I got behind the wheel, and Karin did the back-seat driving. It’s much more tolerable, somehow, when the back-seat driver is pointing a gun at you. We headed out of town, going north and west. After about thirty minutes of twists and turns, most of which I suspected were unnecessary and meant only to disorient me, we arrived in a small and sparsely populated residential neighborhood that looked like something right out of the Monkees’ song “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (a Number Three hit for them back in the summer of 1967). I saw no weekend squires outside mowing grass or barbecuing steaks—probably because it was almost two o’clock in the morning—but there was plenty of light to do so if one wanted to.
The house Karin chose for us was a small, pale yellow number with dark green trim. It came with an attached garage and a For Sale sign bang in the middle of a perfectly manicured front lawn. The garage was open and empty, and the moment I had the Audi inside, I heard and saw (in the rear-view mirror) the door closing automatically behind us. Then the door leading to the house opened, and a man not much smaller than the door stood in the framework. He wore dark slacks, a white shirt, and a gun on his right hip.
“Out,” Karin said from the back seat. “Remain calm, and no harm will come to you.”
The more she said it, the less I believed her. I got out, and the man in the doorway stood courteously aside to let me pass. I went up two steps to the landing and went inside, into the kitchen. There was just enough time for me to notice that the room was done in the same pastel yellow/hunter green colors as the exterior before I joined the ranks of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and Lew Archer by getting whacked behind my right ear with something soft and very heavy. I sagged at the knees. Blackjack, I had time to think, followed immediately by Thanks a lot, Karin, just before whatever it was hit me again and I didn’t do any more thinking for a while.
Chapter Twenty
Elsewhere
Europa Hotel
St. Petersburg, Russia
Chief Inspector Dmitri Borzov, the Marlboro in his mouth blazing furiously, banged on the door of room 506 at seven minutes past two o’clock in the morning. Ten seconds later, he knocked again, louder. The sound of his heavy fist pounding on the metal door boomed up and down the hallway, but if Borzov was concerned about waking up a floor full of bourgeois tourists, he didn’t let on.
There was no answer from inside. He turned to the manager on duty, a mouse of a man half Borzov’s size, with large horn-rimmed glasses and a worried expression. What little hair he had stuck out in all directions, and his face glistened with sweat.
“You did not see Mallory leave the hotel?” Borzov barked.
“N-no, Inspector,” the manager stammered. “That is, yes, Inspector, I did not see him, not personally.” He cast around in his mind for a way to shift the blame. “He must not have left his key at the desk. That fool of a clerk—”
“Can only be half the fool you are, at best. But he is not to be blamed. You have set a standard for stupidity that will be impossible for present and future generations to achieve. Open this door at once!”
Borzov didn’t budge from in front of the door, and the hapless manager had to reach around him to slide the key card into the lock. It clicked, and the light turned green. The inspector pushed down on the handle and barged through. When he stopped short four paces in, he felt something bump him from behind. He swung round.
“What are you still doing here?”
“I—I only thought—”
“A new experience for you, thinking? Tell me, were you the inspiration for Dostoyevsky’s Idiot? Go away, before I arrest you on general principles.”
A stage magician couldn’t have made the man disappear any faster. Borzov’s lips twitched slightly—his version of a smile—and he stood alone in the center of the room.
Both beds had been slept in. Borzov’s face twitched again. Cherchez la femme, eh? Apparently Mallory had taken his own advice and found one for himself. Or, more likely, one had found him. The Schachter woman, clearly; but that didn’t tell Borzov where they were now. He opened drawers and checked inside the closets. Mallory’s passport and wallet were nowhere to be seen, but his luggage, clothing, and other personal effects were still here; even his laptop computer. Maybe he and his date had merely gone for a late evening stroll, but Borzov doubted it.
His cell phone buzzed at him.
“Yes?…What?…Oh. I see…Very well, then. Attend to it.”
He stuck the phone back in his pocket. Whoever had blown up the coroner’s pretty little assistant had, it seemed, also taken care of her boyfriend. With a garrote that apparently didn’t satisfy itself with strangling the victim, but cut through skin, veins and arteries as well.
Multitasking, he thought.
The police inspector’s lips twitched for the third time in the last five minutes. It usually took Borzov a month to run up a total like that.
He lit a cigarette and strode out of the room.
Peterhof Hotel
St. Petersburg, Russia
Maria Rakosi’s eyes flew open. Her right hand closed instinctively on the gun next to her, but she quickly realized she was in no immediate danger. She laid the gun down again and pressed a button on her wristwatch. The green numerals showed fourteen past two in the morning.
She had been asleep for perhaps thirty minutes, but she sat up in bed, instantly as awake and alert as if she’d put in a solid eight hours. She reached for the tablet and switched it on. It came up instantly, and it only took her a few seconds to see what she needed to see.
“Here goes,” she muttered to herself. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Maria reached for her shoes—white Diadora cross-trainers—and laced them up. Then she exchanged the tank top for a sports bra and dark blue T-shirt. The shorts were of the very short variety, but she didn’t bother to change them. They were respectable enough—she wasn’t on her way to the ambassador’s reception, after all—and a little extra sex appeal was always a useful thing to have in the arsenal. One never knew. Then she pulled her reddish-brown hair back into a rough but functional ponytail and stuck a New York Yankees ball cap on her head. Neither hurt her sex appeal in the slightest; more importantly, both would serve to keep her hair out of her eyes.
Maria shoved the tablet and Walther into a blue Adidas gym bag, got keys and passport, and got out of there. When she started her car, the clock on the dash read 2:18.
Chapter Twenty-One
Invariably, the first thing I do on waking up is find out what time it is. That includes after getting whacked on the back of the head, which makes checking the time a more difficult exercise than it ought to be. I eventually determined that it was 02:21 on the 26th of June. So I’d only been out a few minutes.
Next, I worked out where I was: sitting on the floor in a corner of a large and dimly lit room. Yellow and green, which probably made it the same house. The threadbare carpet was a faded and dirty-looking brown. The view from the front window was concealed by a heavy brown curtain.
A dazzling white light came on and my eyes screwed shut against the unexpected flash. The sudden movement of my head sent a massive bolt of pain shooting through me, so stunning that it actually paralyzed me for a moment. When sensation returned, I put a hand over my eyes and opened them again, very slowly.
“My apologies, Mr. Mallory,” a voice said in cool, precisely enunciated British. “I fear that Bruno was a trifle, shall we say, overzealous. Karin Fessler, you already know. My name, by the way, is Parker.”
I moved my hand away and looked at the three of them. Karin had changed clothes in the interim. Now she was dressed in a simple gray business suit, the skirt of which chastely covered her knees. Chastely, I thought, that was a laugh. On the floor next to her stood a black briefcase. But even though she’d changed clothes, she was still wearing that same stupid little half-smile on her face. I’d have given good money just then for the chance of slapping her silly. For an actress, I thought, she didn’t seem to have a lot of different
expressions in the toolbox. Then I remembered that in the last—what, five or six hours?—she’d used that one goofy look to convey five or six different emotions. This probably made her a very good actress indeed, but then again, she didn’t have to be Meryl Streep to fool me.
Bruno stood to my right. He wore no expression at all. When you’re that big and carry a gun, you don’t need an expression. If anything, he seemed bored. I promised myself that if I could, I’d try to even the score with him later. Based on my record to date, that made him the most worry-free man in Russia.
“Parker”—let’s call him that, but if it was his real name, I was Dwight David Eisenhower—was perhaps a couple of inches taller than Karin, maybe five-nine or ten, and of slight to medium build. He had a full head of closely-cropped brown hair, and he was quietly dressed in dark slacks, white shirt, blue and red rep tie, and oversized wire-rimmed glasses. Coming soon to a boarding school for boy wizards near you. But I didn’t have any trouble taking him seriously; something told me that I’d better.
“Sorry about the knock on the head, old man,” he said, “but I didn’t know whether you’d willingly submit to being searched.” He gestured at the coffee table, where I saw my passport, wallet, keys, and phone. “Can I get you anything? Some water, perhaps?”
I nodded. A mistake, because that searing pain shot through my neck again. For a few seconds, the room swam around me like an inflatable bouncy house in an amusement park. When it came back into focus, Karin was still smirking at me and the big guy was still bored. Only the man in the middle showed any concern.
“Do you have any aspirin?” I croaked.
“Of course, my dear fellow, of course!” He turned and spoke in a language I didn’t understand—something Slavic?—to Bruno, who almost snapped to attention when Parker addressed him. He left the room and was back in less than half a minute, handing me a bathroom-sized paper cup of water and four aspirin. I took all four—harder than it sounds, when you’re trying your damndest not to move your head and neck—and set the empty cup on the floor next to me. It had been too much to expect to get a real glass from them, I supposed. Paper cups weren’t much good as weapons.
“No doubt you’re wondering what all this is in aid of,” Parker said.
“Not really. I have a fairly good idea.”
“Indeed? I should be interested to hear it.”
“Okay. You’re using Karin to fix some of the matches in the tournament. She found out that I had talked with Lori, and you people were afraid she might have told me something. So naturally you hacked her to death and cut off her head—”
“Really, old man,” Parker interrupted, smooth and urbane. “You’re making it sound much worse than it was. After the first few seconds, she would have felt no pain. Bruno here is something of an expert in these matters.”
“Sorry. I’m a writer. I get carried away with the occasional flight of fancy. And then you sent Karin around to find out what I knew.” I looked over at her. “Speaking of which, what would you have done if I’d taken you up on your offer last night?”
She smiled. “An added distraction to dull your sensibilities, that is all. Still, I wish that you had done so. I was more than ready to…distract you. At least you would have taken away a pleasant memory of our time together. I very much enjoy making love, and you are a strong and virile man. Even an attractive one—in a way.”
“Why did you have to qualify that last bit? Don’t tell me; you’ll only make it worse.” I turned back to Parker. “So after I exposed her—”
“So to speak,” he murmured.
“I’m telling this. Stop interrupting. So after I exposed her, she got me over here with a story so patently stupid even I wouldn’t take it at face value.”
“Yet you are still here, Mr. Mallory,” Parker said. “I wonder why.”
I wanted to shrug, but that would have meant moving my head and neck, and the aspirin hadn’t started working yet. So I just looked at him.
“I’m curious,” I said.
“So are cats. There is even an aphorism to that effect, I believe. Tell me, old man, at what point did you suspect the match-fixing?”
“Pretty early on.”
“What made you suspect?”
I hadn’t suspected, of course. It wasn’t until Karin overplayed her hand and made the suggestion herself that I was able to tie it in with my colleague Jon Stefansson’s little squiggles in his scorebook and his sideways hints to me that something was rotten in Denmark. When I thought back on it, the squiggles always came after a play that involved Karin Fessler.
I recalled the last game on Day One: the Croatia-Greece contest. Stefansson had asked me what I thought about the last goal, the Greek penalty throw at the buzzer. It was Karin who had whistled the foul…in order to ensure that the Greeks cut the margin to five.
It was the shaving cream on the sink in my room that gave it to me. Point-shaving. Someone paid Karin to ensure that Greece stayed within five goals of Croatia. Nobody would notice; nobody would suspect.
Nobody, that is, except a savvy Icelandic journalist who could smell a rat a mile away.
But I wouldn’t tell these clowns that. Of the two people in Russia I had any use for, one was already dead. I couldn’t bring Lori back, but maybe I could keep Jon out of danger.
“What made me suspect? It’d be simpler to ask me what didn’t. Besides having a naturally skeptical mind, I used to officiate sports myself. I know what to look for, that’s all. There’s no magic to it. It’s almost impossible to fix a game convincingly by bribing the referees, even if all you’re doing is point-shaving. That’s as Mickey Mouse as you can get. They can’t help but look obvious trying it.”
“Mickey Mouse? Oh, I see. As it happens, I agree with you. It doesn’t matter all that much to me at this point; that stage of the operation is complete. Still, it was perspicacious of you to bowl us out so quickly. What had you planned to do with the information?”
“Nothing, until I could confirm it somehow. My boss pays me to report the news, not unfounded suspicions.”
“Most ethical of you, I’m sure.”
I wondered where all this was heading, but I was happy to play along. The aspirin was finally starting to help with my pain, and the grogginess was almost completely gone. More to the point, as long as we were talking, I wasn’t getting killed. I shifted into a more comfortable position on the floor—Bruno took a step closer to make sure that was all I did—and looked up at Parker. The spasm of agony from that tiny movement only lasted half as long as before. Time, as the Rolling Stones sang back in 1964, was on my side, if nothing else. I was a little surprised to discover that I still knew the year after my whack on the head. How high did it go on the charts? Five? No. Six. I knew it was six because another “Time” song, “Time Is Tight,” also reached Number Six back in 1969. Booker T. and the M.G.‘s. My brain, such as it was, seemed to be working as usual.
Which meant that things were probably still hopeless. I shrugged.
“It’s what I do,” I said. “But now what do you do? The tournament starts up again at noon, and Karin and Lori are supposed to work the two o’clock game.”
“I have no worries on that score,” Parker said. “I don’t particularly care what happens now, so long as the tournament continues today. Which it will. Do you have any other questions for me? Or theories that you wish to share?”
“Why did you have to brutalize Lori the way you did? To make the identification more difficult?”
“Exactly.”
“What about fingerprints and DNA? They would still belong to Lori Schachter.”
Parker smiled.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But because the room was registered to Karin Fessler, and because Lorelei Schachter—or someone who looked very like her—” he smiled again and nodded at Karin—” went to the authorities and gave them a sincere and convincing statement. The authorities will in time discover their error, of course, but by then, there will be nothing they c
an do—may, in fact, disavow any knowledge of an error.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Huh? What the hell was that??
I looked over at Karin again. “How many pieces of silver are you in for? Thirty is the usual number, isn’t it?”
She started to say something, but Parker cut her off.
“Miss Fessler has done her part and done it well. Within hours, she will be on an Air Zurich flight to Switzerland, complete with Swiss citizenship papers and an entirely new identity, along with enough money to keep her comfortably fixed for the rest of her life. In fact,” he said, “there’s no time like the present. Bruno!”
Bruno jumped to attention again.
“Sir!”
“Take Miss Fessler to the airport. See that she gets on the plane safely.” He picked my car keys from the pile on the coffee table and tossed them to Bruno, who caught them easily in one massive hand. “I’m sure Mr. Mallory won’t mind your borrowing his car.”
Not minding was not the same as not objecting. I didn’t object. What Cramer would have thought about my losing the car, I was afraid to guess.
Without a word, Bruno crossed the room and took Karin’s arm. Her smirk slipped for a second, but she recovered her composure enough to look back over her shoulder at me as they walked toward the kitchen. Her face broke into a wide grin. Anything would have been an improvement.
“Ciao, Paolo,” she said. “Come and see me sometime.”
I ignored her. Parker and I said nothing as we heard the kitchen door open and close. A few seconds later came the sound of the Audi starting, followed by the garage door going up. The engine note faded as the car backed out and down the driveway; and then there was silence.
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