Prosviyenko leaned closer. “You mean the Tambov mafia? Listen, mister. This is not tourist Russia we’re talking about. If you want to die, there are better ways to do it than to deal with Tambov.”
“Who’s the boss, the pakhan? Who do I need to talk to?”
“You mean Vasiliev? Everyone knows of Kiril Andreyevitch Vasiliev. You don’t have to pay me for that, mister. But no one gets to see him, understand? If half the stories about him are true, believe me, you don’t want to see him.”
“Where would I find him or someone close to him?”
“Listen, this is crazy. What is this about?”
“I’m looking for someone. A woman who may have asked the same questions.”
“You care for this woman?” Prosviyenko asked. Scorpion nodded, thinking that ironically enough, it was true. “Try the Dacha Club on the Nevsky Prospekt,” he said. “Go after eleven. Pozhalsta, don’t mention my name.”
“Spasiba,” thanks, Scorpion said, passing the additional five thousand rubles to him on the tabletop. The reporter put his hand on it and slipped it into his pocket.
“Don’t thank me. Believe me, telling you about Vasiliev, I didn’t do you any favors. So there’s no story, just you looking for a woman who is a smuggler?”
Scorpion hesitated. “It’s complicated.”
“With women, what isn’t?” Prosviyenko shrugged. “Fsyevo kharoshiva!” Good luck! “Listen, there are many beautiful women at the Dacha. Maybe you will see her, maybe someone else. Sooner or later everyone goes there.”
T he bar in the Astoria was leather and glass, subdued lights reflecting off drinks, expensive-looking women in designer dresses perched on stools, looking for business. One of them, a pretty blonde in her early twenties, kept looking over at Scorpion until finally he shook his head no and she shrugged and smiled as if to say, “You can’t blame a girl for trying.” He sent the waiter over to tell her he was buying her a drink but that he wasn’t available. When the waiter told her, she raised her glass to him.
Cheers! she mouthed.
Za Vas! he mouthed back, raising his glass. He watched the rain streak the window in the gray twilight. It wasn’t close enough to summer for the White Nights, when it barely got dark, but it was late enough in spring so that although it was ten in the evening, it was still light outside. He sat sipping Stolichnaya Elit over ice and tried to work it out. He badly needed to talk to Rabinowich.
In the taxi on his way to meet the secretary he had hired, he tried calling him, but the cell phone number had been disconnected. At the secretary’s office he’d tried to track the transmission center from which Rabinowich’s last call had originated, the one he got in Frankfurt, but the best he could do was to be told that the message had been sent from somewhere in the Middle East. Perhaps Rabinowich had gone to Egypt, where the operation started, or else Israel. If it was Israel, was the Mossad involved? That was assuming that he had gone to the Middle East instead of Hawaii, or hadn’t just turned in the SIM on a disposable phone.
What was Rabinowich trying to tell him about the Twelfth Imam? If the Iranians wanted to attack through a proxy, why against Russia, Hezbollah and Iran’s supplier? Unless Russia had reneged on a deal. Suppose the twenty-one kilos hadn’t been stolen. What if it had been made to look stolen to cover Russia’s dealings with Iran, and suppose it wasn’t supposed to be twenty-one kilos of U-235 but fifty or a hundred kilos, or a plutonium plant or S-300 missiles, or God knew what, and the Russians had reneged on the deal? What then? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards were like any other strong-arm outfit. They couldn’t allow themselves to be cheated. They’d have to send a message. That was a possibility, he thought. That Hassani was the diversion, Najla, the enforcer.
He started to signal the waiter for the check when it occurred to him that a bit of arm candy might be useful at the Dacha Club. He motioned to the blonde. She came over and sat down.
“I am hoping you change your mind, milenky, my dearest.” She smiled, resting her hand on his thigh.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Zhana. For you, I am Zhanochka. And you?”
“Damon,” using his cover ID. “I’ll give you five thousand rubles to come with me to the Dacha Club. We won’t be leaving together. I have business there.”
“Listen, Damonya, my sweetness, give me two hundred euros, I do anything you want, any place you want, any way you want,” she said.
“This isn’t love, Zhanochka golubcha. One fifty euros and you find your own way home from the Dacha,” he said, taking her hand as he got up. They caught a taxi outside the hotel. It was still raining, the sky the strange tangerine-gray of the long northern twilight. Once inside the taxi, he gave her the money. She counted it and slipped it into her bra. The taxi turned onto the broad Nevsky Prospekt, the lights from the buildings reflected in the rain- slick street.
The taxi pulled up, and even in the rain there was a line of people standing outside the awning entrance to the Dacha Club. With fifty euros to the doorman and Zhanochka on his arm, they walked past the crowd waiting to get in and into the club, its sleek multistoried metal and glass interior pulsating to loud Russian rock music. Zhana began to sway to the music as she walked beside him to the bar. They pushed in between two men, one of whom was big and broad-shouldered, in an Italian leather jacket, with the look of someone in the underworld. A glance at the tattoo on his neck confirmed for Scorpion that he was of the Belaya Energia, a white supremacist gang. The man started to say something harshly, then stopped and smiled when he saw Zhana. They began talking rapidly in Russian, and she indicated Scorpion with a movement of her head.
“He wants me to go with him,” she told Scorpion, nearly shouting to be heard over the noise of the crowd and the music.
“Tell him you’re free to do what you want if he’ll introduce me to someone,” Scorpion shouted back.
The man laughed and gestured toward the tables near the bar, where there were at least a dozen good- looking women in tight low-cut dresses. “Take you pick, druk. No need introduce. Her I take,” the man said in broken English, grabbing Zhana by the buttocks and pulling her tight against him. She tried to twist away but he held her tight. Scorpion reached over, pried the man’s little finger off her and bent it back nearly to the point of breaking. With his other hand, he grabbed the man’s other wrist in a Krav Maga hold so he couldn’t use the knife he had pulled out, all of it done so quickly no one else noticed.
“The person I want to see is Vasiliev,” Scorpion said.
The man immediately stopped. “You want see Kiril Andreyevitch?”
“Da,” Scorpion said, letting him go. The man put the knife away and let Zhana loose. She turned and looked warily at Scorpion.
“He not see you. Is Tambov,” the man said, holding the finger that Scorpion had twisted.
“Let’s let him decide, druk. Tell him it’s about a beautiful woman and a shipment in the port. We’ll wait for you here.”
The man whispered something to a friend with a badly scarred face, also in a leather jacket, who turned to look at Scorpion, his open shirt revealing the top of a blatnoi prison tattoo on his chest. Then the scar-faced man motioned to his friend and the two of them left, weaving their way through the crowd to a glass elevator. Scorpion watched them till Zhana tugged at his arm.
“We should go now, pozhalsta, my sweetness,” she said urgently. “I give you back the money. We fuck like crazy. I don’t like these bandity.”
“You go. Keep the money,” Scorpion said, kissing her cheek, his eyes on the crowd in the mirror.
“You sure? I mean it. I don’t want no money. I like you,” she said plaintively.
“I don’t want you to get hurt. Go, pozhalsta,” he said, giving her a little shove, never taking his eye off the crowd in the mirror.
“Da svidaniya, golubchik,” she said, looking back at him, but this time Scorpion wasn’t watching. Instead, he walked up to a striking blonde woman in a Burberry raincoat who had just come into the club. She was standing between two Middle Eastern-looking men in suits, their raincoats over their arms. He made the move as he pretended to squeeze by, deliberately bumping into her.
“Hello, Najla,” he said as her eyes widened at the sight of him.
“Well, if it isn’t Herr Crane,” she said, just managing to recover. “Or is it Monsieur McDonald or whatever your name is these days?”
“McDonald’ll do. I guess they were right. Everyone does come to the Dacha Club.” He took her arm. The two
