The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls Read online

  THE TREACHERY OF RUSSIAN NESTING DOLLS

  The Nadia Tesla Series

  OREST STELMACH

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright 2017 © Orest Stelmach

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  www.oreststelmach.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0997253-0-6

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  Also by Orest Stelmach

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  ALSO BY OREST STELMACH

  The Boy from Reactor 4

  The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

  The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark

  The Altar Girl

  For Tra and Nell

  CHAPTER 1

  The best way to find someone who doesn’t want to be found is to make him search for you.

  For an American woman in a foreign country, that can be problematic. Fortunately, I was in Amsterdam. Most people come to Amsterdam in search of something. You can find anything you want and all of it is legal. All I had to do to find the murder victim’s secret lover was to become what he wanted.

  It took me four days to make the necessary arrangements. The biggest impediment to my mission was my American passport. The landlords who rented the type of office I needed leased space only to tenants with EU passports. I finally found one who was willing to make an exception in the spirit of international cooperation. My offer to pay a fifty percent premium in rent may have played a small role, too.

  The landlady’s office was located on a canal with Venetian views and a pair of majestic white swans near a bar called the Black Tiger in the city’s oldest section. The landlady greeted me at the door with a chilling once-over that left me fearing I’d gone too far this time. She looked like a sewer-dwelling cannibal who’d snuck above ground to lure her next meal to her nest, latex skin stretched taut over a bare skeleton disguised by a designer suit. If her profit were threatened, I could picture her crossing the threshold from stark to stark raving mad and consuming my body. God only knew what she’d suffered to become the woman she appeared to be today.

  I sat across from her at a barebones metal desk, gave her my passport, and answered questions about my background. Her English accent sounded Moroccan or Algerian, not Dutch. That made sense because she was probably connected to organized crime. A Netherlands crime organization was less like a Sicilian family and more like a social media network, a collection of nodes that called upon each other to help with the drug and sex trade throughout Europe. That didn’t make it any less dangerous when crossed.

  After the landlady finished her questionnaire, she asked me to fill out some paperwork. Some parts were for her employers, others for the city of Amsterdam. Then she studied her notes like a teacher grading a test. When she was finished she perused them again, as though she couldn’t fail me but was looking for a reason to do so.

  “Your application is in order,” she finally said, with a note of reluctance. “But I must ask you once more. Are you certain you want to do this?”

  “I’m certain,” I said.

  “You understand why I’m asking. We don’t get many women . . . many women like you.”

  “Like me?”

  She looked me over again to make her point.

  I knew what she meant. I was educated, American, and over thirty.

  “Yes. Women who answer questions with a question,” she said. “Women like you.”

  “I told you. It’s a fantasy of mine. It’s on my bucket list.”

  “Bucket list?”

  “A list of things a person wants to do before she dies,” I said.

  The landlady shook her head as though that made no sense. “You understand that the owners of this business are very serious men. If you are planning on conducting any illegal business from your office, they will deal with you quickly and severely.”

  Her words jolted me. The warning didn’t surprise me, but the landlady’s blunt delivery hit me hard. Once again I wondered if I was being too brazen for my own good.

  “I won’t be using the room to conduct any business other than the one for which it’s intended,” I said.

  The landlord appraised me one more time. Her pen hovered over the signature page as though her instincts were warning her that I might have an ulterior motive. If those were, in fact, her instincts, they were spot-on.

  “Seventy-five euro a night for ten nights,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  “You pay every day by four o’clock.”

  “No. I’m going to pay you in full right now. For all ten days.”

  The landlord lifted her eyebrows a smidge. It was the first time I noticed she had any.

  I pulled seven hundred and fifty euro from my wallet and placed them on her desk. She collected the money, signed the lease and gave me a copy.

  I savored a rush of adrenaline. There was no turning back now. I was committed to my mission. And yet the walls closed in on me a bit, too. The process of renting an office had been very professional. I was here of my own volition and I’d been treated respectfully, by a woman, no less. Still, I detected an undercurrent of exploitation. It was as though a syringe had tapped my soul when I’d signed on the dotted line.

  We walked across the canal and continued two blocks further to a parallel street. The Oude Kerk, the medieval city’s original stone church, stood in the center of a square. My new office was located on the periphery of the quaint, circular walkway surrounding the church. It faced the Puccini Bomboni chocolate shop at the base of the church’s towering steeple, and a small café with outdoor seating. I was dying to try a sea salt caramel truffle from Puccini but duty prevented me from consuming any chocolate for now. Duty was, indeed, a bitch. I glanced at my feet on and off as we circled around the church. The cobblestones along Oudekerksplein were notoriously uneven.

  My office was located on the ground floor of an antique brick apartment building. We entered via a back door, passed a room with a vintage washer and dryer, and a dingy bathroom, and arrived at my new work place. It consisted of one room. A single bed occupied one corner. A high chair faced a floor-to-ceiling window. Its shade was pulled down. There was a second door beside the window. It opened onto the street.

  The landlady pointed to a circular button attached to the wall.

  “Panic button,” she said.

  “Who’s going to come to my rescue?” I said.

  “The Turk will come.”

  “What does he look like?”

  The landlady pressed the button.

  I glanced
at my watch to measure the response time. Twenty seconds later a man came thundering down the hallway into my office. He arrived with muscles bunched and eyes bent on rectifying a wrong. He resembled a pallet-flinging, bone-breaking longshoreman who had rendered cranes and robots unnecessary in his day. His face was the size of a dinner plate and as handsome as the pan in which the roast had burnt. He had to stoop to get into the room, and as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, the blast of garlic almost knocked me out.

  He spoke in Dutch and the landlady answered him accordingly. He relaxed once he heard what she had to say, and gave me his version of the once-over.

  “American?” he said.

  The landlady had seen my passport. I couldn’t lie even though I wanted to for some reason, as though being an American put me at greater risk outside the borders of my home country. This, in turn, pissed me off.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m an American.”

  He nodded with an unsettling mixture of determination and glee. “Good,” he said, in decent English. “I’m going to be your first customer.” With that seemingly business-like proclamation, he turned and disappeared.

  The mere prospect of his intentions trumped most of the trials and tribulations of my life and rendered them cake-eating celebrations. I had become too clever for my own good. In fact, I was insane. A sinking feeling gripped me.

  The landlady handed me the key. “Good luck,” she said.

  I took the key and thanked her. She exited via the rear door also. By the time she was gone I’d calmed myself down the way I always did, by reminding myself there was always a way out of any situation, and that the woman who controlled her emotions would eventually find it.

  I returned to my hotel. I worked out at the gym, tanned in the solarium, and ate two egg whites with a side of spinach, which would be my only meal of the day. I’d deprived myself of carbohydrates for the last four days and had rinsed most of the water out from under my skin. At nine o’clock I packed my tote bag and marched back to my new office. I’d decided to open up at ten o’clock, two hours before their ritual meeting. If the mystery lover didn’t come at midnight, I’d stay open until two in the morning. I’d allow a four-hour window just in case this was the one time that circumstances made him early or late.

  I walked to work dreaming of unlimited carbohydrate consumption. But this gnawing yearning for relief was accompanied by a sense of exultation. For the first time in my life I didn’t loathe or dislike my naked body. My nutritional deprivation had also left me with an eerie high. This hyper-awareness kept me nimble and helped me avoid the onslaught of bicyclists along the roads. It was a steady flow of gorgeous and fit people of all ages speeding to their destinations in pursuit of constant fulfillment, and seemingly indifferent to any pedestrian casualties that might ensue. I loathed the perpetual impediment they posed while fantasizing about their quality of life.

  When I arrived at my office, I went into the bathroom and began to transform myself. I slipped into a caramel-colored wig with a ponytail. Then I put on a fluorescent green bikini, strapped on a pair of matching three-inch pumps, and wrapped a pair of lime-colored Revo sunglasses around my head. When I was done, I looked like the product of a deviant affair between an independent urban woman and a praying mantis.

  I opened a half liter bottle of still water and put it on the high chair beside me. The prior tenant had liked to stay hydrated. Then I affixed my MP3 player onto a portable dock with two small speakers and placed it beside the water. The prior tenant also had been a heavy metal girl who liked the eighties even though she hadn’t been born until the nineties. Her favorite group was a German rock band called the Scorpions, and she listened to their greatest hits in a continuous loop while she worked.

  I pressed play. A guitar screamed, drums pounded. One of my brother’s favorite rock anthems started up.

  My transformation was complete. I now resembled the prior tenant, the girl whose murder I’d been hired to investigate. According to my client, the dead girl was a bit narrower in the shoulders and hips, but one had to be looking to really notice it. All I wanted was for her lover to knock on the door at midnight the way he always did on Saturdays. All I needed was to see him face-to-face and ask him some questions. There was a risk he knew she was dead and wouldn’t come, but my client doubted it. They’d only met at her office and only on Saturday nights. The eccentricity of their meetings had fueled their passion for the last two months. According to my client, they were falling in love when the girl was killed.

  I was more than a bit apprehensive as I approached the floor-to-ceiling window. I imagined yanking the curtain aside and making myself visible. Initially I would feel hopelessly conspicuous. That much was certain, but I had experienced enough adversity in life to know that I would quickly get used to my new circumstances. I wondered if I would feel empowered or humiliated and the effect on my self-esteem if no buyers knocked on my door. It would crush my fragile female ego. The only thing worse would be a steady flow of customers.

  I shrugged my insecurity aside. My concerns were to be expected. They were also irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the job. The mystery lover was out there. Tonight he would come looking for his girl. I had become his girl. Hence, tonight he would come looking for me.

  The song’s refrain poured from the speakers:

  Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.

  I felt as ridiculous as the lyrics sounded. But looking and sounding authentic were prerequisites to completing the assignment I’d accepted. Contrary to the popular saying, failure was an option—it was always an option. But if I failed to complete this assignment, I’d be deeply disappointed because I was working for my most important client. So I pushed aside my self-consciousness, took a final deep breath, exhaled, and pulled the curtain open.

  Dark shadows enveloped the Oude Kerk. The oldest section of Amsterdam, named De Wallen after the retaining walls that once stood here, was also Amsterdam’s best known red-light district. Tourists were still ambling by, but the chocolate shop had closed, a pair of creepy men with turned-up collars sat drinking beer outside the café, and a rowdy group of Englishmen was approaching. I sensed a passive form of aggression in the air, though admittedly, I was wearing sunglasses and everything seemed dark to me. I walked over to the second door, the one that would open my office to the men trolling De Wallen tonight, and flicked a switch on the wall. Two incandescent red lights came alive above the exterior of my window. I stood five feet back from the window, the prior tenant’s preferred position, and sipped from the giant water bottle.

  Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.

  I was now legally employed as a sex worker in Amsterdam. I was a window prostitute. I was as far from the Ukrainian Catholic altar girl I’d been as a child as a woman could get.

  Nadia Tesla was open for business.

  CHAPTER 2

  Window prostitutes disliked being gawked at by tourists because they interfered with the seduction of the self-conscious but real buyer. Personally, I didn’t mind the tourists. Nor did I mind the solitary Asian, Nigerian, or German-looking men walking back and forth along the same street as though they were on their way to the Anne Frank museum but got lost. What unnerved me were the occasional gangs of burly men who looked mean and angry. They didn’t smile, laugh, or appear to be having fun of any kind. Hate, not lust, shone in their eyes. They didn’t look like men who wanted me. They looked like men who wanted to kill me.

  And as that thought flitted through my mind, someone cast a shadow against my window and I heard a knock on my door. To the other women in my newfound trade, it would have been the sound of opportunity. But to me it was the sound of reckoning, for even without seeing his face, I knew who’d come a-calling.

  My pulse pounded. I took a breath and cracked the door open.

  But where I expected to see the Turk’s nausea-inducing face, I saw nothing but air. In fact, I had to look down to waist-level to see my first customer. A man in h
is mid-twenties with tousled brown hair sat overflowing a wheelchair. He gazed at me with a heart-wrenching innocence made all the more earnest by the round spectacles that made his eyes look like saucers.

  He cracked his lips to speak but couldn’t manage any words. He gave a little croak instead, as though either my physique or ensemble had taken his breath away. I preferred to think it was the former though I wasn’t one to discriminate between compliments.

  I searched for something to say myself but did no better. In fact, a bolt of anxiety wracked me. I hadn’t contemplated a scenario where a sympathetic-looking man tried to engage my services. I hadn’t considered the prospect of feeling a little bit guilty for saying no. Yet here I was, standing in front of a young man who probably couldn’t get sex any other way. And out of four hundred or so window prostitutes in Amsterdam, he’d chosen me.

  Another unexpected emotion hit me. Not only had I experienced a stab of guilt, I was a bit flush from flattery.

  We both stood there looking at each other until he finally took his eyes off the ripples in my abdomen and looked beyond me into my dimly lit office. His head began bobbing up and down slightly, and I was reminded that there was music playing in the background.

  “Scorpions,” he said, with a lovely English accent. “That’s very nice.” His eyes drifted to my torso before he pulled them back up. “There’s no one like you.”

  If I hadn’t been tanned, he might have seen me blush. “That’s very sweet of you …”

  “No. I mean the Scorpions song. There’s No One Like You. That’s my favorite—wait, you’re American?” He frowned as though this was a shocking observation, which of course, I was sure it was.

  “I’m a citizen of the world,” I said.

  “Don’t think I saw any American women on my last trip. Can I come in and listen to the Scorpions with you?”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I don’t think that’s realistic.”