . yet.

  “If anything interesting comes out of this, I want a piece,” she said, as much a warning as a request.

  This was just a missing persons case, I reminded myself. A first wife and a son who had gone to ground. No reason to suspect foul play. They’d simply dropped out of sight in the last few years. A cursory check of travel records indicated neither of them had left the country for the last five, so they were definitely still here in the UK. Neither Irina nor Sacha’s passport had been used or spotted at any ports. Sacha was still in university, but had taken time off, and that was the last anyone saw of him. Irina had been living alone in a modest flat out near Russell Square when she seemed to drop out of sight around the same time. That raised a bunch of questions for which it was now our job to find answers.

  FOUR

  I took Julia with me to ask about Sacha’s whereabouts. (A pretty blonde next to a dark-skinned Asian man always helped set people at ease.) Sacha was studying at the School of Pharmacy at University College London, and lived with his mum.

  “I find all this concrete a bit depressing, no matter how many shops they have here,” Julia said as we walked through Russell Square. “Imagine living here while her ex-husband was living large in Mayfair.”

  “It was her choice. Irina didn’t want much from him, just what she felt she was due, which was a decent flat. She wasn’t one for luxuries. She was a die-hard socialist at heart. Maybe all this gray concrete reminded her of their old digs in Moscow.”

  “At least they sent Sacha to a good school.”

  Mrs. McCree, the pensioner next door, told us Irina and Sacha were good neighbors, though Irina was a bit reclusive. Sacha was shy, gentle, and radiated thoughtfulness and intelligence, and he would recommend books to Mrs. McCree. “The Russian variation of the sensitive boy,” Julia mused. They often went to see European films over at the Curzon together. Over the last year, Irina had had visits from a well-dressed gentleman with an accent: Mayakovsky. Still visiting his ex-wife. Interesting. Then a few months ago, Irina and Sacha left early one morning and hadn’t been back since. Occasionally some men in suits would come and knock on the door and ask the neighbors the same questions we were asking right now.

  “Sounds like they left after they’d heard the news that Mayakovsky’d died,” I said as we left.

  “So they ran?” Julia asked. “And went dark like that? What were they running from?”

  Mrs. McCree had held some of the post that was coming to Irina’s flat. Electricity bills, junk mail, unanswered letters from Mayakovsky’s lawyers, no doubt to inform her and Sacha of his death, letters from a later date, this time informing them of the reading of the will, which had now been postponed because they couldn’t be found.

  “You’re looking less bored now,” Julia said.

  “I wasn’t bored.”

  “You were all ready to phone this in. Now there may be foul play. This may not be another boring search.”

  “Boring is good,” I said. “Boring means I don’t see any gods popping up.”

  As we walked to the car, my mobile rang.

  A familiar number showed up on the screen as it rang.

  “Heeey, babe. How’s it hangin’?”

  Oh, fuck.

  “Hello, Ariel. You’re not in town, are you?”

  “Sorry, hon. I’m in an undisclosed location in the Middle East. I got bored waiting in this car, so I thought I’d touch base with you and Julia.”

  “Ariel says hi,” I said to Julia, who raised an eyebrow.

  Sleeping with Ariel Morgenstern might have been the second-biggest mistake of my life (the first was becoming a private investigator at Golden Sentinels). Yes, Ariel was well fit and a banshee in bed, her shock of red hair, tight black T-shirts, nipple rings, and Kali tattoo on her arm making her the most goth private military contractor you were ever likely to meet. Oh, she was good fun and had an appealing sense of humor, before you realized she was also a gleefully amoral and murderous sociopath with no boundaries whatsoever. Her company, Interzone, was also a contractor for CIA black ops, and Roger considered her boss, Laird Collins, his mortal enemy, but since Golden Sentinels and Interzone were both independent contractors engaged by the Company, we were expected to play nice and not step on each other’s toes whenever possible. To do otherwise was bad for business. As a result of my original dalliance with her, our respective bosses appointed Ariel and me the liaisons for our companies. Then Julia had gone off and slept with Ariel as well, which cemented what Ariel liked to call our three-way personal bond. Ariel seemed awfully fond of us, sending us texts and selfies from her backpacking holidays, which she went on when she wasn’t off in some hot spot doing horrible things for Interzone. She sent us Christmas cards and birthday cards, and often threatened to visit us in London, promising a threesome. Yes, that would be lovely, if having sex with a ticking time bomb was your thing. I was always relieved that work kept her from setting foot back in London. I had no doubt that if it she was ordered to, she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot us in the head and move on to her next BFFs.

  “So what can I do for you, Ariel?”

  “Always so gracious,” she laughed. “It’s more about what I can do for you.”

  “I’m doing just fine, thanks.”

  “Not for long.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re dealing with the late Lev Mayakovsky.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Please! We always keep tabs on what you guys in London are doing. We’re on the same side.”

  “So what’s this about, then?”

  “I figured I ought to warn you.”

  “About what?”

  “Dead ex-KGB oligarch? Lotta skeletons in a lotta closets. Lots of hungry spooks sniffing around. And what you’re good at is finding those closets and opening them. That’s what the gods compel you to do. You just can’t help it.”

  “Are you suggesting there’s espionage stuff going on?”

  “Baby, Russians are like crack cocaine to all spooks. Your Marcie will never admit it, but nothing gets the CIA’s juices going like Russians ’cause of all the nostalgic Cold War moral certainties that come flooding into the pleasure centers of their brains. There’s gotta be some political angle to all this. There always is with Russians abroad. It’s so quaint I could squeal.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Ariel!” Jarrod’s voice came through in the background, probably on a radio. “What’s the holdup?”

  “Still waiting on the drone to ID them all,” she said absently, then back to me. “Jarrod says hi.”

  “I don’t say hi to Jarrod,” I said.

  I asked Marcie for Jarrod’s file after our first encounter with Interzone last year. He and a squad had been sent to London to murder a bunch of hapless bankers who were suspected of stealing from a CIA-controlled investment account that they helped set up. Henry “Hank” Jarrod was a former sergeant in SEAL Team Six who resigned his commission when Laird Collins headhunted him for Interzone. He didn’t enjoy killing, but did it with a cold and appallingly competent efficiency. What I hated about him was his unerringly polite demeanor no matter what he did, and the more threatening he got, the more polite he became. Ariel was often in his squad.

  “Ariel, we’re about to murder a roomful of people,” said Jarrod with a hint of irritation in his voice. “Can you at least confirm it’s the right people?”

  “Chill, Jarrod,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the facial recognition software to kick in.”

  Ariel chuckled. Just about every syllable from her and Jarrod sent chills down my spine. It was like receiving a transmission from a dark, murderous universe I never wanted to hear from.

  “Do what you do, Ravi. Bring the chaos. You’re Kali’s beautiful monster, unleashing the chains of karma. Whoops, shooting’s started. Gotta go. Later!”


  And with that, she hung up.

  I felt Kali’s hand on my shoulder as she loomed behind me, listening in. Of course Kali would show up whenever Ariel did. We were both her children, after all. Her tongue was positively wagging at the chaos to come.

  “We’re never going to be rid of Ariel, are we?” mused Julia as I started the car.

  “I think she might be Kali’s harbinger.”

  “This should be fun,” Julia smiled.

  “Did you catch this taste for mayhem since we first met or did you always have it?” I asked.

  “It’s not always about you, love,” she said. “It was in me long before I met you. Tell you what, let’s stop by the Metropolitan Archives.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “A hunch.”

  FIVE

  Julia and I spent nearly three hours looking up records and collating the Harkingdale family history. We headed straight for Roger’s office when we got back to Golden Sentinels. Cheryl sensed something was up and joined us.

  “The Harkingdales murdered Mayakovsky,” I said.

  “How do you reckon?” Roger arched an eyebrow.

  “The circumstances of Mayakovsky’s death were unusual and suspicious, even if the coroner declared it suicide,” I said. “Add to that the missing will the Harkingdales want to contest the moment it’s found. They’re so desperate to claim the estate they might as well be wearing a ‘WE TOPPED THE BUGGER!’ sign on their chests.”

  “This is all very circumstantial,” Cheryl said, scribbling notes. “How did you come to it?”

  “We looked up the Harkingdale family history in the registers at the London Metropolitan Archive,” Julia said. “For over a hundred years, the Harkingdales of Sussex had a history of bad financial decisions where they consistently lost their lands and properties bit by bit, but they always clung on by marrying up and marrying rich. And the spouses often died of some sickness or other. Consistently. And the Harkingdales would inherit the property. It happened once or twice a generation, and the intervals were long enough that no one would notice that spouses from outside the family would die after a reasonable number of years. Long enough to have children to continue the Harkingdale line. Men of means would marry a Harkingdale daughter, then end up dying soon after, and she would inherit his property and bring it into the Harkingdale fold. They assimilated any children as well, of course. Occasionally those children would die as well, but in the nineteenth century, people still died from so many illnesses and mishaps that no one would bat an eyelash.”