The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls Page 6

  And as I looked onto the canal and wondered if I were such a person, the obvious hit me. It hit me straight on, like a six-inch screw that penetrated paint and sheet-rock and sank deep into wood on the first try.

  A spare anchor on a boat moored beside the road on the edge of the canal reminded me of the help I’d once given my father. He’d needed to hang a Ukrainian-Catholic cross, the kind with three bars going perpendicular to the vertical one, with the bottom one at an angle. This particular cross was made of iron and required an anchor—a wall anchor. The teeth of the wall anchor gripped the sheet rock and kept the wallboard from crumbling under the heavy weight. Wall anchors required large holes and their removal left visible gashes in the sheet rock.

  The holes in the wall where Iskra had been crucified had been perfect, round holes. That meant the screws had hit the wood that supported the wallboard perfectly. The wood behind the wallboard usually consisted of two-inch by four-inch studs spaced intermittently. The only way to know the exact location of the two-by-fours was by using a stud-finder, which often employed a magnet to detect the screws that secured the sheetrock to the wood.

  Iskra’s killer had not only brought screws and a driver-drill to the crime scene, he’d brought a stud finder, too. Her killing had been a pre-meditated murder planned with precision. My suspicion was that the killer was a friend, that Iskra had let him in, and that he’d executed a plan he’d imagined for days, weeks, or even months. He’d dreamed about driving the screws precisely where they needed to go for her bodyweight to be supported, relished the thought of slicing her feminine body parts from the rest of her body with a knife. And he’d probably had help. It would have been difficult for one man to hold the body and drive the screws into the wood.

  This was a crime of passion and a cold-blooded killing.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called Simmy.

  I needed the name and address of the owner of that damn car.

  CHAPTER 8

  To get the name and address of the owner of the blue Porsche Macan Turbo that had whisked the mystery lover to safety, I needed to deploy humility for the second time in an hour. That was bordering on dangerous behavior, because a woman must maintain a sliver of ego or risk becoming a door mat for family, friends, clients and especially, would-be lovers. The probability that Simmy would ever be the latter had dropped faster than De Vroom had transformed himself into the prince of darkness. Still, a woman never stops dreaming, even about outcomes she’s not entirely sure she wants—Ukrainians and Russians don’t always mix easily or well.

  I called Simmy on his cell phone, a number only six people possessed: his assistant, ex-wife, two children, the coach of his professional soccer team, and I. Or so he’d told me.

  I asked him if he’d traced the plate.

  “What happened to your fatal flaw?” he said.

  “You mean the one where my vast arsenal is effective only if I work alone?”

  “No. The one where you’re arrogant enough to allow yourself to believe it.”

  “It’s trumped by one of my greatest virtues.”

  “Really? I don’t think I remember this virtue. Refresh my memory.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem. It’s the one where I get the job done no matter what.”

  “Oh, yes. That one. I knew there was something about you that I liked. As a matter of fact I just received some information from my man in Brussels. I was about to call you. You have a pen, pencil, or a needle to draw some blood?”

  “I used my needle to thread my way into the crime scene but I’ve got my trusty lipstick. Go ahead.”

  He gave me an address in Bruges that belonged to a woman by the name of Sarah Dumont. I made a note of it on my mobile phone.

  “Do you have a phone number?” I said.

  “Aren’t you the detective?”

  “Weren’t you the one who said I should ask for help when I need it?”

  “No, I don’t have a phone number. There’s no trace of this woman other than her name on that motor vehicle registration. Which is, of course, impossible.”

  “She’s probably the boy’s mother. The odds are low she’d be forthcoming over the phone.” I didn’t bother to finish up my thought process, as I was sure Simmy knew where I was leading.

  “Have you been to Bruges?” he said.

  I remembered pictures of a medieval city that looked like a theme park but was actually the real deal.

  “No.”

  “Then there’s something you should be aware of before you go and try to blend in.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “The local authorities frown on prostitution.”

  I cringed. What a disappointment. I wondered why I’d ever been attracted to him. “Thank you for confirming my theory.”

  “Oh, yes?” His tone acquired an edge. He sounded as though he were picking a fight. “What theory?”

  “The bigger the bucks, the badder the revelations.”

  I ended the call before he could answer, and then cursed at myself. I had to take three deep breaths just to recover. He was a paying client. In fact, he was my most important paying client. I’d indulged my emotions which meant I was not on top of my game. This realization sobered me up. I had no choice but to produce results or my entire livelihood would be threatened. One bad recommendation from my most important client would ruin me.

  I went back to the hotel and made arrangements for a quick trip to Bruges. A little over an hour later I hopped on a Thalys high-speed train to Brussels, switched to a Belgian local, and arrived in Bruges just before 7:00 P.M. I took a taxi to the Hotel Dukes’ Palace, checked in and got a map to get myself acclimated.

  A promotional pamphlet for the Bruges Beer Museum in the hotel lobby reminded me of the contents of Iskra’s refrigerator. Among them were four bottles of a Bruges beer, not the most common selection in a country that produced Heineken, Grolsch, and Amstel. That suggested she’d acquired a taste for it coincidentally, or at the suggestion of her mystery lover. I suspected it was the latter. Objectivity defined the investigator’s vision, but optimism greased the wheels that propelled her to the solution.

  Perhaps the path to finding the solution was in Bruges.

  The growling in my stomach drowned out the echo of De Vroom’s ominous warning. I needed nourishment but I wanted answers even more. I had a quick chat with a courteous man at the front desk about the layout of the central square and beyond. Afterwards, he called a taxi for me. Five minutes later I was seated in the back of a Peugeot with my cell phone displaying a map of the local area.

  The weary driver spoke good English. He told me Bruges was called the “Venice of the North,” which was funny because that’s what the cabbie in Amsterdam had said about his hometown. Both cities were built around canals, but that’s where the similarities ended. Whereas Amsterdam offered a contemporary urban vibe in a historical city, Bruges looked like history itself surrounded by contemporary trappings.

  The drive through the Markt and Burg areas was an exercise in medieval architectural time travel. Spotlights attached to vaulted rooftops illuminated gabled and gilded buildings from centuries past. In the background, a fourteenth century bell tower loomed with an octagonal-shaped lantern on top. There were no sword-wielding, armor-clad warriors on horseback, but the city center’s authentic aura made it easy to picture them thundering around the corner. In their place, tourists ambled along winding cobblestone streets filled shoulder-to-shoulder amidst chocolate shops, boutiques, and restaurants.

  The ever-present canals connected the various neighborhoods, murky waterways that disappeared now and then under the curved arches of the bridges above. Homes carved from stone or assembled with bricks faced the water. I’d travelled one hundred fifty miles but I was still surrounded by canals. If I’d been on vacation, I might have focused on their aesthetics. Nothing promotes a sense of serenity like a calm body of water. But a girl had been crucified and slaughtered in one of the Venices of the nort
h, and my investigation of her murder had taken me to the other. Instead of beauty, I saw hidden depths, untold mysteries, and gentle black ripples that belied a stirring beneath the surface.

  We drove past the city center into a calm residential neighborhood located across a canal called St. Gilles. Two miles further the driver came to a fork and stopped in front of a road that disappeared into a densely wooded area. The car’s headlights provided sufficient light for me to see that the road had been recently paved. There were no cracks in the asphalt and the curbs stood firm and round above ground level.

  The driver’s voice fell a few octaves. “This is the address.” He pointed down the road, then pulled his finger back and looked away as though he was afraid someone might have seen him.

  “You mean this is a private road?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s only one house in there?”

  I spied the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. His eyes bugged out. “You do not know this? I assumed you had an appointment with the owner.”

  “Who is the owner?” I said.

  “If you don’t know that, you don’t belong here. And if you don’t belong here, I don’t want to be here.”

  He started to turn the car around.

  “Stop.” I slammed the seatback in front of me with an open palm.

  The car jerked to a halt.

  I pulled my wallet out and handed the driver twenty euro. “Who lives here?”

  The driver glanced at the money uncertainly, as though he was almost tempted. I added another twenty. He snatched the bills from my hand.

  “A very successful woman,” he said. “She’s a theater person, famous in the theater. You’re from England. You know the type, I’m sure.”

  No one had ever mistaken my accent for a British one, but any confusion about my origins or anything else about me was welcome.

  “Then why can’t you take me in there so I can get a closer look?”

  “There’s a gate,” he said. “There’s security. It is not a place where one should go unless invited.”

  “Why?”

  The driver rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth as though I were exasperating him beyond the call of cabbie duty, or the benefit of forty euro. “The story around town is that the woman lived in Amsterdam for a while but there was a home invasion. A very ugly thing. They say she was lucky she survived. She moved to Bruges and built this house. There is a gate and there is security, and the men who work there have a fierce reputation.”

  The cabbie’s inflection suggested the bodyguards had demonstrated this ferocity.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I said. “Fierce reputation? This is Belgium, not the Congo. How long has she lived here?”

  “A year? No. More. A year and a half. Has to be going on two.”

  “Have they killed anyone yet?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but I have no interest in being the first one.”

  “Then there’s no problem,” I said. “People take the wrong turn, they get lost all the time, don’t they? What’s the worst that can happen?”

  I pulled another twenty euro from my wallet, put it between thumb and forefinger, and rubbed it near his ear.

  He shook his head with reluctance and grabbed the bill. Then he turned the nose of the car toward the new road and powered forward with surprising conviction, a torrent of Dutch words pouring from his lips as he did so.

  As soon as he entered the road the headlights shone on a succession of signs that reminded me of the main road to Chornobyl. The entrance to the sight of Ukraine’s nuclear disaster was marked with warning, hazard, and “Do Not Enter” signs. This road was no different. For a moment I wondered why the formal entrance wasn’t placed at the intersection with the main road, but a mile later we rounded a bend and I understood the builder’s logic.

  Soft lights illuminated a gleaming silver gate. The gatehouse beside it was also contemporary, with steel beams and glass on all sides. The modern structures seemed at such odds with the character of Bruges they jarred the senses. The gate’s purpose was to provide privacy for Sarah Dumont. If it had been placed at the mouth of the road, the gate would have achieved the exact opposite purpose. It would have been a magnet for attention. Still, Sarah Dumont’s design skills seemed questionable at best. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to build something quaint in keeping with the wooded surroundings and Bruges itself? I wondered if her choice was a function of arrogance or poor taste.

  Spotlights burst with light. They obliterated our vision. The driver slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to a stop.

  “This is as far as I go,” the driver said. “You’ve seen the gate, now we go.”

  “Relax,” I said, as much to myself as to him. I had butterflies in my stomach, but I couldn’t imagine a woman could get killed for trespassing in a tourist city in Belgium. Besides, as my first boss, a transplant from Birmingham to New York City had told me on my first day at work in corporate America, a faint heart never fucked the cook.

  I whipped the door open and stepped outside. “Turn the car around and wait for me here. Remember, if you leave without me, I can’t give you the biggest tip I’ve ever given a cabbie.”

  I marched toward the gatehouse without further thought. Two figures moved around the periphery of the spotlights shining from either side of the gate. One appeared to be accompanied by a beast on four legs. A man shouted something in what sounded like Dutch. The words didn’t register.

  “Stop!”

  That word definitely registered and I slowed down. But once again I invoked my training from the Ukrainian girl scouts and pushed myself to act contrary to my desires. I put one foot in front of the other at an even faster clip and headed straight toward the gate.

  As I neared the gate, one of the spotlights followed me. The light blinded me so badly I had to raise my hand to shield my eyes. More shouting followed, and I became aware of a dog barking. Or perhaps it had been barking all along and I hadn’t heard it over the thumping of my heart.

  The light blinding me dimmed but my vision remained impaired. Purple and black images moved before me. The same two men, one holding a dog with a leash, the other a steering wheel locking mechanism. I wondered why a security guard would carry such a thing.

  Both men were long and lean, and dressed in black turtlenecks and field jackets. The one without the dog barked something in Dutch at me again which I didn’t understand.

  “Would you give my business card to Ms. Dumont, please?” I reached into my handbag for the black leather case that held my cards—

  “Stop.”

  I stopped moving, hand in bag.

  The man with the steering wheel locking mechanism device charged me. The other one released his beast, which snarled, leaped at me and knocked me down. A bolt of pain shot up my hip as I crashed to the asphalt.

  The dog climbed onto my chest and bared its teeth six inches from my face. That’s when I noticed the animal’s long, bushy fur, pointed ears and ferocious eyes. The animal wasn’t a dog, I realized. It was a gray wolf.

  The man with the device pointed the tip of his locking mechanism at my torso. When I saw its barrel I realized it wasn’t a steering wheel locking device. It was some sort of fancy submachine gun built for the twenty-first century. A vision of Apple or Amazon extending their technological expertise into weapons flashed in my mind, and I wondered if the gun could put a bullet in a specific body part with a simple voice command.

  “Are you people out of your mind?” I said. “I’m from America, on sensitive business that involves Ms. Dumont. I have a certain reputation with the financial press. You want an international incident? I can get a Bloomberg, CNBC, or MSNBC news crew out here real easy.”

  I’d posed as reporter before which is why those words came to me so quickly. One of the men called off the wolf. The other helped me to my feet. They searched my bag and body with respect and efficiency. After one of them handed my bag back to me, I gave him my business card.<
br />
  “Please tell Ms. Dumont that I’d like to talk to her about her son. I’m staying at the Hotel Dukes’ Plaza. I’m not leaving until I speak with her, one way or another.”

  I glanced beyond the gatehouse before turning away to leave. My vision had adjusted enough for me to spy the small palace in the distance. It looked like a misplaced ice sculpture, a rectangular home carved from glass. In the driveway sat a gunmetal Audi coupe with flared haunches. Beside it, the metallic blue Porsche Macan Turbo. Lights shone in the house. I strongly suspected Sarah Dumont was home. The intensity of her security team’s performance suggested they were guarding a person or persons, not just a building.

  I walked slowly back to the taxi, playing it cool so that I didn’t betray that they’d succeeded in shaking me up. Getting mugged by a wolf had a lasting effect on one’s nervous system.

  On the way back to the hotel, I considered the reason Sarah Dumont had chosen Bruges as her new home. I understood the obvious allure. Bruges offered quality restaurants, world-class shopping, a unique aesthetic, and access to transportation. The Brussels Airport was a two hour drive to the south, and the English Channel an hour away in the north. But it was still an odd choice, as unlikely as the type of home she’d built and the materials from which it was made. Her choice and lifestyle seemed off to me, and carried the strong whiff of someone whose money had criminal ties. This was based on my experience with the Ukrainian and Russian mafia types, whose taste tended toward the ostentatious. In this case, Ms. Dumont’s choices weren’t so ostentatious as they were unlikely.