Eye of the Beholder

Lang Trotter is a very smart man. A good one, too.

I thank him and close the cell phone.

I CATCH A TAXI outside the hotel and give the man the address. I rest my head against the seat and look out along the coastline, the magnificent beaches and the eternal, ice blue sea, as the cab navigates the narrow roads.

Leonid Koslenko, it turns out, had murdered his sister, Katrina, when he was fifteen, insisting to his family afterward that she was a spy bent on destroying their family and country. His parents had connections with the politburo and got him institutionalized instead of criminally prosecuted. And while accounts are still sketchy, it sounds like someone in the KGB became impressed with Koslenko’s physical skills and, after he’d spent two years in a mental institution, recruited him for some dirty work. About two years after that, his disapproving family pulled some strings and cut a deal with the Soviet government-probably spreading around plenty of money in the process-that allowed Koslenko to leave the Soviet Union as a “political dissident.” It was, apparently, a fairly easy sell, because it was widely known that the Soviets locked up political enemies in mental institutions.

But Leo Koslenko was no dissident. He belonged in an institution.

In Koslenko’s mind, his days as an assassin-spy never ended. The United States was just a new assignment, with Natalia Lake Bentley as his mother superior. He continued in treatment for paranoid schizophrenia and took his medications. No one knows what was in his mind during that time-whether he was awaiting orders or whether he was conducting “missions” of his own-but, as far as we know, he managed to stay out of trouble, living fairly comfortably at Mia Lake’s home, working as a ranch hand, so to speak. He came to know Cassie, who was far and away the most approachable, sincere member of the Lake-Bentley clan.

But he was ready when his orders came-the day Cassie murdered Ellie Danzinger in a fit of rage and despair. When Natalia called on him, he sprang to duty.

From what he was mumbling to me about Burgos-He was one of us-it seems that, after watching Burgos dispose of Ellie’s body so efficiently, he came to believe that Burgos was working with them, too. That, in his mind, was why Natalia had directed him to move Ellie’s body to Burgos’s house. He was another spy, a comrade. And when he watched his comrade Burgos kill the prostitutes, he came to believe that prostitutes were the enemy, acting out covert missions, using their occupation as cover.

No one knows how many prostitutes Leo Koslenko murdered after the Burgos affair. Streetwalkers disappear all the time and people rarely look very hard for them. The prostitute he’d been accused of murdering a few years back, it turned out, had the incision between her fourth and fifth toes on the left foot. Police have opened files on other hookers who were found dead; three of them so far have the same signature mark. Others, however, would have to be exhumed, and it’s unlikely anyone will go to the trouble.

That’s why he killed Amalia Calderone, the woman I escorted out of the bar. He thought he was saving my life. He wrapped my unconscious hand around the tire iron, the murder weapon, not to frame me but to get me involved, to wake me up to the fact that help was needed again. He also killed a woman from a hardware store who was not a prostitute but who was very attractive and provocatively dressed and whom his tortured mind took to be a hooker-read spy.

He’d also used a Russian prostitute who went by the name of Dodya to substitute in as Shelly’s double in the bathtub. Turns out, the comradska imported young Russian women into the city and kept them in a warehouse where anyone with enough cash could make use of them. Koslenko had purchased the girl outright for eight thousand dollars, killed her, took her to Shelly’s apartment, and did what he did to her.

He’d been unhappy with me up to that point. I hadn’t responded to his notes. I’d thwarted his attempt to kill Brandon Mitchum. I wasn’t being a comrade. His trick in Shelly’s apartment was intended to get me on board-I had a day or two, at best, before blood tests and other testing would have established that Shelly was not the woman in that bathtub. I think the idea was, if I didn’t clean up the mess-if I didn’t behave-in a day or so he’d kill Shelly for real. In the meantime, no one would be looking for Shelly because everyone-except for me-would think she was dead. He was sure I would know differently.

Natalia Lake, thus far, has escaped any criminal charges. The word is the county attorney is considering a charge for her role in covering up Cassie’s murder of Ellie Danzinger, but I think that’s just to placate the media feeding frenzy. It’s not going to happen. There’s no real proof that Cassie even killed Ellie-she did, of course, but knowing it and proving it are two different things-much less that Natalia actively covered anything up. And this is to say nothing of the fact that Terry Burgos has already been officially blamed, convicted, and executed for the murder of Ellie Danzinger.

Natalia’s statement to the police, of course, left out the part where she directed Leo Koslenko to move Ellie’s body from the apartment to Burgos’s house and directed him to keep watch over Burgos and report back to her. And I haven’t told the police any of that.

Not yet, anyway. And maybe never.

The taxi moves into a residential neighborhood, large estates built high up on the hills, with large fences surrounding them. I had thought about renting some estate for this week with Shelly, but hotels are much better in terms of security. Shelly didn’t need to be sleeping in some giant house with creaks and groans in a place thousands of miles from home.

And, besides, a partner of mine in my law firm said if you stay in Saint- Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, you gotta stay at the Grand Hotel.

I pay the driver in euros sufficient to convince him to stick around. I walk up to a large gate, bordered by twin, white stone blocks, and push a buzzer embedded in a gold plate.

“Bon jour,” a woman’s voice says through a speaker.

“Paul Riley,” I say, “for Gwendolyn Lake.”

“Ah.” She pauses to convert to English. “Mister-Riley?”

“Paul Riley, yes.”

“You have an appointment?”

“No. Tell her I’m alone, please.”

After a good ten minutes, a man walks down the long driveway toward me, looking tan and healthy and wearing all white. “Mr. Riley?”

“Oui.”

“Bon jour.” He opens a small gate and leads me into the estate. We climb endless, outdoor stairs, past well-kept, flourishing island plants and trees. The house itself is large but not monstrous, a two-level brick, full of windows that gleam in the bright sunlight.

Instead of taking me into the house, he leads me down a path that winds around the house, until we reach the back. There is a swimming pool as big as the one that was in my high school, a Jacuzzi off to the side, and a large deck area.

“Ms. Lake,” the man says.

The last time I saw her, she was ragged, in bedclothes and with flat hair, pouring out the beginning of a story to me in the parlor of Natalia’s home. Four hours later, she boarded an American Airlines flight, nonstop to De Gaulle airport in Paris.

Today, she is wearing a one-piece orange bathing suit with a white terry cloth robe over her shoulders, spread out on a lounge chair on the deck by her pool. Her skin is more tanned than the last time I saw her. Her hair has dried from a swim, hanging at her shoulders. She peeks at me over her sunglasses.

She says nothing to me, doesn’t offer me a chair or anything else.

“I don’t know what Natalia told you,” I say, “but I don’t see any charges sticking against her. She’s lucky.”

She places the book she’s reading to the side and sits up in the lounge chair, putting her feet on the deck.