Die for Me Page 6

  Pathetic really, but it no longer matters. I’ve burned my bridges. I’m stateless, loveless and alone.

  When I shoot myself, will it hurt? Will my last sensation be one of unimaginable pain? Or is it as they say, that you don’t hear the shot that kills you, let alone feel it. That it’s just… lights out?

  I don’t think I can bear the idea of a head shot. I don’t want to be found with half my skull missing and my brains all over the silk-upholstered headboard and the damask curtains. I don’t particularly like Dasha, but neither do I want to force her to redecorate.

  A heart shot, then. That will be appropriate in so many ways. It’ll probably take me a few moments longer to die, but I won’t be disfigured. Taking off my glasses, I put them on the bedside table. Then I kick off my shoes, and lie down on the bed with two pillows supporting my upper body. Here we go. An end to fear, to worry, to everything.

  When I’m comfortable on the pillows, I slap the magazine into the Glock and rack the slide. The gun is now cocked, but to shoot myself in the heart I have to invert it, place the barrel against my chest and slip the pad of my thumb through the trigger guard. This is an awkward maneuver when you’re drunk. Glocks don’t have a safety catch, they have a double trigger. You have to engage both parts, and I’m just aligning them with my thumb when a faint sound penetrates my consciousness.

  It’s Oxana. One moment she’s standing by the door, the next she’s on top of me, wrenching the Glock from my hands. I stare up at her. She’s shouting, but the movement of her mouth doesn’t correspond to the words. She bounces off the bed, stalks over to the window, wrenches open the curtains and stands with her back to me. There’s a metallic rasp and snap as she makes the Glock safe.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Her voice is low, barely audible.

  “What did it look like?”

  “You’re not that stupid.”

  “It wouldn’t be stupid. Give me one fucking reason to carry on.”

  She frowns. “Us.”

  “Us? Oxana, I just make you angry. You don’t tell me your plans, and when you speak to me, it’s like you hate me. There is no us.”

  “Eve, please.”

  “That’s what I mean. That tone of voice. I annoy you.”

  “So you decide to kill yourself?”

  “Have you got a better idea?”

  She walks back to the bed. “You are such a dumbass, Eve. Such a fucking dumbass.”

  “Actually, I’m not. I’m pretty smart. The dumbass is you.”

  She sits on the bed, reaches out a hand, and touches my cheek. I slap her hand away, swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit bolt upright, shaking with fury.

  “You look very sexy in that dress.”

  I ignore her, stand up and start to walk toward the door, although I have no real idea where I’m going. She jumps off the other side of the bed, bounds across the room and blocks my path. I don’t slow down, but throw out an arm in front of me, grab her by the throat and slam her hard against the wall. I hold her there, she gasps and her eyes widen, but she doesn’t resist.

  “I want you to show me some kindness,” I tell her, spitting the words in her face. “I don’t give a shit if that’s hard for you. It’s time you learned how to be a fucking human being.”

  “I see.” Behind my hand, her neck is throbbing like an anaconda.

  “No, you don’t see, because you’re too fucking lazy to see. You hide behind your psycho label because it gets you off the hook. But you’re not just some walking mental health disorder, and you know it.”

  “So what am I?” she sneers. “When you’ve finished choking me. Which I’m enjoying, by the way.”

  “Someone who can’t deal with the fact that you have, within your reach, a real living, breathing person who has given up everything for you. Everything.”

  Almost casually, Oxana drives her knuckles into my extended elbow, so that the nerve-shock jolts to my fingertips. I release her neck. Then she grabs one of my ears and a hank of my hair in each of her hands and pulls my face to hers, so that we’re eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. “So what do you want in return, Eve?” she whispers.

  In response, I take her lower lip between my teeth, and bite it. Oxana exhales softly, and I taste her blood. “I want you,” I tell her. “I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine.”

  We stand there for a moment, neither of us moving, just breathing.

  “All the way?” she asks.

  “All the way.”

  She pulls her head back so that she can look at me, and slowly traces my face with her forefinger. Across my eyebrow, down my cheekbone and between my lips, which are glued together with her blood. It dries fast.

  “OK,” she says. “OK.” Taking my glasses from the bedside table, she fits them carefully over my face. “There, now you can see me properly.”

  “You’re still a bitch,” I whisper, taking her hands in mine.

  “I know, pupsik. I’m sorry.” She looks at me gravely. “Tomorrow, we sit down and plan. Together. Dasha is getting us passports and money, but I have to do something for her. We have to do something for her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can we talk about it tomorrow?” She pulls me toward her. “Because right now I have other things in mind.”

  “Really? What sort of things?”

  “Just… things.”

  “I’m quite drunk.”

  “I noticed. Me too. But not that drunk.”

  An hour later, I’m almost asleep when a thought occurs to me. “Sweetie?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Why did everyone laugh at me at dinner? When I said that I spent the whole week shivering. What was so funny? They all, like, pissed themselves.”

  “It was your Russian. Shivering is drozhala, and you said drochila.”

  “What does drochila mean?”

  “Masturbating.”

  “Sweetie?”

  “Eve please, shut the fuck up and let me sleep.”

  “What did Dasha ask you to do?”

  “You really need to know right this second?”

  “I really do.”

  “She asked me to kill the Pakhan.”

  5

  The next fortnight passes swiftly, and for the first time since we left London, Oxana seems calm and focused. She’s naturally secretive, an archetypal lone wolf, and planning an assassination with me is not easy for her. It isn’t easy for me, either; murder is murder after all, even if the intended victim is a horrible person like the Pakhan. But we’ve both kept going. Oxana has begun to share her thoughts with me, and I’ve managed to ignore what she dismissively refers to as my “civilian guilt,” and concentrate on practicalities and logistics. I’ve always been good at that.

  I’m touched by how hard she’s trying to make our collaboration work, and more than that, to make our relationship work. She has no instinct directing her here. She knows how to excite, manipulate and hurt me, but despite the fact that we’ve lived in each other’s pockets for the best part of a month, she still finds my feelings impossible to read. I catch her sometimes, gazing at me with her sea-gray eyes, trying to access my emotions. I find this so heart-rending. I can’t imagine how lonely it must be to have your nose forever pressed against the glass separating you from other people. To be eternally out in the cold, trying to look in.

  I’ll make her feel my love, even if it kills me.

  Asmat Dzabrati, the Pakhan, is sixty-nine years old. He lives in an apartment in a massive, gray seventeen-story building on Malaya Balkanskaya Ulitsa, near Kupchino Metro station. He owns several apartments there, which are occupied by, among others, his four bodyguards, his ex-wife Yelena, and his sister Rushana and her husband. He also leases a small apartment behind the Fruzensky department store, a short drive away, where he keeps his “sugar baby,” a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian woman named Zoya whom he met through an introduction agency. His family and Yelena disapprove of this relationship, and re
fuse to acknowledge Zoya, so she never visits the Malaya Balkanskaya building.

  The Pakhan’s regular ports of call are Zoya’s apartment, a clinic in Nevsky Prospekt where Zoya goes for Botox shots and he for rejuvenation injections, and the Elizarova bathhouse in Proletarskaya. Meetings with the Kupchino Bratva brigadiers are either conducted at an Ossetian restaurant named Zarina, where a private room is reserved for the Pakhan and his guests, or at the bathhouse. Occasionally Dzabrati also entertains at home, with Rushana acting as hostess to gang members and their families. At intervals he visits his cardiologist at a private clinic in the city center. He has a heart condition, believed to be atrial fibrillation, for which he takes Digoxin tablets.

  This information has been provided by Dasha, and has been confirmed by surveillance operations mounted by Oxana. I’ve been involved in some of these, but always at a distance. Mostly I remain by myself in the apartment on Stachek Prospekt, collating and processing information. I’d like to be out there with Oxana, but she’s afraid I would get lost or attract attention in some way. She’s probably right. I have a terrible sense of direction, and when I was sent on a course with A4, MI5’s watcher department, I struggled embarrassingly, and could never get the communications protocol right.

  So Oxana goes alone, which is how she prefers it. On a couple of occasions she’s disappeared for over twenty-four hours at a stretch, returning cold, hungry and dog-tired. At these times I know better than to even try to talk to her. Instead I run her a bath, bring her cheese and cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea, and put her to bed.

  All the intelligence we acquire goes into a file, which we scour continuously for recurring patterns. So far we’ve found none. For all his old-school leadership style, the Pakhan is wary as a fox, and according to Oxana well versed in counter-surveillance. Arrangements and appointments are invariably made at the last minute, decoy cars are used, and his drivers always vary the routes that he travels. As far as we can discover he never uses public transport.

  We’re looking for cracks in this facade. Vulnerabilities that we can exploit. I’ve decided to think of the operation as an intellectual exercise, rather as I used to view my activities at MI5. When I found myself in pursuit of Oxana I lost this sense of distance and became over-involved. With this project I’m determined to re-find my objectivity.

  “Why don’t you have a bath?” I ask Oxana. “I’ll run one. We can get in together.”

  “Not until I’ve figured this out.”

  “Not until we’ve figured it out.”

  “Whatever.”

  We’re in our bedroom, sitting in dusty velveteen armchairs, working through murder scenarios. Oxana’s reaction to problem-solving seems to be to suspend all activity relating to hygiene, and she’s looking particularly grungy this morning. Her hair is standing out from her head in a crown of greasy spikes, her jeans are in shreds, and the grimy pink sweater from the Prekrasnaya Nevesta warehouse, which she has stolen from me and worn every day for a week, is giving off a deathly smell.

  “Has Dasha told you exactly why she wants the Pakhan eliminated?” I ask Oxana.

  “She doesn’t need to.”

  “She wants to run the bratva?”

  “She sees that he’s weakening. Getting older, losing his grip. So she has to make her move, because if she doesn’t, one of the others will. It’s just how it works.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “As soon as the Pakhan is dead, Dasha calls a meeting of the other brigadiers and announces that she’s in charge. No one will say out loud that she was responsible for killing him, but everyone will know it, and they’ll also know that if they give her any shit they’ll be taken out too.”

  “Will it be a problem that she’s a woman?”

  “It shouldn’t be, but it will be. Women are very poorly represented in the field of Russian organized crime. Dasha told me the statistics and they’re horrifying.”

  “So we’re—”

  “Yes, pupsik, we’re doing a good thing here.”

  I’m not convinced. But here we are. As Oxana says, if we don’t take Dzabrati out, someone else will. So we might as well accept the contract, get our papers and money, and disappear. I’m concerned that if we stay here too long, word of us will somehow get back to the Twelve.

  “Let’s review our options,” I suggest. “Are we sure we can’t get into his building?”

  “We could, but it would be difficult. These big Soviet apartment blocks with the narrow corridors were designed for easy surveillance of everyone coming and going. There are two elevators serving the building, both very slow, and there’s always one boyevik at the street entrance and another on the ninth floor, where the Pakhan and his people live. Also, Dzabrati is never alone in his apartment. There’s always a bodyguard. Add in family members, kids… It’s not impossible, nothing’s impossible, but there have got to be easier options.”

  “OK. Zoya’s place.”

  “Possible. He’s driven there two or three times a week, usually in the late evening. A bodyguard takes him up to Zoya’s apartment, waits outside while he does whatever he does to her, and then walks him back to the car.”

  “That’s so disgusting. He’s what? Forty-five years older than her?”

  “Poverty’s disgusting, Eve. Believe me, I’ve been there. As well as the flat she probably gets a generous allowance, like thousands of dollars a month, and instead of working as a cleaner or a cam-girl in some shithole in Ukraine, she gets to spend her day getting beauty treatments and buying nice clothes.”

  “Yeah. Except that she has to be available to creepy old rabbit-face whenever he feels like sex. And I truly hate to think what kind of sex he likes.”

  “I doubt he’s up to anything too heavy. He’s got that heart thing, and if she’s smart she’ll be able to control him. I knew this girl at university who had a rich sugar daddy. He gave her everything: money, clothes, holidays… And he never even touched her. She just had to do herself with sex toys while he watched, and that was it. Like she said, she’d have been doing that stuff anyway.”

  “Still gross.”

  “Says the born-again bisexual.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  “Isn’t it? We’ve both had sex with men, after all.”

  “But is that how you think of yourself? As bisexual?”

  “I don’t think of myself as anything, but technically, I guess, yeah.”

  “So what are you saying? That you still want to have sex with guys?”

  She shrugs. “There are worse sensations.”

  “Fuck you, Oxana. Seriously, fuck you.”

  “So you don’t want to have sex with a man again? Ever?”

  “I don’t want to have sex with anyone except you.”

  “Interesting.”

  I fall for it, of course, as she knows I will. “Why can you never, ever, ever say anything nice?”

  She flicks a glance at me. “Because it’s so much more fun bullying you, obviously. You know I asked Dasha to ask around about Lara?”

  I don’t answer. The only news I want to hear about Lara is that she’s dead.

  “I did, anyway. And apparently she’s been released from Butyrka for lack of evidence. Her case isn’t going to court anymore.”

  “Well, whoopee for Russia’s incorruptible justice system. Are you going to get in touch with her?”

  “No. Why would I do that?”

  “You’re always going on about her.”

  “Only to make you jealous, dumbass. Lara was good at sex, but she was quite stupid. I remember when we were in Venice, having dinner at our hotel, and I ordered us the lobster risotto, which was like the specialità della casa, and the sommelier asked us what wine we’d like and Lara said she wanted Baileys Irish Cream. I mean I’m sorry, but that’s just disgusting. We were kissing later on and I could taste it on her tongue.”

  “Thanks for that little detail. I’ve been trying not to think of you and her in Venice.”

>   She shrugs. “It happened. And I have to admit that I do like pineapple on pizza.”

  “That really is disgusting.”

  “I’ll take you to Hank’s, in Paris. It’s super-delicious.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to try it, even in Paris.”

  “Oh boo, you prude. How I ever got you into bed I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t ‘get’ me into bed.”

  “Oh, you think not?”

  “I jumped. I wasn’t pushed.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is right. And I’m definitely not eating pineapple pizza.”

  “We’ll see about that. But back to Zoya’s place. Getting inside the apartment when the Pakhan’s there would be hard; the door’s reinforced and there’s a high-definition security camera. There’s no way he’d let Zoya buzz a stranger in. Much easier to shoot Dzabrati and the bodyguard inside the building but outside the apartment, in one of the public areas. Ideally when they’re leaving, and walking from the apartment to the elevator.”

  “How do you get into the building?”

  “I’ve found out that there’s a single man living on the second floor who teaches at one of the universities and is regularly visited by one of his female students. I know both their names, and I could pretend to be a friend of hers with an urgent message for him. That would get me inside. Then I could immobilize him, and take things from there. Not ideal, but possible.”

  “The restaurant?”

  “Again, possible. I could walk in, shoot the Pakhan in the face, do a couple of the bodyguards before they can react, and fuck off fast. But big, popular restaurants like Zarina are bad news. They’re crowded, they’re well lit and there’s CCTV. It would be messy, and there would be a lot of witnesses.”

  “Witnesses would definitely be bad news.”