“Wouldn’t it be great to find out Mozart’s rating?”
“Forget about the dead. We’ve got to worry about the living.”
***
When they reached Sardinia, Isaac and Bikie went straight to Porto Cervo. The cigar shop was located somewhere in its vicinity. Their stomachs were rumbling and they decided to eat something before putting their plan into action.
They took a table at the veranda of a little restaurant that caught their eye and started discussing once again what the connection between Professor Link and his assistant might be.
The sickly aroma of gossip hung in the air, but the two friends felt that they were obliged to understand the role of the Japanese woman Yoshi, not out of curiosity, but for the good of the cause, and so they could not avoid the subject.
Everything suggested that the professor was bound to her by more than just sex. She bought his cigars for him, so she could not be just a plain call girl. A lover, friend, assistant? What?”
Isaac suddenly stared, wide-eyed, and his lips stretched out into a broad smile.
“I think that’s her,” he said, jabbing his finger towards a woman walking past nearby, who looked Filipino or Malaysian.
“Ohure, the first Asian woman we see will turn out to be the very one we’re looking for! Of course, you’re a flukey bastard Isaac, but not that flukey.”
“What does flukiness have to do with it? It’s just analysis and precise calculation. You can’t really understand me with your four miserable stars,” Isaac snapped.
“Right, right, definitely. If you multiply the length of the equator by the number of Japanese and divide it by the number of Chinese, take away the square root of ginseng, then you’re bound to get thirteen. If you get bullshit, it means your calculations were fuckin’ bullshit too.”
“Hey, cut the swearing!”
“I’m not swearing even though your calculations make me feel like it.”
“No Bikie, swearing is really the lowest of the low.”
“Stop bitching, you’re just jealous of me.”
“Why, I wonder, would I be jealous of you?”
“You’re jealous of my light-blond locks.”
“What blond locks, you’ve got dark hair.”
“The light-blond locks those pretty little Swedish girls left on my sleeping bag!”
“No Bikie, I rather feel bad for you, my dear friend!! What sort of pain in the neck do you have to be to make girls’ hair come off?
“No way, they tore it out in that surge of passion I made them feel. But don’t be upset I promised to be your mentor in handling women. I think that after a couple of years’ intensive training, I’ll let you move on to practicing – tender kisses.”
“You can kiss my ass…tenderly. And record your advice and talk lines for me, the ones that trimmed the Swedish girls’ hair so sweetly. If they lose their hair like that, I’ll just hold the Dictaphone up to my face and use it to shave with.”
***
Afterwards they walked round the sunny little streets of the town with full stomachs and in an excellent mood.
The superb resort town, fit to rival Cote d’Azur, really lifted their spirits. Every step brought into view hosts of bars, little restaurants, cafes and other pleasant establishments.
Bikie stuck the bandana on his head, slipped on a pair of mirror sunglasses and put on long black shorts. Isaac dressed even more lightly: his entire outfit consisted of a tank top, flip-flops and shorts. There was no shower in the van, but they could walk to the beach and take a dip.
Chapter two
Having returned to the van, Isaac and Bikie started the engine and drove to the cigar shop. It turned out to be in the outskirts of the town, although previously it had been on an upmarket shopping street. There was an upside to that – unlike in the center, here there were convenient observation sites where they could easily park. The shop window displayed hookahs, wine bottles and all sorts of bits and pieces including a cigar box and a humidor.
Driven by the thrill of the chase, Isaac suggested going in, but Bikie objected.
“How could you be so careless? We obviously don’t fit the part of rich smokers or their couriers.”
“Cool it! Half the store window is filled with cheap garbage. It’s a long time since they sold anything but cigars. Come on.”
Getting into the shop turned out to be impossible. A note stuck to inside of the glass said that the shop would open in half an hour. How long ago it had been put up was not clear, and the disappointed friends went back to the van. It was stuffy inside so Bikie parked the van under some trees to cool down.
Bikie took out his laptop and fiddled with it, trying to find a Wi-Fi connection. Isaac watched the entrance of the little store, waiting for the owner or a shop assistant to show up. Long after the lunch siesta crowds flooded down the street, there was not a soul around, just the baking sunlight and hot asphalt frazzling the air. Bikie started the engine to give it at least a small blast of coolness from the air conditioning. The two friends didn’t feel like talking; you might have thought they have been overcome by holiday-resort lethargy, but they were really trying to focus. It felt like at any moment Link would come to the shop and everything would work out just fine.
Eventually an elderly Italian came up to the store opened the door and took the note off the glass. Five minutes later the friends were already inside, just an ordinary little shop, nothing remarkable. Bikie asked about the internet, and a secondhand mini-router was unearthed from among the masses of odds and ends on the shelves. While the shop assistant checked to see that it was still working, Isaac pointed out to Bikie a fridge with a glass door, with neat rows of cigars inside, in boxes and loose. Bikie smiled contentedly. The cigars were found, all right – the only thing left was to wait for the buyer.
After they spent several hours in the van and not a single customer entered the shop their excitement evaporated. They noticed a policeman coming in their direction. He walked up to the van, peered inside vigilantly, knocked on the window on the driver’s side, and when Bikie opened it, asked an unambiguous question:
“What are you doing here, boys?”
“We’re tourists,” Bikie replied brightly, keeping his grip on the laptop. “First day on the island. We still haven’t figured out where to stay, so we’re sitting here arguing and looking at the sites of the hotels nearby.”
“Move on, guys, will you,” said the policeman, in a genial mood. “We’ve had a complaint from the old woman in the house opposite. She says some strange characters got out of a van and then mysteriously went back, and now they’re sitting there with the engine running and making a stink, and are obviously plotting something. I understand everything, but she’s an old lady, why upset her?”
“OK chief,” Bikie responded. “Already gone.”
The policeman walked away. They drove the van away a bit, and Isaac nodded in the direction of the shop. The shopman locked the door and was twirling the handle of the shutters, covering the display window. The guys could leave without any qualms of conscience: the first day of surveillance was officially over.
They stopped a kilometer from the shop, at an empty lot where the van was concealed from the road by bushes. Bikie came up with an idea – let technology do the surveillance. In a blink of an eye he had linked up a web camera from his arsenal to the laptop and fine-tuned the image.
It was almost dark when the friends got out of the van to stretch their legs, grab a bite and install the web camera opposite the cigar shop.
When they reached the site, Isaac noticed an old woman on a chair in front of one of the houses. She was either dozing or enjoying the long-awaited coolness of the evening with her eyes blissfully closed. Bikie caught Isaac’s glance and nodded. They would have to wait. There was a little grocery shop on the ground floor just behind the woman.
“Clear enough, life teaches proprietors to be vigilant,” Bikie explained to Isaac. “Or maybe she’s just feeling bored.”<
br />
They took up a position on a municipal bench, pretending to be tourists resting after a hike and ate the pizza they got on the way. The old lady couldn’t see them, but if they turned round and craned their necks, they could see if she was still on her chair.
It took quite some time before the woman finally got to her feet, yawned, grabbed her chair and retreated in to the house.
“I’ll take the chair inside, so the damn thieves won’t steal it!” said Bikie, imitating an old woman’s voice so convincingly that Isaac could barely hold a laugh.
Mindful of their earlier error, the friends took their time. They waited until the light came on upstairs, which meant the old woman was in her bedroom, and went out again, indicating that she had gone to bed. Only then did Isaac and Bikie get up and stroll gently in the direction of the cigar shop.
Pretending to take an intense interest in a blossoming bougainvillea, Bikie quickly fixed the camera on the fence, hardly even slowing his already-slow stride. To look even more natural, he theatrically sniffed in the air from one of the lush purple flowers, breathed out noisily and walked on, whistling, beside Isaac. Isaac teased his friend, saying that today Bikie had indeed revealed his acting talent.
The entire next day they observed the shop remotely. There was only one customer in the morning, an elderly gentleman with a cane and another three in the early evening.
“Now that’s what I call a rush of customers!” Isaac quipped acidly. “Bikie, maybe we need to think of something else?”
“I already have,” Bikie replied. “I’ve written a little program that responds to changes in the video image. It will be activated every time someone goes into the shop. Something like a remote motion-detecting sensor. Then at least we won’t have to spend the whole day long staring into the monitor. When someone goes in, the computer will chirp to us. And tomorrow we’ll visit the shop again and I’ll put another web camera inside. We’ll be able to see whose buying.”
The third week of surveillance was coming to an end, and the friends were gradually giving in to despair. The program that observed movement at the shop was working excellently, with no glitches, but in all this time cigars had only been bought on eight occasions. The demand for smoking material really was tending towards zero. They took turns keeping watch, making periodical visits to the port.
Isaac followed the first customer, who turned out to be a steward from the luxury yacht Carbonica, obviously not the right lead. Isaac had decided that they would follow all the customers who bought cigars. The next box was bought by some local individual with a beautiful villa in the town’s center. On three occasions cigars were delivered to different yachts, and once to a hotel. On one occasion Bikie had to drive off in a hurry and follow a young guy on a scooter to the nearby town of La Maddalena, while Isaac kept watch from the bench with his computer. And on one occasion they had to drive all the way to Cagliari, three hundred kilometers round trip, almost seven hours. The damn van guzzled so much petrol that they had to fill the tank and then hurtle furiously down the road to catch up with the car carrying the buyer. Thank God, they did. It turned out Bikie was right when he checked on the car’s license plate number to find out the address it was registered at. That was where they eventually arrived. It was all futile. On three occasions the owner of the cigar shop delivered cigars himself, every time to yachts.
Isaac saw the fridge with cigars so often that he started dreaming about it. And Bikie knew the exact number of cigars in it, so he could easily tell how many cigars one or another customer had bought.
Meanwhile the money Wolanski had given them was running out. The island of Sardinia had proved to be far from cheap. Eventually they decided to sell the van since living in it had become unbearable, it was so hot and constantly burning petrol by using the air conditioner was getting too expensive. They made a serious loss on the sale of the van, but they didn’t really have any options. They moved into a budget hotel three hundred meters from the cigar shop and hired a cheap scooter for operational movements around the island.
Their frustration and despair would have overflowed long ago, but after the van, living in a cheap little hotel seemed almost like heaven. The relaxing atmosphere of the cozy Italian island also helped keep their dark forebodings at bay. Their evening walks immediately after the cigar shop closed would beat any psychiatrist treating an onslaught of a depression. Every morning and every evening Isaac jogged five kilometers to the sports ground where he worked out for an hour and then ran back. A little more of that and he would have to buy new clothes again.
Days were exhausting, but evenings after the shop closed was when they could walk to the port or take a swim, and that inspired them with hope for the next day. The backdrop of luxury yachts and laid-back people had a calming effect on them. Now and again Bikie picked up another female tourist, while Isaac and Michelle exchanged phone calls and messages more and more often. He lied to her, saying that Bikie and he were already in Palermo, fearing that Michelle might decide to come to Sardinia. She probably had loads of friends here. He really did not want her to know that Bikie and he were living in a two-star hotel with a communal shower and a kitchen in the corridor. After Wolanski’s villa, his room seemed like the ultimate slum.
After all, the womanizer Bikie had been right. After Isaac’s promising start with Michelle, the involuntary separation only enflamed their mutual feelings. This was especially true with Michelle, who was accustomed to men being willing to drop everything for her sake. The mysterious Isaac had gone zooming off on his own business for nearly a month which made him all the more interesting in her eyes. And what sort of business he had was a mystery too, but he obviously didn’t look like a criminal or a scam artist. No matter how hard she tried to find out where he was and what he was doing, she got nowhere. Nothing but excuses and evasive explanations.
Isaac was not glad to be stuck on the damned island either. From what the doctors said, Vicky was improving, but there was still no question of recovery without surgical intervention. He wanted to see Michelle really badly but then he would have had to tell her everything and he couldn’t. It would be bad for the cause, and there was no point in putting the girl to unnecessary risk.
Isaac phoned Vicky’s hospital too having to explain every time that he was her brother, gradually returning him to that role for real, so he decided that his temporary lust for her was a result of stress and purely brotherly concern. Apart from everything else, getting to know Michelle has been very timely in that way too.
***
The fourth week was coming to an end without any developments. After supper they felt drowsy, and it was time to get back to the hotel. Every time they put this moment off as long as possible since the bench on the street was way better than their room.
“Oh, it’s time to get up,” Bikie moaned. “Get up or get it up? My smartphone always used to confuse the two meanings, automatically switching to ‘get it up’. The software developers were obviously guys with a lewd sense of humor.”
As always Bikie had the urge to talk about women.
“It would be good to get it up and in right now. The last one I had was really wild, well you don’t remember, of course… but anyway, she doesn’t count. As for an all night stand there were just the two Swedish girls, and a really long time ago a girl from the bar who was really boozed up and took a mighty effort to entice me.
“In the morning she was shivering really badly, all uptight and striding around like a tiger in a cage. Really jumpy. She had told her boyfriend she was going to her girlfriend’s place, but she really wanted to get back at him for cheating on her. She didn’t want to break off with him completely but didn’t want to let him get away with it either. I just happened to be available. It was the first time she had done it, cheated that is, and she had to put away a whole lot of drink to go through with her plan. So I can’t say it was absolutely super. I could see her thoughts weren’t on me at all, I was a just a suitable candidate tall with heavy ta
ttoos. The sex was only so-so. I was tired, she was drunk. She was kind of stiff, and a big part of her was against doing it, but another part was demanding revenge. The two of us never even kissed, which I was glad about at first, because she reeked ferociously of booze, and then it started annoying me. But I controlled myself and didn’t even try. Yuck! I remember now she stank of anisette. A horrible smell!
“Chicks are weird, you know. For them even vodka is a kind of perfume; it has to have a fragrance, a noble smell: cherry, lemon, black currant or something of the kind. But then after a shower, everything was just fine with her. She called her boyfriend and told him everything was all right, that she spent the whole evening at Cathy’s place and would be home soon. He did not suspect anything. After she talked to him, she calmed down and told me everything. We sat by the window in our bathrobes for a long time, I drank coffee with a stale croissant, and she told me all her secrets. She knew we’d never see each other again, and I was a reliable skeleton in the cupboard of her soul. Although later she asked how to find me in the social networks and she left her phone number too.
“Her name was Francesca and she was about thirty-five. She worked in Marseille as an assistant accountant in a little company. She said her boyfriend wasn’t all that bad, and she was afraid this would break up their relationship. The boyfriend, she didn’t tell me his name, was an asshole, but the others were assholes too, and it was better to have an asshole that was kind and predictable. He went to a football match in Turin, and picked up some female fan on the way back. Everything would have been just fine, she would never have known a thing, if the local branch of the Marseille fan club hadn’t posted a photo report of the group that went on the trip. And there was one of a girl in a shaggy, light-blue sweater – Francesca had found hair from it in his things. Francesca didn’t start fantasizing about the hair from the sweater getting into his suitcase by accident, she understood everything, but she said nothing. But now she felt bad every time he went on a trip with a night away from home.
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