by Neil Plakcy
19 – Motive for Murder
When Biff woke the next morning, Raki was clinging to a palm frond outside his bedroom window, tapping against the glass. “You’re worse than a dog,” he grumbled, but he got up, leaving Farishta asleep, pulled on a pair of running shorts, and walked downstairs. When he opened the front door the squirrel scampered inside, then hopped up onto the banister and scrambled up to the second floor.
Biff shook his head. He sliced raisin bread and while it was toasting, he poured out a shallow bowl of water and opened a bag of walnuts, leaving them in a small pile on the floor next to the water. He put together a tray of toast, cream cheese, orange juice and strawberries, and carried it upstairs. When he reached the bedroom, it appeared from the squirrel’s glassy stare and his flickering tail that he and Farishta were sharing some kind of psychic connection.
The appearance of the food broke the bond, however, and both of them turned their attention to Biff. “Any news from the squirrel?” he asked, as he slid the tray in front of Farishta.
“He prefers the marble halvah to the chocolate covered type.” She shrugged. “What do you expect? Insight from a squirrel?”
“Guess not.” He sat on the bed next to her, picked up a piece of toast and began to spread it with cream cheese. Raki cheeped at him and he said, “Your breakfast is downstairs.”
Raki took a flying leap from the table to the bed to the floor, and scampered away.
“Are you feeling better this morning?” Biff asked, between bites.
Farishta nibbled a strawberry. “These are better coated with chocolate, you know.”
“I guess that means you’re fine,” Biff said. “Did your discover any insight into those dolls while you slept?”
She shook her head. “But surely you must have books we can check.”
“At the office. I’ll go over there after we finish eating and bring some back.”
They sat together, eating and drinking, for a few minutes without speaking. “This is very nice, Bivas,” Farishta said. “I see why you enjoy living so simply.”
“I lost the urge to make trouble a few hundred years ago,” Biff said, sitting back against the pillows, the last strawberry in his right hand. “I found it more satisfying to restore order than to disrupt it.”
She turned on her side to face him. “Perhaps that is why we get along so well. I am the yin to your yang.”
“Perhaps.”
He pulled the hull off the strawberry and placed it in her mouth. Their eyes met. Biff felt the tug of centuries between them. Then the squirrel bounced onto the bed between them and began chittering.
“Raki says you must get moving,” Farishta said, laughing. “And I should sleep more before we begin our research.”
“I suppose,” Biff said. He watched as Farishta curled up under the covers, her wild black hair splayed against the pillows, and Biff felt a stab of emotion. Was it love? Lust? The urge to protect? He had no idea. “You stay here and look after Farishta,” he said to Raki. “I’ll be back later.”
He drove to the office with a welter of ideas floating around in his head. There were so many loose threads in this case; it was time to start knitting some of them together. The photographer, Sveta Pshkov, was the common link between them.
Farishta had overheard a conversation between Petrov and Laskin that indicated there were pictures of Natasha on that jump drive. But how had Viktor Petrov known that Sveta had taken pictures of his daughter? Surely the girl himself hadn’t told her father.
Instead of going into his own office, he went back to Sveta’s studio. The yellow crime scene tape still blocked the door, but Biff slid inside easily. The photos of Douschka were digital, and Sveta had sworn that the only copies were on that jump drive. But Biff didn’t believe her. She was too street-smart to keep only one copy of something as ephemeral as a digital file. That meant she had to have a backup somewhere.
He didn’t know what the backup would tell him, but it was a start. He opened her laptop and searched for her backup software. When he found it, he started a manual backup and watched as the application scanned through the files on Sveta’s hard drive and discovered nothing to update. Then he clicked the app and asked it to scan for any files that were on the remote server, but had already been deleted from the hard drive.
That operation took a minute or so, and then the screen displayed a list of folders with gibberish names, which existed only on the remote server.
These folders were named in a strange code of Arabic numbers and Cyrillic letters, and Biff couldn’t make sense of them. He opened the first folder and saw a series of erotic photos of a young blonde girl, no more than ten or eleven, and perched on the brink of puberty. She lay against a furry white rug, and her cheeks had been dusted with rouge, her lips painted bright red, to contrast. The rest of the files on the drive were similar, though the girls ranged in age from ten to late teens.
The exploitation of these girls angered him, and he would never have agreed to work for Sveta if he had known she was a pornographer. He forced himself to go through each folder, looking at the girls, in case he could make some kind of connection.
Then he opened one and recognized the beautiful young blonde who posed seductively. In some cases she was naked, while in others she wore sexy underwear. She was not very well developed; from her small breasts and rounded face, it appeared she had barely reached puberty.
He shook his head. What in the world could have possessed this spoiled young girl, whose father would have bought her anything she wanted, to have done something so colossally stupid? Natasha Petrovna had to be smart; she had graduated from an excellent high school, and had been admitted to Yale. She didn’t need the money, and she had to know what she was doing. Was she just willful?
There was no use speculating on her motives. What was done was done, and four people – the valet Usnavy, both Ovetschkins, and Sveta Pshkov—were dead because of her actions.
Where else might Sveta have copied them? He opened a search box on Sveta’s laptop and entered the name of one of Natasha’s files.
While he waited, he wondered if there was anything else he should do. He went back over the sequence of events, trying to understand. As far as he could tell, Douschka had triggered the action by having Sveta take those shots of her, then giving one to her boyfriend Usnavy, who posted it in his locker at the gym.
Usnavy showed it to his friend Igor Laskin, who recognized his boss’s wife. He told Ovetschkin, who directed him to steal the drive from Sveta. Before he handed it over, however, Igor must have taken a look at the contents. When he recognized his girlfriend, Natalya Petrov, he reported back to the big boss, the Professor, her father.
So far, so good. Kill Douschka and Usnavy for cheating. Kill Sveta for taking the pictures of Natasha. But why kill Kiril? Wasn’t he a valuable asset to the Professor’s operation? According to Hector Hernandez of the ATF, he was.
Biff watched as the little search dog completed combing through everything on Sveta’s hard drive. He was rewarded when an email message popped up which included an attachment of the photos of Natasha. They had been sent to an email account in Russia.
That made Biff sit up. He went back to her email program and searched for that account, where he found many messages back and forth. He copied them all to the jump drive, disturbed by what he had found.
Then he closed Sveta’s laptop and went back to his office, where he chose a half-dozen books from the shelves. It was still only ten o’clock, too early to check out Carlos Cardozo’s habits. He put the books carefully into a backpack, shouldered it, and walked out to his car.
When he got back to the townhouse, he found Farishta in the living room reading an edition of Vogue Paris, which had certainly not been in the house when he left. An elegant blue and gold scarf, carefully displayed to show off the logo from Hermes in Paris, tied her black curls together, leaving the ends free to flow around her shoulders. She wore a sleeveless silk top in a matching blue, wit
h black silk Capri pants and black ballet slippers.
Raki was on top of one of the cabinets, holding a walnut between his paws and watching Farishta.
Biff sat down across from her. “I wondered how Viktor Petrov knew that Sveta had taken those pictures of his daughter. And why he killed Kiril Ovetschkin. So I went back to her studio.”
“Bivas. You were supposed to find me books, so we can understand what is in those dolls.”
“I have the books. This is important, too.”
Raki took a flying leap from the top of the cabinet to the low table in front of them. He cocked his head and looked from Biff to Farishta.
“So tell me,” Farishta said. She sat across from Biff.
He went through the chronology he had figured out at the studio. “Then I found these emails,” he said. “Sveta was taking a lot of dirty pictures of young girls, then sending them to someone in Russia, who was selling them all over the Internet.”
“That dirty blad,” Farishta said, using the Russian slang for bitch, or prostitute. “I see why Petrov had her killed. Even if the pictures weren’t of his own daughter.”
“And why he had Ovetschkin killed,” Biff said. “Ovetschkin was the intermediary, the one who hooked Sveta up with the distributor.”
20 – A Book of Demons
While Farishta considered the implications of the child pornography scheme Kiril and Sveta had perpetrated, Biff ushered her to the kitchen, where he opened the backpack and laid out the ancient books from his office on the table. He handed one to Farishta. “You start with this, and I’ll take the encyclopedia of demons.
Raki followed them in and curled up in the corner of the kitchen. The room was quiet except for the occasional sound of a car passing outside. “Could it be a bajar?” Biff asked after a few minutes, turning his book sideways so Farishta could see.
“No, the bajar can only take form as a cat, not a wolf.”
He went back to reading. A few minutes later Farishta said, “Could it be Aeshma imprisoned in there?”
“A Zoroastrian demon? Aeshma of the bloody mace? Is he connected to wolves?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not sure he could be so powerful.”
Biff gave up on the book he had been reading and turned to another, a very old one with a leather binding worn soft over the centuries. A skilled craftsman had etched a whirlwind into the cover and beneath it the book’s title, in a flowing, ancient alphabet full of slants and curlicues.
As he reached for it, he felt it calling to him, and without consciously choosing, he opened the book to a random page. A very faded image of a wolf hovered in the air over the open page for a moment.
Biff felt the same kind of sinister tension move through his body as he had experienced in Laskin’s apartment, though only at a fraction of its strength. Evil, mixed with temptation, enslavement, and a sense of the dark magnificence of the universe. As the image vanished, so did the sensation.
“Holy powers!” Farishta said, her mouth open. “What is that?”
Biff looked down at the page before him. “Div-e Sepid,” he read. “Chief of the Persian demons.”
Farishta moved beside him, and her curls spilled over his shoulder as they read that the Div-e Sepid was a very old spirit, centuries older than either of them, known for his huge size and massive strength. He was skilled in both sorcery and necromancy, able to conjure dark storms with a flick of his fingers.
They looked at each other. “Could it be?” Biff asked. “What I felt just now was the barest hint of what I encountered in the presence of those dolls.”
Farishta sat back in her chair, where she wrapped her hands around her upper arms and rubbed them, as if the room had turned cold. “Yes, it was the same sensation.”
Biff closed the book and pushed it away. “But how could that power become trapped in those dolls? And how did the dolls come to America, and into Laskin’s possession?”
Farishta stared at him and then her mouth opened. “The amulet,” she said.
“The Div-e Sepid is tied to your amulet?” He shook his head. “And you want it back?”
“No, they are not tied together. But perhaps they were both stolen from the same shipment.”
Biff leaned back in his chair. “Talk to me.”
“For centuries, I believed that the amulet was lost,” she said. In the morning sunlight, those strands of silver in her hair glowed with life. “It was just another trinket, so I didn’t mind. But then, perhaps fifty years ago, I began to see these signs of age.”
She held her right arm up against the window. “Do you see?” she asked, pointing to the underside of her upper arm. “The humans call these batwings.” She shuddered.
Biff resisted the urge to smile. He knew what she referred to, but there was no way any human woman would consider that Farishta had an ounce of extra fat there.
“I began to see the silver in my hair. And these.” She made a grotesque face that accentuated the tiny laugh lines around her mouth, and this time Biff could not resist laughing outright.
The squirrel woke up and made a few tsk-tsk-tsking noises, then settled back down again.
“It is fine for you,” Farishta said, glaring at him. “As you age, you will become distinguished.” She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. “I will be a hag.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Never, my love,” he said.
“I went to see Palmiera,” Farishta said. “She is wise in such things.”
Palmiera was a genie whose specialty was in altering personal appearance. Genies of lesser skill than Biff or Farishta, who needed assistance in creating or manipulating human or animal form sought her help. “And what did she say?”
“That I would need the power of the amulet to reverse the aging process,” Farishta said. “So I began to search for it. I followed traces of it to Somalia.”
“I thought that was your work there. The unexplained waterspout that allowed the authorities to rescue those hostages from the pirates. That was you?”
She nodded and leaned back against the windowsill, one finger toying with a dark curl.
“And the tanker that ran aground, allowing the pirates to demand that exorbitant ransom from the oil company? Whose side were you on?”
“I am always on Farishta’s side,” she said. “I set aside a commission for myself. And those were not pirates, by the way. They were rebels who needed money to fund their campaigns to educate young girls.”
“Can it be? The legendary troublemaker Farishta has a good heart after all?”
“I still make trouble, Bivas. I just choose more carefully those I cause trouble for.”
“In any case, your work is impressive.”
She smiled. “Thank you, Bivas. My looks may be fading but my powers are still strong.”
He picked up her right hand and lifted it to his lips. “You will always be beautiful to me, my sweet, no matter how many centuries pass.”
“You are an old flatterer.”
She took back her hand and sat up. “The amulet never was in Somalia; that was a false lead. But I used my commission to return to Baghdad and gain access to the ancient archives.”
“Impressive,” Biff said.
The archives held everything from love notes passed between the ancients to recipes involving long-lost ingredients to old manuscripts of every sort. They were buried far underground, and centuries of human conflict in the area had made them nearly impossible to access without the right connections. Farishta’s ability to reach them was truly an accomplishment and yet another testament to her seemingly endless powers.
“I discovered that the amulet was right there in Iraq, in a cave near the old city of Uruk. It was part of a trove of riches stored there by a dying vizier who believed he would come back to life and retrieve them—jewels and cloisonné vases and elegant tapestries faded with age.” She shook her head. “How silly these humans are.”
“So I have seen,” Biff said.
<
br /> “As soon as I knew where the amulet was, I flew there immediately. And you know how hard it is for me to move through a desert.”
That was true; Farishta depended on the moisture in the air to create her little whirlwinds. In arid climates she had to work very hard to transport.
She sighed. “You will make me some tea, please, Bivas?”
“With pleasure.” He stood, and led her into the living room, where the samovar rested in a place of honor on a brass tray. She reclined on a sofa as he retrieved the tea, the water, the sugar and the glasses.
While the water boiled, Farishta continued her story. “I was a few months too late. I went into the village at the bottom of the valley, disguised as an old woman, and I learned that a rebel group had discovered the cave, and the artifacts, and sold them to finance their army.”
She stood up and began to walk around the living room. “It was a very tedious process to find the trader in Baghdad, and then discover the Armenian to whom he had sold the amulet, along with other items from the cave.”
The water boiled, and Biff prepared the two glasses of tea. He served Farishta, who returned to the couch, and Biff sat across from her. “This Armenian enlisted the help of the Organizatsiya to bring the items out of Iraq and here to the United States.”
“Laskin’s branch of the Russian Mafiya?”
“Yes. He took the amulet, and now I believe the dolls, as his commission.”
“Is the amulet connected to the dolls, and to the Div-e Sepid?”
“I don’t know,” Farishta said. “But I want my amulet back. Without it, I will continue to deteriorate, and then I will die.”
Biff raised his tea glass and sipped as he considered the possibility of a world without Farishta. They had not been together regularly for a very long time, but he had always known she was there in the world, and the time they spent together was amazing and precious. “Then we must get the amulet back for you,” Biff said. “If you can’t take it from Laskin by force, he must give it up voluntarily.”