—
Ranveer is somewhere between sixty seconds and two minutes into his breathing routine when he feels a cold metal cylinder pressed against the nape of his neck. At the same moment, he feels warm breathing in his ear, and in a surly Eastern European accent, he hears:
“Namaste, motherfucker.”
Ranveer opens his eyes and turns his head just enough to see the wide, mischievous grin of Henryk Szczęście, a man said to be every bit as dangerous and unpredictable as an attempt to pronounce his surname. But the interloper’s joviality is short-lived; Henryk’s expression instantly morphs into horror when he looks down and sees the long, lithe slab of Damascus steel pressed against his Achilles tendon with just enough pressure to be felt, but not quite enough to break the skin.
“How do you fancy walking?” Ranveer casually inquires, his English distinctly British. Both men know that barely a flick of Ranveer’s wrist would unspool and snarl the muscles and tendons in Henryk’s lower leg like a poorly cast fishing reel.
“What the fuck, man?” Henryk lowers the instrument in his hand and ever so cautiously steps away from the blade. “You meditate with a goddamn knife?”
When Ranveer was growing up, yoga and meditation were considered subversive and somehow spiritually underhanded by the Islamic Republic, so yeah, he sometimes meditated with a knife.
“You don’t?”
The metal object formerly pressed up against Ranveer’s neck turns out to be the business end of Henryk’s vaporizer. Although he is breathing heavily, he gives the device a good long suck as though he were an asthmatic clinging to life by the fraying thread of his inhaler. Meanwhile, Ranveer leans over and lays his blade gingerly across an incense bowl, where it will not accidentally impale anyone. He then unfolds his legs, stands, and stretches to his full and not-inconsiderable height. The Iranian is several centimeters taller than the Pole, but to balance things out, Henryk has at least fifty pounds on him. By the time Henryk exhales, it barely looks like he is sighing on a cold Warsaw morning, as the majority of the vapor he drew has apparently been permanently sequestered somewhere deep inside his body. The two men regard each other for a protracted moment before coming together in a warm, back-slapping embrace.
“It’s good to see you, my friend,” Henryk says.
“You too.”
Henryk is bald, stocky, tattooed, and has a jaw that looks like it would shatter your fist long before it would succumb to dislocation or fracturing. In fact, in looking at him, it is hard to imagine where you could possibly strike such that your hand or foot or elbow or knee would not come out on the losing end of the bargain. He continues to draw significantly more than his fair share of air as sweat beads on his scalp like condensation, and his uncharacteristically petite ears are as red and radiant as signal flares. Despite the heat, he is wearing a heavy crimson tracksuit that some would consider stylish and that has black (possibly carbon-fiber) herringbone patterns down the sleeves and legs. Both it and his sneakers are emblazoned with the intricate logo of a European designer brand that Ranveer does not recognize on account of the fact that the two men move in very different fashion circles.
“I came in the way you told me,” Henryk says, “and parked just where you said. I thought you were being careful, but then I come in and find you half asleep.”
“Focusing my mind,” Ranveer corrects. “There’s a difference.”
Henryk has been known to beat people to death even while in possession of a perfectly good pistol, and to release choke holds just prior to asphyxiation in order to give his victims enough time to regain consciousness purely so that he can make them experience the horror of knowing that they are about to die all over again. It’s like edging for homicidal sociopaths.
“The fucking elevator is broken. I had to take the goddamn stairs.”
He also has the mouth of a sailor with a raging case of gonorrhea.
“This is a yoga studio. You’re supposed to get exercise.”
The whispered stories of Henryk’s violent nature have expanded to nearly mythical proportions, but ever since he and Ranveer spent a snowy evening in Gdansk over a decade ago pouring each other shots of Belvedere Polish rye, Ranveer has known that none of them are true. Henryk was moonlighting as a lookout for a U.S. Navy Island-class landing ship that the CIA repurposed as a mobile black site, and Ranveer was in town to put as many prisoners out of their misery as possible before they had a chance to unburden themselves. As far as Ranveer could tell, while Henryk had probably been indirectly complicit in dozens of deaths, he didn’t seem capable of putting a suffering dog out of its misery, much less ending another man’s life by his own hand. So rather than establishing a reputation through actual acts of violence, Henryk’s MO has always been to take credit for unclaimed bodies as a sophisticated form of criminal mimicry. He is like a harmless red and black milk snake that is nearly indistinguishable from its lethal coral brethren.
“How is your father?” Henryk asks. “Still in Tehran?”
“Same house I grew up in.”
“How is the dentistry business these days?”
“He finally retired.”
“Ah. And how does a retired dentist in Tehran spend his days? Is he still flying hawks?”
“Falcons. Every day. He’s president of the Tehran Falcon Flying Club now. Falcons, football, and complaining about the Supreme Leader. That’s retirement in Iran.”
“And a good retirement it is,” Henryk affirms. “You’ll give him my love, I hope.”
“Of course. And Aleksander?”
“He wants me out of the game, as usual,” Henryk says. “I told him only if he agrees to marry me. I think I almost have him convinced. We are going to Greece in the spring. That is the best time to go.”
“If you ever talk him into marrying you, you
