Hella Nation - Evan Wright [72]
We sit across from each other at one of the few pieces of furniture remaining in the house, a round black-marble breakfast table in the kitchen. I ask Southland about the death of Konstantin Simberg. He shakes his head sadly. “You mean his ‘murder,’” he says, making little quotation marks with his fingers. “To me, he was a kid that had a lot of different angles going on.”
Southland dips out of the room to answer a phone. His girlfriend, Olga, enters wearing white open-toe sandals and a tight jumpsuit made of something that looks like rattlesnake skin. She is taut and slim, with perfectly erect posture and comically large breasts—when she first got serious with Southland two years ago, he outfitted her with implants. Her brittle yet overanimated style contrasts with eyes as dull and lifeless as the button eyes on a rag doll.
She asks if I would like a drink. I request coffee. She shouts, “I do not know how to make coffee!” and storms out of the room.
Southland enters, still talking on his phone, and brews me a fresh pot of coffee. When he hangs up he shakes his head and apologizes for Olga. You get the idea that their domestic arrangement is a precarious one. Southland knows that a few months ago, Olga made a voluntary statement to Britt, backing up everything Simberg had said before his death. She later recanted her statement and refused to cooperate. Britt has found no way to compel her to talk. Southland’s hopes for staying out of prison rest primarily on her continued silence. He smiles at me and says, “I hate Olga.” Then, after a long pause, he adds, “I love Olga, too. But she’s a twenty-four-year-old ditz. Unfortunately, with Russians, they get into your life and then they’re kind of like a tick. They get under your skin.”
He sits across from me again and returns to the topic of Simberg, claiming he befriended the young Russian with the purest of intentions. “I was thinking this kid needed some guidance,” he says. “I was going to help him out.”
Southland explains that Simberg was a master criminal who fooled him. He refers to Simberg as “Mr. Al Capone.” Southland asserts that Simberg orchestrated the failed truck heist and then the robbery of Peak Physique in such a way that he framed both himself and Langdon. “Simberg dated my girlfriend’s sister,” Southland says, referring to Ksenya. “He pumped me for information about my business affairs. Ksenya was naive and she trusted him. I forgive the girl. She didn’t understand he planned to use it all against me.” Southland says that Simberg’s “master plan” was to rob Peak Physique and blackmail him and Langdon with the threat that he would pin the crime on them.
Southland advances the theory that Simberg was killed by professional hit men sent from New York or San Francisco by the “Yugoslavian mafia.” “This had nothing to do with the deal at the pharmacy,” he explains. “Konstantin was into a lot of things.” Southland says that as soon as he clears his own name, he vows to launch his own investigation.
One of Southland’s impressive qualities is his ability to expound on any topic, no matter how outrageous or absurd, without modulating his tone of pleasant, almost smarmy cheer. He admits that he encouraged his now ex-wife, Kimber, his current girlfriend, Olga, and her sister Ksenya to become strippers, then took