right. Come up when it’s clear,” she said, coming back on the line.
He saw one of the men near the pub open his cell phone to answer a call. He hung up, then made more calls. Scorpion watched as two of the three men left their posts and went inside the pub. He waited another minute, then crossed to the front door.
“ U vas yest pistolet?” the man with the cell phone said, asking in Russian if he had a gun.
“Da,” Scorpion said, handing him the Glock from the holster at the small of his back. “I want it back.”
“Bez bazaar,” the man said, then thoroughly frisked him. When he was done, the man indicated that he should go up to the second floor.
Scorpion stepped into the lobby and took a narrow elevator to a single apartment that occupied the entire second floor. Slavo, the aide he had seen with Iryna, was waiting with a pair of tapochki house slippers. After Scorpion stepped across the threshold, Slavo handed him the tapochki, and Scorpion took off his street shoes and put them on. As was the custom, he left his shoes by the door and went in.
They were waiting for him in the dining room. Iryna was sitting at the table with a stocky middle-aged man with a shock of graying hair and a cleft chin. Scorpion immediately recognized him as Viktor Kozhanovskiy from his posters and images on television. Kozhanovskiy got up to shake his hand. He did it like a politician, clasping Scorpion’s hand with both of his as if to convey his deep friendship and sincerity. On the wall behind him a silent TV showed the lead news of the day: a fistfight in the Verkhovna Rada-the parliament-between members of Kozhanovskiy’s party and supporters of Cherkesov, who were accusing Kozhanovskiy of corruption.
“Welcome, Mr. Kilbane. Will you have some tea?” Kozhanovskiy said in good English as Scorpion sat down.
“Why not?” Scorpion said. “But first…” He took out the handheld electronic sweep unit. “Do you mind?”
“We should do the same to you,” Kozhanovskiy said. “Go ahead.”
As Scorpion scanned for bugs, Iryna poured the tea into a stekans- a glass with a metal base and handle. When he completed the scan, he sat down. Iryna gestured that he should help himself to sugar, jam, or honey, and passed him a plate with horishke pastries and bublyky, almond cookies.
“Of course, we called Reuters in London,” Kozhanovskiy said, pouring himself more tea and mixing in a teaspoon of jam. “It seems you are who you say you are.”
“Nice to know,” Scorpion said, thinking it was a good thing Shaefer had followed up. But the cover was thin, very thin.
“Iryna has briefed me. Firstly, has anyone seen Alyona? None of our people seems to know anything.”
“She was at the Black Cat, the cafe on Andriyivsky Uzviz, this morning. She was supposed to be in a play but hadn’t shown for last night’s performance. She told her fellow actors she couldn’t be in the play anymore.”
“They were concerned?” Kozhanovskiy asked.
“With good reason. Apparently, her boyfriend-this Sirhiy Pyatov-is abusive. She was afraid of him. She told them they were mixed up in something.”
“Isn’t he with the campaign?” Kozhanovskiy turned to Iryna.
She nodded. “Dirty tricks.”
“Like what?” Scorpion asked.
“You have to understand, this is self-defense,” Kozhanovskiy said, lighting a Marlboro Menthol. “The Cherkesov campaign paid someone to publish a story in Sevodnya that claimed I looted the treasury when I was Minister of Finance. Among other things, they’ve accused us of running a heroin ring out of our campaign headquarters, that I’m a puppet for the Americans, and even that I’ve fathered a secret love child with Iryna!”
“That’s a better story than the assassination. Is it true?” Scorpion said.
Iryna looked directly at Scorpion. “I work with Viktor Ivanovych. I don’t do it with my legs spread. Gospadi! To be taken seriously as a woman in this country isn’t so simple.”
“Iryna is a public figure in our country.” Kozhanovskiy said. “And because she’s beautiful, she gets more than her share of media attention, which is helpful to us. But trust me, her brain is more valuable to us than her looks.”
“So what kind of dirty tricks did Pyatov do?” Scorpion asked Iryna.
“He created a false Facebook page supposedly of one of Cherkesov’s officials named Makuch,” she said. “It implied that Makuch is a pedophile. Pyatov also put out leaflets in Donetsk claiming Cherkesov is a homosexual. They put Photoshopped pictures of him in a woman’s pink panties and bra on the Internet,” a ghost of a smile on her lips. “He sent out notices in Kharkov oblast, an area we expect to go overwhelmingly for Cherkesov. They were supposedly from the Central Election Commission, telling people they hadn’t registered properly and were not eligible to vote.” She shrugged. “Things like that. They do the same to us.”
“What else can you tell me about Pyatov?”
“In the beginning, he was useful, as I said. Then he stopped showing up. No one’s seen him in two or three weeks.”
“And neither of you has heard anything about an assassination plot?”
“Not till you showed up,” Iryna said. She looked hard at Scorpion. “What’s happened to Alyona? She’s only been missing for a few hours. What aren’t you telling me?”
She was good, Scorpion thought. Whoever judged her just on her looks underestimated her. She had that extraordinary combination of being cool, smart, and sharp that the Russians call krutoy.
“She’s probably dead,” he said, watching them. Kozhanovskiy stared at him, stunned. Iryna had to stifle a gasp. Either they were both great actors or he had caught them by surprise.
“What do you mean ‘probably’?” Iryna said, taking a deep breath.
“There’s no body. I entered her apartment. There were traces of blood in the bed and in the shower. I found a hacksaw from Pyatov’s work hidden under the sink, its blade missing. The hacksaw frame had traces of blood. Her neighbor told me sometime around noon there were screams and sounds of a quarrel and the televidenie got very loud. Later, she saw Pyatov leave alone with a big suitcase on wheels.”
“Gospadi,” Iryna said softly, almost to herself. My God.
“What about Pyatov?” Kozhanovskiy asked. “Does anyone know where he is now?”
“I checked at his work,” Scorpion said. “They haven’t seen him in three weeks.”
“You’ve been busy,” Iryna said, looking at him with those intense blue eyes with a tinge, he could swear, of real interest, as if seeing him for the first time.
“If Pyatov killed Alyona, it means…” Kozhanovskiy began.
“ Tak, yes-it means he couldn’t trust her,” she said. “The assassination plot could be real.”
“Pyatov worked for us!” Kozhanovskiy said. “The media will crucify us! It’s a disaster.”
“It’s worse than that,” Iryna replied, her fist clenched on the table. “If the Russians think we killed Cherkesov, they’ll invade. It’s the end of Ukraine!”
“NATO will have to do some-” he started to say.
“Nichivo!” she snapped. Nothing! “NATO will make noise and the UN will tsk-tsk; the Europeans will cluck and the Americans will shake their fingers and say, ‘Shame on Russia,’ and they-will-do-nothing,” she concluded, enunciating each word.
Kozhanovskiy looked at her. “We should call the politsiy.”
“Before we find out who else might be implicated?” she said. “And what if they arrest us? On the eve of the election! Half the politsiy are crooks and the other half are working for Cherkesov!”
“What can we do?” he asked.
“We have to stop Pyatov,” she said.
“How do we even know he’s the assassin?” Kozhanovskiy growled. “All we know is what this journalist,” indicating Scorpion and using the word like a curse, “is telling us. We have no idea who he is.”
“Alyona’s friends, the actors at the Black Cat,” Scorpion said, “told me that three weeks ago Pyatov came into money. They said he had a big deal going. The same time he stopped showing up for work.”
“The same time he stopped working for us,” Iryna murmured.
“They said he was Syndikat,” Scorpion added. “They were afraid of him.”
“ Sooka suna, it fits,” Kozhanovskiy cursed. He looked at Iryna. “Now what?”
She took a sip of tea, eyeing Scorpion.
“Mr. Kilbane, you mean to track Pyatov down, don’t you? We couldn’t stop you if we wanted to, could we?”
