Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [98]
As he moved at a normal gait he continued to check the box he was in, using any reflective surface he came upon: shop and car windows, the side mirrors of parked vehicles. The two shadows varied their distance, occasionally allowing people to get between them and their assignment in order to remain as inconspicuous as possible.
At this point there was no possibility of losing them; he hadn’t the time. Besides, he had no problem with them knowing where he was going, it might even give them a laugh.
The brothel was on the west bank, in the Pechersk district, in a beautifully restored postwar building with a splendid view of the river that more or less bisected the city. He could have ascended in the tiny elevator, but he preferred to take the stairs, which were wide, curving, and ornamented with a polished, hand-turned wooden railing that felt good and solid beneath his fingers. By the time he reached the third floor he was only slightly winded, but his legs felt terrific. He hadn’t been this exhilarated in years.
The young girl took his coat and scarf into her booth just inside the vestibule. Ekaterina, in one of her more provocative ensembles that showed off her long legs and her ample breasts, came bustling out, and kissed him on both cheeks. Linking her arm through his, she asked him what he was in the mood for, the usual or something a bit different. She spoke in French, because it lent her establishment a degree of upscale romance.
“Mon habituelle.” My usual.
“Toujours la même fille,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. Always the same girl.
“Mais une tellement belle fille,” he replied. But such a beautiful girl.
She led him through a door she unlocked with both an eight-digit combination and a key that hung around her neck.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said, switching to English because it was an idiom with no analog in either French or Russian. They stopped in front of one of the many closed doors lining both sides of a wide, imaginatively lit hallway. “Just remember,” she whispered, rolling one impressive breast against his arm, “if at any time you change your mind, you’ve only to ask.”
He thanked her in his charming, rather formal old-school manner. Waiting until she had disappeared behind the locked door at the end of the hallway, he knocked on the door twice, waited five seconds, then knocked three times.
Without waiting for a reply he opened the door, stepped through, shut and locked the door behind him. He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room with furniture covered in yellow and pink chintz. The one window overlooked a steep green bank down to the somnambulant Dnieper River. Young children, overseen by their mothers, rolled down the embankment, laughing and shrieking, while two lovers lost in themselves stood arm in arm staring out across the gunmetal water.
“Did she try to get you into bed?” Riet Boronyov said.
Gourdjiev nodded. “Again.”
“She wouldn’t charge you, you know.” Boronyov jackknifed his small but very fit frame off the bed on which he’d been reclining, almost as if he had been daydreaming. “She’s hot for you.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev thought of the widow Tanova, her tea and fresh-baked stollen, and laughed. “She’s just rising to a challenge.”
“Don’t tell me you think you’re too old,” Boronyov clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “because I wouldn’t believe it.”
“I’m not here to speak about Ekaterina or my sex life.”
“No, of course not.” Boronyov gripped the older man’s hand in friendship. “But it would make her happy, and a happy employee is a productive employee.”
“I don’t see how Ekaterina could be more productive than she already is. You take a great deal of money out of this business.”
“Indeed.”
Boronyov looked more like a bug-eyed wizard than an oligarch. When you were a billionaire, Gourdjiev thought, you could afford to be strange-looking without fear of anyone commenting on it. Everyone wanted to be your friend, unless they were too terrified to approach you,