Beyond Suspicion

47

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Vladimir had a business meeting at “the club,” a generic term that lent the place much more dignity than it deserved. The actual name on the marquee was “Bare-ly Eighteen,” a strip joint where any middle-aged man with ten bucks and an aching hard-on could watch recent high school dropouts dance naked on tables. No jail bait, but not a single dancer over the age of nineteen, guaranteed. Of course, if 60 Minutes ever called, the girls were all honor students in premed who simply liked to dance naked for extra money.

Vladimir knew the truth, which was why he never showed up at the club with less than a pocketful of ecstasy pills, a wildly popular, synthetic club-drug that acted both as a stimulant and a hallucinogen. The distribution pipeline was largely European, so Russian organized crime had found huge profit in it. Each aspirin-sized tablet was manufactured in places like the Netherlands at a cost of two to five cents and then sold primarily in the over-eighteen clubs for twenty-five to forty bucks a pop. A girl-any girl, not just a stripper-could go nonstop for eight hours on one pill, dancing, thrusting, craving the caress of strangers. At his cost and with those kinds of results, Vladimir was happy to give it away to his own dancers, especially when he had guests to impress.

He handed the bag of pills to the bouncer at the entrance. “One for each girl,” he said, then pointed with a glance toward the double-D blonde on stage showing off her tan lines. She had a pacifier in her mouth, a telltale sign that she was already on ecstasy. The drug sometimes made users bite their own lips and tongue, and a pacifier was a curious but commonly accepted way of preventing that. In a strip club, it had the added bonus of making it look as though she really loved to suck.

“Give her two,” said Vladimir.

“Yes, sir.” The guy was a brute, and no one but Vladimir was ever a “sir.”

Vladimir had with him two men dressed in expensive silk suits. One was big and barrel-chested, with a neck like a former Olympic wrestler’s. The other was shorter and overweight with the round, red face of a Russian peasant who’d somehow found money. Vladimir led them through the lounge area, a circuitous route to his usual booth in the back. It gave them a chance to enjoy the scenery before turning to business. The bar was basically a dark, open warehouse with neon figures on the walls and colored spotlights suspended from the ceiling to highlight each dancer. Young, naked flesh was everywhere, surrounded by men who coughed up the cash to gawk, talk, laugh, and shout at women as if they owned them. A numbing sound system drowned out most of the obscenities, blasting the perennial bad-girl anthem, the old Robert Palmer hit “Addicted to Love.”

At the snap of his fingers, Vladimir’s two hottest dancers hopped off nearby tables and assumed new posts at the brass firehouse pole closer to his booth. Vladimir sat with his back to the stage, facing a mirrored wall of cheap thrills. His guests sat across from him with an unobstructed view of the show. As if the girls cared or would even remember, he introduced his guests. The wrestler’s name was Leonid, a Brighton Beach businessman whose business was best left unexplained, though it was pretty common knowledge around the club that Miami was second only to Brighton Beach in terms of number and organization of Russian Mafiya. The short guy was Sasha, a banker from Cyprus.

“Where’s Cyprus?” asked the Latina girl. She had the habit of running the tip of her tongue across her front teeth, which could have been the ecstasy. Or perhaps her braces had just been removed and she liked the smooth sensation.

“It’s an island in the eastern Mediterranean,” Sasha said.

“A suburb of Moscow,” said Vladimir.

She licked her teeth and kept dancing, having no way of knowing what Vladimir really meant. Cypriot bankers laundered so much money for the Russian mob that the city of Limasol might as well have been a suburb of Moscow.

A topless barmaid with a gold ring through her left nipple brought them a bottle of ice-cold vodka and poured three shots. The bottle was gone in short order, and halfway through the second Vladimir steered the conversation toward business, speaking in Russian.

“You like my club?” he asked.

His guests couldn’t take their eyes off the girl in the long, red wig swinging naked on the pole.

Vladimir said, “I have to run this joint seven days a week for an entire month to clean the amount of cash I can wash in a single viatical settlement.”

Leonid from Brighton Beach shot him a steely look. “We didn’t come here to talk viatical settlements. That’s off the table.”

“I just don’t understand why.”

The banker raised his hands, as if refereeing. “Let’s not go down that road. The fact is that Brighton Beach was planning to flush ten million dollars a month through viatical settlements for the foreseeable future. That option is no longer attractive. So all we want to know, Vladimir, is this: What alternative are you offering?”

He sipped his vodka. “The blood bank is coming along.”

“Ha!” said the wrestler. “What a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s on the verge of taking off.”

“Will never work. You can’t possibly do enough volume to wash ten million dollars a month.”

“How would you know?”

“The best money-laundering operations have some amount of legitimate business. You have two stinking vans. You can’t even draw enough blood off the street to fill the handful of orders you get each week.”

“We’ve filled every single order.”

“Yeah. And you had to take blood from cadavers to do it.”

The banker grimaced. “You took blood from cadavers?”

Vladimir was smoldering.

“Tell him,” said the wrestler.

“It’s not important.”

“Then I’ll tell him. We had a woman in Georgia with a two-million-dollar viatical settlement. AIDS patient. Should have been dead three years ago, so the order went out to expedite her expiration. Vladimir farmed out the job to some joker who injected her with a bizarre virus, which is a whole problem by itself. But to make matters worse, he took three liters of blood from her.”

“Is that true, Vladimir?”

He belted back the last of his vodka, then poured himself a refill. “Who would have thought they’d notice?”

“Ever heard of an autopsy, you idiot?” said the wrestler.

“It was an honest mistake. Why leave perfectly good AIDS-infected blood in a dead body when you can sell it for good profit?”

“It’s that kind of small-time, foolish greed that makes it impossible for us to do business with you people in Miami.”

“So this is why Brighton Beach canceled the viatical contract?” said Vladimir.

“Your man shot her up with a virus so rare that the National Center for Disease Control has her blood under the microscope. And then he took three liters of her blood with him. Why not just paint a big red ‘M’ on your chest that stands for ‘murderer’? You’re going to get us all caught.”

“So you admit it. One mistake in the whole arrangement, and the hot shots in Brighton Beach think they can just walk away from our deal.”

“We don’t have to explain ourselves to you people. The decision was made, and it was blessed at a high level. End of story.”

“It’s not the end of it,” Vladimir said as he pounded the table with his fist. “We put a lot of time into this viatical deal. Things are in place. And you just think you can pull the plug, see ya later?”

“We have good reasons.”

“None that I’ve heard.”

“I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

“Then fuck you!” said Vladimir as he threw a glass of vodka in his guest’s face.

The wrestler lunged across the table. Dancers screamed and ran for it as the banker ducked to the floor. Three huge bouncers were all over the wrestler before he could get a hand on Vladimir.

The wrestler was red-faced, eyes bulging. But the bouncers had both his arms pinned behind his back.

“This is the way you treat your guests?” he said, huffing. “I was invited here.”

“And now you’re invited to leave.” Vladimir jerked his head, a signal to his boys. “Throw his ass out.”

The wrestler cursed nonstop in Russian and at the top of his lungs as the bouncers put the strong-arm on him and dragged him away.

The banker peered out from under the table.

“You too, Sasha. Beat it.”

The little man scurried away like a frightened rabbit.

The barmaid immediately replaced the spilled bottle of vodka. Vladimir refilled his drink, and with a snap of his fingers the dancers resumed their posts at the brass poles, backs arched, breasts out, hair flying. The music had never stopped, and the scuffle was over.

Or maybe it had just begun.

Either way, the girls kept right on dancing.