an orange-tinted syrup that he hoped would taste something like Grand Marnier, or maybe cough syrup.
It was more like liquid fire. Jelled liquid fire. Like napalm, it clung to his throat.
“Good?” asked the woman.
“Oh yeah. Good,” managed Nuri. “Can I have some water?”
She came back with the menu as well. It offered food in three languages — Moldovan, English, and Russian.
“Do you get a lot of Russians in here?” he asked the hostess after he ordered a small steak.
“Russian?” The woman made a face and said something Moldovan that was too low for the computer to pick up but was clearly not a compliment.
“The Russians cause problems?” Nuri asked.
“You are Russian?”
“No, no. American.”
“I thought,” said the woman. She nodded approvingly and began talking. She didn’t like Russians. She told him that they were dirty pigs and often didn’t pay their bills. The cafe got a few every few months, big lugs who smelled like sweaty cows.
“Four yesterday, for lunch,” she said. “Enough for a year.”
“Are they tourists?”
She made another face.
“You have a lot of tourists?” Nuri asked.
“Tourists? Here? We have one place to stay. A small place. And this restaurant. What tourists would come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“There are no other restaurants or hotels — that is why people stop here. The countryside, maybe. They see, they like. Every so often, though — Russians.”
“Why? They looking for a bargain?”
She shrugged.
“They say they train for Olympics,” she told him. “Bicyclists.”
“Bicyclists?” Nuri wasn’t sure he heard the word right.
The hostess frowned and waved her hand. “I know what bicyclists look like. Skinny. These are always big. American football. Bicyclists? Ha!”
She walked off, shaking her head.
Nuri remembered the woman’s complaints an hour later, after dinner, when he left the restaurant and heard Russian being spoken behind him. He walked another step, then stopped, looking both ways as if trying to see if it was safe to cross the street.
Two men were entering the cafe. They were the only other people out.
He thought about them as he walked back to his car. The Russian mafiya was involved in many of the marijuana operations in Moldova, and while this wasn’t a big area for pot cultivation, he had firsthand proof that it wasn’t entirely bereft of it either.
Would the Wolves stop here on their way to the farm? If you didn’t want everyone descending in one swoop, maybe. It was right on the road.
More likely not, he decided. But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. He walked back, glancing into the restaurant from the other side of the street. The men were seated toward the back of the room, barely visible through the large window. Clearly, the hostess didn’t see their presence as helping business much.
Nuri thought of going in and leaving a bug — he had several in his bag in the car. But it was likely the woman would greet him in a way that made it obvious he’d decided to come back. Even if he came up with a plausible excuse, he might make the Russians suspicious.
He changed direction and headed back toward his car. Just as he was about to cross over, he saw the sign for the hotel the hostess had mentioned. It was more house than hotel, a small, late nineteenth-century residence divided into guest rooms.
Nuri got his bag out of the car and went to the hotel. The clerk at the desk was also the owner, a rotund but friendly woman in her fifties, who smiled when Nuri told her the owner of the cafe had recommended he stay there.
“I’m a little tired and just need the night,” he said in Moldovan, with MY-PID’s help. “You have rooms?”
They had four. Three were open.
“Maybe my friend is in the other?” he asked, switching to English.
The sign outside had indicated that English was spoken, but the woman didn’t know much beyond “hello” and “credit card.” Nuri was counting on this — he started describing his friend in great detail.
The woman held up her hands and told him in Moldovan that she didn’t understand.
“My friend, my friend,” he said. “A businessman — he came from this town.”
“We have two guests,” she said. “Russian. In Room 4. They’re foul-smelling oafs, but money is money.”
“Money, yes,” said Nuri, pretending that he hadn’t understood entirely. “You have my credit card.”
“Everything good.”
“Great,” he said. “Where is my room?”
Nuri’s room was directly across from the Russians’. He put his bag down in it, then went across the hall and knocked on their door, just to make sure no one was there.
When no one answered, he played a hunch, fitting his room key into theirs. The door opened without his even needing to jiggle it.
He slipped a bug into the light fixture, then decided that was too obvious. He found a better spot in the baseboard heater, and left another in the bathroom beneath the sink.
Could he do more?
He looked around the room. The men had each brought a small overnight bag containing only a change of clothes and a couple of bottles of vodka. There was no laptop to inspect, no papers to rifle through. He had a tracking bug, but he thought it would be conspicuous inside either piece of luggage, given that there were no interior pockets or other crevices where it could be easily hidden.
Back in his room, he tossed his bag out the window into the yard so it wouldn’t be obvious he was leaving for good. That turned out to be unnecessary — the proprietor had gone into her own apartment to watch television when he came down, and didn’t even see him leave.
As he walked around to get his bag, he noticed a small parking lot at the back of the house. He scooped up his bag and walked over to the two cars in the lot — a ten-year-old Toyota, and a new Hyundai.
Which one belonged to the Russian?
The Hyundai surely, he decided, but with two trackers in his pocket, he bugged both, slipping the devices over the cars’ gas tanks.
Nuri drove around the countryside for over an hour, partly to kill time and partly to get a feel for the area. The gentle hills and abundant streams made for excellent small-scale farming, but small-scale farming couldn’t compete with the much larger operation elsewhere in Europe, let alone the rest of the world.
On the one hand, the Moldovans had an almost idyllic setting and lifestyle; on the other hand, they were poor, at least by Western standards. He had seen incredible poverty in Africa, and no place in Europe would ever match that. But he couldn’t help feeling somewhat sympathetic to this country, which seemed better suited for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
His job wasn’t to be sympathetic. He was just starting to head for the meeting with the police when MY-PID reported that the Russians had returned to their rented room. Listening to them was better than the radio, and so he had the computer translate for him as he drove.
The beginnings of the conversation were mundane — they criticized the food they’d just eaten and debated whether the hostess would have been worth taking to bed.
Then they broke out the vodka.
“We ought to just go out tonight,” said one. “Better to sleep there than in this flea trap.”
