“The Mafia?”
Astimovich glanced over at him, and nodded warily. “You gotta deal with them if you want to survive in this town. It’ll be expensive, but damned well worth it.”
“How much are you paying?”
“Plenty,” the cabby said. He laughed. “Everybody pays. My brother-in-law is a big deal son of a bitch at the Grand Dinamo, and still I pay.”
“I don’t have a problem with that. But when the time comes I don’t want to deal with some kulak.”
“My brother-in-law knows what he’s doing,” Astimovich said. “What kind of business are we going into, boss?”
“I’ll let you know when I get back.”
“When’s that?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a little longer, maybe a little sooner.”
“What do you want me to do in the meantime?”
“Keep your mouth shut.”
They pulled up in front of the busy Leningrad Station, traffic heavy as usual. The snow had finally stopped but the temperature had plunged. Everything looked dirty.
“Three weeks is a long time,” Astimovich said sullenly. “How do I know you’re coming back?”
“Because we’re going to make some money,” McGarvey said. He peeled a thousand francs from a thick bundle of bills and handed it to the cabby. “Let’s call this a down payment, shall we?” “Spasiba,” the cabby said, pocketing the money.
“Do as I say and you’ll be a rich man. Cross me and I’ll kill you. I’ve got connections now in this town too.”
“Okay, boss. You’ll see everything will be hunky dory.”
McGarvey got his bag from the back seat of the cab and disappeared with the crowds inside the railway station. He waited by the front doors-for a few minutes to make sure that Astimovich wouldn’t try to follow him, then went to the stand-up restaurant and had a glass of beer and a meat pie. In three days he had learned what he needed to know about Tarankov and conditions in Russia. He felt that his odds had greatly improved from the thousand-to-one he’d told Yemlin. But there was still a long way to go, because he wouldn’t go through with the assassination unless he could improve his chances to at least fifty-fifty.
His overnight train for Helsinki was scheduled to arrive in the Finnish capital shortly before 9:30 a.m., giving him ninety minutes to make his Finnair flight to Brussels where he would pick up his Avis Renault and drive back to Paris.
He was leaving Russia several thousand francs poorer, but if the million dollars had been deposited in his Channel Islands account as Yemlin promised it would be, then money would not be a problem. Nor would it have been in any event. The investments he’d made over the past twenty-five years, starting with the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ ranch in Kansas, had done well. He was not a wealthy man, but he was independent. His demand for money from Yemlin had only been done to insure that the Russian was serious. Money was something they understood almost better than any other concept.
Gathering his bag, he left the restaurant and walked through the terminal to the trackside gates where he had to show his ticket and passport. Outgoing Russian customs wouldn’t occur until Vyborg, but his gun was tucked safely away in his laptop computer, and Russians these days were more interested in what was being brought into the country than what was being taken out.
TWENTY
A few minutes past 5:30 p.m.” the Air France Concorde SST from New York, touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport with a tremendous roar, its needle nose drooping like some gigantic insect. Of the 143 passengers, Elizabeth McGarvey was one of the last off, letting her seat partner, an extremely boring attorney from New Jersey, precede her. During the four-hour flight across the Atlantic the man had done everything within his power to convince her to meet him at his hotel for drinks tonight. At first his attentions had been flattering because he was reasonably good looking. But then he’d become funny and finally annoying. But she didn’t want to attract any attention so she’d quietly gone along with him, even taking down his hotel number. But she refused to ride into the city with him or even get off the plane together because her father, who was insanely protective of his daughter, would be meeting her, and she didn’t want to cause a scene, to which the lawyer agreed wholeheartedly. By the time she got off the plane she was in an extremely bitchy mood.
She taped the Elizabeth Swanson passport and identification papers to her midriff between the bottom of her bra and the top of her panties. She didn’t think that even a Frenchman would dare pat her down. And unless authorities were expecting her, there’d be no reason for the customs officers to become suspicious.
“The purpose of your visit to France, Mademoiselle?” the young passport control officer asked from his booth.
“Tourism,” Elizabeth replied curtly.
The officer stamped her passport indifferently, and she walked back to customs. She’d flown Air France, not a foreign carrier, so she’d arrived at Aerogare Two which was only for Air France and therefore uncomplicated. This evening the terminal was practically deserted.
There was no sign of her seat-mate when she picked up her bag and headed for the rien a declarer line. The customs official smiled at her and passed her through with a wave, and she was in France. It had been easy.
Upstairs in the main terminal she got a couple of thousand francs from the ATM using her mother’s credit card, then went back downstairs again and outside to the cab ranks.
“Good evening, Mademoiselle,” the cabby said.
“L’Hotel Marronniers sur la Rue Jacob clans la Rive Gauche, s’il vous plait,” she said, sitting back. “Out, Mademoiselle,” the driver replied respectfully.
As they pulled away from the curb, Elizabeth took a cigarette! out of her purse, lit it, then cracked the window by a couple of inches.
“Pas de fumer Mademoiselle,” the driver said sternly over his shoulder.
Elizabeth ignored him.
“Mademoiselle, please no smoking,” he said, looking at her reflection in the rearview mirror.
She stared out the window, totally ignoring him, as she slowly uncrossed her legs giving him a good view up her short skirt, and then sat back even farther so that her skirt hiked almost up to her panty line. The driver stopped complaining, but from time to time he glanced in the rearview mirror, and she rewarded him with a couple more looks up her skirt, which seemed to make him happy.
She and her mother had spent a few days at the small, but pleasant Hotel Marronniers on the Left Bank a few years ago after she’d finished school in’ Bern. She thought it unlikely that anyone on the staff would remember her, but even if they did it wouldn’t matter, because she wasn’t here illegally, nor had she committed any crime on French soil.
Her father was here someplace, she thought as they crossed the river and got off the ring highway at the Quai Marcel Boyer above the Pont National. Paris was his home of choice, he’d explained to her, because for the most part the people were civilized, they minded their own business, and their food and wine were the best in the world. Besides, where else would a Voltaire scholar feel more at home than in France?
Rush-hour traffic was thinning out by the time the cabby dropped her off in front of the hotel that was hidden behind a courtyard. She went inside, showed her passport and booked a room for a week, and paid for it with her own credit card. It would take twenty-four to thirty-six hours for her presence to be known in Paris from her hotel registration. By then she would have either found her father or she would have checked in with Tom Lynch, so hiding her trail was no longer as important as it had been on the shuttle from Dulles to Kennedy, and the Concorde flight over.
She thought she recognized the old concierge behind his desk, but if he remembered her he gave no hint of it. The bellman helped her upstairs with her bag, and after she tipped him and he was gone, she flung open the
