“I’ve got a dinner meeting,” said Rochelle. “It will have to be late.”
“Late is fine. Do you know Eric’s Bar, across the street from the Kinotheater Kiev on Chervonarmiyska Street?”
“I’ll find it. What time?”
“What time?” Oxana repeated looking at Jan.
He held up ten fingers and then another one.
“Eleven?”
“Eleven,” said Rochelle.
“I’ll bring my fiancé,” said Oxana. “He’s a policeman. He would very much like to meet you.”
Jan nodded yes.
“Perfect,” said Rochelle. “Eleven at Eric’s Bar. I look forward to it.”
The call ended, and Oxana returned the phone to her purse as Jan crumpled the empty white bag and dropped it into the metal trash container to his right. He got up. So did she.
Balta watched them walk down the path together. He was reclining on a blanket under a tree about fifty yards away. In front of him was a gathering of six old men watching two other old men playing chess on a park bench. They provided near perfect cover.
Balta decided to follow the man with Oxana. At the moment he looked like someone for whom he should have some concern. Balta had no doubt that he could handle the man if it were necessary or if it would help get the diamonds. And he felt that this just might be the case.
He welcomed the challenge.
The street was almost empty. The few people James Harumbaki passed were drunken men and a woman who clutched her purse as he approached from behind her. She looked over her shoulder, saw this black man with his mouth open panting behind her, and pressed herself against the wall, searching inside her oversized bag for the knife her husband had given her for things like this.
James saw the fear in her eyes and simply kept running, losing blood from the stub of his finger, leaving a red trail as he bled through the cloth napkin he had snatched from the table in the bar.
It was not easy to will the world back into submission. He tried as he trod on, no longer running, not looking back over his shoulder. There was no need.
Even with his loss of blood, the out-of-shape Russians were no match for the lean, athletic Botswanan. Still, he could hear someone coming behind him. James had no idea where he was running. His thought now was to get out of sight of his pursuer, hide until daylight, hope that he could stop the bleeding, and perhaps even get back to Patrice and the others and reunite with his missing finger.
His run was now a slow shuffle. He chanced a glance over his left shoulder. There came a large man.
The man was jogging steadily. He was not one of the three Russians who had taken him prisoner, killed his friends, and cut off his finger. This man was fully clothed and determined, and definitely not out for a jog.
James willed himself to hurry. His body did not respond. He turned and spread his legs to meet the man who was coming. Maybe he could surprise the man, kick him between the legs, break his collarbone with a blow to the neck. The options were not good, but at least there were options.
The man was closing. Far behind him, in the light from a street lamp, was another man, a slouching creature who reminded James less of a man at this distance than of a monster.
The pursuer closed in now.
Then there was the sound of a car behind the man. James saw headlights coming closer. The car screeched as it changed gears. James headed for the sidewalk.
The car almost hit the pursuing man and skidded to a stop in the street next to James. The back door of the old Zil opened.
James knew the car. He had ridden in it to the bar.
No escape. He looked at the man coming down the street and could see now that the man was holding a gun.
“
“I had that audience and you took it from me. Now I think I’ll take something from you.”
The man in the street with a gun, no more than twenty yards away now, shouted, “Stop.”
James went through the open door of the car.
Iosef fired a shot, and then another as the car in front of him took off down the street. When it had turned a corner, Zelach appeared at his side. Unlike Iosef, Zelach didn’t appear to be breathing hard.
“I thought you do not work out,” said Iosef, panting.
“I do not.”
“Are you even sweating?”
“No,” said Zelach. “Yoga.”
“You do yoga?”
Iosef was looking down at the trail of blood he had been following.
“Yes. My mother, too. She taught me.”
“Maybe she will teach me.”
“I’m sure she would,” said Zelach.
“Good. Now we must find the people in that car.”
“How?”
“The Botswanans.”
Sasha Tkach was afraid.
He moved slowly up the dark, narrow wooden stairway in the old three-story building that had once housed the offices of the Voluntary Collective of Sewing Machine Operators. The stairway was dark. The steps creaked with each step he took.
The building had been converted to apartments more than half a century ago. The conversion had been far less than successful. Some of the apartments were small, just single rooms of unimpressive size. Others were four rooms of varying sizes.
Sasha moved to the door he was seeking, took a deep breath, brushed back his hair, smelled his breath against the palm of his hand, and knocked.
He had left his gun in the hotel room provided by Jan Pendowski and the Kiev Police Department’s Smuggling Division. He had put on his primary change of clothing, told Elena, who was in the room next to his, that he was going out, and made his way to this building, to this door.
He knocked again and thought he heard a woman humming. She sounded happy. The sound of happiness was not a good sign.
“Yes?” she asked.
“It is me,” Sasha said.
There was a beat. Then the door opened and there stood Maya, looking small, dark, a brush poised touching her long, dark hair.
“You are here,” she said.
Had he hoped for a look of forgiveness, or even a tiny smile of appreciation, he would have been disappointed.
“I am here,” he said.
“Why?”
“May I come in?”
She considered, let her hand with the brush drop to her side and answered, “No. Yes. Come in.”
She was wearing a pale green dress he did not recognize. Around her neck was a strand of small, glittering glass pieces that looked like diamonds. Sasha had given the strand to her as one of the many peace offers made over the years for his inevitable transgressions. Was there hope in it being around her neck?
She stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door.
“The children?” he asked, looking around the room brightly lit with aluminum floor lamps and scattered with
