“Bingo,” Foss said. “It’s show time.”
“Wait. He has a very expensive car in the back.”
“Living in this shithole? Not a great investment.”
“No, but given we were admonished to be careful about theft, it does indicate that people are cautious about stealing from him.”
Foss’s expression tightened. “Okay, so he’s armed. Good call, and I’ll be careful.” He started toward the house, but I took his arm.
“It’s not just that. Why would someone with enough money for a sixty thousand dollar car live here?” He looked at me blankly. “Because he doesn’t want anyone to know where he is,” I said.
“If I were trying not to be seen, I’d own a little econobox, not a big, flashy Benz.”
“Precisely.”
“Which means the car is for show when he’s out on the town.” Foss’s face lit in a smile. “He’s not just hiding out. He’s here expanding his business.”
“Oui, I think so.”
Foss gave a derisive laugh. “It also means he’s either crazy or none too bright.”
“Oui. Trying to accomplish two opposite tasks at the same time is not the mark of a rational mind.”
Foss took my hand and trotted us to the back of Rudenko’s house. Thirty seconds after getting there, he had us in position. The man’s skillset could still surprise me. A half hour later, a short man with curly hair came trotting around the corner, heading for the Mercedes. Foss and I ducked down as he opened and entered the car. Just as the ignition fired with a low hum, Foss rose and stuck his pistol on the back of Rudenko’s head.
“Hello, Weasel,” he said. “Nice meeting you.” Then he knocked him out using his pistol’s handle. I glared at him. “It was easier this way,” he said, shrugging.
“Exactly how do you expect us to question him after you knock his brain out?”
“I thought we already agreed he doesn’t have any brains.”
“Foster Cain, you are being stubborn for no reason.” I wanted to stamp my foot but there wasn’t room in the back seat.
He gave my cheek a soft pinch. I pulled away, almost. “I promise I’m not, sweets. He has a GPS unit in the glove box there. I’m guessing he has wherever he’s been meeting potential clients programmed in there.”
“Why are you sure he doesn’t meet them here?”
“You said yourself, he doesn’t want anyone to know where he’s living. He probably rented digs somewhere he can play the big shot pimp and then he sleeps here where no one would think to look for him.” Foss got out, lifted Rudenko over his shoulder and put him in the trunk. “Can you drive?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
“Good. You drive, I’ll try to figure out the GPS.” I didn’t move at first. “Are you mad at me?”
I sighed, climbed out and walked around to the driver’s seat. Once we were underway I said, “No, I am not mad, but only because you called me ‘sweets.’”
“If I knew that was the key, I’d have never called you anything else.” I wanted to hit him, but I needed two hands on the wheel. The Mercedes was not sexy like my Renault.
The GPS unit picked that moment to squawk. “Home. Office.” Foss gave me a sheepish look.
“It’s in Arabic,” I said.
“Uh, maybe you should …”
“Shush. I think you’ve done enough for one night.”
***
We arrived at the location Rudenko had marked Office as darkness enveloped the city. Being a captive to caution, Foster insisted we sit in the car for an additional five minutes, ensuring we weren’t seen. He was concerned that whomever we’d encountered earlier might be following us still, but we saw no one, as I expected. The address the GPS routed us to was a two-level stone office building that looked more empty than occupied. Foss pulled our captive out of the trunk while I tried to convince myself we hadn’t just crossed international borders to commit a kidnapping. I hoped Captain Gharnati was as enamored with me as I thought.
From the car, I heard Foss giggle. “What the hell is this guy wearing?”
I shushed him and opened the outer door with the key. Foss came in, carrying Rudenko over his shoulder.
“This would have gone faster if he could walk,” I said.
He ignored me and asked, “Which office, do you think?”
“Oh, now you care about what I think?” I checked the directory, using my mobile as illumination. The interior lights were fortuitously low, shielding our entry. “Upstairs,” I said. We climbed in the lift and rode to the second floor. There were several offices with company names on the doors, and a single, wooden door marked only 204. “This one,” I said. “It’s the only office that didn’t show up in the directory.”
We entered and Foss used some cord to tie Rudenko to a chair. I made a cool towel by dampening some old cloth and placed it on his head, which seemed to arouse him. He was naturally startled and undoubtedly certain he was about to die. However, with persuasion and gentle tones, I convinced him he was safe. Rudenko was an odd little man, not at all like Danni. He was no taller than me, with a rectangular physique he’d managed to cramp into a ridiculous suit capped by a tan and blue blazer that looked as it if had been stitched together from random scraps. The top was tan and the bottom navy, which looked all the more silly given Rudenko’s hips were wider than his shoulders. The suit coat’s cuffs stopped three or four inches from his wrist allowing his flowered shirt to show underneath. The busyness of his top half was enough to cause my brain to produce the sound of an electric guitar, but when matched by the tight, silver, above-the-ankle pants he wore with it, his every movement was like a Jimi Hendrix concert in my head. I was glad Foss tied him down if only to minimize my headache.
“Why the hell’d you hit me, mate?” he said, frowning up a tornado at Foss. He had a nasally, high susurration of a voice that reminded me of feedback. Hendrix needed to turn down his microphone. Despite the graveness of the situation, I began to giggle, which Foss exacerbated by looking even more serious. Rudenko pursed his lips, which were accompanied by a wisp of a mustache that looked as if it had refused to grow since he’d turned fourteen. His wide, bulging eyes, furrowed brow, and curly hair made him look like more like a cross between a pug and a poodle than a weasel. It took all of my resolve to restrain my chortles.
“Are those boats on your pants?” Foss asked without a smile.
“Yeah,” Rudenko said, an odd glow of pride in his voice, “I had to pay a pretty penny for this suit, I’ll tell you that.”
“Yeah, I bet you did.”
“I’ll ask you again, and I’d appreciate an answer this time. Why’d you hit me, and why am I tied up?” He seemed to inhale after every pause. For a moment, I feared perhaps he too had been exposed to polonium and his lungs were compromised. However, I detected none of the odors that I picked up from Danni’s exposure. I decided it was just a curious manner of speaking.
Foss started to interject, but I held up one hand. “If you don’t mind, I would like to try.” Foss waved me on with a broad, matador’s stroke of his arm. “I’m afraid my partner and I are erring a bit on the cautious side. Lacking confirmation that you sent the cab driver to pick us up, and given there have been attempts on our lives today, we thought to restrain you until we were certain.”
“Well, did it occur to you to just fuckin’ ask? You could have knocked on the door. I waited hours for you to show.”
Foss gave me a look that got lost on its way to embarrassment and decided to remain at confusion. “Monsieur Rudenko was the one who sent the cab that picked us up. Apparently, both he and our previous friend wanted to meet with us.”
“That’s right, and my useless driver never showed up neiver. I’m dockin’ his pay, the twat.”
I bowed. “I am afraid that is my fault. I lost my temper when he began endangering our lives.” Foss squinted at me and shook his head.
“Is he dead?” Rudenko asked.
“No, but I’m sure he has
a pretty bad headache,” I said.
“Yeah, all over,” Foss said.
Rudenko said, “That makes two of us.” He frowned again. “Can you untie me now?”
I looked at Foss who shrugged and untied him. As I helped, he whispered in my ear, “Could you let your partner in on these secrets from now on?” I didn’t understand what secrets he referred to, so I ignored the request.
Rudenko, who insisted we call him Weasel, was an animated little man, rushing to and fro as he talked, only stopping periodically to check to see if we were still paying attention. He was a classic example of an adult that didn’t get enough attention as a child, just as Danni was a case of a girl who had quite the opposite problem. Foss and I happily played the unseen audience to his Hamlet. As Rudenko soliloquized, I could feel a strange affinity emanating from him. He knew Danni had died although he refused to tell us how. No one in the Institute had released any information, and Rosie wasn’t listed as next of kin, as she and Danni had no legal status. As a result, Rosie had pretty much been left pounding on the governmental stonewall. Even the autopsy results were classified. Still, Rudenko had opened his sad monologue by looking at Foss and saying, “I am in your debt for not letting me baby bruv die all alone.” He choked and added, “It must be a horrible way to die, the Po.” Rudenko was a lost puppy, all alone within a world of glitz and glamour that he neither understood nor belonged in. We were as close as he had to a family, given we were the last people to see Danni alive. I felt bad for Rudenko, not that Danni was gone, but that he didn’t even like Weasel much. It must be terrible to miss someone who wouldn’t miss you back.
I’d determined our driver in the Fiat worked for him by process of elimination. As Sherlock Holmes often said, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Someone knew we were in Morocco, and the only people likely to know were Hardesty; Gharnati, his contact; the government, who perhaps wanted us not to come; and the man or men we were pursuing. Our driver couldn’t have worked for the government because those agents were chasing us in the first Mercedes. Likewise, they didn’t work for Gharnati, as the second taxi had that position. That left our criminals, whom I assumed were in the remaining two vehicles—the second Mercedes and our cab. Although an improbable coincidence, the second Mercedes was an accident of timing. It wasn’t us they were chasing but our driver in an attempt to follow him to Rudenko’s hideout. Once we started accelerating, they had no choice but to try to stop us. They meant to kill the witnesses—Foss and me—and force our driver to cooperate. I was not certain of my theory until I heard the GPS unit’s voice in Arabic. Rudenko spoke only Russian and English, having been reared among the tough streets in London. That told me Rudenko didn’t drive his own car, and I then knew who did.
“Why did you send for us?” I asked him. He was calmer now, as I made us all a fresh pot of coffee. Rudenko sat at the conference table nursing his cup with both hands. Nothing calms the hyperactive mind like a strong brew. My partner was letting me lead, mostly sitting in the shadows, as he normally did, reading Rudenko for traces of deception. It allowed me to channel the man’s emotions without worrying about details. I had my silent Foss for that.
Our subject hesitated for a long time, sipped his coffee and spoke, staring in the cup. “I was never too keen on the sex trade, you know? Drugs is where the big money is, but Danni had big dreams and I owed it to him to make them come true. With all the shit he had to endure when he was a girl …”
“Like being molested?” I asked.
“You knew about that?” I gave a noncommittal gesture. “Danni must have trusted you then. He didn’t tell nobody about that but me and his bird. It was something they had in common, you know?” Both Foss and I nodded at the same time and Rudenko’s body posture relaxed. “Anyway, Rosie rang me. Not sure how she got my mobile, but she rang to let me know you’d be looking for me.”
“Goddammit,” I heard Foss mutter.
“She wanted me to help you, mate. I’m not sure why, to be honest. Maybe it was knowing what Danni did.”
“With the polonium.”
“Right. Under no circumstances was we supposed to move that. None. Danni’s little jealous streak could have written us a death sentence if someone found out.”
“Lucky it’s classified information, then,” Foss said. That was his cue for me to press harder. Rudenko was weakening, torn between wanting to cleanse himself and self-preservation. Foss and I were fishing—casting the line, reeling him in a bit, giving some more line. It was a delicate balance and we both understood the line could snap and we’d lose our fish.
“This is all interesting family history, Weasel,” I said, “but it doesn’t help us wrap this case. We need to know where you got the polonium, who is involved, and what they plan to do with it.”
“I can tell you anyfing you want to know about the escort setup, but I can’t tell you that. I might as well shoot meself in the head.”
I glanced at Foss who shook his head ever so slightly. Not yet, not quite. “Tell me about the escort ring then,” I said. “You implied the setup was Danni’s idea?”
“Yeah. I mean, look, we’re the ones what’s taking all the risk.” Foss sneered at him. “It’s true! In most the countries we operate outta, what the girls do ain’t even illegal. It’s just settin’ up shop and making all the arrangements that get the cops all bovered. That lot don’t like foreigners moving in without paying their proper respects.” Foss rolled his eyes, but to my surprise, nodded. Rudenko spoke directly to him. “You’d be surprised how much of my budget goes to get them to look the other way.” He huffed. “It’s them lot that’s the criminals.” He looked from Foss to me and back. In my mind, he briefly became that little pugapoo puppy, begging for approval. Foss nodded at me.
I stood. “You’re wasting our time.” I said to Foss, “Maybe it’s time to call Captain Gharnati.
Rudenko looked as though someone had burst him with a pin. “Okay, alright!” He ran his hands through his hair and bent in the chair with his head almost to his knees. What do you want to know?”
“All of it,” Foss said.
Over the ensuing sixty minutes, he painted a story of a complex system that I was certain he could not have created, nor Danni, for that matter. It was a multilayer escort service that Rudenko revealed was multinational in order to broaden their base and to keep any individual unit, called franchises, under the radar of local authorities and local press. There was an absolute upper limit of fifty hosts, the sex workers, per franchise. Once that level was met, it was time to expand to another city or district. None of the franchisees, those like Danni and Rosie, knew each other. He painted a verbal map, with Foss taking notes, of cities and franchises, with seven in the UK and fifteen in Germany alone. London was an exception, being the core operation, with one hundred hosts in each of two cells of the franchise. All of the franchises reported through Rudenko, whose only job seemed to be to coordinate operations.
“How do you keep things in line?” Foss asked. “Where there’s sex and money, there’s greed and trouble.”
“It’s like any other business. I have enforcers to keep franchisees paying their fees. The key is just to make them more afraid of us than they are of the police.”
“Is that what Seize Mai is for?” I asked.
Rudenko smiled. “They told me you was pret’y sharp. Yeah, the whole terror fing is a front, but it’s not for the government, it’s to let franchisees know we mean business.” He gave a harsh cackle that sent the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. “We had one idiot in Cairo decide he was going in business for himself. Seize Mai blew up the apartment building he owned. No more problems after that.”
“Jesus fuck,” Foss said. “Nineteen people died in that attack.” His hand slipped in his pocket and for a moment, I thought he was going to shoot Rudenko. I stepped between the two men.
Rudenko sensed it too. “It wasn’t me, mate, I swear. It was
… never you mind. It—it just wasn’t me, that’s all.”
“Tell me about the police,” I said, still blocking my partner’s beautiful anger.
“You mean do they work for me? Just the street-level types I have to bribe. Nothing major. No one knows about the link to Seize Mai but you two.”
He was wrong about that, but I chose not to tell him how close the authorities had come tracing their operations. Instead, I said, “I’m sure that’s true, but it’s not what I meant. I want to know if this is just a prostitution ring, why haven’t the cops broken it up? There can’t be that much money in all these small rings, even dispersed all over the world. Why all the risk?”
Rudenko fidgeted in his seat and stalled, so Foss and I left him sitting alone.
“I need the fuckin’ loo,” Rudenko shouted behind me.
“Piss yourself,” Foss answered. To me, he said, “He started pointing himself at the door when you asked that last question. You’re on the right track here. Don’t let him off the hook.”
I nodded my understanding and turned to speak to Rudenko when a horrible whistle and a rush of air broke the night’s silence. The window broke, there was a flash, and Foss screamed, “Down!” Then the night exploded in a blinding glare that even my sunglasses couldn’t shield. I bent and the room erupted with sound as another projectile, which Foss told me later was a second rocket-propelled grenade, detonated and rent the office to shreds. The outer walls were blasted to rubble and the force of the explosion and ensuing fireball collapsed the ceiling and set the room ablaze. I lay in stunned silence for a few moments, unable to see anything but the remnants of the white light on my retinas. After a time, shadows began to appear within the white and I could make out the figure of my partner shouting at me. He was holding a fire extinguisher.
From dim miles away, I recognized the words, “Are you okay, babe?”
The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure Page 23
