The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

CHAPTER 13

Footsteps pounded toward me. They came from inside the apartment building, just as they had when the Turk first appeared in my office after the landlady pressed the panic button as a demonstration. I turned from my doorway and saw someone entering my office through the inner door.

He was the Turk’s young protégé.

Someone slammed me from behind.

I stumbled, teetered, took aim for the bed and landed face first on the mattress. The sheet smelled deliciously crisp and clean with a faint scent of a floral garden. The outside door closed behind me. I knew I’d just become a prisoner in my own office and yet here I was, marveling at the diligence of the window prostitutes’ cleaning service. The things I noticed at the most unlikely times never ceased to amaze me. I wondered if the wiring in my brain was off.

As I rose to my feet, I heard a deep voice bark instructions from behind. The protégé scampered out of the room and closed the door behind him. I recognized the Turk’s voice. I knew it was he who’d given the orders even before I turned around.

The sight of the Turk jarred me nonetheless. It wasn’t his rawboned structure or the gargantuan size of his head, but rather his constantly seething nature. Menace oozed from his pores and left one wondering how many miles his engine could log before it expired.

He locked the door from the inside and stood with his back to it. In the event I needed to leave immediately, I would never get past him. The only escape was through the interior door, and that assumed it wasn’t locked.

The Turk opened his hip-length leather jacket and started to undo his belt.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Preparing to get paid.”

“What?”

“Preparing to get paid,” he said. “You came back here. You’re not really a professional. You dressed up like the dead girl so you were probably working for her family, trying to find her killer. Am I right?”

He was right, of course, but I didn’t admit that to him. I was too shocked by the realization that I’d underestimated him so badly.

“Surprise, surprise, American woman. The Turk is not as stupid as he looks.”

He dropped his pants, stepped out of them and tossed them onto the bed. I tried not to glance at his mostly bare lower body but my eyes went there of their own accord. Hair on top of hair on surprisingly spindly legs, black leather underwear in the finest Speedo tradition, and of course, the requisite bulge that he probably thought was a major turn-on. I suppressed a surge of bile, and finally, a surge of adrenaline told me I’d better do something fast.

I made the time-out sign. “Whoa, my strong and handsome friend. Stop right there.” I picked up his pants and tossed them back at him. “Put those back on.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and let the pants fall to the floor. “I will answer your questions only if you pay me.”

I tapped my bag, which miraculously still hung off my shoulder by a strap. “Of course I’ll pay you.”

“Not that way.” He grabbed his crotch. “You must pay me the way a woman who rents this room should know how to pay.”

“But I’m not that woman. You said so yourself.”

“That’s not what I said. I said you’re not really a professional. But you did rent the office. So you should act like a professional. You should pay me like a professional.”

“You want me to act like a professional?” I said. “Okay. I’ll act like a professional.”

The Turk smiled and nodded.

“I understand that Amsterdam is very protective of its prostitutes,” I said. “That the local government has instituted anti-discrimination laws for the protection of legal sex workers. For instance, if a sex worker were to be denied a loan at a bank, and that bank were found to have discriminated against her profession, it could be found guilty in a Netherlands court of law. At this moment, I’m a legally employed sex-worker. You understand that, right?”

The Turk’s eyes narrowed, as though he agreed but didn’t like the direction in which I was headed, or the confidence with which I was navigating my path.

“What if I filed a complaint? There must be a way I can file a formal complaint against a man who’s supposed to be protecting me, the legal sex worker, but instead has tried to force himself upon me twice?”

“That is a lie.” The Turk raised his finger and pointed it at me. “I have never tried to force myself on you. I have never touched you.”

“I beg to differ. I think it was you who just pushed me in here and locked the door behind him. It will be my word against yours. I can get a billionaire and a dozen CEOs to swear in court my word is bond. How about you?”

He paused to process what I’d just said.

“Put your pants on,” I said, “and let’s do some business.”

He seethed for a moment, long enough for me to pray the interior door wasn’t locked if I needed to run.

“What business?” he finally said.

“You’re not as slow as I thought but you’re far from Formula One material. I ask, you answer, I pay cash. That kind of business. Good enough?”

He gathered his pants around his waist. I took the sound of his zipper moving northward to be a response in the affirmative.

“Tell me about your relationship with Iskra,” I said.

“Relationship?” He shrugged. “What relationship? She worked. I protected. Sometimes I sampled the merchandise. At first I paid, but after a while, she got a taste for the Turk, and I didn’t have to pay.”

I cast a skeptical look at him. “In case I didn’t state the obvious, you lie, you don’t get paid. So let’s start over. Sometimes you tasted the merchandise. Meaning you paid her for sex?”

“No. I asked her to read the lines on my hand and tell me my future.”

“Why did you stop paying her for sex? What do you mean she got a taste for the Turk?”

“She got a taste for the Turk means she got a taste of this.” He tapped his heart.

“What is that supposed to mean? That you didn’t fall in love with her, but she fell in love with you? Are you kidding me?”

He scoffed. “Love? Love is for the very rich and the very poor, for those who are bored because they have a lot of money, and those with no hope because they have no money.” He thumped his fist against his chest again, like a Catholic begging forgiveness for his sins. “Iskra got a taste of what it was like to be with a real man. Not in bed. In life. I protected her. I took care of her. And I didn’t judge her. I didn’t ask her for anything that she didn’t want to do for money. And so…” He nodded as though his implication were clear.

I was starting to wonder if I was missing something obvious. “Yes? And so?”

“And so she hired me.”

His answer took my breath away. That was not a proposition I’d even contemplated.

“Hired you to do what?” I said.

“To protect her.”

“From what?”

“Not what,” he said. “Who.”

“She was scared of someone?”

“Not scared. Terrified.”

“Did she tell you who?”

“No.”

“She didn’t mention a young man?” I said. “A young man named Sasha?”

“She did not name names.”

“And what kind of protection did you provide, exactly?”

“I walked her home after work. She said she was no longer comfortable being out at night alone.”

“And you did this for her in exchange for sex?”

The Turk nodded. “Twelve times.” He shook his head, a longing etched in his face. “That girl was unbelievable. She didn’t have sex with you. She was sex. She had that gift. You touched her and she melted. There was no acting in her. The first time she put her mouth—”

“Stop,” I said. “I’ve heard the soundtrack to a similar movie before. How do you know she was terrified?”

The Turk bristled. “How did I know? She would walk beside me holding my hand like a scared little kitten. When we got to her apartment, she’d ask me to go in first and check every room to make sure no one was waiting for her.”

I pictured Sasha unleashing his full verbal fury after a decade of unrequited love. Was that enough to propel Iskra into a state of perpetual fear? I didn’t think so. “Sasha is Sasha,” her father had said. That implied there had always been a certain immaturity to him, one that Iskra had undoubtedly seen and managed. Based on the Rosta-Russian man-boy I’d met, I didn’t see him inspiring fear any more than I saw him bringing a stud-finder to a meticulously planned crucifixion of the girl he’d loved his entire life.

“Did she ever ask for your help outside of work?” I said.

The Turk shook his head. “I walked her home after she turned off her lights. That’s it. Nothing else. If she had asked for more help, I would have given it to her. But she never did.”

“When did this all start? When was the first night she asked you to walk her home?”

“Two weeks before she died.”

That jibed with the general time frame of when Sasha had discovered Iskra was moonlighting as a sex worker and seeing a woman.

“Did you know that one of her clients was a woman?”

“Of course I knew. I know everything that happens in the rooms that belong to the women I protect.”

“Did Iskra ever talk about that woman?”

“Never. And I didn’t ask her, either. That would have been against my professional code of conduct. The relationship between a woman and her client is a sacred thing. It’s business.”

On that note, I opened my wallet and gave the Turk a hundred euro. Given we’d talked for less than fifteen minutes, it was an overly generous hourly rate. He didn’t complain or haggle one bit. Instead, he slid the bills gently into his wallet, walked over to the door leading to the streets, and opened it.

“Was I right about why you’re here?” he said.

I looked him in the eye but didn’t say a word.

He nodded with approval.

“One other thing,” I said. “Did she give you a key to her apartment?”

The Turk dismissed the idea with an immediate frown. “Why would she give me a key? We were not friends.”

In fact, it didn’t matter if she’d given him a key or not. The knew each other. Theoretically, he could have entered her apartment by knocking on the door. But I wanted to see the look on his face when I asked the question. He was clearly more intelligent than I’d assumed and he would have surely realized why I was asking. But he didn’t appear concerned that I might consider him a suspect at all.

I walked back to my hotel frustrated yet energized. Sasha had told me that Iskra had said that the Turk was obsessed with her. That was a lie, but I couldn’t be certain if it was Sasha or Iskra had fabricated a story. My money was on Iskra. I suspected that one of her clients really was obsessed with her but that she didn’t want Sasha confronting him. By lying, Iskra was protecting her childhood friend from someone she considered powerful and dangerous.

She had been scared, mortally so. She’d been afraid to return to her home alone at night. Surely the person whom she was afraid of was this person who was obsessed with her, the one who eventually killed her.

I had an eerie feeling that I was close to the killer and that the most significant piece of information was already in my possession. This suspicion was based on an intuition similar to the one I’d experienced during dozens of corporate investigations. I’d seen all the necessary data points. I simply hadn’t visualized them in the proper order yet, which was to say I hadn’t spotted the definitive lie among them.

Food was on my mind when I stepped into the hotel lobby. A woman at the front desk called me by name before I could get by.

“There’s a gentleman waiting to see you,” she said, with a big smile.

Alarm bells sounded in my head. It could only be De Vroom, I thought. He must have found out I hadn’t followed his orders and was still looking into Iskra’s death.

“Where is this gentleman?” I said.

Two other female hotel employees appeared out of nowhere and stood eyeing me and beaming beside her. I felt like the winner of a pageant I’d never entered.

“In the bar,” she said, and motioned toward the glass stairs to my right.

I passed a reading room and entered the restaurant on the left side of a corridor. The bar was positioned on the opposite side of the dining room, behind the kitchen. I took a deep breath and entered the lounge. I expected to see De Vroom sitting on a stool nursing a whiskey, looking like the model in a photo shoot for some beverage aficionado’s magazine.

Instead I found Simmy Simeonovich sitting at a table for two. An outrageous bouquet of tulips rested on one side of the small circular table in front of him. Beside it stood a tantalizing box wrapped in glossy red and white paper with a matching bow. He rose to his feet as soon as he saw me, and the cumulative effect of his appearance and the loot on the table was to render me speechless.

“Good evening, Nadia.”

He delivered his greeting with a gentle enunciation and a slight bow, like the man I thought I’d befriended two years ago, not like the oligarch who’d chastised me when I’d been released from jail.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

“The box?” He glanced at the table. “Oh, that. Forget about that. That’s for later.”

I was intrigued but reluctant to let him know how happy I was to see him, especially bearing gifts. Hence, I ignored the tulips and put my hand on my hip.

“Why are you here, Simmy?”

“To make amends,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“To make amends. To try to explain to you why I am the man I am and…” He pursed his lips as though asking me to save him from the embarrassment of having to display any more humility.

“And?” I said.

Even the Simmy I’d known prior to Amsterdam would have bristled at my refusal to cut him any slack. This, however, was not the Simmy I knew. This was someone entirely different.

He straightened his posture and arched his chin a bit. Cleared his throat like a man intent on making sure his words sounded real, true, and hit their mark.

“And I’m here to apologize for my poor behavior, and to ask you to please forgive me.” He reached down, wrapped his hand around the bouquet and handed it to me.

I took the flowers from him the way a robot would wash a windshield, mechanically, without any awareness of what I was doing. I knew my ears had not deceived me and that I had heard him correctly, but I didn’t believe a word of it. How could I? No man had ever spoken to me in such a heartfelt fashion, let alone one who’d made his vast fortune by eschewing humility and lived in a world where it was considered a weakness.

“Will you have dinner with me?” he said. “Here? Tonight?”

I nodded.

“Excellent,” he said.

“I need to go upstairs and freshen up. Did you… did you want to come up and wait in my room?”

He smiled and bowed again. “Thank you, but no. It would be more appropriate if I wait for you here.”

“Suit yourself,” I said.

I turned to leave but decided he deserved a reward for all that he’d said and done so far. I knew how to reward him because I knew it was my irreverent American ways that he enjoyed so much.

“Can I ask you a question before I go?” I said.

“Yes?”

I donned my finest straight-man look and paused a beat for effect. Then I twisted an expression of great curiosity onto my face.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

Simmy smiled. “Knowledge.”