“If you can give us useful information, we can come to a deal,” I said.
“Deal not money,” the mutterer said, backing toward his cab, an old Skoda. “Time is money.”
“A hundred US dollars,” I offered. “More if you give us something worthwhile.”
He took another drag of his cigarette. “OK. Come,” he said. “Come in taxi.”
“Jack...” Dinara interjected, her concern evident in her voice.
“It’s OK,” I replied.
“Come,” the mutterer repeated. “We take a ride.”
Chapter 64
The oppressive darkness of a January night set in during our journey across the city.
“What’s your name?” I asked the mutterer, who drove with two fingers on the wheel.
“Ghani,” he replied, glancing back at Dinara and me. “From Afghanistan. You know it?”
I knew it all too well. The memory of my last day on the battlefield was still seared in my mind. I’d lost so many friends, and our driver might have sympathized with the people who’d killed them. Heck, he might have been one of them.
“No,” I replied. It was simpler to lie. “I’ve never been.”
“I have,” Dinara replied, surprising me. “A long time ago. In Kabul.”
The driver nodded, and I got the sense he knew better than to pry. Had she been there with the FSB? As a Russian operative? Or simply as a traveler? It was a part of the world that was so damaged a simple conversation risked opening a sectarian can of worms.
“When did you last see the man in the photograph?” I asked.
Ghani sucked on his cigarette. He’d taken off his hat and rubbed a hand through his thick salt and pepper hair. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which I tried my best to ignore in the confined, warm cabin of his rattling Skoda.
“The day after yesterday,” he said.
“The day before yesterday?” Dinara qualified.
Ghani nodded. “Yes, yes.”
I glanced at Dinara and saw that she was also alive with the thrill of a lead.
“What time?” I asked.
“Morning,” he replied. “Maybe ten o’clock.”
That was roughly an hour before Ernie Fisher was murdered.
“He ask me to take him to Lefortovo. To a fun house. He tell me wait then we go to airport,” Ghani said. “But we never go airport. When he come out of fun house, he angry. Mad. Tell me take him home. He forget something.”
“The key?” Dinara guessed.
Ghani looked at her blankly.
“Fun house?” I asked.
“You know,” Ghani replied. He arched his eyebrows, sucked on his cigarette and glanced at Dinara. “For girls.”
“He means a brothel,” Dinara clarified.
“Fun house,” Ghani repeated. “Is where I take you.”
He drew in another lungful of smoke and exhaled slowly, filling the velour-covered cabin with a thick cloud.
“You married?” he asked us.
“No,” Dinara replied. “We work together.”
“Why no?” Ghani asked. “You very beautiful,” he told Dinara. “And he got the eyes of a mountain man.”
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Yes. Is very good,” Ghani replied. “You keep woman safe. You dangerous.”
Chapter 65
A group of four rowdy men rounded the corner. They were pushing each other and jeering as they made their way along Energeticheskiy Passage.
Ghani was crawling along the road, which enabled Dinara to take in the neighborhood. They were in Lefortovo District to the east of the city, one of the most deprived parts of Moscow. Energeticheskiy had to be one of the low points of the area. The tall blocks that flanked the street were crumbling and covered in graffiti. One wing of the huge apartment building on the corner had been gutted by fire and the windows had been blown out, but the rest of the structure was still inhabited. Discarded food containers, empty bottles, nitrous canisters and needles littered the gray slush that covered the pavements.
Ghani’s taxi was crawling along because there was an old Mercedes ahead of them, cruising the street, the driver examining the women who stood in lit apartment windows, or who braved the freezing conditions in faux fur coats and little else.
The four rowdy men on the sidewalk chatted to a couple of fur-clad women and went into one of the rundown Soviet-era blocks. There was little doubt what this particular street was famed for.
The Mercedes stopped and the driver, a bald man in his sixties with a jowly face, beckoned a young woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty.
Ghani tooted his horn, but the jowly man ignored him.
“He’s doing business,” Ghani said.
Dinara looked at Jack and saw him frown. Was he wondering the same things she was? As the woman leaned through the driver’s window, what went through her mind? What did she really think of this older, unattractive man and the things he was asking her to do with him?
The woman didn’t look happy, but she nodded, and rounded the back of the jowly man’s car where her haunted eyes were caught in Ghani’s headlights. She climbed in the passenger seat of the Mercedes and the car sped away.
“Sad girl,” Ghani observed as he continued along the street. “This is it,” he said, stopping his taxi outside a decrepit old villa. “The fun house.”
“Can you wait?” Jack asked as he opened the door.
“Sure,” Ghani replied. “No problem.”
Dinara shivered as she and Jack got out of the taxi and approached the brothel. Ghani pulled into a space a short distance up the street.
The fun house was an old imperial villa that had somehow survived the vast Soviet-era developments that had been constructed around it. Fifteen-story blocks loomed either side of the villa’s small garden, and the patches of damp that blackened the building suggested it rarely got any light. Fitting, because it was immediately obvious it was home to the kind of business that thrived in darkness. A woman wearing nothing but her underwear lounged on a recliner in one of the upstairs windows. The room was backlit in crimson, and she eyed Dinara and Jack suggestively as they approached the building.
They passed a once grand wall that had crumbled long ago. The ruins poked through the thick snow, which covered the small front garden. A couple of mangy, leafless trees were the only things to protrude from the white blanket and their branches reached skyward like the bony fingers of a dying animal. The house itself was also crumbling. The window frames were rotten, the painted façade cracked and flaking and the guttering was broken.
Dinara followed Jack up the steps and he tugged on an ancient bell pull. Moments later, the door was opened by a huge man in a dark suit with a shaved head.
“Come in,” he said in Russian.
“Welcome, darlings,” a voice chimed, and Dinara saw a large woman sashay along the hallway. She wore a billowing outfit of many folds and colors, a dusty blond wig, and her face was caked in thick makeup, which made her age difficult to guess. She could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty.
“A couple,” the woman remarked. “Very adventurous, my dears.”
The interior of the house was almost as much of an assault on the senses as the woman’s dress. Brightly painted walls, erotic sketches and photographs, nude sculptures, gaudy cushions, throws and drapes of every hue collided to ensure the mind was equally amused and disgusted wherever the eyes fell.
“My name is Madame Agafiya,” the woman said in Russian. “Welcome to my humble house. Tell me, do you want one girl, or two? Or maybe a man?”
Dinara looked at an uncomprehending Jack, and blushed. “None, thank you,” she replied in Russian. “We’re here to ask some questions.”
“Police?” Agafiya asked, suddenly on edge.
“No,” Dinara replied.