“I think I should put myself in your hands,” he said, handing back the menu. “I’m very hungry.”
She nodded confidently.
“I imagine it will be different than what your Russian friends ordered last night,” he added.
Her smile turned to a frown. “They wouldn’t know good food if it bit them.”
“Why do so many Russians come here?” he asked. “To the village — not here. Here it’s obvious. Your food is so good. And the cocktails.”
He pointed at his empty glass.
“They only drink vodka,” she told him.
“What is it about the area? If they don’t really ride bikes?”
She shrugged. “It’s always been that way.”
Nuri got little else from her but food. She brought an appetizer dish that looked as if it were pancakes, though there were bits of what he thought were meat in them. The main course was familiar — beef with noodles, and very good.
Dessert consisted of two pastries. They looked exactly the same, but tasted very different. One, filled with some sort of fruit, was borderline delicious. The other, with a mystery filling, was borderline poisonous.
Maybe not so borderline. Nuri had one bite, felt his stomach start to turn, and got up to use the restroom.
When he came back, the hostess was clearing the table. He started another conversation, mentioning that someone had told him about a Russian doctor who helped train athletes for the Olympics before Moldova was independent.
“Russian doctors.” She made a face.
“Bad?”
“One struck my mother in the street twenty years ago. She could not walk forever after that accident. Did he even apologize? And he came back many times — still sometimes I see him.”
“He lived here?”
“Not lived. But stayed. Russians.” She shook her head.
“Came here a lot?”
“Not in my cafe.”
“But the town.”
“They come in. They think they own us.”
“I’m sure. What about this guy? He owned a house?”
“She has the house. A kilometer out of town. She is Russian, too. He pays, I’m sure. You know the kind. With a family. On the side, they play.”
“You know his name?”
“Pfff — all Russians. Who keeps track?”
She took the dishes and went back into the kitchen.
Nuri reached into his pocket for the MY-PID controller and called up a photo of the doctor.
“Is this him?” he asked when she returned.
The hostess made a face, then looked at him as if he had tricked and betrayed her.
“I’m an investigator for the Olympics,” he told her quickly. “We believe this man may have done some illegal things. If you have information about where he lived here, or any of his dealings, it would remain confidential. I would never say where I got it.”
It was one thing to complain about the Russians, and quite another to reveal that you were investigating them, especially when you had appeared to be just a benign tourist. The woman instantly turned cold, going so far as to pretend that she didn’t understand his English.
It had been a calculated risk, and Nuri knew he had had lost. But her reaction made it obvious that the doctor was in fact the same person. Finding which property he owned was simply a process of elimination, solved within a few minutes by MY-PID as it searched through property and utility records. These were somewhat sparse, but the computer filled in the gaps by accessing every possible record it could find. It finally gave Nuri two possible locations for the house.
There was no way he was going to sleep now, at least not until he checked them out. They were two kilometers away, one northeast and the other just slightly northwest of the hamlet.
He drove past both. Neither looked much like the sort of place a man who lived in the Chisinau mansion would choose. Both were over a hundred years old; neither measured more than eight hundred square feet. One leaned to the left; the other seemed to be missing a foundation pier on the right. The lights were on in both houses, but neither had cars out front.
Nuri debated what to do. The action at the farm had shown that the Wolves were extremely formidable, and he didn’t want to walk into an ambush. On the other hand, the longer they waited to talk to the woman, the less likely they’d find anything of use. He debated it back and forth and finally decided to see what he could find out.
Nuri parked in the driveway of the house that was missing the foundation pier. It was a muddy, rutted affair that cut diagonally across the front yard. He got out of his car. He was still working on his cover story when the door opened. The inside light framed a slender blonde in her early twenties standing in the doorway.
“Can I help you?” she asked in Moldovan.
“I am looking for Dr. Nudstrumov,” he said, using Russian.
“Dr. Nudstrumov? What are you saying?”
She was still speaking in Moldovan, and didn’t appear to recognize the Russian at all when Nuri repeated it.
“I don’t know a doctor,” she told him. “Do you have the right house?”
The woman was pretty, and certainly the sort that might be kept in a love nest, as the woman at the cafe had put it. But as soon as Nuri heard a male voice behind her, the theory lost a great deal of credibility.
Unless, of course, the man was one of the Wolves.
“Perhaps he uses a different name,” said Nuri, exhausting the phrases he had memorized with MY-PID’s help.
The woman shrugged. The man appeared behind her. He was only a little taller than she was, thin — not an overjuiced type like the men at the Wolf farm.
“I’m looking for the doctor’s relatives,” said Nuri, moving to English as the idea occurred to him. “Because we have news — we believe he is dead.”
“Who?” said the young man. He understood the English, but it quickly became clear that the doctor’s name meant nothing to either him or the girl. Nuri showed them the photo on the MY-PID without getting a reaction.
“I’m sorry for bothering you,” he told them.
The second house was so close to the road that Nuri couldn’t even park in front of it, fearing that his vehicle would be sideswiped. He found a wide shoulder about thirty meters farther down. Parking there, he walked back along the road’s edge. As he approached, he could see an old woman working in the kitchen, washing dishes. She had the wrinkled face of a woman who had seen much trouble in her life, but her movements were graceful, the sort of effortless gestures a ballerina might make.
Nuri stopped. What would she have looked like twenty years before, when the athletic training facility was still operating?
In her thirties, still attractive, but on the precipice of decline.
Nuri prompted MY-PID for a new set of phrases, rehearsing them as he walked to the house.
“The doctor sent me,” he said when he knocked on the door. “I was to collect the things.”
“What?” she answered harshly in Moldovan.
“I don’t know. He said that you would know.”
“Are you crazy?”
Remembering what the woman at the cafe had said, Nuri switched to Russian.
“The doctor sent me,” he told her.
“What language is that? Speak in Moldovan.”
He repeated the words the computer had told him.
