Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  “Smashing deception with deception,” she said and smiled. “A most elegant contradiction.”

  At least she was leaving me alone, but she was really speaking to me, since I was the only one who could see or hear her.

  “All the better for the changes to come,” Bagalamukhi said, and sashayed out the door.

  Changes? What was she talking about?

  I hated it when the gods spoke to me, because it was always something cryptic and never good. I put the thought out of my head. It was me; they were manifestations of my psyche. I was only making things complicated for myself thinking about changes and Prophecy.

  At least, that was what I told myself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mayakovsky’s solicitor scheduled a reading of the will a week later. Tobias and Charles Harkingdale accompanied Cecily to lend her support through this difficult time.

  “He’s your father’s lawyer, not yours,” David said beforehand.

  “I know,” Sacha said.

  “You need to get your own lawyer to work with him, and protect you and your mother’s interests,” David said. “And you’ll want to disclose your situation, including the attempt to have you both killed.”

  With that, Sacha engaged David as his lawyer, tying Golden Sentinels to his protection and interests. Roger was well chuffed. Being on the payroll from Sacha’s inheritance meant more pay, especially given how much we’d acted to help him.

  “It’s all thanks to you, Ravi,” Roger said with pride. “You always bring that little something extra to a case.”

  “And all for just a pound,” Mark said.

  I shrugged.

  We gave Sacha all the evidence we had gathered against the Harkingdales.

  “You could just turn the evidence over to the police,” I said. “Let the law take its course.”

  “Thank you,” Sacha said.

  With that, David accompanied Sacha and Irina to the reading of the will. Ken and Clive went along to provide muscle, and send a message. Sacha wanted them to see Ken and Clive.

  “Don’t drink anything they’re offering,” Mark quipped.

  David shuddered and glared at Mark as he walked out.

  “He’s like a character out of Dostoyevsky,” Julia said. “The angry, sensitive boy who knows more than he would like, whose innocence is gone forever, looking at the world with darker eyes.”

  Sacha reminded me of some of my secondary school students. Maybe this was why I wanted to help him. Back then, if a student showed signs of distress or trouble at home, we would try to talk to their family and then call in Social Services. This was several worlds away from that. This was probably much worse. We were in a gray world where justice wasn’t always served and no one was truly safe. I wanted to at least save Sacha and his mother, strike some universal karmic balance for a change.

  David, Ken, and Clive were wearing Benjamin’s pin-cameras on their jackets so we could watch the proceedings.

  The look on the Harkingdales’ faces when Sacha and Irina walked in alive and well was definitely worth the cheers we threw. Ken and Clive stood protectively by Irina, who was quite chipper and lucid from the supplements Mark and Sacha had mixed for her. Mark and Benjamin did a Mexican wave and the gods followed suit, which I found disconcerting.

  The Harkingdales had to sit and quietly shit themselves while Mayakovsky’s solicitor read out the will. As we expected, they had been cut out. Cecily, as the widow, was given the penthouse flat in London she lived in. Other than that, she—and by proxy, her family—got fuck all. The properties, holdings, and money all went to Sacha and Irina. Much of it was placed in a trust to take care of Irina’s care and pay for Sacha’s living expenses and education.

  “This is an outrage!” Tobias Harkingdale cried. “Trickery! We’ll file an appeal!”

  No one in the room took him seriously.

  David proceeded to play the recording of Charles hiring Ken and Clive to murder him and his mother.

  “We have multiple copies backed up to various servers,” David said. “Should anything untoward happen to Sacha or Irina, or me or my colleagues, the recordings and screencaps of the Harkingdales trying to hire contract killers will be automatically released to the police, blogs, and the media.”

  So that was the play. David had discussed the pros and cons of whether to release the evidence to the police. There were possible liabilities, accusations of entrapment, not to mention that the Harkingdales’ lawyers could tie up proceedings so the case would take years to come to trial, and even then, there was no guarantee of a conviction. There was no way to charge them for Mayakovsky’s death, and Sacha decided it was better to continue to hold it all over them to keep himself and his mother safe. Releasing the evidence to the media would be a scandal the Harkingdales couldn’t survive even if they were never tried.

  Sacha and Tamsin threw a party at his flat, inviting his classmates who’d helped shelter him and his mother, and us. Roger and Cheryl, Ken and Clive begged off. Olivia was busy with whatever she was up to, and Benjamin wasn’t into it. Marcie had her own party full of A-List celebrities to go to, so it was just David, Julia, and I. It was an odd sight, a bunch of private investigators and Hindu gods nobody saw but me, mingling with a bunch of university students while Irina sat quietly in the corner, smiling absently at childhood memories she was reliving. Julia remarked that Sacha and Tamsin were a cute couple, though who knew if that relationship would last. Mark was having a grand old time hanging out with fellow enthusiasts for the ultimate high and sharing a spliff.

  “I’m going to sell most of the properties,” Sacha said. “My mother and I already have more than enough money from the trust.”

  “Well, the Chinese are on a buying spree for London properties,” I said.

  “They can have them. I don’t care. I can use the money from the sales to form my start-up.”

  “Are you going to be all right, then?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Sacha said. “I will never forget what you did for me.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  So ended this particular case. Justice was sort of served. As usual with us, nobody was arrested. The police didn’t come within spitting distance. That would have been that, if Ariel hadn’t called me three weeks later.

  “Babe!” she said. “I never thought you had it in you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wiping out the Harkingdales. That was a masterful op.”

  “What? I did nothing of the sort.”

  “No, that’s what’s hot about you. You weren’t anywhere near this. You let the Russians do it?”

  “Russians? What?”

  “That Marcie bitch didn’t show you the intelligence briefing from this month? The Harkingdales are literally no more.”

  My stomach began to fall.

  “Ariel, tell me from the start. What’s this about the Russians and the Harkingdales?”

  “Look it up, babe. It’s okay. I’ll wait.”

  I’d been busy and hadn’t paid that much attention to the news. Tobias Harkingdale collapsed at his club after a night of heavy drinking and died of heart failure days later in hospital. Charles Harkingdale went for a drive out to Dover with his wife and children and never returned after that weekend. Their car was found near the White Cliffs. Cecily Harkingdale, seemingly distraught, took some pills and cut her wrists while soaking in the tub, virtually mirroring Lev’s demise. Signs of a family that finally fell apart?

  “Think about it,” Ariel said. “Who do you think would want them gone?”

  “Sacha.”

  “Think the kid had it in him? Nah. This was hardcore. It was Russian spooks. Ask your Marcie.”

  No wonder I had seen the gods waging war in the sky when I took this case. No wonder Shiva, Kali, and Bagalamukhi had been hanging about when we went after the Harkingdales. Shiva the destroyer of the world was overseeing the destruction of the Harkingdales’ world. This was their apocalypse.

  I
searched the deaths on the Internet. The Harkingdales’ deaths were made to look like accidents and suicide, and weeks apart to avoid suspicion. No wonder I hadn’t noticed, since I was busy on other cases. The Russians were experts at that. Just like how the Harkingdales made Mayakovsky’s death looked like suicide. This was karma.

  Kali stood behind me, smiling.

  “Haven’t you forgotten, my son?” she said. “You are an agent of Chaos, bringing change. You are my lovely monster.”

  I hung up my phone and showed everyone the news.

  “Yeah, that fits,” Marcie said.

  “What fits?” I asked.

  “My buddies at the embassy noticed a bunch of Russian spooks were coming and going an awful lot in the last few weeks. Not a lot of chatter about what they were coming to London for.”

  “KGB? FSB?” I asked.

  “They were all former KGB, gone private. We’ve known these guys for a long time. These Ivans, Sergeis, Evgenys. They were hardcore Soviets before the Wall came down. Way before I joined,” Marcie said. “Both the Brits and our guys were wondering what they were up to, since we didn’t know about any major ops the Russians were pulling in London.”

  “So they all came to London to get the Harkingdales, then?” Benjamin asked. “A few weeks of surveillance and planning, then swooping in and Bob’s yer uncle.”

  “This is like a fantasy of the Revolution,” Mark said. “How many old-school Communists get to actually wipe out a bunch of upper-class wankers these days? It’s the execution of the Romanovs, updated. It’s like a dream come true for them.”

  “Not every day you get to wipe an entire family of posh villains off the map, Ravi,” said Roger. “Quite a result.”

  What was my karmic tally now? I didn’t want to think about it.

  “How do we know this for sure?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing about deniability, isn’t it? It’s impossible to be sure,” Cheryl said.

  “Are you worried the cops are going to come knocking? Do you think you’re a suspect?” Marcie asked me.

  “No, but—”

  “There’s nothing that ties them to us at all,” David chimed in. “No reason the firm would be questioned.”

  “So the Harkingdales have literally vanished off the map,” Olivia said, the first time in months I’d seen her impressed. “Scorched earth.”

  I looked at Julia, who watched the screen intently. She returned my gaze and merely raised an eyebrow.

  “This is one for the books, eh, Ravi?” Ken said.

  “Not even we ever dreamed of knocking off a whole family of villains,” Clive said. “Respect.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sacha opened the door to his mother’s flat. He’d gotten a decent haircut. His clothes were more formal now, a white dress shirt and black trousers, not the hoodie and dirty jeans I had last seen him in. He handed me a check. The amount shocked me. It was in the five figures.

  “It’s a small percentage of the first property sale. From the Chinese conglomerate that bought my father’s building in Holborn,” Sacha said. “It’s not very much, but I wanted to compensate you for what you did for me.”

  “Or to buy my silence.”

  Hurt, he looked at me.

  “I didn’t order their deaths, Ravi.”

  “I can’t accept this check. It’s blood money.”

  “It’s my appreciation for your work, Ravi, for helping me get justice. You trapped the Harkingdales for me.”

  “I didn’t mean for them to get killed.”

  “Neither did I. It was part of my father’s legacy.”

  “You didn’t call those men from Russia?”

  “No. They came to London on their own. And I’m not sorry they did.”

  “Did they tell you they were here to get the Harkingdales?”

  “I didn’t know they were here until after the deed was done,” Sacha said. “They contacted me after it was done and said my father could rest in peace now. That the scales were balanced. Then they went back to Moscow. I had no objection.”

  “So that’s it, then?” I said. “Your mother will be looked after. You can start a company to develop legal drugs and gene-editing to improve memory, cognition, cure Alzheimer’s.”

  “Isn’t there an old Buddhist saying?” Sacha said. “There is no need to take revenge. If you wait long enough, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by in the river.”

  “If you can live with all that.”

  “Deposit the check, Ravi,” he said, resigned.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  My head was spinning when I left Sacha’s flat. How had the Russians known the extent to which the Harkingdales murdered Lev Mayakovsky? If Sacha hadn’t contacted those ex-KGB men, there was only one other person who could have gotten word to them.

  Marcie.

  “Did you—?”

  “Put a hit on the Harkingdales?” Marcie said, surprised. “Why would I? And I don’t have the power to do that. They were already finished. It served no strategic purpose to get rid of them. They have no real impact on geopolitical policy. By our standards, they were a bunch of petty criminals, not threats to national security.”

  “Then how did this happen?” I was still fighting to stay calm. Lord Shiva was sitting on the office sofa, gingerly picking dirt out of his fingernails in a particularly unnerving manner. He looked at me with pity.

  “Well, I wrote a report as I always do. This consequence of Lev Mayakovsky’s death was of some academic interest to the intelligence community.”

  “Wait, by ‘community’ you mean the whole—?”

  “Dude, we trade gossip like anyone does. Spies are like schoolgirls when they chat with each other in private.”

  “So does that mean MI5, MI6 know this? And the Russians would know it, too?”

  “Yup.”

  “So those Russians decided—?”

  “To go on a mission that was totally off the books.”

  I dragged Marcie into the soundproof conference room.

  “Marcie, did you plan this outcome all along?”

  “Hell no! I had no skin in this game, and I had nothing to gain from it.”

  “Why would they even avenge Mayakovsky?” I asked. “I thought they hated his guts.”

  “Spies may disagree with each other,” Marcie said. “Be on opposite sides, even try to kill each other from time to time, but spies have an understanding: they’re in a priesthood together. It’s the most exclusive club in the world, and they’re loyal to that ethos.”

  “So, what, it’s a point of honor?”

  “For a bunch of ex-KGB dudes, totally. Deep down they’re still Communist true believers. They can’t stand the idea of some English aristocrats taking out one of their own, and for something as petty as money. That made it personal.”

  “And I caused it to happen. Fuck. Fuck!”

  “Ravi, chill. You couldn’t have known.”

  “I should have!”

  Marcie scoffed.

  “Oh, come on, Ravi. If you could predict that a routine case about an inheritance and a will reading would end up with a bunch of Russian spies wiping out a whole British family of blue bloods, you would not be toiling away as a private eye. Dude, you would be the God Emperor of the World.”

  The gods were standing behind Marcie, all looking at me with pity and tut-tutting at my hubris. Shiva took a photo of my ashen face with his phone.

  The conference room was getting too crowded. I excused myself and walked to the loo, where I bent over and vomited the entire contents of my curry lunch.

  What have I done?

  Lord Vishnu stood over me as I huddled at the sink to splash water in my face. I really had been getting too comfy in this job. That was when fate stepped in and kicked me in the arse.

  Through the glass walls of his office Roger saw I was unhappy, and he was already pouring me a brandy when I came out of the loo and walked towards his office.

  “Good result, Ravi,” h
e said, offering me a glass.

  I downed it in one gulp.

  “How can you say that? I wiped a whole family off the map.”

  “Well, technically, not you. And good bloody riddance to them. Those Harkingdales have been a plague on the land for over a hundred years. In one fell swoop, you’ve made the world safe for hapless rich bastards hoping to marry into a titled family that wouldn’t murder them for their dosh. It’s almost like you’re an antibody that rose up and eradicated a long-running infection in the body politic.”

  “I am not a vessel for class revenge! Or a harbinger of karma!”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, old son. You just happened to say the right thing to the right person at the right place at the right time, and got a result.”

  “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”

  “You’re not doing anything other than your job, and then the world reacts accordingly, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Perhaps that’s why the gods like hanging around you so much. You’re guaranteed to give ’em a good show.”

  “I don’t see how you could carry on saying I’m a mensch.”

  “Of course you are. That’s what makes you not only a good investigator here, but interesting to me. You’re a weaponized mensch.”

  “If this is the real nature of the cosmic joke, then I’m not sure I should keep being a part of it.”

  “I don’t think we get to choose, old son.”

  Roger looked at me with a mixture of pity and what looked uncomfortably like admiration.

  “Ravi, my boy,” Roger said. “Perhaps you’d like to get out of town for a bit, out of the country, even?”

  BLACK BAG LA

  ONE

  The light was different in Los Angeles.

  I couldn’t get used to it.

  People told me it was the smog. It served as a kind of filter for the way sunlight seeped through the air and onto the city, giving it a kind of almost hallucinatory sheen. At dusk, as night descended, the dying glow of the day was particularly surreal and vivid. No wonder the entertainment industry was headquartered here. Fantasies could only be born out of a city that wasn’t quite real, a city that had been brought into existence through sheer will and desire. Los Angeles was like a mirage forced to take solid form at the hands of men who imposed their vision on the otherwise desolate desert landscape. I was fascinated by the cracks in the road that always needed to be mended, the continuing shift of tectonic plates, the erasure of the city’s own history as old buildings were constantly demolished in favor of the new. Like its inhabitants, this city was obsessed with always appearing young. Its permanent default state was a battle against entropy. All it took was money and power. I’d swapped the gray, wet dystopia of London for the blazing, sun-blasted dystopia of LA.