Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [81]
If Pauling had even a fleeting notion of not paying, he knew it wouldn’t work. He now knew the truth—if what was in the note was truthful. Time to pay up. He unzipped his jacket’s inside pocket, withdrew the envelope containing the two hundred thousand dollars, and handed it to Glinskaya, who pocketed it without bothering to count what was in it.
“We made a good deal, huh?” Glinskaya said pleasantly, slapping Pauling on the arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“No, thanks,” Pauling said, remembering the number he was to call once the transaction was completed.
“Pauling, again, I get agitated when you say no to my hospitality. Come on, one drink. To celebrate.”
“All right,” Pauling said.
“There is a good bar close by. I, ah, am a partner in it. You will like it. Real liquor and real women available for a price. Maybe you will take a liking to one.”
Pauling didn’t respond, simply fell in step with Glinskaya as his two goons followed close behind. They left the park through the main entrance and walked a block along Krymsky Val until reaching a narrow alley leading to another street. Glinskaya entered the alley but Pauling stopped. Glinskaya turned and said, “Hey, Pauling, come on. The bar is on the next street. We take this, what do you call it, this shortcut?”
Pauling still hesitated, but the two men in suits nudged him into the alley. He slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and fingered the Glock 17 in the right, the prussic acid vials and nitro ampules in the left.
The alley was not as deserted as Pauling initially thought. There were a few small shops, an occasional open door to a ground-floor apartment revealing the life of its occupants, and three vagrants with their backs against a wall, two asleep, the third muttering in Russian and extending a tattered paper cup. Pauling was surprised when Glinskaya dropped coins into it.
They reached the street at the end of the alley, a commercial thoroughfare lined with bars and restaurants with gaudy neon lights heralding their names. Pauling had been on that street before during his seven-year stint in Moscow. Many of the bars were owned by organized crime, and he’d met with contacts in some of them.
“Over there,” Glinskaya said, motioning with his hand for them to follow. His bar was a hundred feet down the strip, on the same side of the street where the alley emptied out. They reached it and Glinskaya pointed up at the flashing sign in Russian, which Pauling translated: THE GOLD COIN. While Glinskaya proudly indicated the sign, and Pauling and the two henchmen briefly looked up at it, the first shots crackled, one after the other, automatic-weapons fire, four guns, four shooters in a black Mercedes that had pulled up to the curb simultaneous with their arrival.
Pauling instinctively threw himself to the ground, knocking over a flower seller, an elderly woman, on his way down. His right hand came out of his pocket holding the Glock 17 but he held fire as he tried to take stock of the situation. Passersby screamed and tried to get out of the way. Pauling saw Glinskaya lying in a heap on the sidewalk. One of his men was down, too. The other returned fire but a barrage of shots from the Mercedes sent him stumbling back, arms flailing as he went through the bar’s plate-glass window, sending a shower of glass inside and to the sidewalk.
Pauling’s immediate thought was that he’d happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, in the midst of a Russian mob hit. Did the men in the car know he wasn’t part of Glinskaya’s mob? Or was he the target? A street lamp stood between Pauling and the car, not enough to prevent anyone in the vehicle from shooting at him, but enough of a barrier to hinder a clear view. Pauling came to his knees, raised the Glock with both hands, and trained it on the Mercedes, which he expected would roar away, its job done. Instead, three of the four doors flew open and the men who’d gunned down Glinskaya and his henchmen came through them, AK-47s in their hands. Pauling didn’t hesitate. He and the Glock