But there was always a way. An old friend flew cargo planes for FedEx. He was based out of Memphis, but he got me on the eleven o’clock run from Boston to New York. In a little over an hour I was walking into an “adult entertainment club” called Gentry on West Forty-fifth street in Manhattan.
This was what used to be known as a strip club. Or a jiggle joint. But in polite circles it was called a “gentleman’s club” until that term became politically incorrect too.
I guess the tittie-bar owners didn’t want to offend feminists.
The mirrored lobby was lined with the requisite bouncers from New Jersey in black blazers too short at the sleeves over black shirts with white pinstripes. The carpeting inside was garish red. The railings and banisters were so shiny they didn’t even try to look like brass. The music was bad and loud. There were swoopy red vinyl lounge chairs, red vinyl banquettes and booths, half of them empty. The other half were filled with conventioneers and mid-level executives entertaining clients. Bachelor parties from Connecticut. Japanese businessmen on expense accounts. Spotlights swiveled and disco strobe lights spun overhead and there were mirrors everywhere.
The girls-excuse me, “entertainers”-were pretty and stacked and spray-tanned. Most of them looked cosmetically enhanced. When they danced, nothing jiggled. There was enough silicone in the place to grout every hotel bathroom in Manhattan. They wore thongs and garters, skimpy black brassieres and heels so high I was amazed they could keep their balance without pitching forward head first.
On the main stage, a shallow half-moon with a brass railing, an embarrassed-looking young guy with bad skin was getting a “stage dance” in the bright spotlights with a slinky black woman doing acrobatic moves an Ashtanga yoga master wouldn’t attempt.
A collage of huge “art” photos of selected female body parts lined the stairs. I found the “VIP Room,” according to the red neon sign on the door, upstairs just past the cigar bar and a line of private “rooms” with red velvet curtains that served as walls. A generously proportioned woman with pasties on her nipples held the door open for me.
Here the music was more traditional. Justin Timberlake was singing about bringing sexy back, which segued into Katy Perry confessing she’d kissed a girl and liked it. The walls were lined with white drapes illuminated from below with purple spotlights. A slightly higher class of clientele sat here, in tan suede clamshell banquettes that faced the stage. More scantily clad fembots tottered around with trays of drinks. A Brazilian-looking beauty was giving a lap dance to a corpulent Middle Eastern businessman.
The guy I was looking for was sitting at a banquette with burly bodyguards on either side of him. Each wore a cheap black leather jacket and was as big as a linebacker. One had a crew cut; the other had black Julius Caesar bangs. You could tell they were Russian a mile away.
The boy was tall and skinny, with a pasty complexion and a patchy goatee. He wore a foppish black velvet jacket with skinny, beaded lapels that would have looked fruity on Liberace. Under it he wore a black shirt with a tiny collar and a skinny black tie. He was drinking a glass of brown liquid and holding court for five or six equally scruffy-looking guys his age who were doing shots and ogling the entertainers and laughing too loudly and generally acting obnoxious.
Arkady Navrozov looked fourteen, though he was almost twenty. Even if you didn’t know that his father, Roman Navrozov, was obscenely rich, you could tell by the kid’s entitled demeanor.
Roman Navrozov was said to be worth over twenty-five billion dollars. He was an exile from Russia, where he’d amassed a fortune as one of the newly minted oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin by seizing control of a few state-owned oil and gas companies and then taking them private. When Vladimir Putin took over, he threw Navrozov in jail on grounds of corruption.
He served five years in the notorious prison Kopeisk.
But he must have struck a deal with Putin, because he was quietly released from prison and went into exile, much of his fortune still intact. He had homes in Moscow, London, New York, Paris, Monaco, St. Bart’s… he’d probably lost track himself. He owned a football club in west London. His yacht, the biggest and most expensive in the world, was usually docked off the French Riviera. It was equipped with a French-made missile defense system.
Because Roman Navrozov lived in fear. He’d survived two publicly reported assassination attempts and probably countless others, thanks to his private army of some fifty bodyguards. He’d made the mistake of speaking out against Putin and the “kleptocracy” and apparently Putin was thin-skinned.
His only son, Arkady, had been thrown out of Switzerland the year before for raping a sixteen-year-old Latvian chambermaid at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne. His father had spread around quite a bit of money to make the charges go away.
He feared his son might be kidnapped and made sure that Arkady never went anywhere without his own matched set of bodyguards.
But Arkady was a modern kid, and he posted things on Facebook and some social-media site called Foursquare where apparently you tell all your friends your whereabouts every moment of the day.
Earlier in the day he’d posted:
Arkady N. in New York, NY:
wrote a tip @ Gentry: Rocking VIP Rm tonight!
When he arrived, he posted:
Arkady N. @ Gentry
w. 45th St.
Not long afterward, I arrived at Gentry too, only I wasn’t rocking it and I didn’t post it anywhere.
I don’t like people to know where I’m going before I get there. It spoils the surprise.
MY TABLE was across the room but within view. I glanced at my watch.
Exactly on time the best-looking woman in the room sidled up to Arkady. His bodyguards shifted in their seats but didn’t consider Cristal to be a mortal threat. She whispered something in the kid’s ear and slithered onto his lap. One hand stroked his crotch.
His friends sniggered. He got up bashfully and followed her through the purple-lighted drapes to one of the private areas on the other side.
Arkady’s bodyguards hustled over, but he waved them away.
As I’d expected.
Before they returned to the banquette I was gone.
THE CURTAINED-OFF private-dance area where Cristal had led Arkady looked like a fake Victorian boudoir in a Nevada brothel. It had red velvet tufted walls, a shaggy red carpet, and a large red velvet bed with gold fringe. The lights were low.
From behind the red curtains I could see the two of them enter.
“-to make yourself nice and comfortable while I fetch us some champagne, all righty? You like Dom?”
She settled him down on the bed and put her tongue in his ear and whispered, “I’ll be back in two shakes.”
“Hey, where the hell you going?” the kid said. He had a flat, over-Americanized Russian accent.
“Honey, when I get back I’m gonna take the top of your head off,” she said, slipping out through the curtains. Then I handed her a wad of bills, the second half of what I’d promised her.
Arkady smiled contentedly, stretched like a cat, and called after her, “That a promise?”
He didn’t notice me sidling up to the bed from the other side. I lunged, quick as a cobra, clapped a hand over his mouth and jammed my revolver against the side of his head. I cocked the trigger.
“You ever see the top of a man’s head come off, Arkady?” I whispered. “I have. You never forget it.”
73.
Roman Navrozov owned the penthouse condominium in the Mandarin Oriental, with one of the great views of the city. He had been spending a lot of time in the city recently. He was trying to buy the New York Mets, whose owner had been hit pretty hard by the Bernard Madoff fraud.
He felt safe in the Mandarin, according to my KGB friend Tolya. There were multiple layers of protection and several entrances and egresses. The vigilant staff were only his first line of defense.