by Neil Plakcy
“Try to work out every day,” Biff said. “Usually eight to nine or so on the weekdays. Later on the weekends.”
“Ah, me too,” Laskin said. “Not tomorrow, though. Big party tonight. My girlfriend Natasha graduates from school. Tomorrow I will sleep in.”
“I’ll see you Monday, then,” Biff said. “Das veedanya.”
“Vy gavareet pa-russky?” Laskin asked.
“No,” Biff said, though his Russian was reasonably fluent. “Just a word or two here and there.”
“Ah, well, you are good guy anyway, Bill.” Laskin clasped a sweaty hand on Biff’s back, and then walked into the locker room.
When he walked out of the gym he whistled, and Raki came swinging through the palms, taking a major leap that landed him right in the back seat of the open convertible.
“One of these days you’re going to kill yourself doing that kind of thing,” Biff said, putting the car in gear. Raki chittered from the back seat.
Biff drove back over to his office and parked. He was surprised to see the crime scene tape gone from Sveta’s storefront and the door open. Leaving the squirrel behind, he walked over to the studio and stepped inside. As he did, a bell rang, and a dark-haired guy in his twenties stepped out of the workroom.
“Good afternoon,” he said in a voice devoid of accent. “Are you interested in scheduling a sitting, or in picking up work you’ve already ordered?”
“Neither. I’m Biff Andromeda, from the investigation agency down the hall. Sveta was a client of mine.”
“I’m Mike. Sveta’s cousin. I’m taking over the studio. Did Sveta owe you money?”
“No, just stopping by to say hello. I’m sorry for your loss. You’re a photographer yourself?”
“Not like Sveta. But when I was a kid she used to take pictures of me, and let me hang around.”
Biff wondered if the pictures Sveta had taken of Mike were like the ones she’d taken of Natasha Petrovna, but he didn’t want to bring that up—at least not yet.
“Well, if you decide you want to come in for a portrait, let me know,” Mike said. “I’ve got a lot of work in the back, trying to catch up on what’s going on.”
“Sure. I’ll let you go.”
Biff walked back out into the sunshine. Interesting. Mike would undoubtedly find the emails about Sveta’s pedophile operation, if he didn’t already know about it. Probably a good idea for Jimmy to drop in and make it clear that the business needed to end with her death.
When he opened the door to his office, Raki scampered in behind him, and hopped up onto the bookcase, finding an empty space to snuggle where some of the books Biff had removed had rested.
He opened his computer and created a file for his interactions with Laskin at the gym. It was important to keep track of anything Laskin said, no matter how minor, as well as any details he provided Laskin about his own life. They all had to tie into his cover as Bill Adams.
When the two of them spoke at the gym, Biff had focused on the fact that Laskin wouldn’t be at the gym on Sunday morning. As he typed out the reason, though, he thought it might be interesting to sneak into Natasha’s graduation as an observer. He was still curious about her reasons for posing for Sveta, and it would be interesting to see the interaction between Laskin and Petrov at a social occasion.
But where was the graduation? He sat back in his chair and tried to remember everything he had heard or learned about Natasha. She was going to Yale in the fall. In conjunction with her father’s money, that probably meant she went to private school. He turned to the computer and did some quick searching.
Bingo. A Natalya Petrov was registered as a graduating senior at Miami Beach Academy, an exclusive prep school in the ritzy beachfront neighborhood of Surfside, a couple of miles south of Sunny Isles Beach. With only twenty students graduating, the ceremony was small enough to be held in the ballroom of an elegant hotel in Bal Harbour.
Biff shut the computer down, roused the squirrel, and the two of them walked out of the shopping center. He stopped for takeout Thai on the way home, and back at the townhouse he gave all the peanuts from the chicken satay to Raki.
When they were finished eating, Biff dressed in his most conservative business suit and prepared for a stressful evening—spying on a man who not only knew him on sight, but with whom he’d shared a workout that very morning.
23 – Ceremony
It was a gorgeous night to drive in along A1A with the top down. A warm breeze coming off the ocean made the palm fronds dance, and lights shimmered in the high-rise condos that lined the beach. With his excellent vision, Biff could identify thousands of stars in the sky invisible to human eyes, as well as the masts of sailboats bobbing in Biscayne Bay and the closing blossoms of the hibiscus that lined the road.
When he reached the Bal Harbour Beach Hotel, Biff left his car with the valet and his squirrel in a palm tree by the entrance, and walked inside. A big sign with red and blue balloons attached announced the Miami Beach Academy graduation was taking place in the beachfront ballroom, and he walked down a curving staircase to the ground level.
The lobby was filled with proud parents and impossibly young graduates in navy blue gowns over their suits and dresses, holding matching mortarboards with red and blue tassels decorated with tiny 2011s. He identified a niche in the wall behind a potted palm where he could lounge without seeming hidden, yet remain out of sight of most of the crowd. The room buzzed in a mixture of Russian, English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of the wealthy in the northern part of Miami-Dade County.
He didn’t have a good enough fix on the voices of any of the Petrovs to use his extra-strength hearing to identify them. So instead he had to scan the crowd face by face until he found them, across the room from him. Viktor was bulky stony-faced in an elegant black suit with spit-shined black dress shoes. He had missed a few dark hairs on the left side of his chin when shaving. He wore a yellow gold Rolex watch encrusted with diamonds, and diamond pinky rings on both fingers. No wedding band, though.
His wife, Maria Petrovna, stood beside him, wearing a mid-calf silk dress that was undoubtedly from a designer Farishta would recognize, yet hung on her like a shapeless flour sack. She balanced uncomfortably on low heels and couldn’t stop fiddling with the clasp of her tiny, jeweled purse.
Natasha stood just far enough from them to make it clear to anyone who looked that though they were her parents, she hated them with a fervor reserved to the adolescent. Her strapless gold taffeta dress, which had to have been custom-tailored, was breathtakingly lovely. The seamstress had gathered fabric in a taffeta rose to disguise her undeveloped bust, and tapered it to accentuate her slim waist. Though it came to a demure length mid-calf, it still showed enough of her long, slim legs to tantalize any man.
She carried her white graduation gown and white cap over one arm. She chewed nervously on her lower lip and kept looking toward the ballroom entrance.
Then Igor Laskin arrived, in a pearl-gray suit that had been carefully tailored as well, to emphasize his impressive musculature. He wore a white shirt and a purple tie embellished with gold crowns, and when he entered the lobby he walked as if he was a king approaching his queen—with a sense of entitlement and regal bearing that caused heads to turn and voices to murmur.
He carried a corsage for Natasha—a purple and white orchid tipped with gold to match her gown, and to match his tie as well.
Natasha threw her arms around him and kissed him while her parents frowned. Laskin shook Petrov’s hand, then kissed Maria Petrovna on each cheek. The three of them made awkward conversation, painful for Biff to eavesdrop on, until a bell rang.
From somewhere in the back a woman announced, “Parents, family and friends may enter the ballroom. Graduates, please come around to the side entrance.”
Natasha stepped back from Igor and looked at her parents. She kissed her mother on the cheek, then her father, both of them still looking unhappy. Then she joined a girlfriend to hurry off.
>
“You know she goes to Yale in August,” Viktor said to Igor in Russian.
Igor bowed his head slightly. “Of course, Professor. I would do nothing to interfere with her education.”
“Make sure you keep your word,” Petrov said. Then he offered his arm to his wife, and they stalked forward into the ballroom.
Biff saw Laskin’s jaw tightening, but he said nothing, just followed behind them. Biff slipped out of his hiding place and into the ballroom and took a seat toward the rear of the crowd, watching as the ceremony began. A state Senator gave the commencement address, and various students were called forward to accept awards. Natasha was not among them.
Then each in turn, the graduates stepped forward to receive their empty diploma cases and pose for photos with the dean of the academy. The whole thing took nearly two hours, and Biff was bored out of his mind.
But he hoped there was something to be learned, and so he stuck it out. When the last young man had crossed the makeshift stage, the dean pronounced them all graduates, and the audience applauded—most likely in relief, Biff thought. Then the glass doors to the outdoor plaza were opened, and everyone streamed out for appetizers and cocktails.
The graduates returned their caps and gowns at a table by the hotel wall as their parents lined up at the bars. Biff accepted a vodka and tonic from the bartender, then located the Petrovs. He found a place to stand behind a palm tree, sipped his drink, and observed.
People eddied around Natasha and her family, classmates and parents extending congratulations. Viktor and Maria had softened a bit, glowing with pride at their daughter’s success. Igor Laskin stood by, and Biff could see Natasha’s girlfriends casting Laskin covert appraisals.
Members of a band appeared and took their places across from the bar. Viktor Petrov opened his wallet to retrieve a business card for a father of one of Natasha’s classmates and a piece of paper drifted out, landing on the floor by his feet. He didn’t seem to notice he had lost it.
Biff was curious to see what was on it—but there was no way he could get close enough to pick it up. He heard a short chirp and looked up to the palm tree beside him. A squirrel bounced on the frond. Was it Raki? Probably, unless Biff had developed a disturbing magnetism that attracted rodents to him. He looked up at the squirrel and sent him a message. Bring me the paper from the floor over there.
Raki jumped from one frond to another, and Biff thought either he’d mixed up the message, failed entirely—or simply tried to communicate with some other squirrel. But then Raki scampered down the palm trunk and raced across the flagstone tiles of the oceanfront terrace.
He easily grasped the piece of paper in his paws. “Oh, look, a squirrel,” Natasha said, pointing to him.
Raki took off like a shot across the flagstones. “Nasty creatures,” Maria Petrovna said. “They bite, you know.”
“I think they’re cute.” Natasha put her hands on her hips and turned to her mother. She was about to say something else when her father glowered at her.
The same woman’s voice came over the PA system. “We invite young ladies and their fathers, and our young men and their mothers, to come to the dance floor.”
Natasha looked at her father. He smiled and offered her his arm. Petrov lumbered through a slow dance with his daughter draped over him, the pride on his face evident. Biff almost liked the man then.
Biff hung around for an hour as the crowd dissipated. When the Petrovs left, he followed, disappointed that he had not learned anything more interesting than that Viktor Petrov disapproved of his daughter’s relationship with Igor Laskin.
He handed in his ticket to the valet, and when the car arrived he put the top down, giving Raki a chance to swing into the back seat. As they drove up Collins Avenue, the squirrel climbed between the seats to sit beside Biff. At a traffic light, Raki chittered, and Biff looked over at him. He was holding the paper he had picked up at the hotel in his paws.
“Thank you, Raki,” Biff said, reaching over to take the paper from the squirrel. The light changed, so he slipped it into his jacket pocket, and didn’t retrieve it until they were back at the townhouse.
The only thing on the slip of paper was an email address in Russia. It looked familiar to Biff, though, so he sat down at his laptop and pulled up his file on Sveta’s case. The address Petrov dropped matched the one where Sveta had been sending her illicit photographs.
So Petrov knew, Biff thought. He knew that the porno photos of his daughter had been emailed to Russia, where they had been distributed to perverts worldwide. And he must therefore have known that Kiril Ovetschkin had been Sveta’s distributor. There was his motive in having Ovetschkin murdered.
It was too late on Saturday night to call Jimmy Stein with the information—and what would he do with it, anyway? Just add it to his dossier. Instead Biff emailed him.
Once he had, the vodka and the accumulated stress of the past week caught up with him, and he yawned. He crawled into bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. He slept late, knowing that Laskin was going to miss his morning workout and that Biff could, too. When he did get up, he found Raki was in the living room next to a bowl of walnuts Farishta must have left for him. He had a nut between his paws, and looked up at Biff.
“I’m not your nutcracker,” Biff said, walking on into the kitchen. He fixed himself a hearty breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes, bacon and hash browns, and flipped through the Sunday paper as he ate.
When he finished, he climbed back into bed with his laptop and checked his email. He was delighted to see one from Farishta. She had been able to find how the dolls and the amulet had arrived in the United States.
The shipment had originated in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. According to her information, the artifacts had been smuggled over the border between Iraq and Azerbaijan, one of the countries that had been born of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Biff knew that many of the Russians in Sunny Isles Beach came from that part of the former Soviet Union, so it was likely they would still have contacts back in the old country.
The shipment’s manifest read agricultural parts, but Farishta wrote that it actually contained Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles. It seemed that someone in Baku had slipped a number of additional items into the container, which had been removed in Miami. She didn’t know what happened to the guns, but from what Hector Hernandez had told him, and from Kiril Ovetschkin’s travel, Biff assumed they had continued on to Managua, Nicaragua.
She was still trying to understand how the amulet and the Div-e Sepid might be interacting, and she would be back in touch soon, she wrote. She signed the email with a couple of smiley-face emoticons and a line of xs and os. Yes, hugs and kisses to you too, he thought. When you get back here, though. Not through cyberspace.
He sent back a reply, telling her what he had learned so far, and warning her to be careful. He ended with “Raki misses you. And so do I.” No xs and os, though.
It was a rainy, overcast day, so he stayed in, reading everything he could find on the Div-e Sepid and associated spirits. He already knew that “div” was Persian for demon, but learned that the Div-e Sepid was the chief of the demons of Mazandaran, a province in the north of Iran, on the Caspian Sea coast. He was physically huge, and could conjure a dark storm of hail, boulders and tree trunks.
He could have been an albino, Biff read, or simply have come from a race of very light-skinned humans who had attained some level of magical powers. In any case he was a fearsome creature, and if he had been imprisoned in those dolls for a long time, he was bound to be very grouchy.
He was certainly a much more powerful spirit than either Biff or Farishta, or any genie they knew, even those members of the ruling council of genies. Who or what had managed to trap his spirit in those dolls? What could release him from the enchantment?
Sometimes, Biff knew, a spell could be broken simply—a kiss from a virgin, blood from a willing sacrifice, and so on. Sometimes it required a complex spell that could only
be conjured by a master of great skill. And sometimes it required a concatenation of objects and events that were extremely unlikely to ever occur at random. He had no idea what would unleash the Div-e Sepid on the world, and only hoped neither he nor Farishta would stumble on it accidentally.
Late in the day, when the rain cleared and the hot sun dried the streets, Biff went out for a long run around his neighborhood. A truck from a company called Gomez Moving was parked down the street, and though he knew Gomez was a common Hispanic last name, he thought of Gomez Addams, the patriarch of the cartoon family.
He could just see Morticia flouncing out in her tight black dress, carrying a single box. Wednesday, Pugsley, Lurch and Uncle Fester, all pitching in. Even Thing scurrying across the lawn with a carton in its fingers.
24 – Protective Coloration
Monday morning, he woke early and went for another brief run. He left Raki in a palm tree outside his townhouse and drove to the Bolshoi Gym, arriving in time to meet Igor Laskin there. “How was that party you went to Saturday night?” Biff asked, as they worked side by side on the leg press.
Laskin shrugged. “Was okay. My girlfriend, she is young. She is old soul, so we are fine. But her friends? Like spoiled children.” He shook his head. “I was born in Russia, you know. I live there until I am fifteen. Then come to US with my parents. We have nothing. Not even pot to piss in.”
He finished his set and stood up. “We have to depend on relatives for everything. Right away, I am working hard. Making money. But Natasha’s friends? Always Mommy this and Daddy that.”
He stalked over to a bicep curl machine, and focused his anger on it. Biff followed him, working calmly, waiting for Laskin to speak again. By the time they had both finished twenty reps, Laskin had regained his composure.
“Natasha and I, we dance at party, we have drinks, we make good time. She go to college in August.”
“Here in Florida?” Biff asked, as they walked together to the weight benches.
