The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [42]
She smiled. “I’m pretty good with a poker, too, Pavel. You’d be surprised.”
“Perhaps,” he said, coaxing a shower of sparks from a log. “But I enjoy this. I do not have time anymore for such ordinary jobs.”
Setting down the platter of toast on her Indian coffee table, she giggled.
“What is it?” Pavel asked, putting the poker back in its place. “What is funny?”
“There’s enough Beluga here for the whole block. And I can’t believe you brought $4,000 worth of caviar over in a Tupperware bowl. There’s something absurd about it.”
“No more absurd than a once-poor Jew like me eating it,” he said, almost wistfully. “My mother loves Tupperware.”
“I’m sorry, Pavel. Really. Why don’t you open the Dom?”
As he prowled around the near the windows, his hands clenched into fists, the room seemed to bristle with repressed energy. Like a giant in a dollhouse, Charlotte thought to herself as she eyed him, warily, from the couch.
“I am sorry, Charlotte. You see, I have just opened my new hotel.”
“But that’s great news, Pavel,” Charlotte said. “Congratulations! We should toast your new success!”
Suddenly, his fist hit the wall and Charlotte shrank into her chair.
“It is a disaster, Charlotte. It nearly killed me. Getting the money, finding the workers, and now …”
“What? Nobody came?” Charlotte asked. “You have no guests?”
“Oh! I have guests,” Pavel retorted, licking his fist, as the cork flew across the room. “They steal everything. They steal the pillows, the sheets, the paintings on the walls.”
“We call it pilfering, Pavel. It’s a problem in hotels here, too.”
Pavel grinned. “You call it pilfering when guests check out, carrying off a six-foot gold mirror in my lobby? In front of my people at reception?”
Charlotte tried to imagine a similar scene taking place in the lobby of the Carlyle. “That’s unbelievable,” she said. “Why didn’t they call the police or try to stop them?”
“The police are criminals, too, Charlotte. So now my hotel is like a prison. I have bolted the beds and chairs to the floor. I have removed all the rugs and the decorations. It’s …”
“A catastrophe?” Charlotte offered, touching his sleeve. Did this man ever sit down? She wondered.
“No. It’s business as usual in Russia, Charlotte. This is what freedom means to us now. Permission to steal just a little bit more. But let’s drink,” he said, filling her glass.
Charlotte smiled as Pavel passed her the crystal flute of champagne and a toast point with so much caviar on it, she had to cup her hand under her chin to catch the eggs.
“You are still smiling, Charlotte. Is it the Tupperware?”
“No. I was thinking of you and the burning building,” she replied.
Pavel laughed. “The night I break my window and crawl out? When the firemen are all standing around smoking cigarettes?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said, as she crunched her toast and the first mouthful of pearl-like eggs slid down her throat. “You yelled at them. ‘Why for God’s sake don’t you come in and get me?’ ”
“We ring your bell and nobody answered,” Pavel said, finishing the story as he attempted to squeeze his 6′ 4″ frame into the confines of a velvet slipper chair. “I am choking on smoke and they wait for me to answer my doorbell.”
“Pavel, come over here,” Charlotte said, indicating a place for him on the sofa. “It’s making me uncomfortable, just watching you.”
“Here’s to your beauty,” he said, touching her glass and sitting down next to her.
“Would you like to hear some more Russian stories?” he asked, taking a slow sip of the Dom.
“You mean fairytales, Pavel?” she replied, pulling her knees up in front of the fire. “I would love to.”
“We Russians have always believed in fairytales, Charlotte,” Pavel said. “Because in our country, they come true.”
Was he being facetious? God knows, the news from Russia was like something straight out of Grimms: gassing theaters, killing schoolchildren, murders and mobsters. There were questions, however, that Charlotte simply didn’t ask Pavel. How he really made his money. Why it was safer for his family to live in New Jersey than Moscow.