Russian Roulette

by Austin Camacho

  “What would you have me do?” Ivanovich asked, his eyes flicking toward Viktoriya. “I am a hunter, not a protector.”

  “Well, for just a little while we’re going to have to exchange roles.” Hannibal pulled out his wallet and dropped bills on the dresser. “Go downstairs and rent the room next door. Then stay out of sight and watch this door. Watch the landing. Watch the stairs. Watch the parking lot. If you want to keep Viktoriya safe, you’ll be looking everywhere except at her. Got it?”

  * * * * *

  All the way across town Hannibal had thought about nothing except what he might find when he arrived at the address Sidorov gave him. Boris Tolstaya might be holed up alone, or he could have an army of Eastern European thugs with him. He could greet Hannibal as the smooth gangster he appeared to be in his photos or as the hardened killer Hannibal now suspected him of being. He might panic, or he might offer money for Hannibal’s silence. It didn’t matter. All Hannibal really wanted to do was to establish his location as a certainty, appraise the relative risk he presented, and call Rissik to take him into custody. With any luck, he would squeeze the location of the money out of Tolstaya and return it to Uspensky to end any chance that people would hunt Viktoriya. After he got the man to admit which murders he had committed, of course.

  Doubt didn’t begin to creep into his mind until he was parked two houses from Tolstaya’s residence. The house was a modest rambler in suburban Silver Spring with a small yard and stained vinyl siding. He felt very close to the answers he had been seeking for days. He also felt very close to death. A wise man would call the police right then. Hannibal drew his Sig Sauer, charged the slide back, clicked the safety off, and slid it back into his holster.

  Hannibal expected a long wait after he rang the doorbell. It seemed unlikely that Tolstaya would know who he was. He might suspect police, but they wouldn’t send a lone man to the door with no vest. He might be expecting his doctor or a delivery boy. In any case, Hannibal would have only seconds to make him feel safe. He figured he would start with one truth that should not be threatening, that Yakov Sidorov had sent him.

  It would be hard to say who was more surprised when Renata opened the door. Hannibal knew immediately why Boris had been so hard to find. She was able to rent a house as Renata “Queenie” Cochran without raising any alarms while police watched for activity in the name of Tolstaya.

  “Nice to see you,” Hannibal said, watching Renata’s red-rimmed mouth hang open. “Should I be surprised? It seems your loyalties flow rather fluidly.”

  “Ben is safe, and he doesn’t need me anymore,” she shot back, searching the street behind Hannibal. “How did you find me?”

  “I’m alone. And Dr. Sidorov sent me to check up on his patient. May I come in?”

  Her eyes flashed from side to side as if she was searching for an alternative. Not seeing one, she stepped back. As Hannibal entered, she took his arm and guided him to the dining area. She sat and, seeing no one else, he sat also, but with his back toward a wall.

  “Where is Boris, Queenie?” Hannibal asked. “Or is it Renata again?”

  “Queenie, please,” she said. “Even Boris calls me that now. He’s in the backyard. He likes to be out in the sun.”

  Hannibal nodded. “He might not see a lot more of that. He must feel the net closing in on him after he got rid of Dani Gana.”

  Queenie leaned back, her brows reaching up toward her scarlet bangs. “Boris didn’t get rid of anybody. He’s not dangerous. He’s running for his life. They’ll kill him if they find him.”

  “You must mean Uspensky and the mob boys,” Hannibal said. “Boris was your concern all along, wasn’t he? Poor Ben.”

  Queenie’s eyes went down to the table. Then, with a good deal of apparent effort, she raised her eyes to face his. Her brow wore deep furrows and her lower lip began a slight tremble. Hannibal thought he read sincere remorse in her eyes.

  “You’re right. I took advantage of Ben. I took advantage of his love because I knew he could help me try to get Boris’s money back. If Dani had been reasonable, he’d have negotiated with Ben and we could have found out where he hid the money. But instead he…” She couldn’t go on, so Hannibal filled in the blank.

  “Instead he beat the man half to death. All because Boris couldn’t take care of his own business.”

  “You have to understand,” she said, straining not to shout. “Boris’s life was at stake. These men in the Mafiya, you don’t know these men. He had to stay in hiding. God, I need a cigarette.”

  “Well, before you fire one up, I’ll just wander outside and have a few words with your husband du jour.”

  Hannibal walked slowly thorough the kitchen and turned sideways to peer through the window. The man in the yard was sitting on the far side of a wooden table with his back to the house. Hannibal couldn’t see his hands. It was possible, he supposed, that the man was sitting there with a shotgun in his hand, waiting for trouble to call. There was really only one way to find out.

  “Mr. Tolstaya,” Hannibal called as he opened the back door. “Yakov Sidorov sent me to check on you. My name is Hannibal Jones.”

  “Sidorov,” Tolstaya repeated, not moving. “He may be the only man alive smart enough to not want any of the missing money.”

  “Maybe,” Hannibal said, stepping out into the sunshine, onto the neat, level lawn, “but it would sure make a lot of people’s lives better if you returned it to its rightful owner.” Tolstaya’s mention of the stolen money left no doubt that he knew who Hannibal was.

  “I am the rightful owner,” Tolstaya said. “That money belongs to me. Gartee Roberts stole it from me, left the country, and changed his name.”

  “And that’s why you killed him, isn’t it?” Hannibal asked, stepping closer to the still figure. “That’s murder number three for you, isn’t it?”

  The scent of grass that had been mowed that morning spoke to him of life, not death. Hannibal wasn’t sure what he expected next, but it was not the sound of grass bending under rubber wheels and a subtle squeaking as Boris Tolstaya turned his chair toward his visitor and rolled closer.

  “You can’t pin Dani’s murder on me,” Tolstaya said. “You can’t pin any murder on me.”

  He rolled his chair closer, into Hannibal’s silence. The face was the one in the photographs of Boris Tolstaya, except that it was a little thinner. The black hair was a little thinner too. The change in his body was more profound. This man was half the size of the rakish gambler whose photograph Hannibal had been carrying around in his pocket. He wore a heavy sweater and slacks that hung on his frame. Two transparent plastic tubes snaked up from the back of the chair to clip into his nose. Tolstaya stopped just three feet in front of Hannibal. The left side of his mouth curled into a half smile.

  “You didn’t know,” Tolstaya said. “Sidorov kept his word after all.”

  “I guess he did,” Hannibal said. “What happened to you?”

  Tolstaya laughed, a weak but real laugh. “You Americans. Always so direct. But you are right, you never learn anything otherwise. What has happened to me, Mr. Jones, is called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

  “ALS,” Hannibal muttered.

  “Yes, the disease named after your baseball player Lou Gehrig,” Tolstaya said, turning and rolling back toward the table. “I soldiered in Afghanistan at the same time that Nikita Petrova was there. I believe I was exposed to many of the same chemicals and toxins your soldiers faced during your Gulf War of 1991. Most escaped without harmful effects. Many did not. I am among them. It’s neurological, you know. This wasting disease progresses quickly once it gets hold of you.”

  “I’d read that nobody knows what causes ALS,” Hannibal said, sitting at the table opposite Tolstaya.

  “I know,” Tolstoya said. “Many soldiers know. Of course, they don’t have much of a voice. No one survives this disease. There is no cure. I no longer have the strength to move my legs, Mr. Jones. My arms will be next and then eventually I won’t ev
en have the strength to breathe. I hope for only two things. One of them is peace and comfort until I die.”

  “And the other?” Hannibal asked.

  “That my enemies never learn that I became so weak and helpless and died this way.”

  “By your enemies, I take it you mean your former mob partners,” Hannibal said. “But I’m not sure I understand,” Hannibal said.

  Tolstaya took a deep breath and clenched his jaw. “That is because you think I am simply a gangster. You do not understand who I am.”

  Who was this man Boris Tolstaya, Hannibal wondered. He was a Russian gangster. Bu he was also a soldier stricken with a fatal disease. He was a lifelong keeper of secrets. He was an underworld figure who was at odds with his closest allies. And he was a man who seemed oddly at peace with his fate. Then the picture became clear. Boris Tolstaya was not concerned with dying, Hannibal decided, only with the nature of his death.

  “Come on,” Hannibal said, “there’s no reason to keep secrets now, except maybe your location and your health situation. If I wanted to give those away, I would have already done it. I can keep those secrets for you until it no longer matters, but you can’t just keep me in the dark.”

  Tolstaya nodded and his mouth formed an upside down U, the universal symbol for considering a new premise. He looked toward the house and the half-smile returned. “Ahh, what the hell. Yes, of course I mean my friend and partner Uspensky. But I cannot blame him, really.”

  “I don’t know,” Hannibal said, weaving his fingers together on the table. “In my circles, you don’t kill a friend over money.”

  “It’s not the money,” Tolstaya said with a short laugh. “It’s the federal charges. I did skim some money from the brokerage firm, you know. So did Uspensky. Between us, it was enough to allow the IRS to build a case for income tax evasion. Ivan fears that if they find me before he does, I’ll turn state’s evidence and help them send him to jail. And he knows that if they never find me, it still leaves him to take the fall. But if he found me, well, he could make me the fall guy. It would be easy to show evidence that I stole the money to avoid taxes.”

  “So, you’re saying your low profile has nothing to do with Nikita Petrova’s death, or Raisa’s, or that of Dani Gana?”

  Out the corner of his eye, Hannibal saw Queenie approaching slowly from the house. He stayed quiet until she stood beside the table. He could not interpret the look that passed between her and Boris, but it was not the look of love or hate or regret or obligation although it had elements of all of those.

  “Is everything OK?” she asked.

  “Everything is fine, my dear,” Boris said. “Join us. The time for secrets between us is long past.”

  Queenie sat, but Hannibal felt that he was still Boris’s focus. He would sit quietly and hear all that Boris had to say. As was so often true, he counted on silence to draw the truth out.

  “I will tell you what there was between me and Nikita Petrova” Boris said, maintaining eye contact only with Hannibal. “First, we had the army experience in common. Then I worked with him to launder local Mafiya money through my firm. Then we gambled. He gambled poorly and he eventually owed me a great deal of money. This put me in the position to pressure him to turn a blind eye while I skimmed from the mob money he brought to our brokerage firm. That was all there was between us.”

  “That’s a lie,” Queenie said. “There was the girl.”

  Hannibal’s brows reached for his hairline. He was astonished that Queenie would contradict Boris, especially with a third person present. Boris leaned forward, his eyes pressed together as if focusing all his power on Queenie’s defiant face. His breath came in jagged gasps.

  “What are you talking about?” Boris said, each word sounding like a separate sentence.

  “You wanted his daughter, Viktoriya,” Queenie said, her voice dropping into a deeper, more hateful register. “You wanted that child. You would have used her to clear his debt.”

  Boris’s face, already pale and wan, fell like an underdone cake. His eyes stayed with Queenie but his gaze softened. His mouth quivered only for a brief second.

  “You knew.”

  “Of course I knew,” Queenie said. “And one night, at the Russia House, I told Raisa. I assume she told her husband. I know that Boris would not let you take his little girl away. Like everyone else, he loved her too much. I know that is why you and Nikita fought, that night. That is why you killed him.”

  “You can’t know that,” Boris said, raising a weak arm in protest.

  “Of course I know,” Queenie said, standing. “There was a witness. Dani Gana saw you kill him.”

  Queenie snapped to her feet, knocking over her chair behind her, and ran for the house, leaving a loud sob in her wake. She didn’t seem concerned that Hannibal knew she was living with a philandering murderer, but she apparently couldn’t stand to let him see her cry. Considering all the violence and double-dealing that circled Boris Tolstaya’s life, it seemed odd that the moment felt so awkward. Hannibal let a few seconds of silence sit between him and Boris, but found more questions irresistible.

  “So…you and Viktoriya?”

  Boris smirked. “Not quite what my wife imagines. I wanted her help in the business. A beautiful, strong, and ambitious young woman can always be useful. I could see that she was attracted to the money and the power it brings. Sadly, her father never got past seeing her as a helpless little girl. She wanted to see northern Africa and made it clear in her clumsy overtures to me. I offered to send her to Algeria to make business arrangements there. But Boris, he stood firmly against me, even after I offered to wipe his debt clean.”

  “I’m surprised you would honor his wishes,” Hannibal said.

  “Fortune smiled, on him and me. I met Dani back when he was known as Gartee Roberts. He was also young and ambitious and attractive in his way. And he was attracted to the money. And he had family in Africa. In fact, his family ties reached high into the Moroccan government. So I sent him to Morocco with new clothes and enough money to get established. In short order he wormed his way into their foreign service. The test there gets easier the more you pay to take it, you see. And once he was working for the embassy, he could cross borders at will with however much cash we needed to move.”

  “So then Nikita had little to offer you to clear his markers,” Hannibal said, shaking his head. “His death was pure and simple. A mob hit for unpaid gambling debts.”

  “Nikita’s death was an accident,” Boris said, his voice now softer. “I did not hate the man, and you know you can’t collect from a corpse. We went to the roof to talk, Nikita and I and two of my associates from the firm. The conversation got rough. I had to discipline him. It was meant to be a beating, nothing more, to show him I was serious. He…” Boris paused for more labored breathing. “I didn’t know how sick he was. How weak he was. It seems his injuries took far more out of him than anyone suspected.”

  “Oh, it was an accident, huh? I’m sure that made his widow feel better,” Hannibal said.

  “I took care of Raisa.” Boris dropped his fist on the table with all the energy he had. It was a pathetic display of weakness that somehow made Hannibal feel a little better.

  “She knew it was you,” Hannibal said, standing.

  “She found out somehow,” Boris said. “Nikita left little money behind, but his wife blackmailed me for enough to keep her in her chosen lifestyle.”

  Hannibal stood, hands in pockets, staring down at Boris in disgust. “And that’s why you had to kill her too.”

  Boris rolled back from the table, his shadow just reaching Hannibal’s toes. He stared at his own knees, then held his palms wide and stared up into Hannibal’s face as if preparing himself for crucifixion.

  “Look at me,” he said through clenched teeth, and then louder, “look at me. Who could I kill?”

  Hannibal had to admit this truth. Within the last week Boris Tolstaya could have no more slipped into Raisa Petrova’s house to shoot
her than he could have hunted Dani Gana down in Rehoboth Beach.

  “Nikita’s death sounds more like manslaughter than murder, so why not just come clean and explain. Why should I keep your secret now? If you talk to the police, you can go to a decent facility where they can care for you properly.”

  “You will keep my secret because you know that whatever the police know, Ivan Uspensky will know soon. He believes that Renata and I both know the location of the missing fortune. Even if I am in custody he will find her and torture her for information she does not have.”

  “How selfless of you,” Hannibal said.

  Boris smiled, making it clear that he did not miss the irony in Hannibal’s dry tone. “That is your reason for keeping my location to yourself. For myself, I prefer to keep my reputation intact until the end. Let them all think I am a killer. Renata can take care of me well enough between now and the end.”

  “How nice for you. But doesn’t the Petrova girl deserve some justice?”

  “Justice?” Boris breathed, and choked. “Really, Mr. Jones, what possible purpose could it serve for me to be in prison? Is it not sufficient that I am a prisoner of this chair?”

  “Which brings me to the one remaining thing I don’t get,” Hannibal said. “Now that I know what she knows, I don’t understand why Queenie is still here. She loves you far more than you deserve.”

  “You think so?” Boris turned his chair to face the back door more directly. “You have listened to my story, but not paid much attention to what you know about her. Renata believes that I know where the missing money is. And she believes me when I say that I will share that information with her just before I die.”

  Hannibal looked back toward the door. “You didn’t kill Dani Gana. You never even found Dani Gana. You don’t have any idea where the money is, do you?”

  Boris gave him a sly smile and turned his chair away from Hannibal and the house. Hannibal realized this sad, sick man was right about one thing. He was being well punished for whatever his crimes were during his life. It made him feel good to know that the random vagaries of fate didn’t just strike the innocent.