unmatched furniture.
“They are with Masha tonight. I am sorry. I did not know you were coming to Kiev.”
He waited for her to offer him a seat. She did not.
“Perhaps tomorrow,” he said.
“You came to Kiev to see the children?”
“And you, and because of a case. Elena is here with me.”
“Give her my best.”
“Would you like to see her?”
“No. I was about to go out.”
“I see. Maya, I have changed.”
“Into what?”
There was a bitterness in her voice he did not recognize and did not like. He had interviewed too many people, particularly women, not to recognize what she was doing.
“Who is it?” he asked.
Maya’s shoulders drooped, but only slightly. She looked at the brush in her hand and then at the wall, wishing that perhaps it would provide some counsel.
“I am going to dinner with a man from my office.”
“The Japanese?”
In response to his history of infidelity, a little more than two years ago Maya had begun a brief affair with an older, married Japanese executive with the company for which she worked.
“No. I have not seen him since. .”
“Are you going to come back to Moscow with the children? I do not mean right away, though that would be. .”
“I am not coming back to Moscow,” she said softly. “You are not going to change. I don’t want to spend any more years trying with you and failing.”
“Would it cost so much to try once more?”
“Too much,” she said. “How long are you planning to be in Kiev?”
“Not long.”
“Can you come back tomorrow morning to see the children before I go to work?”
“Yes.”
“Eight o’clock.”
She looked at the door again and then at her watch. He knew why she was doing both. He should have made an effort to make the situation easier for her, but he could not bring himself to do it.
And then a knock came, startling Maya who looked around for someplace to put her brush. She settled for a small round table with a surface the size of a dinner plate.
Another knock. She looked at Sasha, trying to decide whether she would choose defiance or pleading. She decided on a plea. Sasha closed his eyes and nodded in acceptance of a truce with good grace.
Maya opened the door. The man was not impressive. He was slightly shorter than Sasha, at least a decade older, his gray hair thinning significantly. His face showed weathering and suggested reliability. He wore a knowing smile and a very neatly pressed blue suit, white shirt, and a tie that hinted at old English school.
The man kissed her cheek before she could back away and close the door.
“This is my husband, Sasha,” she said, folding her hands knuckle white in front of her. “Sasha, this is Anders.”
The two men shook hands, and Maya said, “I did not know Sasha was in Kiev till he knocked at the door a few minutes ago.”
Anders nodded and smiled.
“I have heard a great deal about you,” Anders said in only slightly accented Russian.
“I have heard nothing about you,” said Sasha.
“Maya and I work together. I’m Swedish, forty-five, reasonably healthy, a lawyer, unmarried.”
“And you tell me all this, why?”
“Because I want to marry your wife and raise your children.”
“What has she told you about me?”
“Sasha,” Maya pleaded.
“That you love her, are a fine father, and a good but immature and very unreliable man,” Anders said.
Sasha nodded. The assessment was accurate. Sasha liked the man. This encounter would have been so much easier if he could see something in Anders that he could attack, but he saw and felt nothing.
“Yes,” said Sasha.
“I think you should go now, Sasha,” Maya said, touching his sleeve.
He looked down at her hand, willing it to stay where it was, knowing his will had no effect on her and had not for a long, long time.
“We should go too,” Maya said softly. “Come by in the morning, Sasha.”
Sasha nodded. He suddenly had questions that he knew he could not ask: Did she love this man?
“Tomorrow,” he said, taking Anders’s offered hand and then moving to the door.
When the door had closed behind him, Sasha heard their voices but he could not make out what they were saying.
Gerald St. James listened calmly to the caller and with his free hand popped a ripe, black Greek olive into his mouth. After listening for a few minutes, he said, “No more killings.”
“No more are needed,” said the caller.
“That is for me to determine. It was for me to determine before you disposed of, what’s his name?”
“Lebedev.”
“Lebedev. The policeman from Moscow? Is he competent?”
“Yes.”
“Meaning he could cause a great deal of damage.”
“Yes.”
“But if he were killed, they would send another.”
“But not one so competent, probably.”
“Keep me informed, and I may revise my order.”
“To. .?”
“Refrain from killing. This has become very messy. I don’t like things messy.”
The caller knew that in his younger days, when Gerald St. James was a Bulgarian street robber, killing had been very messy.
“If it is necessary, it will not be messy.”
“Good.”
St. James hung up. Let the caller worry about it. The entire operation was not going smoothly. The murders at Devochka were drawing too much police attention. The termination of the Botswanan connection in Moscow had run into problems. The recovery of the transported diamonds in Kiev was at best incomplete.
St. James was alone in the house in Kensington-Highgate. His very English wife was visiting friends for the weekend. One of those friends was Vikki Thorpe. Vikki’s husband was Sir Charles Thorpe, former head of the British consulate in northern Russia, the area which included all of Siberia.
Gerald St. James would get up in the morning, drive himself to pick up his wife, and conveniently run into Sir Charles. Gerald had a proposal he wished to make, a very subtle proposal which he hoped the sometimes-obtuse member of the House of Lords was capable of understanding.
Weak links, weak links, weak links. Balta was an expert in finding weak links, be they in the personalities of those he stalked or worked with or those at the base of their necks that invited the blade.
Balta didn’t enjoy killing. It was simply something he did well. Other people’s dying was his living. The question now, as he lay naked in bed after a hot shower, was: who was the weak link, and who might he have to kill.
