Private Moscow

by Patterson, James

  “You look like you could use a break,” Dinara said as we left an antiques dealership.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. It was bad enough being useless. I was determined I at least wouldn’t be the one to slow us down.

  “The owner recognized Ernest Fisher,” Dinara told me, gesturing toward the double-fronted store on the ground floor of a large redbrick building. The shop’s windows were full of old Russian and Ottoman furniture and art. “He said Fisher bought an armoire from him a few years ago. He came in to have some restoration work done to one of the drawers shortly after buying it.”

  “Might have been the one the key was hidden in,” I remarked.

  “Maybe,” Dinara agreed. “The owner hasn’t seen Fisher since.”

  We walked down the street a little and stood near the corner of Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya, the Embankment. The light was fading quickly, and the buildings on the other side of the river were already twinkling in the last of the sunshine. It would be dark soon and the stores would close for the day, and we’d be left with restaurants and bars. Despite the canvass being my idea, I couldn’t help but feel we were clutching at straws.

  I looked around, searching for inspiration. We’d already canvassed most of the nearby businesses and would soon need to widen the area of our search. I glanced at Dinara, who was pale. The legacy of her ordeal at the hands of Veles and his associates? Or had her hangover finally caught up with her? Or was she simply feeling the effects of a long day trudging the frozen city? We couldn’t carry on for much longer.

  I looked down Year 1905 Street and saw a taxi pull into a spot near the corner of the Embankment. It was soon followed by three others, and the four drivers got out and clustered on the sidewalk. Three of them lit cigarettes and the fourth used a vape.

  “Come on,” I said to Dinara, and I felt her spirits lift when she registered where we were heading.

  The taxi drivers looked as though they were from Central Asia. They all wore heavy woolen coats and thick beanie hats and were laughing and chatting, but when one of them spotted us, he signaled the others and they fell silent.

  “Taxi?” the nudger asked.

  Dinara replied in Russian, and the man looked blank and held up his hands in the universal gesture of incomprehension.

  “English?” I tried.

  “Is better,” the man replied.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Uzbekistan,” he said uncertainly.

  “Do you work this neighborhood?” I said.

  One of his companions muttered something and the nudger clammed up.

  “Talk is trouble,” the mutterer said. His dark skin was puckered around his mouth and eyes, and his bushy black eyebrows were flecked with gray that almost matched his patched coat. I placed him in his mid-forties, but his eyes seemed older, as though they belonged to someone who’d seen a lifetime of misery.

  “We’re not looking for trouble,” I replied. “We’re trying to find people who recognize this man.”

  I produced a photograph of Ernie Fisher and showed it to the group. The mutterer took a drag of his cigarette.

  “How much?” he asked. “If my eyes see him. How much you pay?”

  “If you can give us useful information, we can come to a deal,” I said.

  “Deal not money,” the mutterer said, backing toward his cab, an old Skoda. “Time is money.”

  “A hundred US dollars,” I offered. “More if you give us something worthwhile.”

  He took another drag of his cigarette. “OK. Come,” he said. “Come in taxi.”

  “Jack …” Dinara interjected, her concern evident in her voice.

  “It’s OK,” I replied.

  “Come,” the mutterer repeated. “We take a ride.”

  CHAPTER 64

  THE OPPRESSIVE DARKNESS of a January night set in during our journey across the city.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the mutterer, who drove with two fingers on the wheel.

  “Ghani,” he replied, glancing back at Dinara and me. “From Afghanistan. You know it?”

  I knew it all too well. The memory of my last day on the battlefield was still seared in my mind. I’d lost so many friends, and our driver might have sympathized with the people who’d killed them. Heck, he might have been one of them.

  “No,” I replied. It was simpler to lie. “I’ve never been.”

  “I have,” Dinara replied, surprising me. “A long time ago. In Kabul.”

  The driver nodded, and I got the sense he knew better than to pry. Had she been there with the FSB? As a Russian operative? Or simply as a traveler? It was a part of the world that was so damaged a simple conversation risked opening a sectarian can of worms.

  “When did you last see the man in the photograph?” I asked.

  Ghani sucked on his cigarette. He’d taken off his hat and rubbed a hand through his thick salt and pepper hair. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which I tried my best to ignore in the confined, warm cabin of his rattling Skoda.

  “The day after yesterday,” he said.

  “The day before yesterday?” Dinara qualified.

  Ghani nodded. “Yes, yes.”

  I glanced at Dinara and saw that she was also alive with the thrill of a lead.

  “What time?” I asked.

  “Morning,” he replied. “Maybe ten o’clock.”

  That was roughly an hour before Ernie Fisher was murdered.

  “He ask me to take him to Lefortovo. To a fun house. He tell me wait then we go to airport,” Ghani said. “But we never go airport. When he come out of fun house, he angry. Mad. Tell me take him home. He forget something.”

  “The key?” Dinara guessed.

  Ghani looked at her blankly.

  “Fun house?” I asked.

  “You know,” Ghani replied. He arched his eyebrows, sucked on his cigarette and glanced at Dinara. “For girls.”

  “He means a brothel,” Dinara clarified.

  “Fun house,” Ghani repeated. “Is where I take you.”

  He drew in another lungful of smoke and exhaled slowly, filling the velour-covered cabin with a thick cloud.

  “You married?” he asked us.

  “No,” Dinara replied. “We work together.”

  “Why no?” Ghani asked. “You very beautiful,” he told Dinara. “And he got the eyes of a mountain man.”

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “Yes. Is very good,” Ghani replied. “You keep woman safe. You dangerous.”

  CHAPTER 65

  A GROUP OF four rowdy men rounded the corner. They were pushing each other and jeering as they made their way along Energeticheskiy Passage.

  Ghani was crawling along the road, which enabled Dinara to take in the neighborhood. They were in Lefortovo District to the east of the city, one of the most deprived parts of Moscow. Energeticheskiy had to be one of the low points of the area. The tall blocks that flanked the street were crumbling and covered in graffiti. One wing of the huge apartment building on the corner had been gutted by fire and the windows had been blown out, but the rest of the structure was still inhabited. Discarded food containers, empty bottles, nitrous canisters and needles littered the gray slush that covered the pavements.

  Ghani’s taxi was crawling along because there was an old Mercedes ahead of them, cruising the street, the driver examining the women who stood in lit apartment windows, or who braved the freezing conditions in faux fur coats and little else.

  The four rowdy men on the sidewalk chatted to a couple of fur-clad women and went into one of the rundown Soviet-era blocks. There was little doubt what this particular street was famed for.

  The Mercedes stopped and the driver, a bald man in his sixties with a jowly face, beckoned a young woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  Ghani tooted his horn, but the jowly man ignored him.

  “He’s doing business,” Ghani said.

  Dinara looked at Jack and saw him frown. Was he wondering the s
ame things she was? As the woman leaned through the driver’s window, what went through her mind? What did she really think of this older, unattractive man and the things he was asking her to do with him?

  The woman didn’t look happy, but she nodded, and rounded the back of the jowly man’s car where her haunted eyes were caught in Ghani’s headlights. She climbed in the passenger seat of the Mercedes and the car sped away.

  “Sad girl,” Ghani observed as he continued along the street. “This is it,” he said, stopping his taxi outside a decrepit old villa. “The fun house.”

  “Can you wait?” Jack asked as he opened the door.

  “Sure,” Ghani replied. “No problem.”

  Dinara shivered as she and Jack got out of the taxi and approached the brothel. Ghani pulled into a space a short distance up the street.

  The fun house was an old imperial villa that had somehow survived the vast Soviet-era developments that had been constructed around it. Fifteen-story blocks loomed either side of the villa’s small garden, and the patches of damp that blackened the building suggested it rarely got any light. Fitting, because it was immediately obvious it was home to the kind of business that thrived in darkness. A woman wearing nothing but her underwear lounged on a recliner in one of the upstairs windows. The room was backlit in crimson, and she eyed Dinara and Jack suggestively as they approached the building.

  They passed a once grand wall that had crumbled long ago. The ruins poked through the thick snow, which covered the small front garden. A couple of mangy, leafless trees were the only things to protrude from the white blanket and their branches reached skyward like the bony fingers of a dying animal. The house itself was also crumbling. The window frames were rotten, the painted façade cracked and flaking and the guttering was broken.

  Dinara followed Jack up the steps and he tugged on an ancient bell pull. Moments later, the door was opened by a huge man in a dark suit with a shaved head.

  “Come in,” he said in Russian.

  “Welcome, darlings,” a voice chimed, and Dinara saw a large woman sashay along the hallway. She wore a billowing outfit of many folds and colors, a dusty blond wig, and her face was caked in thick makeup, which made her age difficult to guess. She could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty.

  “A couple,” the woman remarked. “Very adventurous, my dears.”

  The interior of the house was almost as much of an assault on the senses as the woman’s dress. Brightly painted walls, erotic sketches and photographs, nude sculptures, gaudy cushions, throws and drapes of every hue collided to ensure the mind was equally amused and disgusted wherever the eyes fell.

  “My name is Madame Agafiya,” the woman said in Russian. “Welcome to my humble house. Tell me, do you want one girl, or two? Or maybe a man?”

  Dinara looked at an uncomprehending Jack, and blushed. “None, thank you,” she replied in Russian. “We’re here to ask some questions.”

  “Police?” Agafiya asked, suddenly on edge.

  “No,” Dinara replied.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Agafiya asked, gesturing at Jack. “Doesn’t he speak?”

  “He’s American,” Dinara replied, and Agafiya’s eyes lit up.

  “Ah, American,” she said in English. “We have many American friends who visit us here. Our girls speak excellent English for the best intimate moments. My name is Madame Agafiya, American friend, and I welcome you to my house.”

  “We’re just here for answers,” Jack said. “Nothing else.”

  Agafiya’s smile fell away. “We don’t give answers,” she said bitterly. “Only pleasure.” She looked at the huge bouncer. “Show them out,” she commanded in Russian.

  The bouncer put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, and Dinara saw from the change in her boss’s expression that the man had made a serious mistake.

  Jack grabbed the bouncer’s hand and twisted his fingers to breaking point, forcing the huge man to his knees and making him groan in pain.

  Jack fixed Agafiya with an unflinching stare. “Answers are our pleasure,” he said.

  CHAPTER 66

  “PLEASURE COSTS,” MADAME Agafiya said.

  “We’re willing to pay,” I replied, releasing the big man’s hand.

  He backed away with the insolent look worn by all defeated men: I could have beaten you if I’d really been trying.

  I paid him no mind. He could have his bravado and I’d keep my victory.

  “Then let us get out of this cold hall and go somewhere warm,” Madame Agafiya said.

  She led us into a parlor off the hallway. It was a large room with high ceilings and was furnished with every piece Moscow’s flea markets had to offer. Or at least it seemed that way. There was clutter everywhere, and two green fabric couches stood as islands among a sea of pictures, photos, figurines and tiny collectibles. Was it designed to disorientate her patrons? Or simply to mask the decayed state of the building?

  “Sit.” Agafiya gestured at the couch nearest the window.

  She settled on the one opposite, and her bouncer watched us from the doorway. Dinara and I did as instructed, and I felt the old springs give as I sat on the frayed couch.

  “What answers? And how much?” Agafiya asked as she arranged the layers of her multi-colored dress.

  “We’d like to ask you about Ernest Fisher,” Dinara replied. “We were told he came here.”

  Agafiya’s hands froze and she studied them as though they were suddenly the most interesting things in the world.

  “I don’t know this man,” she said.

  I ignored the obvious lie and produced a photograph and showed it to her. “Ernie Fisher,” I said, “but it’s possible you know him by another name.”

  Her eyes flashed with indignation when she looked up. Her gaze softened as it shifted from me to the photograph.

  “I’ve never seen this man before,” she lied. “Who are you people?”

  “Would it make a difference if you knew he was dead?” I asked.

  Agafiya looked as though she’d been slapped in the face. “You lie,” she said.

  Dinara produced her phone and showed the stunned Russian madam a news article based on the Otkrov blog piece. It featured a photo of Ernie Fisher and gave an account of his death.

  “Why would someone do this?” Agafiya said at last. “Ernst was a nice man.”

  “So you did know him,” I remarked.

  She nodded, and tears formed in her eyes. “He was an old friend. He told me never to say I knew him or that he was here.”

  “Where did you meet?” I asked.

  “Many years ago. I worked in a bar. He was a customer,” Agafiya said. “Long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe thirty years?” she said.

  “In Russia?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Agafiya replied. “I’ve never been to another country.”

  I was surprised. There was nothing in Fisher’s history to suggest he had any contact with Russia prior to his chief-of-staff posting.

  “Did he have a room here?” I pressed. “A private space?”

  Agafiya shifted uncomfortably.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Your silence doesn’t protect him anymore. It just protects the people who killed him.”

  Agafiya eyed me uncertainly.

  “If you help us, we might be able to find the man who murdered Mr. Fisher,” I assured her.

  She nodded. “Downstairs. But there’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing?” Dinara asked.

  “He told me never to go inside, but I did. Just to see, you know,” Agafiya said. “The room is totally empty.”

  “Can you show us?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 67

  THE BASEMENT WAS a vast, damp, dingy space which was accessed through a heavy locked door and a staircase that ran down from the kitchen. The place was ripe with decades of rot.

  “You see?” Agafiya said. “Nothing.”

  Knotted old floorboards and expos
ed stonework formed the outer shell of the basement. The house above was supported by rows of stone columns, which had been half encased in wood cabinets. There was nothing else in the room.

  “Does anyone else have a key?” I asked.

  Agafiya shook her head. “Me and Ernst.”

  “Who put the cabinets around the columns?” Dinara asked.

  “Ernst,” Agafiya replied. “He told me it was to protect them.”

  Dinara and I shared a look of excitement. The structural supports were slightly larger than the safe we were looking for.

  “How many are there?” I asked.

  She looked bemused. “You Americans can count, surely?”

  “So you don’t know?” I said.

  “There are thirteen,” Dinara remarked.

  “Thirteen,” Agafiya repeated emphatically.

  I stalked through the basement, examining the floorboards around the supports, looking for any sign of disturbance.

  I found it in the heart of the room. I crouched down and touched a scuff mark beside a column. Scored lines arced across the floorboards. I checked the cabinet around the support and was gratified to feel a catch at the top. I pressed it and the panel directly in front of me swung off a latch and eased open a little. I pulled it wide to reveal a Kaso safe inside the cabinet. I tapped the stonework directly above it, and heard a hollow sound. The stone rising above the safe was a façade designed to fool people into thinking this was just another structural support.

  “What is it?” Agafiya asked, hurrying forward. “A safe? Why would Ernst need a safe?”

  I produced the key I’d found in Fisher’s apartment, and pushed it into the lock. I felt the satisfying clunk of the cylinders disengaging and the bolts drawing back.

  Agafiya whistled when I opened the door. Like Karl Parker, Fisher had a stash of guns, documents and a huge amount of cash.