And he really wishes he hadn’t found his man.
For starters, Interpol has issued a red notice for this gentleman, which means cooperating countries are to arrest him on sight. Additionally, a chunk of his assets have been ordered frozen by Executive Order 13348—and the authorities plan to freeze said assets once they can find them. He’s also been convicted in absentia by a court in the Central African Republic for document forging, and been asked to testify before The Hague for purported business dealings with several Serbian war criminals. If you Google this man’s name, articles with headlines like “The World’s Most Dangerous Gangster” and “From Red Mafiya to Royalty” flash before your eyes.
And then there’s the coup de grace:
This gentleman was kicked out of Russia. Putin and his men considered his continued presence a risk to state power due his fathomless finances and personal army.
His name is Andrei Protosevitch.
And as Kyle’s about to scream in abject terror, Lara does it for him.
Kyle rushes over, holds her down. “Quiet, quiet. It’s me.”
She’s thrashing around under the sheet, shrieking in her sleep.
He puts his hand on her forehead. “Quiet. Quiet, Lara. It’s me.” She starts to wake up, to recognize the room.
Kyle moves his hand away. “You okay?”
“Nightmare,” she says. “Fuck…I was in such a deep sleep.”
Kyle sits at the edge of the bed facing away giving her privacy until she comes down from the dream.
“It’s the same one I’ve had for years.” She reaches over for her cigarettes.
Kyle turns around, looks at her. “What’s your dream?”
“Why?”
“You said it was recurring.” Kyle laughs. “When I had a nightmare, my dad always told me to tell him about it. He said if you tell someone, you’re not alone anymore. Dream can’t get you then because you broke the bond between the two of you.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Humor me,” Kyle says.
She lights her cigarette, takes a drag. “I’m waiting tables at this banquet on the top of a skyscraper. It’s so tall that it’s touching the clouds. The guests are all rich, almost royalty. I keep getting them more wine. I wheel out a roasted pig for dinner. They’re all loud and fat and drunk and getting worse. And they never stop laughing. Even if no one’s saying anything, they’re all laughing. I bring around pieces of the pig for everyone, put them down on the table, and then…one of the guests puts a huge knife through another guest’s palm. And they’re both laughing. The stuck one pulls out the knife, laughs at the blood. He takes the same knife and puts it through the other one’s chest, and that guy’s heart comes out the other end. The one who lost his heart, he puts his hand through the hole and starts laughing harder.” She crushes the cigarette, sick of smoking it. “And everyone follows suit. Just tearing each other apart with knives and hands. And I realize, These people can’t die. They can’t. And they do this often.”
Kyle nods. “I’d wake up screaming.”
“There’s more. So, when they’re not looking, I split. I run one level up to the roof. And I’m so close to the sky and the moon and all the stars. I hold my hand out and touch it, I touch the sky, and it’s ice-cold. The sky is freezing. Then I start to cry uncontrollably. I can’t take it that I’ve touched the sky and it’s cold.” She lies back down, stays silent for a while, and then starts to laugh. “I think…I think I actually feel a lot better.”
“Told you,” he says, going back to the chair. “You okay to talk?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m okay.”
“Well…this isn’t much of an improvement over your dream. I got into Robinson’s account. He just made an enormous transaction. And it all went to one person.”
“Who?”
“It’s bad…really bad.”
“Just tell me who.”
“Andrei Protosevitch.”
“Oh, Andrei,” Lara says.
“‘Oh, Andrei,’” Kyle repeats. “Fuck yes, Andrei. I’ve been reading about him for the past hour. His press makes Satan look effete and…balanced.”
“He’s all right, you know, once you get to know him.”
“I don’t want to get to know him. He’s a fucking killer.”
“So’s Robinson…”
“I know that now…”
“Well, who the fuck did you expect someone like Robinson to be friends with? Lara points to the laptop. “We need to find out what Robinson paid him all that money for.”
“I can’t figure that out through the accounts. I only know the amount that was transferred.”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
“How?”
“We ask Protosevitch.”
Kyle’s totally lost. “How? You going to call him or something?”
“No.” Lara laughs. “No. You can’t talk about something like this with Andrei over a phone.”
“Then…”
“We’re going to ask him in person.” She smiles. “You’re on. Robinson.”
“No. No. No way,” Kyle says. “No fucking way. The guy was thrown out of Russia. Putin threw him out of the country. Putin.” He’s getting even more flustered. “And you want to just go there and ask him what Robinson paid him all this money for?”
“First off, he got kicked out of Russia because he had more money than the state and refused to give Putin his cut. He’s a businessman…”
“He’s wanted by The Hague…”
“I disregard all international courts of law…”
“I don’t.”
“We’re going to see him. Andrei’s going to tell us what we want to know because Robinson is coming to see him. And everyone talks to Robinson.”
“Impossible,” Kyle says.
“Protosevitch and Robinson haven’t seen each other in years. Ten years, at least. I see Andrei on Robinson’s behalf. I mean, if I didn’t know Robinson, I would buy that you’re him.”
“I cannot take a meeting with Andrei Protosevitch.”
“Like you said, we have to follow the money.”
Kyle breathes in. “We’re going to get caught. And then he’s going to kill us.”
“You’re probably gonna get killed regardless. And so am I,” she says without any obvious opinion on the subject. “It’s just a question of who does it. It’s a shit state of affairs for the two of us right now. We need to stick together.”
“But…”
“I’ll get in touch with Protosevitch. Set up the meet.”
Kyle sinks into the chair, can’t get over his assignment. Needless to say, he’s stressed. He closes his eyes and sees patterns of molecular upheaval, floating galaxies of anxiety, red streaks of cosmic pulsations portending his headache to come.
He raises his hand to his face, lets his forehead fall into its forgiving cup, and then looks down and sees his shirt cuff dotted with tiny drops of blood.
He’s shocked; his thoughts scramble. Then he raises his hand to his nose. Dollops of blood streak his knuckles. He’s really bleeding hard.
Shit. Not again, he thinks. This always happens.
He gets up, sprints to the bathroom, and Lara doesn’t even raise her head.
43.
Kyle sits on the toilet, drops his head back, and pinches his nose tight with a wad of tissues. Since he was a kid, whenever his stress level shot up, it all came out through his nose.
He knows he can’t be Robinson. He fucking can’t. He met the man socially, had drinks with him in a hotel room. He didn’t absorb a personality, and he certainly didn’t meet the man Lara’s been describing.
A professional black operative. A man able to make a call and get a friendly meeting with Andrei Protosevitch. Protosevitch. The guy has seventeen billion dollars the public knows about. Kyle doesn’t even want to consider what you have to do to get that kind of money, although it seems like
he’ll have a pretty good idea in a few hours.
His nose is really bleeding; he feels faint. He tosses the soaked batch of tissues into the trash and grabs a new one.
Lara knocks on the door.
Kyle sniffles, says he’s fine.
Lara opens it anyway. “What’s wrong?”
“Bloody nose.”
Lara looks at the pile of Kleenex in the garbage. “Christ.…You’re gushing.”
“I’m aware.”
“Will you be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sick?”
“No…I get these when…” He hangs his head.
“What?”
“When I’m nervous.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Could you talk to me for a second? I know it sounds stupid but…can we just talk like two people? Not about Robinson or Protosevitch. Just talk to me. The way people do.”
She kneels down next to him. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Where are you from?”
“Volgograd. Used to be Stalingrad. Do you know it?”
He looks over. She’s still in her lace underwear, having stripped down for her nap, and her bra barely contains her breasts. “No.” That’s the cruel part of desire—it always seems to present itself when you’re at your lowest moments.
“You’re not missing much. I got the fuck out when I was eighteen.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Germany. Berlin. Friend of mine heard they were looking for au pairs there and signed up. I did too. Ended up being bullshit…got sent to work in a nightclub instead.”
Kyle tosses the bunch of tissues and gets another. “So you were…trafficked?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
She lowers her head a little.
“Can I ask something?”
Lara nods.
“How’d you get hooked up with Robinson?”
“His best friend, guy named Radek, owned the club I worked at. Robinson came in all the time. I knew him a little. Robinson told Radek he needed a courier, someone to be his face. He asked Radek if he could have me.”
“But Robinson is your…boyfriend, right?”
“In time, he was that too.”
Kyle stares at the blood under his fingernails.
She looks up at him. “How’s the bleeding?”
“A little better.”
She keeps talking. “My name isn’t really Lara. Robinson named me that. His favorite book is Doctor Zhivago. He said I reminded him of the girl in it.”
“I read it in college,” Kyle says. “You reminded him of a metaphor for the schism in a nation’s soul?”
She smiles. “I guess I did.”
“Do you still want me to call you Lara?”
“Yeah. I do.”
Kyle pulls the tissues away from his nose. He’s better.
Lara rises. “I’m gonna make the call to—”
“Don’t say it,” Kyle says. “I think I finally got things under control.”
She nods, stands by the door. “Try to get some rest. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
44.
The banana-yellow awning over the brick building reads, simply, Lounge, in Khmer. Fowler bangs on the red door—which vibrates from the pounding bass on the other side—and waits for four thick dead bolts and a chain to be undone.
The doorman stands before him cradling a collie puppy barking like a machine gun on helium. “Shhh, Songha,” the doorman says as he puts the dog down. A cherubic snowball with a brown patch around its eye.
Fowler peers inside and sees the doorman’s chair, a steel bar stool with arachnid legs. A Škorpion submachine gun rests where the man’s ass was thirty seconds ago.
“Here to see Pang.”
Party lights throw pinwheels of primary colors across the doorman. Reds and blues, emergency lights whirling to the beat. “He expecting you?”
Songha lies down at Fowler’s feet and starts to chew on his shoelaces.
“No,” Fowler says.
“Everyone gets announced.” The doorman picks up the house phone. “Who are you?”
Fowler hands over his ID. The humidity is unbearable; you end up drenched standing still. He feels the salt sting of sweat streaming into his eyes.
The doorman dials a number, scrutinizes Fowler’s ID. “CIA. Haven’t seen you boys around here for a while.”
“We’ve been busy.”
“Whole War on Terror thing?”
Fowler smiles. “Yeah.”
The doorman cradles the phone between his chin and shoulder, waiting for a voice. “Thought Obama ended that.”
“The Times ended it. Obama still seems to be all in.”
Someone finally picks up on the other end. The doorman utters a quick Khmer sentence, then listens. “You can go back,” he says to Fowler. “But you gotta leave your gun with me.”
“Not gonna happen.”
The doorman uses his massive shoulder to block the entrance. “Then you don’t go back.”
Songha perks up, sensing impending violence.
Fowler bites his lower lip. “Does Pang really pay you enough to fuck with someone like me?”
The doorman doesn’t take much time considering. “He’s in the back office.”
45.
On a raised stage alive with blinking lights, a young local girl in a Stetson and a jean skirt karaokes. She works the microphone in her hands, oblivious to the sexual overtones. Behind her, on a flat-screen television, the lyrics bounce and stream, which is helpful for the audience, because she’s massacring the song.
Rapid lyrics don’t translate to the torpor of the Khmer tongue without casualties.
In the lounge area, a gaggle of young girls entertains the local press corps—middle-aged men with pitted salamander faces. They lean back on leather couches while the girls straddle their chests or sit in their laps.
One of the girls puts a reporter’s hand over her hint of breast, takes a hit of smoked heroin, and blows a thick cloud into his mouth.
Two others have gone down to their panties for a reporter who sits there looking as if he can’t be bothered to glance at the pair scissoring each other on a sofa.
Fowler looks over at the two girls. One has pink streaks in her hair. The other one has red. Yeah, he thinks. I’ve come to the right place. Find clues in a reprobate foreigner’s hotel room, and they’ll likely lead you to Pang.
In a room cordoned off by a muscular gargoyle of a guard, Fowler sees a soccer game playing on a flat-screen, sees a blackboard listing the teams, sees men holding fistfuls of bills before a roulette wheel, sees the elderly feeding coins into slot machines and drinking down complimentary beer.
The gargoyle telegraphs a message: Move it the fuck along.
The reason Pang took it upon himself to “entertain” the press corps had everything to do with that room. A few months ago, one of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s men went into an underground gambling den and lost close to eight hundred grand in one evening, and the press broke the story. In a country where the bulk of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it caused a furor. If a government minister could afford to drop that kind of money, then surely those corruption charges must be true.
In response, Hun Sen ordered his officials to shut down the dens and told citizens it was their solemn duty to tip off the government if they knew of any establishments his people had missed. He even set up an anonymous hotline.
Pang decided the easiest course was to get the press corps laid and throw them a few hundred American a month. They were the reason the dens got busted in the first place. So Pang fed them girls and drugs, and they in turn fed Pang’s disinformation to the people and—more important—Hun Sen’s ministers, and in record time, Pang was back up and running.
Gambling is an essential and tragic piece of the Khmer DNA. Fowler’s seen men bet on the amount of rainfall during a mons
oon. When the storm passed, the guys would get a ruler, climb up to the roof, and crown the winner.
Fowler reaches the end of the corridor, bangs on the door to Pang’s office.
46.
Pang answers after undoing four or five dead bolts and a chain and punching in a code. He’s on the phone, working the filter of a cigarette between his teeth like a nervous test-taker with a pencil while shouting orders in Khmer.
He beckons for Fowler to enter.
Fowler takes a seat, listens to Pang conducting heated business—although most conversations in Khmer sound heated to Fowler, since he understands about 20 percent of the content, at best. He taps his foot on the floor and lights a cigarette.
Pang finishes his call, tosses the prepaid cell into the garbage, where it joins a graveyard of junked phones. “I’m so sorry for making you wait.”
“It’s okay,” Fowler says. “I’ve got time.”
Pang dusts clumps of cigarette ash from his seat cushion before he sits down. “Oh no. You’re an American who has time. You’ve been here too long, haven’t you?” Pang laughs at his own joke. His English is functionally perfect; he speaks it with as much of a French accent as a Khmer one. “You’ll have to excuse me…this is most embarrassing…but I can’t seem to remember you.”
“We met a while ago,” Fowler says.
“Under what circumstances?”
The singer outside switches from Lady Gaga to Wall of Voodoo’s new-wave classic “Mexican Radio.”
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Pang shakes his head before Fowler can answer. “She practices every day and never gets any better. It’s a sin, an absolute sin, what she does to music.”
Fowler nods and smiles. “It is…certainly awful.”
“But she’s my niece…what can I do? If I don’t let her sing, God knows what she’ll do with her mouth.”
“Not a lot of good options for girls her age around here.”
“Not at all.”
Fowler takes a drag off his cigarette. “Passports. That’s how we know each other.”
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