The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

by Orest Stelmach

  “It’s a grass roots organization of young people who love Russia. President Putler started it after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine to make sure that subversive American interests never manipulated the people of Russia into doing the same.”

  Of course, I thought. Whenever any country did something that threatened Putler’s expanding empire, he blamed America. “What did Iskra do for Nashi?”

  Romanov chose his words carefully, the way a man does when’s trying to withhold information. “She organized rallies … created internet sites … campaigned for politicians and the like. She was a lovely child.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we moved here.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twelve years ago.”

  “Why did you move here? You seem to love Russia.”

  “Of course I love Russia, just as I’m sure you love that decrepit pit you call home.” Once again, Romanov paused to consider his answer. “It was time to leave. For business reasons.”

  That meant he probably had to leave Russia to avoid prosecution for some offense, real or imaginary. This suggested he’d fallen out of favor with the people in the Kremlin, who may have been prepared to support his competitors’ attempt to have him jailed, or were intent on subduing him themselves.

  I was curious to know more, but I knew better than to pry into his business affairs. Tap a Russian’s heart, and it might come pouring out. Inveigle yourself in his business affairs and he might give you an up-close and personal tour of his company’s waste disposal equipment.

  “How old was Iskra when you moved here?” I said.

  Romanov thought about the question. “I’d say she was about nine or ten. She was a good student. When she turned seventeen, she was accepted into the modern theatre dance program at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Her mother and I were very proud. We rented an apartment for her and gave her space. We kept our distance even though we live close by in Oud-Zuid—old South Amsterdam. Her mother insisted we not interfere in her life. I knew it was a mistake. She fell in with a bunch of liberal types at school and became an experimental child.” He looked at me and nodded. “Probably just like you.”

  “How so?” I said. The only thing I’d ever experimented with outside of school was a microscope my parents gave me for my ninth birthday.

  “Sex, drugs, rock and roll. It was all born in America, wasn’t it?”

  “Rock and roll, I think so. The other two may pre-date my decrepit homeland. I know this is a sensitive topic, but I have to ask you. How long did she work a window in De Wallen?”

  “Spare me your false sympathy. You’re a mercenary. Act like one.”

  “How long had Iskra been working as a prostitute?”

  “Not long. Three months. She worked part-time, weekends only.”

  “Did you know about this from the start?” I said.

  “No.”

  “How did you find out?”

  He considered the question. “The second worst way possible.”

  I made the obvious deduction. “A friend?”

  He shrugged. “We asked her to stop, we begged her … I threatened to cut off all financial support but she said she didn’t care. She said she wanted to make her own money and this was something she wanted to do. That if other girls from Russian were doing it, she could, too.” Romanov shook his head.

  “And the mystery lover wasn’t her only customer?”

  “I wish,” he said.

  “Did Iskra have a boyfriend?”

  Romanov’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Obviously she had a boyfriend. That was the reason you prostituted yourself.”

  “I don’t mean the mystery boyfriend, I mean, was there anyone else?”

  He shook his head.

  “There had to be other boyfriends.”

  “There were many boys,” he said softly, “and a few men. But she never brought anyone to our house for dinner. If there had been someone serious, she would have brought him to dinner. Do you have leads on the identity of this mystery lover?”

  “I’m working on it. Are you conducting any kind of inquiry of your own? Because that would not be helpful …”

  “The police warned me to stay away, and these days, a Russian in Amsterdam must listen to the police. Besides, Simeonovich has insisted to my wife that you will get to the bottom of this. And regardless of how much of a hypocrite he is—if a hand were to fall on his shoulder, it would release a mountain of dirt from beneath his Brioni suits—I have never known him to give compliments where they are not deserved.”

  “I agree.”

  Romanov nodded hopefully. “That you will get to the bottom of this?”

  “That he doesn’t give compliments. Do you have any enemies that might have done this?”

  “I sold my business when I left Russia. There is no reason for anyone to hate me. Besides, if a Russian wanted to get even over something that happened in the distant past, he’d come after me first.” He paused and looked me over. “Your last name, Tesla. What is the ethnic origin?”

  “My parents were full-blooded Ukrainians.”

  I braced myself for a derogatory response, but instead the sun burst on his face. “Ukrainian? Why, that is fantastic,” he said.

  “Why is that fantastic?”

  “Because that means you’re a full-blooded Russian, too.”

  The temperature in Stout! seemed to rise. “I … I don’t understand. I told you my parents were Ukrainian.”

  He shrugged good-naturedly, not a patronizing or condescending note about him.

  “There’s no such thing as Ukraine and there are no such people as Ukrainians,” he said. “That’s just some senseless nonsense created by a few self-styled Nazis near Poland. This is great news. The investigator from America is actually Russian. I see why Simeonovich thinks so much of you. He may be a genius after all.”

  If my brother, Marko, were here, he would have short-circuited, had a stroke, and fallen to his death. His demise would have been a function of not being able to decide whether to stab Romanov in the eye with his fork, or try to spoon it out and force it down his throat.

  The waitress brought our food. Romanov spooned his yoghurt with zest and enthusiasm. I eyed my spoon with newfound fascination, and ate my wolfberries one at a time to make my meal last. I even calmed myself down enough to chew a few of them.

  When we were done, Romanov insisted on paying the bill. I didn’t object. Instead I let him impress me with his gentlemanly ways.

  Then I countered with my own insistence.

  I demanded he take the American whore with the Russian bloodlines to the place she wanted to go more than any other.

  I insisted he take me to the scene of the crime.

  CHAPTER 7

  We were buddies now, the dead girl’s charming father and I. Romanov actually had the nerve to open a gap in his elbow for my arm so we could walk to Iskra’s hotel like old friends or new lovers headed for a café in Prague. I took him up on his offer and walked arm-in-arm with him to further earn his trust to help my investigation. Never had I been happier to be snuggled close to a man who’d called me trash. Humility was an indispensible weapon in the arsenal that was going to lead me to the pretty boy who had eluded my chase. It was also one of the hardest weapons to deploy because when you needed it the most you wanted it the least.

  Romanov led me to a row of houses packed wall-to-wall. A bell-shaped gable topped the building that contained Iskra’s apartment. A lattice of iron rods was strapped to each side of the house.

  “To keep it upright,” Romanov said, when he noticed I was staring at the rods. “The houses in Jordaan were built on thousands of logs. They were pounded into the ground because it’s so wet. If you look closely, you can see the house is leaning a little bit to the right. Without support, it would eventually crumble. I told my wife this was an unstable place for our daughter to live. But my wife only listens when she’s speaking.”

  We took the stairs to the se
cond floor. The police had cordoned off the door to the apartment with red and white tape featuring the words POLITIE – NIET BETREDEN. I remembered what Romanov had said about needing to behave himself in Amsterdam but evidently his interpretation of my ethnic heritage had unleashed his machismo. He ripped the tape from one side of the door frame like a matador snapping his cape, not worrying about whether he could re-attach it later. Then he took out his key and unlocked the door. The door jam and lock appeared in perfect condition.

  “When you got here that day,” I said, “was the door open?”

  “It was closed but unlocked.”

  “And the windows?”

  “The big windows in the living room can’t be opened. The side windows in the bathroom and bedroom were locked from the inside.”

  “So whoever killed her knew her.”

  “I wouldn’t know what the police are thinking. Maybe if I was Dutch they’d keep me informed.”

  Romanov opened the door. The apartment opened into a living room which led to a kitchen in an open floor plan. Two interior doors stood open along the wall on the left. I could see the edge of a bed in one room, and bathroom tile on the floor of the other.

  “Who else has a key?” I said.

  “Besides Iskra? My wife and I have a key.”

  Black powder stains revealed latent fingerprints on the walls, chairs and tables, and built-in cabinetry. Even from a distance I could see them all over the kitchen countertops. Other than the powder stains, however, the apartment was surprisingly well-organized given it had belonged to a twenty-something single girl.

  “Did Iskra have a cleaning lady?” I said.

  “Yes. An old Indonesian woman. I’m sure she had a key, too.”

  “Who else?”

  He shrugged. “A man. A boy. Ten men. I have no way of knowing. Like I said, we gave her space.”

  The furniture was sleek, modern Dutch, not dissimilar to a Scandinavian design but more whimsical, with more curvaceous and lacquered finishes. Film and theater posters with dance themes hung on the walls. The kitchen gleamed apart from the print marks. I pulled my sleeve over my fingers and opened the fridge. A tray full of energy drinks, half a dozen yogurts, a jar of pickled herring, milk, pineapple juice, a huge bar of Tony’s Milk Chocolate, and ten bottles of beer filled the shelves. The beer was a brand called Brugse Zot. From Belgium.

  I closed the refrigerator door and studied the kitchen. The more I looked around, the more I wondered how I’d had the nerve to take this assignment. I’d told myself that the investigation of a crime was a matter of logic and common sense, that my forensic financial skills would translate. But now that I was visiting an actual crime scene, my inexperience and uncertainty asserted themselves. I feared Romanov would sense my indecision, detect my incompetence, and label me a fraud any moment.

  As it turned out, he had his own issues.

  “I … I can’t go in there with you,” he said.

  He stood at the entry to the kitchen, arms wrapped around his chest, eyes pointed diagonally toward the floor like a socially awkward teen. Up until this point, he’d been a type A personality, the king of eye contact.

  I knew he was referring to the bedroom because I knew that’s where Iskra had been killed. I knew what he was talking about because I felt the same dread in the pit of my own stomach. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to see the room myself, yet there were my feet moving toward it with morbid anticipation. The discovery of fraud, embezzlement or an undervalued investment opportunity had always invigorated me. The moment of discovery—that instant when numbers leapt off a financial statement and transformed themselves into a firm conclusion—was the juice that fueled countless hours of labor. My walk toward the bedroom, however, galvanized my senses even more dramatically.

  Light spilled through sheer curtains covering the window on the right side of the room. Streaks and splashes of blood in the shape of a wide-bodied cross marred the center of the opposite wall. The center area below the place where her Iskra’s pubic region would have rested contained the most blood. In fact, so much blood had spilled from her body that the wallboard appeared black. The image of a man hacking away at Iskra’s torso flashed before me. I suffered a wave of nausea.

  The four points of crucifixion defined the upper and lower boundaries of the blood-stained canvas. The area of the wall surrounding the screw holes were also stained black. I walked around the bed to get a close-up look. The light-colored hardwood floor looked more like redwood as I approached the place of crucifixion.

  The crime could have been a random act of violence, but given Iskra had most likely known her killer I doubted it. I wondered what kind of passion had inspired such a level of hate, gazed at the wall and wondered what else I could deduce that could be of value. As is so often the case with company analyses, I saw nothing. But I didn’t allow frustration to overwhelm me. Instead I stood there staring at the blood-splattered wall, telling myself over-and-over again that patience was a prerequisite to success. This, in turn, relaxed me and kept my mind straight.

  Still, nothing came to me.

  “Are you okay in there?” Romanov said.

  I told him I was fine and that I would be out in a moment. I decided to rest my eyes and divert my focus. I looked around the rest of the bedroom. Two pillows, stacked one on top of the other, contained indentations of a human head. The comforter, similarly matted in the shape of a human being, also remained untouched. There were no electronic devices in the room, no computer, phone, or music playing devices. The police might have removed them for analysis if they’d been here, I thought.

  A closet contained an assortment of clothes and boxes on a shelf. I didn’t reach for any of the boxes, nor did I rifle through the bureau beside the window opposite the wall of death. If there had been anything of interest in either of those places, the police would have secured it as evidence by now. I didn’t delude myself into thinking I’d find some clue the police might have overlooked. My forte was the interpretation of that which was visible.

  The bureau also contained a collection of pictures, each standing upright in frames of various sizes. Most of them featured Iskra alone, with female friends or her family. One of the family pictures, the size of a playing card, included Iskra, her parents, and a nerdy-looking boy in glasses. Iskra and the boy looked like young teens in the picture.

  I removed some tissue from my bag and used it to avoid contaminating the frames with my fingertips. Then I carried the photo into the living room and showed it to Romanov.

  “Who’s this boy?” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes and studied the picture. It was the first time I’d looked at Romanov since I’d gone into the bedroom, and his face had turned ashen in the interim. He looked as though he was fading in proportion to the time I spent at the crime scene, and if we remained in the apartment another hour, he might die from the stress.

  “That’s just Sasha.” Romanov shook his head as though he were irrelevant. “Friend of the family. Sasha’s parents moved here before we did. I knew her father forever. He and Iskra were friends.”

  “Just friends?”

  He cracked a weary grin as though the prospect of them being romantically linked was a joke. “Yes, just friends. Sasha is a good boy, but he’s Sasha, you understand—”

  Feet clattered outside the door.

  De Vroom burst into the room. Another man in a suit and two uniformed cops followed. De Vroom looked like a completely different human being from the one who’d interviewed me in jail. Gone was the smug look of a calculating cop intent on getting the information he wanted. In its place was fury.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “This woman is a friend of the family,” Romanov said in decent English. “She’s here at my request.”

  “Your request?” De Vroom said. “You have no business being here either. This is a crime scene. When you took down that tape, you broke the law.”

  Romanov brought his wrists together and o
ffered them to De Vroom. “Go ahead, then. Arrest a grieving father. After all, I’m Russian, so you want to prosecute me for something, don’t you?”

  De Vroom averted Romanov’s eyes, turned to me, and ripped the frame out of my hands. “And this is evidence in a murder investigation.” He glanced at the picture, looked at both of us as though we deserved the firing squad, and handed the picture back to his colleague. “You,” he said, pointing at me, “outside. Now.”

  He insisted I go down the stairs first. I could feel him so close behind me I was afraid he’d step on the back of my shoe.

  We exited the apartment building. The sight of the canal and the blue sky above would have been welcome relief if De Vroom hadn’t been with me.

  “Did you run that license plate?” I said.

  “You will cease all investigations into this case immediately. You will leave Amsterdam at once. If I find you nosing around the murder of Iskra Romanova one more time, we’ll forget about our arrangement. I’ll press charges against you for obstructing justice, illegal prostitution, and being a menace to the Netherlands. I’ll have you deported, banned, and ex-communicated from whatever godforsaken church accepts you as a member.”

  He was hurling so many bombs at me I had to take a second to make sure he was done. Only then did I speak.

  “Yeah, but did you run that plate?” I said.

  His cheeks puffed up so much he actually stopped being handsome for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and lowered his voice to a whisper, so gentle and infused with such genuine-sounding concern that I lost my breath.

  “For your own safety, Nadia,” he said. It was the first time he’d ever used my Christian name, and it put fear in my heart. “You must stop this now. You must leave Amsterdam now.”

  With that he turned and marched back up stairs and into the apartment building. When the door shut behind him, I knew not to follow him back inside. I knew not to wait for Romanov. If De Vroom saw me waiting for him, that alone could set him off into following up on his threat, and I couldn’t take that risk.

  I headed back along the canal toward my hotel instead. With each step, De Vroom’s heartfelt warning left a deeper impression on me. He had run the plate. Perhaps the owner of the Porsche Macan was so dangerous that my life would be in jeopardy if I went near him. I thought of the crime lords who controlled the sex and drug trades in Amsterdam and what they might be capable of doing to protect their businesses. After De Vroom’s warning, only an addict would pursue this case. Only a woman with a compulsive need to prove herself would dare continue.