He shrugged. “The tunnel, I imagine. Some government functionary will be months getting that place sorted.”
“Wasn’t it a risk, giving him a fake rock?”
“It shouldn’t have been. But I fear I’ve miscalculated,” Kingsley admitted. “I expected he’d go straight to his boss, at Finchlingly Manor, six kilometers down the road. Where government agents are waiting to take Igor into custody. That’s where I planned to question him.”
“But why wouldn’t he authenticate the diamond?”
“Because Mirko was well trusted. The Cartier of money launderers. The De Beers of Marylebone. You don’t survive in his trade by ripping off customers.”
“Mirko isn’t going to survive,” I reminded him.
“And Igor has just reached the same conclusion regarding himself.” Kingsley stood abruptly. “Off we go.”
Igor lumbered along at a good clip now, leading us across a pedestrian overpass into a working-class neighborhood.
“Where’s he off to then?” Kingsley asked. “If not to his employer, or the train station, or the airport—”
“Church,” I said. “To pray for his immortal soul.”
“Nonsense. If he were the churchy sort, Norwich Cathedral was right in front of him.”
“But that’s Anglican, right?” I asked. “He made the sign of the cross as he left the marketplace.”
“That wasn’t the sign of the cross, it was psoriasis. He’s been scratching regularly. And in any case, Anglicans also cross themselves.”
“But Anglicans cross left to right for the Holy Ghost part,” I said. “Igor went right to left. What do you bet he goes to a Russian Orthodox church?”
“I’m not going to bet with you. Wouldn’t be sporting. I’ve failed only four times in my entire career, and—now what’s he doing?”
What Igor was doing was staring at his phone as he walked, twice doing a one-eighty, the sign of a man at the mercy of Google maps. Seven minutes later he reached a one-story brick building with all the charm and spaciousness of a vacuum cleaner store. A sign near the door read RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH. But the door was locked. Igor rattled it twice, then gave up and checked his phone.
“Let’s go question him right now,” I said.
“Have you never done a proper ambush?” Kingsley asked. “We need privacy. Pity that church is closed.”
“Yes, pity that Russian Orthodox church is closed.”
“Don’t gloat,” he said. “It’s unattractive.”
Minutes later Igor got his bearings and took off, with us following, until Gothic spires came into view, rising out of the drab suburbs.
“Cathedral of John the Baptist,” Kingsley said. “Roman Catholic. He must’ve converted. And unless there’s a mass in progress, that’s where we’ll make our move.”
St. John’s was what a cathedral should be, all white marble and stained glass resplendent in the dying light of late afternoon. A dramatic Pietà dominated the left half of the church, just past the transept, and that’s where Igor stopped. He genuflected, crossed himself, and knelt.
Kingsley and I found a pew near the back. “It’s weird to be in a church with a dog,” I whispered. “And a gun. Why ambush him here?”
“We won’t ambush,” Kingsley answered. “We’ll converse. Note his body language: he’s dying to confess.”
As if he heard us, Igor straightened his spine, turned, spotted us, and bolted.
Kingsley was after him in a flash, leaving me to grab Gladstone and follow, down the nave toward the altar, a left at the Pietà, around the back, and out the side door. Igor was faster than he looked, sprinting across a parking lot and into someone’s backyard.
But it wasn’t a backyard, it was an entrance to a park. We sped down a walkway, past a sign saying PAY HERE pointing to an “Honesty Box,” through a vine-enclosed path and around a bend, into a glorious sunken garden.
The garden was rectangular, ending in a beautiful stone facade. Igor headed that way, then peeled off to the right, scrambling with difficulty up a terraced wall and disappearing into a thick copse.
“Go left,” Kingsley called over his shoulder. “The understory! I’ll take the right!”
Having no idea what an understory was, I nevertheless scurried up a side stairway and into a thicket so dense that day became night. I set Gladstone down onto the forest floor and unclipped his leash so he wouldn’t strangle himself, and made my way blindly forward, thinking I may as well have been back in the tunnel. I imagined Kingsley doing the same on the opposite side of the garden while our quarry waltzed back out and onto the street.
And then there he was, on the path in front of me.
Igor looked more startled than threatening. He stared at my hand, and I looked down too, to discover I’d drawn the gun from my purse.
Our eyes met. He was pale, and from the ears up bald. From the ears down he sported a fuzzy glob of red hair, a clown wig cut in half. It gave him a hapless air, Larry of the Three Stooges.
I tried to say “Stop” in Russian, but what came out was zdravstvujtye, which of course meant “good day,” which was equally useless. Because Igor had already stopped and neither of us was having a good day.
“Where’s my brother?” I blurted out, and then “Gde moy brat?” before realizing that this man would have no idea who I was, let alone my brother, in any language.
“You can shoot me,” he responded, in very good English. “Please.”
Maybe it was the influence of the Honesty Box at the entrance, but I said, “I’m sorry. My gun isn’t loaded.”
At that point Kingsley came crashing through the thicket behind Igor. He looked at my gun and between gasps of breath said, “Let’s go down to the garden and find a nice bench, shall we?”
Kingsley was right about one thing: Igor was dying to unburden himself. Mopping his sweaty brow with his windbreaker sleeve, he said, “I was hired by—”
“Spartak Volkov,” Kingsley said. “We know all that.”
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t know all that. Who is Spartak Volkov?”
“Russian émigré,” Kingsley said. “Tons of money, ties to both your government and mine. He hired Igor to assassinate—”
“Sarah Byrne,” said Igor, nodding. “A simple job.”
“For one with your skill set, yes. You’re a poisoner by vocation and a baker by avocation. Your passion is pastry,” Kingsley said, and then, noting Igor’s surprise, “I saw it immediately.”
“But how? You are not psychic!” Igor said.
“There are bits of calcified dough on your collar,” Kingsley said. “Your fingers are stained from food coloring. Red Dye No. 3, which you must’ve brought from Moscow, as it’s banned in England. Only an aficionado travels with his own food coloring.”
“I use but a drop,” Igor said, a tad defensive. “For my icings. Okay, and my jellies. Because Sarah Byrne, she loves to eat the English desserts. This I learn from Spartak Volkov. He makes my job easy. Sarah Byrne has been a long time from England, he tells me, and she visits now and wants her cakes. She will die for her cakes.”
“Victoria sponge: arguable,” Kingsley said. “But spotted dick?”
“Banoffee!” Igor said. “Figgy duff!”
“What on earth are you people talking about?” I asked.
“The remains of their cream tea,” Kingsley said. “Masterfully done, Igor.”
“I paid the chauffeur,” Igor explained. “He tells me she goes on Thursday to a psychic. I set up my cart outside the shop. I wear my apron. My hat. She comes. She buys. Two of everything! She goes into the shop. I hear through the window: Mirko makes tea, they eat her cakes.”
Little hairs on the back of my neck sprang to life, but I couldn’t yet account for them.
“But when I report to Volkov, he grows mad! The woman, yes, the woman should die, he says. But Mirko? No. Because Mirko the Psychic, he tells me, is also Mirko the—the—” He waved his hands.
“Money launderer?” I of
fered.
“Fence?” Kingsley suggested. “Procurer? Black marketeer?”
“Yes! The whole world trades with Mirko! Everybody loves Mirko! Russian, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Herzogovinian—”
“Yes, yes,” Kingsley said impatiently. “We get the drift. So you’re in trouble. You call the number on the sign in front of the shop. I answer. You’re relieved: Mirko is alive, you think. And Mr. Volkov is particularly relieved, as he has given Mirko a very large down payment on a very small rock. And now Mr. Volkov sends you with the balance, to collect his diamond. Like a common courier, but what choice do you have? Come, no need to look amazed, Igor. I happen to be a genius. But tell me: something made you suspect I was not Mirko. What was it? My accent?”
Igor shook his head. “It was the sign. ‘Walk-ins welcome. Both kinds.’ Do you remember? I say to you, ‘I myself would like to be a walk-in. How does this work?’ But you did not answer. At first I thought you don’t know the answer. But then I thought. . . .” He shrugged. “We were there for business. For diamonds, not for spirits. We did not have all day.”
“I don’t have all day either,” I said. “Can we get back on topic? So the two poisonees, Mirko and Sarah Byrne, went into the tunnel, thinking to get away from you, Igor, because they suspected what you’d done.” I turned to Kingsley. “And you went into the tunnel after them. And my brother Robbie stayed behind in the shop. Not thinking ‘poison,’ just thinking ‘hungry,’ as he always is anytime he goes an hour without food.” I turned back to Igor. “It’s not just possible he’d be tempted by your sweets, Igor; it’s virtually certain. But my brother’s a picky eater. So what I need to know is, did you put polonium in every single thing you baked?”
A silence settled on us, so that I could hear the birds in the garden singing their twilight songs.
“How do you know my poison is polonium?” Igor asked quietly.
“Totally obvious,” I said.
“You are a psychic!” he said, with awe.
“Nobody’s a psychic!” I said. “You take pride in your work, and you like a challenge, and polonium takes talent,” I said. “And experience. You probably trained in Moscow. Lab X. And also,” I went on, “because everyone in this crazy story either is Russian or knows Russian, so everyone, upon feeling sick, thinks ‘poison’ and then they think about Alexander Litvinenko and his teapot of polonium and they’re off to the ER, screaming ‘radiation poisoning.’ Including Robbie. Which is why he disappeared. So while I feel sorry for the psychic and the opera singer, I need to think about my brother now, so you need to tell me, Chef Boyardee, did you bake polonium into everything?”
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “The flies’ graveyard, yes, and the Garibaldi biscuit. But not the—wait!” He stared at me. “What opera singer?”
“Sarah Byrne,” Kingsley told him, “was the alias used by Yaroslava Barinova whenever she was in London. She liked to go incognito. She also wore wigs.”
If Igor had been pale before, he was now the color of toothpaste. The white kind. “Yaroslava Barinova?” he gasped. “I have killed Yaroslava Barinova? The greatest mezzo since Anne Sofie von Otter?” He clutched at his heart, scrunching his windbreaker in his big baker’s hands.
I patted him on the back, but he was beyond comfort. “I deserve to die!” He pointed to Kingsley. “I give you rubles, you give me junk. Yes, I am stupid. I kill Mirko, the fence. Yes, I am sloppy. But now, now—” His voice rose to a scream. “Yaroslava—Barinova!—the pride of Perm!” His screams turned to coughing, and he reached into his windbreaker to pull out a tiny aspirin tin, from which he took a pill. He stuck it in his mouth, swallowing with a grimace. Then he began to cry. And cough. And cry.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and handed him my bottle of water. He knocked it back, drinking half, and wailed anew.
“Igor!” I yelled. “Toughen up. I’m sorry about your opera singer, but what about my brother?”
But Igor was done talking. A strangled sound emanated from him, an unearthly noise, like someone screaming with a closed mouth, or the braying of a donkey—his head reared back and then he fell forward. Kingsley and I, on either side of him, reached for him, but he dropped from the bench to his knees and into a kind of seizure, his mouth foaming. A dark calm settled over me as I held onto one arm and felt Kingsley holding onto his other, and Gladstone, one paw on the man’s knee, howled. The four of us stayed like that for some moments, arms and legs entwined in a group hug there in the Plantation Garden, until the life drained out of one of us, and we were only three.
“Polonium for the customers,” I said, “but old-school cyanide pill for himself. Poor Igor.”
“Before you get all sentimental,” Kingsley said, “consider this: Spartak Volkov had Yaroslava Barinova killed because she jilted him. A slow death, so she could think on her sins. That’s what our Igor did. His life’s work. Just eat your trail mix and try not to romanticize assassins.” We were on the train back to London, side by side, now with Gladstone between us like a snoring armrest. Our adrenaline levels were returning to normal and our fingers and toes thawing.
If Igor’s death was operatic, its aftermath was not. Kingsley had me help him remove Igor’s green windbreaker, from which prints could be lifted.
“Theoretically,” I said. “But practically speaking, unlikely.”
“Don’t argue. Leaving fingerprints scattered about is unprofessional.”
It seemed to me that Igor looked lonely, lying there in a brown polo shirt that didn’t cover his belly, and when Kingsley made a phone call to his mysterious government agency, I found Igor’s iPhone in the grass, clicked on his iTunes, and set it on repeat so that “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” would accompany him to the afterlife.
But Kingsley plucked it from the grass on our way out. “Leave it here? Are you mad? A mobile is a font of information.”
Once on the train, Kingston kept up a steady stream of conversation, clearly for my benefit. We tacitly avoided the subject of Robbie. “Shall I tell you what became of the cat?” he said suddenly.
“Touie,” I replied, “is stuffed into Mirko’s freezer. You had to remove a twenty-pound turkey to make room for her. I hope she was dead when you did it.”
“She was. I stopped by Robbie’s flat this morning to drop off the dog—my landlady, an excellent woman, claims she’s grown allergic to him. I must’ve just missed you. You, on the other hand, did not even see a dead cat on your brother’s bed.”
“I saw her. It didn’t occur to me to check her for signs of life.”
“Ah. You see, but you do not observe.”
“Why’d you give her collar to Gladstone?” I asked.
He looked at me, surprised. “Dogs need tags. She had no use for it anymore.”
“Well, anyway,” I said. “It was kind of you to spare me the ordeal of a dead cat.”
“It was curiosity, not kindness. I’m interested in cause of death; I plan to test her for butane and benzene, for a monograph on mattress toxicity.” He was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What is the other definition of a walk-in? Other than a client without an appointment?”
“It’s a New Age term,” I said. “It’s someone who’s tired of living, whose soul vacates their body so a more . . . evolved soul can move in. A spiritual celebrity.”
“What nonsense.”
I shrugged. “Some souls don’t want to waste time with birth and childhood. They’ve been here before, and they’ve got work to do. But after the trade happens, the new souls generally forget they’re walk-ins. Which means you—or I—could be some kind of historical figure and not even realize it. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. A dead Beatle.”
“Right,” he said. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all day. And it’s been a long day.”
“Whatever,” I said. “But next time you impersonate a psychic, you might want to notice the sign outside your shop.”
“I saw the sign. All my senses are excellent. Evolved, ev
en.”
“You saw, but you did not observe,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “I observe that you are picking out the sultanas in that trail mix I bought you. So you dislike sultanas. Does your twin share this aversion?”
I looked down at the small pile of dark, withered rejects, swept aside on the table in front of us. “What’s a sultana?”
“A dried grape. Ingredient in sultana cakes, scones, Garibaldi biscuits, and the like.”
“Ah—squashed flies?”
“Precisely.”
“Oh, yeah. Robbie hates them. Raisins, currants, all dried fruit.”
Kingsley blinked. And a slow smile spread across his face.
As the train neared Liverpool station the ping! of an incoming text woke me. I’d dozed off, my head against Kingsley’s shoulder. I looked at my phone.
So long story short, I’m allergic to my new bed, thought it was something more serious and went to the ER and some idiot gave me penicillin, so THAT nearly killed me, but anyway, finally home, hope u weren’t worried and btw, where are u? and where the f is my cat? xox
“What does that mean,” Kingsley said, reading over my shoulder, “when you Americans sign xox? I understand x, but what’s the o?”
I smiled at him. “I think I’ll just show you.”
PRESTON LANG
Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars
from Deadlines
There are no professional hit men in America. That’s not to say people don’t take money in exchange for shooting a guy in the head. Some heavy kid gets a thousand bucks to whack another banger? Sure. But there’s no suave pro who lives a normal life until he gets the call from his handler to take down your difficult mistress, your work rival, your wealthy uncle. And there’s certainly no telephone number some suburban dad can call to order a fifteen-thousand-dollar hit on a Little League coach. It’s a cool setup for a story, but I’ve been a reporter too long, covered too many murders—it can’t really happen. Not only would a business like that get busted in a week, but there just isn’t enough work out there to make it feasible.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 Page 8