The Death Trust

THIRTY-FOUR

Excuse me, please. If you’re taking this flight, we’re about to close the gate,” said the attendant in heavily accented English. She leaned over me with a look of concern cracking her makeup.

Jefferson Cutter, the father of the widow, my so-called influential friend, and the owner of the company that provided the instruments for Abraham Scott’s doomed glider. His name was starting to pop up a little too often, wasn’t it? Coincidence? My definition of coincidence: events whose connections have yet to be uncovered.

“Sir?” said the woman again. She had a kind face but it had spent too many hours in the air, and her skin looked about ready to shed.

“Okay,” I said. I picked up my bag and fed my boarding pass through the machine. I walked down the square hallway until I intersected the tube with a door and another flight attendant. There were no windows to tell me that I was about to catch a plane. It could have been a train, or a narrow cinema. I tried to tell myself this as I followed another flight attendant’s directions to my seat. It was on the aisle, and the two seats to my right were empty. I shoved my bag in the overhead locker, reached across and closed the plastic blind, and sat tight. The woman sitting across the aisle glared at me. I smiled at her, probably more of a grimace, then I closed my eyes and tried my damnedest not to urinate.

It was raining heavily in Riga, a murky sheet over the town that made the medieval center seem even more of a time capsule. Ancient spires pierced the low cloud cover and disappeared into it. Behind the old rose the new, a twentieth-century city. The old city reminded me of the towns I’d seen in stories as a child, the sort where trolls lived under the bridges. My cab driver was Russian. I knew this because he told me. He also told me he was a communist and that he loved vodka and cigarettes. He didn’t need to tell me about the cigarettes because he was smoking and the interior of the taxi smelled like a spittoon, butts piled in the ashtray so that every time he braked, the load shifted and a couple toppled out and dropped onto the floor. I hoped the vodka thing was just a bit of lighthearted banter, but, from the way he meandered back and forth across the road’s center line, I doubted it.

“Riga, jewel of the Baltic,” he announced as we crossed the rat-gray river behind which the city was built. “Where you going?”

I flipped open the folded postcard and said, “Two hundred and thirty-one Dzimavu-iela. Did I say it right?”

He shrugged and said, “Drink half a bottle of Russian vodka and try again. You’ll get it.”

“Your English is good. Where’d you learn it?”

“I was translator for Red Army. Your English is good, too.”

The driver was around fifty, with wiry gray hair, the putty nose of the heavy drinker, and deep laugh lines emanating from the corners of his eyes. He had a broad, gray-bearded face and few teeth. The ones he had stood like old marble tombstones among the weeds.

An old, dull green car blowing more smoke than a forties movie star pulled out in front of us, filling the cab with the fumes of baking grease and unburned fuel. My driver wrestled with the wheel and swore at the vehicle, swerving around it and losing the inch of ash curling off the end of his cigarette, which fell between his legs. I hoped for the sake of his unborn children that there were no embers in it.

We skirted the old town, swerved right down a wide boulevard lined with art nouveau buildings, one of which I noted housed a department store, and pulled up across from a building with a stone gargoyle with large curled toenails perched on a shield over the arched doorway. Beside it was a neon sign in blue and pink of a naked woman. She was leaning over to spank her butt and each time she did, a different bunch of neon tubes filled with color, animating the figure so that she simultaneously winked. How lucky was that gargoyle? The name of the place was a roadkill of consonants, all the vowels having hit and run.

“The Bump?” I asked the driver.

“Da,” he said with a nod.

“Is it open now?”

“Da. Open twenty-four hours. I know better place than this,” he said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand, as if casing a titty bar at eleven in the morning was an everyday occurrence. “More girls, prettier — virgins. I take you.”

Of course they are. I said, “Do you know of a hotel nearby? Walking distance? Not too expensive.”

“You pay a hundred dollars U.S.?”

“If I must,” I replied. The driver pulled back into the traffic, did a U-turn, and lurched to a stop outside The Bump.

“There is a hotel on top,” he said. “A hundred a night.”

How convenient. I thanked the driver, who gave me his cell number and told me I should call him if I found the girls at The Bump too old and ugly and unvirginlike.

I was eager to check in, but more eager still to get fresh underwear. I took a walk to the department store half a block away, struggled through the language barrier, and bought a few pairs of boxer shorts and a change of clothes. Then I went back to the hotel and got a room for one night.

It was nearly noon and I was dragging my feet. I took a shower and lay down on the bed. For whatever reason, sleep wouldn’t come, so I took out the folder containing Scott’s downloads and started reading about Chechnya. I woke up ten hours later, not knowing where I was.

The sleep had done me good. I took another shower, put on the white T-shirt and loose brown corduroy pants I’d bought, and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. It was 2300 hours before I made it to The Bump. A Beyoncé track played as I handed over the entry fee to an old matron done up like a madam from a French bordello, perched behind a cash register reading — from the looks of the cover — a romance novel.

I walked through a cave, pushed aside a heavy red velvet curtain, and entered a vast, crowded space. A woman, tanned and tall and dressed in no more than a tiny skirt made from transparent red mesh, strode past on heels high enough to induce a nosebleed. Her hair was long, wavy, and yellow and she prowled rather than walked, as if maneuvering to play with an injured mouse she’d spotted. She smiled at me in a way that communicated she wanted to have sex with me right here, right now.

I made my way to the bar, which ran the full length of one very long wall. Bottles of liquor of every color lined the shelving backed by a mirror, lit by alternating pink and white spotlights. The bar itself was a combination of stainless steel and zebra skin and was three or four deep in male customers. Liberally scattered among them were young women who laughed and chatted with the men as if they were good friends, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were, mostly, next to naked.

The theme of the place reminded me of a set for a sixties Playboy shoot. Large mobiles with orange, red, and pink circles within circles hung from the ceiling. The motif was continued in various wall hangings and on the thick carpet.

At each table, skewered by a brass pole that ran from floor to ceiling, a naked woman performed various feats of advanced leg opening. Around the walls, red leather booths held intimate gatherings. The place was humming. Everywhere, young women were either taking off their clothes or were already entirely naked, their ankles in the air. No one seemed to be complaining about this. Indeed, the men mostly watched these performances silently, glassy-eyed and tense, their endocrine systems dumping quarts of testosterone into their systems while their elbows bent subconsciously, pouring alcohol down their throats as if to extinguish a roaring fire within.

Over the PA system a male voice announced something in what I assumed was Latvian and a number of men surged to a large glass tank filled with water. Two blondes appeared out on stage from behind a glass bead curtain, wearing gold bikini tops and ultrashort gold miniskirts. They couldn’t have been more than eighteen, yet they had huge breasts and impossibly small waists, just like Varvara. They strutted to the platform in front of the tank and undressed each other. The men licked their lips. The two women climbed into the tank, kissed passionately, and began soaping each other up with hands that were far from shy.

If, as Varvara had suggested, this was a front for the Chechen separatists, it was a movement I could happily consider joining.

I ordered a Coke. The drink came as I was enveloped by a woman’s scent — the very same one Anna Masters used, if I was not mistaken — and I felt a cool hand slip under my arm. I flinched slightly, acutely aware of the gunshot wound above her fingers. I turned and looked into the face of an angel wearing spectacles. I know it’s trite, but my first thought was beauty and brains. Her hair was straw-colored, wavy, and tumbled around her shoulders. She wore pink lipstick and a tight white sheath of Lycra so that I had to use my imagination, but not too much. Her voice was light and clear, like a bird chirping in a cage, and she was speaking to me in what I decided must be more Latvian. I shrugged to let her know I didn’t understand a word she was saying. She immediately switched to English and said, “Hey, stranger, don’t be shy. Where you from?”

“A little town — you wouldn’t know it.”

“Oh, you are American. I love Americans,” she said. She’d picked my accent, but I couldn’t return the compliment. She could have come from one of the Baltic states, Russia, Georgia, the planet Venus. She ran a fingernail lightly from my ear across my cheek and down my neck and chest, stopping at my belt buckle. “You have nice body. My name is Katarinya. I would love to dance for you.”

“I’d love that too, Katarinya, but first I have to meet someone. Maybe you know him?”

“Oh, you know someone in Riga?” One perfectly plucked eyebrow arched higher.

“We’ve never met. His name is Alu Radakov,” I said.

Katarinya almost jumped at the mention of the name. She didn’t know how to react, whether to be extra friendly — if that were possible — or suddenly cautious. After a moment of internal turmoil, visible on her face, she decided on the latter.

“Yes, Alu. That is him. Over there, the man partying with the redheaded woman.” She gestured at a booth where a considerable number of women were entertaining a cluster of men. The word “cavorting” came to mind. I wasn’t sure which man Katarinya was referring to, there being two attentive redheads in the group, clearly earning their pay.

When I looked back to clarify this, Katarinya had vanished, but then I spotted her with her arm around the neck of a fat, middle-aged businessman while she rocked on his lap, her back arched in apparent ecstasy. Maybe she was moving on his wallet.

I strolled over to the booth. “Alu Radakov?” I said. There were six men and eight women. All but one of the men were bearded. The mood of the party went from bawdy lust to leery in a heartbeat. I toasted them with my Coke and said, “Varvara Kadyrov and I are good friends. She said if I ever came to Riga I should look you up.”

A clean-shaven man, in a white body shirt opened to the breastbone so that more hair than on a barbershop floor was revealed, leaned back. His body language told me he was the man I’d come to see. I knew when I was being evaluated, so I did likewise. Radakov’s head was round like a bowling ball and his hair was black and waxed into short, unruly quills. His eyes were cold and gray and the lids drooped, giving the impression that he’d been awake for a week. Maybe he had been. It wasn’t a kind face, nor was it especially brutal. He appeared to be fit, if the thick muscular neck was any clue, and his forearms were bunched with well-defined muscles that reminded me of cable. After a moment’s consideration, he smacked the rump of the stunning redhead perched on his knees. She yelped playfully, got the message, and skittered away rubbing her ass, high heels clicking on the polished marble floor.

“Yes, and you must be Special Agent Vin Cooper,” he said. His accent reminded me of Varvara’s and Flight Lieutenant Peter Bishop’s rolled into one. Educated in England, perhaps? “I’ve been expecting you. Can I get you a drink?”

Expecting me? I glanced at my glass, which now held mostly ice. “Thanks,” I said.

He said something to the men at the table. All had peasant faces with broad Slavic features — high cheekbones with eyes set wide enough apart to make me question their origin in the gene pool. One was painfully thin with sallow skin, sunken cheeks, and a nose that reminded me of an eagle’s beak. His eyes were black pits beneath a solid, single brow. All the men except Radakov wore black vinyl jackets. When Radakov had finished having his chat, the men smiled warmly and toasted me as if they’d just been told I had five daughters of child-bearing age, all of whom were virgins. I raised my glass in a return salute as Radakov came out from behind the table and herded me toward the bar.

“You’ve come a long way,” he commented.

I shrugged. “It’s a shrinking planet. How did you know I was coming here?”

The woman behind the bar ignored the men waiting their turn and served Radakov. “There’s not much I don’t know about my friends and enemies. What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Coca-Cola. Which one am I — Friend? Or enemy?”

“That stuff will kill you — too much sugar. I myself drink lime and soda. And I haven’t yet decided.”

“If you know who I am, then you know why I’m here.”

“You are investigating the death of Abraham Scott,” he replied.

“More accurately, his murder.”

“Yes,” Radakov agreed. “Unfortunate business.” He made a gesture in the air and was attended immediately by a tall, dark waitress who wouldn’t have been out of place in Italian Vogue or on a Brazilian beach. He said a few words to her, and she raced on ahead and cleared one of the booths occupied by women taking a break from taking their clothes off.

When we were settled in the booth, I said, “Why was it an unfortunate business?”

“Can I call you Vin?”

“That’s my name,” I said.

“There is much you don’t know, Vin.”

“Fix the problem and fill me in.”

“How long are you staying in Riga?” He watched a woman with white wavy hair down to her buttocks strut past. She winked at him and rolled her tongue around her upper lip.

“As long as it takes.” I didn’t want to tell him that, more truthfully, my stay would expire when I ran out of cash, which, at current levels of expenditure, gave me until the day after tomorrow.

“You are staying here? In the hotel?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Excellent. Then you shall stay as my guest — I own it.”

I was immediately uncomfortable, my Protestant work ethic compromised by the knowledge that I was living off the proceeds of a known people-smuggler, and who knew what else. “I’m happy to pay,” I told him.

“Nonsense. Do you see anything here you like?” he said.

I figured he wasn’t talking about the décor. “No,” I said.

“You Americans — you are all so…repressed,” he concluded, shaking his head.

“Let’s talk about General Scott.”

“General Scott started out repressed, but I brought him around. He came to have a fine appreciation of the female form, even if he didn’t partake.”

“I know. I met his girlfriend.”

“Yes, Varvara. Exquisite, but troublesome. She was one of my star attractions here. The general fell in love with her.”

“Really,” I said.

“So I gave her to him as a present.”

“Or a bribe?” I said.

Katarinya, the young woman who’d approached me at the bar, distracted Radakov. Actually, we were both distracted. She strolled past on her way to somewhere, leading a young man by the hand who was practically panting. My eyes followed her, unconsciously. Her glasses intrigued me. I didn’t usually associate eyeglasses with women who oozed sex. It was like lusting after the school librarian. Her perfume eddied around our table.

“So, you like Katarinya?” said Radakov.

I didn’t answer.

“Yes, she is beautiful. From the Ukraine, from an extremely poor family. What you see is genuine. She has not visited my surgeon, one of the few women here who hasn’t.”

I sipped my drink.

“You want to fuck her, I know,” he said. “I can arrange it.”

“Why did you have Abraham Scott killed?” I said, ignoring his offer.

Radakov sighed. He shrugged. “It was not me. I was against it. There were others who insisted on it.”

“Will you tell me who these others are? Are you referring to The Establishment?”

Radakov turned to face me. “You have no idea what you are dealing with.”

“Like I said, enlighten me.”

“Perhaps. But not tonight.”

“After General Scott’s son was killed in Iraq, he went to Baghdad for a couple of days. Shortly after that, he came here to Riga. In between, he went somewhere else. Do you know where he went?”

“Yes, I do.”

The woman who had shown us to the booth came over and whispered in Radakov’s ear. “Excuse me, Vin,” he said, “I have a business to run. Tonight, as I said, enjoy my hospitality. We will talk more tomorrow.” He spoke to the waitress and motioned at me. She nodded a couple of times and then Radakov walked away.

The woman flashed her professional smile at me. “Anything you want, let me know.” Like Radakov, she turned and melted into the crowd. It was past midnight now and the place was jammed. The growing number of customers had been matched by an influx of Radakov’s women. The two blondes who’d bathed in the tank earlier were now onstage, doing a double act. I felt as if I was watching reruns. Time to leave.

I walked out of The Bump, past a line that snaked down the road. Riga might have had a massive gender imbalance in its population, but that didn’t seem to have affected Radakov’s business. The place was a gold mine.

I was in a busy part of town, the street lined with restaurants and bars. Riga was a lively place. I found a joint that served steak, and took a table outside. Women of all ages cruised the street, apparently on the hunt for available men. I knew this because several times I had to inform complete strangers that, no, I wasn’t dining alone — my wife had just gone off to powder her nose. I bought a glass of wine and an entrée and had them placed beside me to cement the ruse. I didn’t want company. In fact, I was starting to wonder about the wisdom of being in Riga at all. What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t owe Abraham Scott or his wife anything. And now I’d pretty much ended my OSI career by thumbing my nose at the big cheese, ignoring the order to return to Washington. Was it just my resentment at being shot at and mugged? What drove me? I wanted to believe that it was a heightened sense of judgment, or was it justice? Was I trying to prove something to myself — that I could still do this gig? Showing off to Anna? “Jesus, what the fuck were you thinking?” I said quietly to myself.

The steak arrived and it was good, but, despite the growl in my stomach, I had no appetite. I forced it down and left. The night was chilly but I didn’t feel it — I was too busy thinking about all the information in this case, all the facts that led nowhere, all the deaths, and the cold reality that I had no solid leads to a suspect. In fact, I was grasping so hard for something to hold on to, I’d even considered adding Jefferson Cutter to the list of people of interest. I had absolutely no doubt that Radakov was mixed up in this mess — he’d admitted as much. In a way, he’d also confirmed the existence of The Establishment, but I had no authority here to extract anything from him that he wasn’t willing to divulge.

Radakov, the Chechen separatist and peddler in sex slaves; General Scott, four-star general of a huge NATO airbase; Harmony Cutter Scott, his wife — the chief players in this drama. Perhaps General Scott was trying to find out what made Radakov tick, hence all the information that he’d downloaded on the Chechen separatist movement. And what about The Establishment? Was it a government think tank of some kind? Or something else entirely? Several times during this investigation I’d felt a sense of the whole coalescing, or, given the amount of blood that had been spilled, coagulating, but then something new would pop up and the feeling would dissolve. As Anna had observed, someone out there obviously thought of me as a danger or potential threat; otherwise, why the attempts on my life?

I glanced up. My feet had found their way back to The Bump. The line outside had lengthened and the music was still pumping. Somewhere within, a door opened and a hot ball of stale beer fumes, body heat, and perfume rolled over me. It was getting on to 0130 hours and, although I wasn’t feeling tired, I’d had enough, and I wanted to get up early so that I could get on Radakov’s case. I walked through the entrance to the hotel, lost in speculation.

My room was quiet and dark. I turned on the bedside lamp and stripped. I needed a shower, if only to get the airborne testosterone from The Bump off my skin. I climbed under the hot water, careful to keep the gunshot wound high and dry. Ten minutes later I got out, toweled off, and went back into the bedroom.

I stood in the doorway, towel around my waist, frozen. When I was last there, like, just before I got in the shower, I didn’t remember seeing a woman kneeling on the bed. But that’s exactly what was there now. I recognized her. It was Katarinya, only she wasn’t wearing her glasses anymore. In fact, she wasn’t wearing anything.

She said, “I know you want to fuck me. I felt your longing for me. I have thought about you inside me.” She put her head down on the covers and stretched forward with her hands, keeping her ass high. Her fingers slid between her thighs. They began to gently stroke and rub her vulva. “Please fuck me,” she begged. There was suddenly a look of intense pleasure and pain on her face, as if someone had flicked a switch. She’d turned on a sexual hunger that could only be sated — if what I was hearing and seeing was any indication — by a good ol’ Yankee boy in the saddle. But I didn’t buy it. Aside from the fact that if I had this effect on women I was sure I’d have experienced it already before now, I’d seen this very act performed by several women earlier tonight for men who had responded by inserting dollars under their G-strings with their teeth. Yeah, I was aroused, but that was offset by the pity I felt for her for being manipulated, used as someone else’s instrument, and by my anger at Radakov for doing the using.

“Katarinya, please get dressed,” I said, squatting down on my haunches beside her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I replied. I put my hand on her shoulder. She responded by rubbing her cheek against my fingers, and then softly biting one of them.

“I am not sexy for you?” she asked at full pout, coming up on all fours and advancing toward me, her full breasts swaying between her arms.

“You’re not here because you find me attractive.” My throat was annoyingly dry. “Radakov told you to come.”

“Yes, he did. But I like you, especially because you’re resisting me.” She sucked in her bottom lip and held it under her teeth suggestively. Her eyes went to my towel. “Oh, and it is all an act, see?” There was mock surprise in her voice as she reached in and fondled me. I was hard but, while my body might have been a boiling sea of willing hormones, my head and heart said, emphatically, no.

I stepped back from the bed, beyond reach. “You have to leave now.” When I met with Radakov in the morning, I didn’t want him to think I owed him anything. And there was another reason for this reluctance and her name was Anna Masters.

Katarinya sighed, got up from the bed, and put on her clothes, or rather cloth — the white Lycra sheath. In a matter of a second or two, her attitude swung from crawling-the-walls-horny to utter indifference. She slipped her feet into her high heels and left without a backward glance. If she were a cat, she’d have flicked her tail with disdain.

I cleared my throat. The door closed. Four men charged at me from the shadows. No time to move. I watched them come, mouth open in surprise, blindsided. They hit me like a stampede. Katarinya, a decoy. I went down on the carpet. I recognized them. Radakov’s men, his companions from The Bump. I elbowed one across the bridge of the nose. The bone collapsed like a crushed aluminum can but the injury didn’t slow him any. They pinned my arms behind me, and locked my head in a wrestling hold. Two of them sat on my legs as the door opened again. Black boots, black pants walked in. The assailants wrenched back my head to face the newcomer. The black shoes belonged to the man with the monobrow, the beak, and the black eyes. He lifted something in his hands. What was he holding? Shit, was it a hypodermic? A small jet of clear fluid shot from the sharp end. Jesus, fuck! He drove his knee into my ribs and slammed the needle into the side of my neck.

“You fuckers,” I yelled. “I will personally farrmm bleeeeeo…”