The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

CHAPTER 12

Four hours later I was back in Holland and returning to an historic residential neighborhood which also contained an infamous red-light district. From Amsterdam to Bruges and back, from one murky set of waterways to another, I seemed to be following the canals wherever my investigation led me. Now I was right back where it all started, in De Wallen, the place where forbidden dreams came true.

I’d called George Romanov from the train to Brussels and asked him to arrange a meeting with Sasha. “Sasha is Sasha,” Romanov had said, when I’d queried him about the boy’s relationship with Iskra in her apartment. In fact, Sasha’s full name was Sasha Norin, and like so many of his generation, he called himself an entrepreneur.

Romanov told me that Sasha was a graphic artist who was trying to build a clothing empire. He’d started out by making designer t-shirts. His brand was currently featured in a dozen stores in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam areas. Meanwhile, to support himself, he moonlighted as a tour guide at the Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp Museum. Yes, there really was such a place in Amsterdam. It was right around the corner from the Cannabis College.

The Museum’s main level was filled with what looked like museum quality prints, books and even a miniature reproduction of a ship. Romanov had told me to look for an awkward-looking young man. What I saw instead was a gangly, Rastafarian-looking man-child with rat’s whiskers all over his face. He wore jeans, a yellow t-shirt with a jungle motif, and a monstrous green, gold and red Rasta hat that looked more like a sock for elephants. Gnarly dreadlocks fell from the bottom of the hat. I couldn’t tell if they were part of the hat or his own. Given the authenticity of my surroundings, I strongly suspected they might be real.

I waited for him to finish speaking to a family of three. Then I walked over to him.

“Sasha?” I said in Russian.

His face lit up as though he’d been waiting for me all day. “Yeah, mon. You must be Nadia.”

He sounded like Bob Marley after a heavy diet of blintzes and borsch, the product of Russian and Jamaican parents, which he was not. That he had answered in English was a bold assertion that his English was better than my Russian. I doubted that was true but it would have been rude for me not to switch languages.

He led me to a painting of several weeds hanging on a wall. I’d never smoked anything in my life. Not a cigar, cigarette, and certainly not marijuana. I understood and respected its medicinal applications. Full-stop. But where recreational use was concerned, even where legal, I couldn’t contemplate enjoying it more than a glass or three of some fine wine.

“Did you know that only the mature female species makes you high?” he said.

I thought of Iskra and Sarah Dumont. The only problem with that association was that neither of them seemed very mature.

“If only you could say the same for the human race,” I said.

He laughed without hesitation. His easy-going nature surprised me. I’d expected an introverted recluse, bitter, sad and angry that his unrequited love had died. But he channeled no such vibe. What he did channel was congeniality, which boded well for me. He was listening, seemed intelligent, and was willing to speak with me. After George Romanov, Sarah Dumont, and even my client, Simmy Simeonovich, I was grateful for the prospect of having a straightforward conversation with a person of interest.

“Downstairs, in the seed bank store,” he said, “we weed out the boring males. So they don’t dilute the mature female’s potency.”

“But if you do that, don’t you end up with a bunch of egocentric, unstable males?”

Sasha never stopped smiling. “Yeah, mon, but that’s what the mature female seed wants. She uses them for her own benefit. Reproduction is all the male is good for. After she’s done with them, no one has any use for them.”

“Don’t tell them that.”

“No worries, Miss Nadia. God created every herb and called them all good. You want to try a sample downstairs before we talk?”

“Never on a weekday for me, thanks.”

A group of eight college-aged tourists entered the Museum. I motioned to the far corner of the room. Sasha nodded right away, understanding I wanted privacy. We huddled beside a poster from a 1936 movie titled “Marihuana: The Weed with Roots in Hell!”

“I’m sorry about Iskra,” I said. “I know you were both close.”

His reaction made it seem as though I’d pulled on his dreadlocks, opened a spout in his head, and all his joy had gushed out. He hung his head, and for a moment, I was afraid the weight of his Rasta hat might tip him over. His reaction to my question reminded me of George Romanov, who’d also fallen apart as soon as I asked about his daughter.

“Mr. Romanov said you were awesome,” Sasha said. “That he’d never met a woman as tough as you. He said you were committed. That you were going to find out who killed her. He said you were Russian, too.”

A bit of light shone in Sasha’s eyes when he accused me of having a similar ancestral heritage, and I was not inclined to dim it even though that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

“That’s right,” I said, my ears in partial disbelief that I was willing to tell this lie. “My parents came from the former Soviet Union.” There was no need to mention Ukraine.

“Cool, mon. Given you’re an American, you know… It’s not the easiest thing to trust an American these days… This makes it a lot easier. Tell me what you want to know? I’ll tell you anything if it helps you find the killer. Anything at all.”

“Iskra’s father said you grew up together?”

“We were both born in Russia. My father was a government official. He worked with sportsmen, national teams, that sort of thing. After capitalism came to Russia, my father and Iskra’s father went into the sporting goods business. They became the biggest distributors of sports equipment in all of Russia. Then they got bought out and we all moved here when we were kids. My parents died, first my father, then my mother, when I was still a kid. The Romanovs sort of adopted me. I was really lost back then. They saved me.”

“So you and Iskra, you were like brother and sister?”

He hesitated for a moment as though considering his answer, then nodded. “Exactly like that.” He followed up with some nervous laughter. “We used to fight in our teens, mon. Just like cat and dog, you know? But I never had nothing but love in my heart for that girl, and she knew that, yeah she did.”

“Is that why you followed her to De Wallen, got drunk, ambushed her in her apartment, and called her a dyke and a whore?”

That earned me a double take and a stern look, but Sasha quickly reverted to his laid-back self.

“Not my finest moment,” he said, “but I apologized the next day.” His chin rose. He studied me with suspicious eyes. “How did you know… I didn’t tell anyone about that…”

I wasn’t about to reveal Sarah Dumont as my source.

“Were you shocked when you saw her in the window in a green bikini, selling herself to any man that came by?”

Sasha started to clench his teeth, but then smiled as though suddenly realizing that I was provoking him to see if he would lose his cool and what else he might admit to.

“Wouldn’t you have been?” he said.

“Big time,” I said. “But not as shocked as I would have been when I realized that one of her clients was a woman. How did you figure that out? You must have followed that one client. Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t need to follow her. I bumped into her on the sidewalk after she left Iskra’s room on purpose. Just to get a close look at her face.”

I’d seen Sarah Dumont sans make-up and she’d fooled me.

“And you could tell just by looking at her up close that she was a woman?” I didn’t believe him for a minute.

“No, mon,” he said, sounding even-keeled, not overly solicitous or defensive, as though what he was about to say was the gospel truth. “When I bumped into her my hand accidentally touched her between the legs. And there was nothing there, you know? Nothing. That’s when I knew.”

“So then you got drunk and went into Iskra’s apartment and waited for her. Meaning you had a key to her apartment and you could come and go as you pleased, right?”

“No,” he said, without hesitation. “It wasn’t like that at all. I respected her. I never bothered her. Sometimes I’d call her up and she’d say come over for a beer. She used to drink Grolsch and then when she started drinking that Belgian stuff I knew something was wrong. She gave me the key because she trusted me. She lost her key all the time and always had to call her parents to let her in. And she hated when they came by because her mother would always nose around in all her personal stuff. So she gave the key to someone she could trust to be there for her if she locked herself out. She gave it to me.”

I spied moisture in his eyes, not necessarily the kind that grew to tears, but still an honest indication that the topic was causing the speaker genuine distress.

“Did you kill her, Sasha?”

“Me?”

“You were so hurt, so angry, maybe you lost your composure the way we’re all prone to do with the ones we love, the ones we care about so much when they’ve done something that hurts us so much.”

Sasha looked dejected, as though I’d made the worst possible accusation. “No,” he said firmly.

He brought his hand up to wipe his eyes. I noticed the watch around his wrist for the first time. Evidently my agenda and his Rasta-Russian looks had distracted me from spotting it before. It was a stainless steel Panerai chronograph, noteworthy for its elegance and exclusivity. I recognized it because I’d seen Simmy wearing one when he was dressed casually. I didn’t know the price tag, but what was a struggling entrepreneur doing with a watch suitable for an oligarch?

“Nice watch,” I said.

He glanced at and pulled his arm to his side, as though I’d discovered something he was supposed to hide.

“Oh. Yeah, thanks. It was my father’s. He bought it as a gift to himself after he sold his business in Russia.

“It’s nice that you wear it.” I cleared my throat. “Do you know anyone who would have wanted to harm Iskra? A jilted boyfriend? A jealous rival from school?” I almost said “other jilted boyfriends” but I caught myself just in time.

“No one like that,” he said. “But there was that guy in De Wallen. He was obsessed with her. I told the cops about it. I don’t know if they checked him out or not. But then, I don’t even know if they want to solve the murder or not. I mean, Iskra was Russian, and this is the Netherlands, you know?”

“Who was this man?”

“Her bodyguard. At the window. He had a nickname of some kind.” Sasha scrunched his eyes as he tried to remember.

“The Turk?”

Sasha snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

“How do you know he was obsessed with Iskra?”

“She told me.”

“What? When?”

“That night. When I was in her apartment waiting for her. She blurted out that she was already having problems with a guy at work and she didn’t need any more from me. Next day when I called to apologize I pressed her for details because I was worried about her, you know? That’s when she told me his name. She made me swear to keep it to myself and never go near him. She said he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt me if I upset him.”

“She said that to you?”

“She did.”

“And you told the police this?”

“I did.”

I wrapped things up with Sasha. He gave me his mobile phone number and address without hesitation. I wanted to leave on the most congenial note possible, so I put my hand on his shoulder and thanked him for his help. Some light reappeared in his eyes when he felt my touch and heard my words, and he bid me farewell with a smile.

I’d arrived at the Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum mildly intoxicated about what Sasha might reveal about Iskra and its potential benefits to my investigation. I left as sober as the girl who was never asked to dance at the ball. I felt as though I was walking around in circles, literally and figuratively.

On the surface, Sasha’s assertion that the Turk had been obsessed with Iskra presented a new suspect with a potentially powerful motive. If he’d fallen in love with her, he might have demanded that she quit the business. Alternatively, he might have been horrified to discover that one of her clients was a woman. That seemed less likely for a man who worked with prostitutes for a living. More likely was a scenario where Iskra admitted to the Turk that a woman had won her heart. Perhaps that had infuriated him past the point of self control.

But was he the calculating type who would plan and stage a despicable act of cruelty? Did I picture the Turk as a meticulous planner who’d bring a stud finder to mount his victim on a wall with a carpenter’s precision? No, I did not. He was more likely to snap, which was to say he was more likely to snap her neck in a moment of fury. Still, I couldn’t be certain of this.

The only firm conclusion I could come to after my meeting with Sasha was that all leads brought me back to De Wallen.

The Turk worked in De Wallen. And that is where I would have to return if I wanted to speak with him.

I made a U-turn, picked up my pace and headed back toward Iskra’s—and my—office. The red lights were on above the windows of the African girls’ offices on Ouderkerksplein. I could see their fleshy outlines in the windows closest to mine. It was still early by the red-light district’s standard, and there were only a few passersby when I arrived. My office was dark and empty as expected.

I unlocked the door, stepped inside, turned on the interior light, and took a deep breath.

Then I hit the panic button, stepped back outside, and waited.