Private Moscow

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.

“What’s the matter with him?” Agafiya asked, gesturing at Jack. “Doesn’t he speak?”

“He’s American,” Dinara replied, and Agafiya’s eyes lit up.

“Ah, American,” she said in English. “We have many American friends who visit us here. Our girls speak excellent English for the best intimate moments. My name is Madame Agafiya, American friend, and I welcome you to my house.”

“We’re just here for answers,” Jack said. “Nothing else.”

Agafiya’s smile fell away. “We don’t give answers,” she said bitterly. “Only pleasure.” She looked at the huge bouncer. “Show them out,” she commanded in Russian.

The bouncer put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, and Dinara saw from the change in her boss’s expression that the man had made a serious mistake.

Jack grabbed the bouncer’s hand and twisted his fingers to breaking point, forcing the huge man to his knees and making him groan in pain.

Jack fixed Agafiya with an unflinching stare. “Answers are our pleasure,” he said.