by Lee Vance
The English folders contain a random collection of documents and spreadsheets, most routine. There’s a letter to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles concerning the renewal of Andrei’s driver’s license, one to his prep school, pledging a one-thousand-pound gift, and another to his tailor, placing an order for new shirts. Nothing and more nothing. A folder labeled “Records” contains an Excel spreadsheet. I click on it and a dialogue box pops up, demanding a password. Shit. I’ve seen advertisements on the Internet from companies that claim to be able to recover lost passwords. Lifting a blank CD from the spindle, I pop it into the computer and drag the Excel file to it. A second dialogue box asks if I want to wipe the original file from the hard drive. I hesitate a moment and then click on “OK,” figuring Andrei wouldn’t want a file he’d bothered to protect on a computer being used as a Web server.
It takes another ninety minutes to persuade myself that there’s nothing else interesting on the computer, unless Andrei’s hidden information in a system file, in which case I’ll never find it anyway. The apartment’s freezing, but I don’t want to close the window. I turn the light out, close the laptop, and flip it over, leaning forward in my chair to rest my hands and cheek on the warm case. The fan hums soothingly. An image of Jenna comes to mind, huddled in bed in some frigid Scottish hotel, laughing as I blew warm air under the covers with a hair dryer. I push the memory away, trying to remember exactly how I calculated the distance to the moon, and what it felt like to be so confident of my perspective.
14
I WAKE to the sound of a key in a lock. Someone rattles Andrei’s doorknob as I rub my face with my hands, recalling where I am. Muffled thumps sound from the hall, a hand or foot striking the door repeatedly. I left the dead bolt unlocked; whoever’s trying to get in must have turned the key the wrong way. It’s just past two. Waiting in the dark as a stranger assaults the door, I wonder if I was wrong to dismiss Katya’s fears so lightly. I wish I’d brought my father’s gun with me.
The door eventually opens, revealing a man in a baseball cap backlit from the hall. He coughs an angry word in the direction of the open window before turning to the alarm panel. My chair squeaks as I stand up, prompting him to spin toward me.
“Andrei?” he says.
“No, a friend.”
He snaps on the overhead lights. I raise a hand against the glare, startling him into jumping back toward the door. Realizing his error, he steps forward again and erupts in vitriolic Russian, his meaning clear despite the language barrier. He wants to know who I am and what the fuck I’m doing here. The volume rises as he begins shaking a finger. He must be threatening to beat the crap out of me. He’s too small to be much of a threat, a skinny twenty-year-old in an Oakland Raiders cap, wearing low-slung jeans, a leather bomber jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, and black high-top sneakers that look like the Keds I wore when I was twelve. I’m about to tell him I don’t speak Russian when I realize he’s switched languages.
“So who the fuck are you?” he says, doing an adenoidal De Niro.
“I work for Turndale,” I say, improvising. “This is our apartment.” Lifting the computer behind me, I turn it so the silver sticker on the bottom is visible. “And this is our computer. So the question really is, Who the fuck are you?”
“Fucking liar. I never see you at the office.”
The cap’s brim shadows his eyes, but I can see a gray metal ring piercing his lower lip. Pongo said the secretary had a son, a mook with a metal ring in his face.
“I work with Katya Zhilina in New York. You’re Olga’s kid, aren’t you?”
Surprise flashes across his features, giving way almost immediately to sullen watchfulness. He’s staring at the computer. I sit down again, my forearm resting on top of the machine, and smile reassuringly.
“I’m not here to hassle you. You answer a couple of questions and I’ll get going.”
I wait patiently while he gives me the flat stare tough guys use in the movies. After about thirty seconds, he crosses to the open window, slamming it shut so hard that I can hear the counterweights bang against the pulleys.
“What fucking asshole opens the window at winter?” he says.
“Your English is lovely. You learned in school?”
“MTV,” he sneers. “From Beavis and Butt-Head.”
Dragging a dining room chair over, he straddles it backward, pulling Marlboros and matches out of a jacket pocket. Cigarette lit, he leans sideways to drop the match into the glass containing the used condom, doing the tough-guy stare again through the smoke.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Dmitri.”
“I’m Peter. The sooner you tell me what I want to know, Dmitri, the sooner I’m out of here. Capisce?”
“Li sento,” he says, affecting a yawn.
“Where’s Andrei?”
He shrugs.
“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”
“No.”
“Does your mother?”
He doesn’t even bother to shrug, a twist of his lips suggesting contempt at the notion that he talks to his mother.
“Andrei’s going to be pretty unhappy if he learns you trashed his apartment.”
“So I’m sorry. No big deal.”
“Is it a big deal that you stole his computer?” I ask, guessing that he was responsible for the machine’s disappearance.
“Andrei’s computer is stole?” His eyes widen in feigned amazement. “You found it here, yes? In his apartment? This is a very strange stealing.”
“I found it uploading pictures of guys with nine-inch dicks getting to know each other better.”
“You like the pictures?” he asks mockingly. “You want to meet one of those boys?”
I take Andrei’s phone out of my pocket.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Calling your mother,” I say, bluffing him. “This is Andrei’s phone. She’s on his speed dial. I’m going to ask her to come over. She knows you’re using Andrei’s apartment, right?”
“Wait.” He shakes his head, eyes skittering nervously around the room. “Don’t call her. She’d have a fucking cow.”
“So talk to me. When did you last see Andrei?”
He takes a deep drag on his cigarette, looking painfully put-upon, and then flicks ashes morosely in the direction of the water glass.
“The day he flied out. He called me in the morning and said to pick him up in the car.”
“Where did he fly to?”
“I don’t know. He says take him to the airport and I take him to the airport.”
“You always drove him?”
“For a year almost. My uncle drove, but he makes a crash from too much vodka, so my mother makes me drive.”
“How did Andrei seem that day?”
“Like he is thinking somewhere else.”
“Distracted?”
“Right.” Dmitri nods. “He is distracted. He gets in the car and says he is leaving, and that he might not come back. He says my mother has money for me.” Dmitri clucks derisively, shaking his head.
“What?”
“That fucking bitch never gives me money. She keeps everything I am to be paid. For the rent, she says, and the food. Her cabbage is very fucking expensive.”
“You were working for nothing?”
“Nobody is working for nothing,” he says, giving me a cool glance.
I take my wallet from my jacket, remove a hundred-dollar bill, and crease it neatly down the middle.
“Tell me,” I say, putting the bill on the coffee table between us. He picks the money up and pockets it.
“Andrei isn’t using the car very much.”
“Ah. And when he wasn’t using the car, you were.”
“A car can make a lot of money in Moscow,” he says with a shrug. “Enough to get my own flat maybe. If Andrei goes, I must give the car back. Turndale is only leasing it.”
“Which was a big financial hit for you.”
/> The kid nods emphatically.
“Is that why you stole his computer?”
Dmitri objects strenuously to the notion that he swiped the computer, and we agree to settle on the word borrowed. He explains that Andrei’s files were automatically backed up to an external hard drive every day in the office, ensuring he never lost data.
“Which is why you thought it was okay to borrow the laptop,” I say.
“Right. Who will care? Andrei leaves the computer on the backseat. I check to make sure it is backed up and put it under a blanket in the boot. I go for coffee and say I forgot to lock the door. No big deal. The computer is here; nothing is stealed.”
Dmitri flaps a hand casually but sounds a little embarrassed.
“Where’s the external drive that Andrei backed up to?”
“He took it with him.”
Sitting up straight to unkink my back, I run my hands over the top of my head, trying to think.
“You look like shit,” Dmitri says matter-of-factly.
“Thanks for the feedback.”
“Here.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small yellow box. “Rub a little under the eyes,” he says, offering it to me. “Is very good when you are getting no sleep.”
I flip the box over, recognize the logo, and toss it back at him disgustedly.
“I don’t want your fucking hemorrhoid cream.”
He catches the box in midair, surprisingly quick.
“This box is only for the face,” he says, sounding offended. “All the boys use it.”
“What boys?”
He produces a pink business card from another pocket with a theatrical flourish and then snaps his wrist, flipping it at my chest. I grab at it but miss, then pick it up off the floor while he smirks at me. The card reads “www.russianboys.net” in fancy gold script on one side and has a phone number on the other.
“You’re a pimp?”
“I have friends,” he says coldly.
“Tell me about your ‘friends.’ ”
“You are too nice to be hearing about my ‘friends,’ ” he says, mimicking my inflection. “Probably you should fuck off now before you are hearing something bad.”
I wonder whether I shouldn’t just smack him. “Maybe your Web site is more like a dating service? Where friendly people can meet each other?”
Ten minutes later, I understand the rudiments. Dmitri’s stock-in-trade is knowing people—mainly young gay Russian men. He makes introductions, arranges parties at clubs, and moonlights as a car service. Some of his friends like to meet foreign businessmen. The better hotels won’t let his friends hang around, preferring to fill up their lobbies with “peasant girls in cheap shoes, showing off plastic tits.” So Dmitri’s friends pay him a small fee to be listed on his Web site, and he pays barmen and bellboys in the hotels to hand the cards out discreetly.
“You’re using Andrei’s computer as a graphics server,” I say.
“The Web site is getting more hits with more pictures. Other people link to good content. Google ‘gay Russian boys,’ ” he says pridefully. “I’m number one.”
“It must be nice to have Turndale paying for your bandwidth.”
He leans back, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Listen. I don’t give a shit about anything except finding Andrei. Whatever you’re doing here is fine by me.”
He lights another cigarette from the butt of the previous one and shrugs.
“Fucking bandwidth will kill you.”
We sit quietly for a minute while I try to figure out how Dmitri fits into Andrei’s disappearance and Jenna’s death.
“How’d you get the keys and alarm code to Andrei’s apartment?”
“My mother has keys.”
“And the alarm code?”
“The same as his network password at work,” he says disapprovingly. “Except the letters turned into numbers. Is very bad security.”
“You hacked Andrei’s network password?” I ask, a suspicion beginning to form. Maybe Dmitri’s responsible for some of Andrei’s problems. “Did you ever do anything on-line using Andrei’s identity?”
“I am network administrator,” he says, shaking his head vehemently. “I don’t hack and I don’t phish. Business is about your reputation. Everything I do is on the up-and-down.”
“You tell me the truth now and there’s no problem,” I say, hoping to encourage some admission from him. “But if I waste a bunch of time chasing Andrei’s credit card charges or his phone bill and discover I’m investigating stuff you did, I’m going to be very pissed off. You and your mother will both hear from Turndale.”
He smokes some more, considering.
“You don’t care about small things.”
“Right.”
“Maybe somebody made an extension on the car,” he says, examining his cigarette. “Maybe somebody made an upgrade on the Internet service.”
“What else?”
“Nothing,” he says, still not looking at me. “Nobody wants to go to jail. Andrei signed up the car and the T1 line. Maybe somebody just made changes. Changes are a small thing.”
I take a moment to regroup, trying to intuit whether he’s holding something back. Pongo I could read like a book. This kid’s a little outside my experience, but he doesn’t seem particularly criminal.
“Tell me about the day Andrei flew out,” I say, deciding to move along. “Before you took him to the airport. Where were you when he got out of the car and left his computer on the backseat?”
“To the clinic.”
“What clinic?”
“Moscow Free Clinic. Andrei is knowing the doctor who runs it, Dr. Anderson. She takes care of boys and girls who get sick.”
“Where is it?”
He removes yet another item from his coat pocket and offers it to me. It’s a foil-wrapped condom, identical to the ones under Andrei’s bathroom sink. I tilt it to the light, noticing Russian numbers and letters on the wrapper.
“It is the address of the clinic. The address is also on the condom, so it can be read when you are wearing it. Sometimes it is a big clinic and sometimes it is a small clinic,” he says, leering.
“What’s Andrei’s connection to it?”
“Andrei is helping. He knows I have many friends, so he makes me meet Dr. Anderson. She gives me condoms to give to my friends.”
“To give or to sell?”
“She makes me promise not to take money.”
“And do you?”
“No.” He looks offended. “Not from my friends. Also I give them away with my card. The girls pay small money sometimes,” he says, grinning. “You know, a handling fee.”
There’s a piece missing. How the hell did Andrei get involved with a Russian AIDS clinic?
“Is Dr. Anderson young?”
“Old,” Dmitri says. “Maybe your age.”
“Is she attractive?”
“She might be cute. She should wear lipstick, and buy new shoes.”
“Was Andrei seeing her?”
“I told you. He is seeing her that day.”
“No. I mean was he sleeping with her?”
Dmitri frowns uncomprehendingly.
“He was sleeping here.”
“Was Andrei fucking her?” I ask, irritated.
Dmitri looks at me curiously and then his face lights up with amusement.
“You are very confused,” he says.
The desire to smack him is stronger, but he’s right. I’m confused, and I’m tired. The smart thing is to get some sleep. I can speak with this Dr. Anderson myself tomorrow. Dmitri shrinks back warily on his chair as I get to my feet, but he’s still grinning.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” I say. “You get this place cleaned up before then or the car and the T1 line are gone.”
His face falls comically as he looks around.
“Cleaning up after yourself is a small thing,” I tell him. “And nobody gets anything for nothing.”
15
; IT’S WELL PAST THREE by the time I get back to my hotel. I brush my teeth and crawl into bed, exhausted, but my brain’s spinning too fast for me to fall asleep. Dmitri raised more questions than he answered. I can’t imagine why Andrei fled or what his involvement was with this clinic, and I still don’t have any idea who was looking for him or what he might have sent Jenna. Frustrated, I sit up and turn on the light. Grabbing the phone from the bedside table, I dial Tilling’s number. I want to know what she’s learned about the guy with the Felix tattoo.
My call gets kicked into her voice mail. I hang up unhappily and dial my own number, hoping perhaps she called me. I’ve got one new message.
“Hey, Peter. It’s your old pal Rommy here. What’s the matter? You not taking my calls anymore?”
He sounds as if he’s talking with his mouth full. I take the phone from my ear, intending to delete his message, when a half-heard phrase catches my attention: “Brunswick, Ohio.” He’s in mid-sentence as I lift the phone to listen again.
“… a real nice place you grew up in. A lot of cute forty-year-old blondes drivin’ minivans full of kids. I’m wonderin’ how many of these soccer moms you banged back when they were juicy little cheerleaders. Might have been better for everybody if you’d never left this place.”
Rommy pauses, a rustling noise filling the silence. It’s hard to imagine him in my old hometown.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, chewing loudly. “I’m eatin’ my dinner here. A Double Whopper with cheese, the best burger in town. Anyway, I’m doin’ a little research for the book. I stopped by the local cop shop and got them to extend me some professional courtesy. Imagine my surprise when I found they had a file on your mom. They must have had a real good police photographer back then. Great pictures. They’re gonna make nice art for the book. There’s one of your mom here in the front seat of her car, with a couple of firemen workin’ one of those Jaws of Life things.…”
I punch the off button and leap to my feet, fighting an urge to put my fist through the wall. I’m halfway across the world, getting jerked around by teenage pimps, while Rommy’s being spoon-fed photographs of my dying mother. If I could get my hands on him right now, I’d beat him to a pulp, regardless of who might see me or what the consequences might be. Sweat drenches my T-shirt as I begin pacing, memories of my mother’s death pulsing in my head.