The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls Page 8

  I didn’t understand the origins of Sarah Dumont’s gall, but it couldn’t have been strictly a function of her personality. Someone of power was standing behind her lending credence to her threats, of that I was certain. I was also sure that the most prudent course of action for me was to tell her I was going to leave her alone and get out of town.

  “He removed her reproductive organs, you know,” I said. “And cut her breasts off. This was after he crucified her to a wall in her apartment.”

  Sarah Dumont stared at me. As the seconds passed, her expression gradually turned to one of resentment, as though I’d wronged her by sharing the details of Iskra’s plight. She looked away and back at me, each time with more anger. Finally, she exhaled and shrugged.

  “The girl was just sex to me but if that’s what happened to her, that’s just wrong. Come, I’ll buy you lunch. You get an hour to ask whatever questions you want but after that, I’m done. And if you ever come snooping around my house again I’ll have you killed.”

  CHAPTER 11

  She led me to the back door of one of the countless restaurants along the perimeter of the city centre. A note was taped to a side window.

  “Due to the Swedish Barmaid falling off her bike pissed and the boss selling sexual favors in warmer climates, Café Bottoms Up will be closed for the rest of the week.”

  The note made me smile on the inside.

  “No, I’m not the boss,” Sarah Dumont said, with a note of disgust. “I’m the boss’s boss, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  She glared at me.

  I shrugged. “I never thought for a second that you were the Swedish barmaid.”

  “I hope not. I’m sure there’s some food in the refrigerator but I can’t cook.”

  “I can.”

  She cast a look of surprise at me. “Really?”

  Five minutes later I was cooking a large omelet in a copper skillet atop a state-of-the-art range in a gleaming stainless-steel kitchen. While I prepared the eggs, she opened a bottle of chardonnay and warmed some day-old bread in the oven. I split the omelet in half and served the eggs on some smashing Villeroy and Bach plates with a farmhouse design. We sat down to eat in a cozy dining room with country French furnishings and contemporary impressionist paintings on the walls.

  “How are my eggs?” I said. “Not quite as fluffy as you’re used to, I bet.”

  Her hesitation confirmed I was correct. “They’re good,” she said. She looked down at her food. “How did she die?”

  “The way I told you,” I said. “The way no human being deserves to die.”

  “No. That’s not enough. I want to know exactly how she died.”

  “Respectfully, I’m not sure there’s any benefit to that.”

  She stared at me with the unblinking eyes of a woman used to giving orders and having them followed. Once again this surprised me because she was so young.

  “Let me be the judge of what’s beneficial to me, yes?” she said.

  I told her everything. Her reaction was in sharp contrast to the tear-stained and traumatized carriage of Iskra Romanov’s father. She was quietly respectful but showed no signs of grief.

  “When you saw me in De Wallen on Saturday night,” I said. “You came because you thought Iskra was still alive, obviously.”

  “It was just fun for me,” she said. “I’d never been with a woman before. The first time we fucked she put her lips on me and sucked me the way you’d suck a peach when you’re trying to keep the juices from running all over your mouth. She must have kept it up for … ten or fifteen minutes? I don’t know. I’m not sure how long. By the end I was barely conscious. It was this gentle, constant, excruciating suction. The pressure built up inside me … I thought I was going to come so badly I would die. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever had sex so good you thought you would die from the orgasm?” She reached out and touched my arm. “I’m talking about really dying from it.”

  I smiled because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d had plenty of thoughts of death and orgasms since I’d arrived in Amsterdam and taken on the case. In fact, I still had high hopes for those sea salt caramels at Puccini’s.

  “That sounds like reason enough to want to know who killed her,” I said.

  Sarah pursed her lips and nodded as though she’d come to a profound realization. “You know, you’re right. I may never have sex that good again in my life. I mean, I’m still young, but you can’t take anything for granted.” She turned her attention back to her food. “We only saw each other nine times. We always met at her office.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. It was a game. Or that’s how it turned out. We met in Tilburg at a T.R.A.S.H. performance.”

  “What’s that?”

  She sighed as though I were an idiot. “T.R.A.S.H. is the cutting edge of dance in Holland. Actually, it’s more than dance. It’s a combination of dance, performance art, and live music. I’m friends with Kristel, the choreographer. I was in town to see a performance. Iskra was there for an audition for a summer series. Something she could do between semesters at school. Kristel asked me to sit in.”

  “Did Iskra get the part?”

  “No, but she got me. You know how sometimes a man stares at you, and it’s not because he admires your brain?”

  “Only when I diet, tan and wear a lime green bikini.”

  “That’s funny,” Sarah said, giving me another unsettling once-over. “You’re one of those insecure types that has a lot more going for her than she wants to admit. That’s how Iskra looked at me. Like those men. Like she wanted to consume me. It gave me goosies. It gave me goosies up and down my arms. I wanted her right then and there. That never happened to me before with a woman.”

  “So you agreed to meet in De Wallen?”

  She nibbled on some bread and nodded.

  “She told you she was a prostitute?”

  Sarah Dumont smiled. “No. That was the sexy part. She gave me a business card. No title. Just a name, an address, and a mobile number. She said she worked late, to show up at midnight. I figured she worked out of her home. I thought I was going to her apartment.”

  “Instead you found her standing in a window with a green bikini and headphones on, sipping mineral water from a bottle.”

  “Mmm. So sexy.”

  “Was it just sex or did you talk, too?”

  “No talking. Until the last night we were together.”

  My ears perked up. “What happened then?”

  “She asked me if I wanted to get a drink. I said ‘sure.’ We went to bar and talked for two hours.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Her. We sure as hell didn’t talk about me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Once again Sarah Dumont glanced at me as though I were devoid of brain cells. “Why would I want a sex worker to know anything about my business?”

  “So you really had no feelings for her.”

  “My body had feelings for her body. She gave me pleasure. But a woman with another woman, like in a relationship … That’s not natural and it sure as hell is not for me.”

  “I’m guessing she felt differently?”

  “You guessed right. She’d fallen for me, big time. Don’t ask me why. We didn’t know anything about each other. Maybe it was because I’m a fast learner, and it didn’t take long for me to give as good as I got.”

  “Did she tell she was in love with you?”

  Sarah Dumont rolled her eyes. “Poor thing. It was painful to listen to but I didn’t want to upset her so I went along with it.”

  “You mean her body was still providing your body with pleasure, and you didn’t want to lose the opportunity for more of the same.”

  She raised her fork and pointed it at me. “You’re a smart woman, aren’t you? Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “What did she tell you about herself?”

  “She said she knew sh
e was a lesbian since her early teens but she’d never told her parents. She said they were old-school Russians and they’d never understand. Said her father would have gone nuts if he knew. Disowned her, stopped paying for university.”

  “She was sure of that?”

  “And how. She told me that there’s no sympathy for gays and lesbians in Russia. None whatsoever. She said being gay was considered a mental illness in Russia until 1990. That seventy-five percent of Russians think being homosexual is immoral. That you can’t work with children in Russia if you’re gay. And if you have a job in child care and they find out you’re gay, you’re fired.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “And if you talk about gay rights in front of a child you can be arrested for espionage. You can be tried for treason and killed. And there’s a movement to pass a law that would allow the government to take children away from gay people.”

  I remembered George Romanov’s assertion that homosexuality and pedophilia were somehow connected.

  “And Iskra’s father is sympathetic to all of this crap,” I said.

  “You say that as though you met him,” Sarah Dumont said.

  “I had lunch with him.”

  “Iskra said Russians think Americans spread the word about homosexuality like a weapon. To destroy the moral fabric of Russian children and ruin their society. I guess the government has brainwashed them. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have plenty of gay friends and I don’t think it’s moral, but neither is prostitution and I had a real good time with one myself. To each his own, you know?”

  “Did Iskra give you a key to her apartment?” I said.

  “What for? To tell you the truth, I liked her better when I didn’t know anything about her. Once she showed she was just another needy girl. I was automatically turned off. Not that I wouldn’t have sampled the goods a few more times …”

  This time I paused for a few seconds and let her finish her food and sip her wine. I didn’t want to appear overeager with my final query.

  “Are your parents originally from Belgium or the Netherlands?” I said.

  Sarah Dumont stared me down. That question didn’t have any obvious bearing on Iskra’s death. I knew it, and she knew it, too. I’d asked it out of curiosity, because her age and profession didn’t seem consistent with her lifestyle. Contrary to what the taxi driver had suggested, I hadn’t found much about her on the internet. She’d been the choreographer of two highly acclaimed dance shows and had won accolades across Europe. But I doubted that success could have generated sufficient income to build her glass mansion in Bruges.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind you asking. I’m proud of my parents. My mother’s Belgian. She’s a school teacher here in Bruges. My father started out as a city planner in Brussels. He made a lot of contacts. Then he went into construction. He was very successful. He died three years ago. He left my mother and me very comfortable.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “And you’ve lived in Bruges long? I saw your house from the gate last night. It’s very beautiful.”

  “You know how long I’ve lived here. The taxi driver or someone in the hotel would have told you that. Wherever you go, one thing stays the same. People love to know other people’s business. I lived in Holland for a while, but that didn’t work out for me so I moved out here to be with my mother. I can get to anywhere in Europe pretty quickly. But listen, you’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “What are the right questions?” I said.

  “You should be asking me who else had a key to her apartment.”

  I smiled, and she answered without making me ask the obvious question.

  “Sasha had a key,” she said.

  Sasha was the boy I’d seen in Iskra’s photos, the one whom her father had dismissed as an innocent family friend.

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “She told me.”

  “Why?” It seemed incredible that during their first conversation outside the bed, Sasha’s name would come up.

  “We were talking about the fact she kept her sexuality a secret. That she had to keep it a secret given her parents were hardcore Russians. I asked her if anyone knew and she said yeah, her friends at school knew. She had a lot of guy friends from school. Her father thought they were all boyfriends but they were just beards. Whoever said men were useless never needed to keep her lesbian ways a secret.”

  Her final comment struck a chord, but I chose to ignore it and stay on point. “So none of Iskra’s Russian friends knew she was a lesbian or a prostitute, until . . . “

  “Until Sasha followed her to De Wallen one night.”

  “When was this?”

  “About a week before she was killed.”

  “What happened?”

  “She came home that night after work and found him waiting for her in her apartment drunk. She said he scared the hell out of her, which was why she told me the story in the first place. He insulted her, called her a dyke and a whore, told her he’d hate her for the rest of her life. Which, of course, was a lie.”

  “Sasha was in love with Iskra.”

  “Sounded like it to me,” Sarah Dumont said.

  “Then what happened?”

  “She said she called him the next day and the day after that but he never called back.”

  I pushed my chair back. I had to return to Amsterdam as soon as possible.

  “He’s too obvious, right?” Sarah said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This Sasha. He can’t possibly have killed Iskra. He’s too obvious.”

  “In my experience,” I said, “the solutions to most problems are fairly obvious. The challenge is to understand the problem in the first place.”

  “And what was Iskra’s problem?” Sarah Dumont answered her own question. “She had to lead a double life, right? On the one had she was her parents’ daughter, but on the other hand she had to be herself.”

  “No,” I said. “That would have been bad enough. She chose to lead a triple life. She was someone’s daughter, her own woman, and the girl in the window in De Wallen.”

  “Which one got her killed?”

  I stood up to leave. “That’s what I have to figure out.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Four hours later I was back in Holland and returning to an historic residential neighborhood which also contained an infamous red-light district. From Amsterdam to Bruges and back, from one murky set of waterways to another, I seemed to be following the canals wherever my investigation led me. Now I was right back where it all started, in De Wallen, the place where forbidden dreams came true.

  I’d called George Romanov from the train to Brussels and asked him to arrange a meeting with Sasha. “Sasha is Sasha,” Romanov had said, when I’d queried him about the boy’s relationship with Iskra in her apartment. In fact, Sasha’s full name was Sasha Norin, and like so many of his generation, he called himself an entrepreneur.

  Romanov told me that Sasha was a graphic artist who was trying to build a clothing empire. He’d started out by making designer t-shirts. His brand was currently featured in a dozen stores in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam areas. Meanwhile, to support himself, he moonlighted as a tour guide at the Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp Museum. Yes, there really was such a place in Amsterdam. It was right around the corner from the Cannabis College.

  The Museum’s main level was filled with what looked like museum quality prints, books and even a miniature reproduction of a ship. Romanov had told me to look for an awkward-looking young man. What I saw instead was a gangly, Rastafarian-looking man-child with rat’s whiskers all over his face. He wore jeans, a yellow t-shirt with a jungle motif, and a monstrous green, gold and red Rasta hat that looked more like a sock for elephants. Gnarly dreadlocks fell from the bottom of the hat. I couldn’t tell if they were part of the hat or his own. Given the authenticity of my surroundings, I strongly suspected they might be real.

  I waited for him to
finish speaking to a family of three. Then I walked over to him.

  “Sasha?” I said in Russian.

  His face lit up as though he’d been waiting for me all day. “Yeah, mon. You must be Nadia.”

  He sounded like Bob Marley after a heavy diet of blintzes and borsch, the product of Russian and Jamaican parents, which he was not. That he had answered in English was a bold assertion that his English was better than my Russian. I doubted that was true but it would have been rude for me not to switch languages.

  He led me to a painting of several weeds hanging on a wall. I’d never smoked anything in my life. Not a cigar, cigarette, and certainly not marijuana. I understood and respected its medicinal applications. Full-stop. But where recreational use was concerned, even where legal, I couldn’t contemplate enjoying it more than a glass or three of some fine wine.

  “Did you know that only the mature female species makes you high?” he said.

  I thought of Iskra and Sarah Dumont. The only problem with that association was that neither of them seemed very mature.

  “If only you could say the same for the human race,” I said.

  He laughed without hesitation. His easy-going nature surprised me. I’d expected an introverted recluse, bitter, sad and angry that his unrequited love had died. But he channeled no such vibe. What he did channel was congeniality, which boded well for me. He was listening, seemed intelligent, and was willing to speak with me. After George Romanov, Sarah Dumont, and even my client, Simmy Simeonovich, I was grateful for the prospect of having a straightforward conversation with a person of interest.

  “Downstairs, in the seed bank store,” he said, “we weed out the boring males. So they don’t dilute the mature female’s potency.”

  “But if you do that, don’t you end up with a bunch of egocentric, unstable males?”

  Sasha never stopped smiling. “Yeah, mon, but that’s what the mature female seed wants. She uses them for her own benefit. Reproduction is all the male is good for. After she’s done with them, no one has any use for them.”