The food came, then went almost as quickly: despite their slim and trim physiques, both women knew what to do with a knife and fork. They hadn’t been finished thirty seconds before the dirty dishes disappeared as if by magic. Felicity reached for the wine bottle.
“So, what did you think of the new man?” Maria asked. Despite Hungarian parents and a Brooklyn upbringing, she spoke with no trace of an accent from either place. In addition, her French and Italian were also indistinguishable from those of a native speaker. It was one of Cramer’s odd requirements that all of his employees, from newspaper delivery boys on up, be proficient in at least two foreign languages. So far as anyone knew, he himself spoke and understood only English. But “so far as anyone knew” was in Cramer’s case not very far.
Felicity (Portuguese and German; she was currently learning French with Maria’s help) shrugged. “He’s younger than the others. Good-looking too, I suppose…after a fashion. But you’d know more about that,” she teased. “You spent more time with him than I did.”
Maria made a face. “I suppose,” she agreed. He seems a decent enough person, anyway. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What, then?”
“His experience, or I should say, his lack thereof. He’s got a journalism degree, two years in the Navy as a public affairs officer, and three years as a reporter—a sportswriter, for God’s sake—in East Lambert. Wherever that is.”
“Up north somewhere, I think. So?”
“So he’s not exactly Ernest Hemingway or Edward R. Murrow, is he? When he first came in, I thought that he might be interviewing for a position on one of the newspapers.”
“There’s a vacancy on the Desk,” Felicity pointed out, “and Mr. Cramer knows what he’s about. Why shouldn’t what’s-his-name, Mallory, do as well there as anyone else?”
“I just told you. Because he doesn’t have the experience that the others have. You know their records. They’ve covered wars, organized crime, hurricanes, earthquakes. None of them is less than forty years old, and none of them has been in the business for less than fifteen years. Mallory’s only thirty-one, and he’s done nothing more demanding than issue press releases and report on how well the high school football team is progressing this year. And you should have seen his face while he was filling out the paperwork. What is the phrase…deer in the headlights?”
Felicity picked up the wine bottle. She looked at Maria, who shook her head; then she topped off her own glass.
“Well, naturally. His first day on the job, and the boss tells him ‘you’re going to Russia.’ Anyone would feel overwhelmed. Remember what our first day was like? But he’ll be fine, you’ll see. Like you said, he wouldn’t be here if he couldn’t look after himself. He speaks the language, and he’ll be covering sports, same as he was doing before. And—repeat after me—Mr. Cramer knows what he’s doing.”
“I know that,” Maria said. She took a sip of wine, then looked up, frowning. “And I know Mallory probably knows what he’s doing, too, but I just have the feeling that something, somewhere, is very wrong with this picture.”
Felicity stared across the table at her friend. She’d known Maria Rakosi for close on fifteen years and in all that time, she had never once known her to be wrong about one of her “feelings.” And, of course, both of them knew why there was a vacancy on Cramer’s “special assignment” desk. It was a recent vacancy. Maria had had a feeling about that one, too…and Bob Carradine was—had been—the best in the business.
But Felicity laughed.
“What crystal ball are you getting that rubbish from? You Central Europeans are all alike,” she said. “Everything’s danger and melodrama and superstition with you lot. Dracula isn’t real, love. He doesn’t exist. Bram Stoker made him up.”
“He got him from somewhere,” Maria replied. “And Bram Stoker was born and raised in Ireland. Just remind me again, Fliss, what part of Central Europe is that in?”
“You’re hopeless.” She downed the last of her wine and set the glass carefully on the table. Then she moved her head a quarter turn to the right and raised her hand, barely getting it to shoulder height before their waiter appeared in front of them. He was out of breath, and his bald head glistened with a faint sheen of perspiration. Felicity smiled up at him.
“Check, please,” she said. Felicity picked up the tab on Fridays, Maria on Mondays. If nothing else, their system had the advantage of being easy to remember.
“Immediately, Madam,” he said. He spun round and moved off, almost at a run. The two women watched with quiet amusement.
“It’s been three years now,” Maria said. “I’ve wondered a hundred times what Mr. Cramer said to them.”
Felicity laughed again. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’d have given a month’s pay to be a fly on the wall.”
The waiter appeared with the check. Felicity took it from him, mentally added a standard tip, and rounded up to make the total an even dollar amount. She handed the finished product along with her credit card back to the waiter, who beamed his approval. He would have beamed had she torn the check up and thrown it in his face.
Dusk had fallen by the time they left the restaurant and walked home. It wasn’t far: the two women shared a townhouse in the West 40s. A slight breeze tugged at their skirts and played with Maria’s long auburn hair as they walked. Felicity shook a cigarette loose from a pack of Dunhill Lights. Maria watched as she shielded herself from what little wind there was to light it.
“Can I get one of those?” she asked.
Felicity’s eyes opened wide.
“You?” She handed over the pack and her lighter. “You don’t smoke ten cigarettes a year. What’s the occasion?”
As her friend did earlier, Maria stepped to one side, out of the wind. She lit the cigarette and drew deeply on it; then, before turning back to Felicity, she made a surreptitious sign of the cross. That done, she returned the cigarettes and the lighter, and the two of them started walking.
“No occasion,” Maria said. “No occasion at all.”
Piraeus, Greece
Lopez sat in a dark and dingy bar just outside the main gates of the Pelekoudas Shipyard and nursed a glass of retsina while he waited.
“Nursed” was an understatement: the contents of Lopez’s glass would have evaporated long before he could work up the nerve to drink it down. He enjoyed many varieties of wine—was in fact a connoisseur of note, with a diverse and well-stocked cellar at his villa in Torremolinos—but how anyone could drink this paint thinner was beyond him. In ancient times, he knew, pine resin had been used to seal wine vessels to prevent the contents from spoiling, but it hadn’t been necessary for that purpose ever since the Romans started using barrels back in the third century or so. The Greeks actually liked the taste, though, and had continued the practice to this day. They were welcome to it, Lopez decided. He wondered if his palate would ever be the same again.
It had not been difficult to track his quarry. He was, as Lopez’s client had suspected he was, attached to the man Stavros Kyronis, a Greek shipping magnate.
A half hour on the computer filled in some of the blanks for Lopez. To complete the picture, he flew to Greece, where he took a room in an undistinguished Piraeus boardinghouse and spent the next several days around the docks and in the tavernas: asking a discreet question here, standing a round of drinks there, until he had the information he wanted.
The bodyguard’s name was Nicolas Triandos. He had been with Kyronis for as long as anyone could remember. The friendship between the two men apparently extended all the way back to their childhood, when they roamed the streets of Piraeus together, surviving by their wits and by the simple expediency of taking whatever they needed in order to survive. Often, they took those things by force, a method of operation at which the big and powerful Triandos excelled.
Kyronis, tough enough in his own right, was the brains of the outfit. He was also by far the more ambitious of the two. On his sixteenth
birthday, while Triandos languished in a Piraeus jail cell, he signed on as a deckhand on a freighter bound for Istanbul. At the age of twenty-six, he owned three freighters of his own; ten years later, the number had increased to thirty. Today, at the relatively young age of forty-seven, Stavros Kyronis commanded a fleet of more than fifty ships, though it had been years since he set foot on any of them.
And Kyronis wasn’t the man to forget a friend. Eleven years ago, he found Triandos—again in a Piraeus jail cell (Triandos was not upwardly mobile in the least)—and hired him as his personal bodyguard, moving him into his mansion on the outskirts of Athens.
The arrangement suited Triandos admirably. The pay was little more than an ordinary Greek laborer would receive, but for a man of his talents, the job was undemanding and with free room, board, clothing, and everything else, Triandos could easily have gone the rest of his life without having to spend a cent.
Except that he had every other weekend off.
Nicolas Triandos made the most of those opportunities. He was deeply attached to his roots, and the man’s fortnightly routine was unvarying. On Friday evening, he took a taxicab into Athens, then a bus down to Piraeus, where his first order of business was to visit a local whorehouse. This took an hour or so of his time, never more. With that out of the way, he would next stop into a taverna down by the docks (this one; always the same one) and drink himself into a stupor before staggering away to a nearby rooming house to sleep it off. When he awoke, at noon or so the next day, he repeated the itinerary. On Sunday morning, he would clean himself up, dress in the more or less respectable clothes he arrived in, take the bus into Athens, and a taxi back out to the mansion.
Today was Saturday; the second night of the cycle. On the previous night, Lopez had arranged to bump into Triandos as he was coming out of the whorehouse. Speaking a basic and very vulgar Italian-accented Greek, he fell into conversation with the bodyguard, and accompanied him to the taverna, where they disposed of three bottles of what was apparently Triandos’s drink of choice. (Lopez literally disposed of his, pouring most of his share onto the floor when Triandos wasn’t looking. Retsina, he decided, made a better all-purpose cleaner than it did an alcoholic beverage.) Around one in the morning, they left and staggered down the street to the boardinghouse.
Lopez had helped Triandos up the stairs and opened the door to his room. Inside, a bare and dim incandescent bulb on the ceiling revealed four dirty walls, an even dirtier bed, a toilet with an overhead tank, and a chipped and stained ceramic sink. Of the four rooms on the second floor, only Triandos’s appeared to be occupied. It didn’t matter either way to Lopez. He would be very quiet, and besides, the habitués of such a place were not likely to be a curious lot…
The front door of the bar opened and Lopez looked up in time to see Triandos enter. He would have started his drinking at the whorehouse, Lopez knew, but he didn’t look any the worse for wear as he crossed the floor toward the table where Lopez was sitting. The table itself was nothing more than an empty wooden spool that at one time had held (Lopez looked down) one thousand meters of 30-gauge insulated wire.
Triandos saw him and waved. Lopez smiled and raised his glass in response; then he stood to greet him. They embraced, the bodyguard almost engulfing the averagely-sized Lopez in a massive bear hug.
“Marco, my friend,” he said. (For the purposes of this little job, Lopez was Marco Moretti, a Sicilian deckhand on the Martorell III, a cargo ship of dubious distinction currently berthed in Piraeus.) Triandos gestured at the bottle on the table as he sat down. “You have started without me. The retsina, she gets into your blood, eh?”
Lopez sincerely hoped not. But he smiled.
“You may be right, Nico. At any rate, I did not know how long you would be with the ladies, and did not wish to waste any time.”
Triandos reached for the bottle and poured himself a tumblerfull, then promptly drained half the contents and topped off the glass again before setting the bottle down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smacked his lips, and laughed.
“There were two of them this evening, Marco. Two of them! Sixteen and fourteen years old. The young one was especially cooperative. You should have been there, my friend. I would have been happy to share with you.”
Lopez found the idea as abhorrent as the man himself. You’re making this much easier for me, animal, he thought. But he widened his eyes, professing interest. “Two of them? No surprise, then, that you were late. I forgive you—and I congratulate you, Nico. Tell me, did you take them together, or one after the other?”
Triandos banged the now-empty bottle down on the table and roared for another.
“Together,” he said. “I could not restrain them. I tell you, my friend, there is no feeling in the world like it. Young, eager bodies, soft but firm in all the right places—”
“I trust you also were firm in all the right places, eh?”
Triandos roared with laughter. Even in the raucously loud taverna, customers for meters around stopped drinking and smoking long enough to take a look before getting back to business.
“Firm? I was as hard as the columns of the Parthenon, Marco—and in much better shape, eh?” Then he smiled and lowered his voice. “But now, not so much,” he confessed. “That is why there is retsina—to pass the time between women.”
Lopez filled both their glasses. “Well said, my good friend. Let us drink, then. To women.”
“To women!”
And so on and so forth. Lopez kept listening and Triandos kept talking and drinking. At length, he pushed back from the table and stood up, gesturing in the general direction of his bladder.
“Time to dispose of the old retsina,” he announced, “and make room for the new.”
Lopez didn’t think there was much difference between old retsina and new, but he smiled and nodded.
“Not too much, though, Nico,” he said, tapping his wristwatch. “Remember that you have to be back at work tomorrow afternoon.”
Triandos groaned.
“Do not remind me, Marco,” he said. “Okay. One more glass when I return—for the road, eh?”
“You drive a hard bargain, my friend.”
Triandos stumbled off. Lopez reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and pulled out a small glass tube. Keeping his hand under the table, he removed the stopper and then, concealing the tube in his fist, emptied its contents into Triandos’s glass. The vial went back in his pocket; then Lopez filled both their glasses with what was left of the retsina.
It was well after eleven when the two men finally paid their bill and moved unsteadily out into the street. The boardinghouse wasn’t far, but Triandos, singing bits and pieces of what Lopez guessed was some sort of Greek ballad, weaved from side to side of the narrow street like a sailboat tacking against the wind, and the trip took twice, almost three times as long as it ought to have done. Lopez hoped that he had calculated the bodyguard’s tolerance accurately. True, if he simply passed out, it would make things easier, but on the other hand, he had been ordered to give the man a lesson. And for that, Triandos would need to be awake.
Eventually they made it. Lopez half pulled, half carried the much heavier man through the door of the boardinghouse. The caretaker, a small wizened man who couldn’t have been a day under eighty and looked like he had been preserved in formaldehyde (or perhaps retsina, Lopez thought), cackled at them as they stumbled through the lobby.
“Another big night, eh, gentlemen?” he said.
Lopez shrugged. “Den katalavaíno,” he replied, in halting Greek. “No understand.” After a few more minutes, he managed to get Triandos up the stairs and into his room, closing the door behind them.
Triandos gazed vacantly around him, but seemed to at least realize where he was. Then he saw Lopez and wrapped him in a drunken embrace.
“Thank you, Marco,” he said thickly. “You are my friend, my good friend. I—”
Lopez squirmed free. “Enough, Nicolas. It is only what one f
riend would do for another. Now, let us get you into bed.”
He helped the bodyguard out of his heavy denim jacket and Triandos collapsed onto the bed as if his legs would not support him any longer. This came as no surprise to Lopez.
“Do not remind me, Marco,” he groaned. “At least not until…” He pointed to a small battered travel alarm clock on a chair next to the bed and tried to continue speaking, but no words came out, and the bodyguard’s arm dropped of its own weight, hanging over the side of the bed. Lopez nodded.
“What is it, Nico? The alarm? Of course, my friend. You just relax.” By the time Lopez had turned back around, Triandos’s eyes were closed. His breathing was deep and regular.
Lopez watched him for a few moments. Then he reached into his bag and pulled on a pair of thin powder blue latex gloves, such as a physician might use to examine a patient. Next he took a pair of heavy-duty PVC cable ties and fastened each of the drugged man’s wrists to the iron rails in the headboard. They were not so much for restraint as they were to allow Lopez maximum freedom of movement. Then he slapped the bodyguard a few times across the face, not gently.
Triandos came awake, and Lopez nodded with satisfaction at what he saw. The drug had indeed done its work. The bodyguard’s eyes moved crazily here and there, scanning the room at random before finally finding Lopez and focusing on him. The eyes showed fear; but mostly, they showed a total lack of comprehension. It was a combination Lopez knew well.
“Ah, Triandos, my friend,” he said quietly. “You are awake, I see. I was hoping you wouldn’t sleep the night away. We must have a little talk.” The words came in fast, fluent, classical Greek.
The bodyguard stared at him. It was all he could do.
“Tetrodotoxin, Triandos, should you wish to make mention of the fact in your memoirs. “Your particular dose was extracted from the liver of a fugu, a Japanese pufferfish. The poison blocks the body’s sodium channels without crossing the blood-brain barrier. As a result, the victim remains fully conscious as his muscles slowly become paralyzed. In some cases, breathing stops, and asphyxiation follows. But if one—forgive the impersonal pronoun, Triandos—if you can make it through the first twenty-four hours, then you will make a full and complete recovery. The good news is, I think that you will recover. I certainly hope you will, because I have no wish for you to die.”
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