A Date You Can't Refuse (16 page)

“Babe, he's waiting,” Kimberly said.

Yuri stood. He put a hand on my shoulder and briefly squeezed it. “I want to talk to you later.” Then he bent down and retrieved something from the floor. My piece of paper. “Yours?” he asked, reading it.

I took a deep breath. What the heck. “Yes.”

“What's it say?” Kimberly asked, reading over his shoulder.

“Poprobuji 31 Aromat, tebe legko budet osmotretsya—Udachi,”
Yuri said.

“Poprobuji 31 Aromat, tebe legko budet osmotretsya—Udacht?
Damn,” she said softly. So Kimberly spoke Russian. Did she write it, too?

“What's it mean?” I asked.

Yuri continued to stare at the paper. “Where did this come from?”

“The words were written on the mirror in my bathroom this morning. In lipstick. I copied it. What's it mean?”

Yuri threw a glance at Kimberly, then looked at me. “It's nothing. Slang.”

I held out my hand for it, but Yuri didn't notice.

He was already turned away from me, feeding my note to the paper shredder.

I
wanted to pack my bags and get out of Dodge. What did Yuri mean, slang? What slang? “You're toast”? Because he wouldn't shred a note that said “Have a Nice Day.”

But I couldn't ask him because he and Kimberly had gone, taking Olive Oyl and leaving me in the office. Alone.

I was of three minds. On one hand, I was taken aback at Yuri, because it was an imperious gesture, even hostile, to destroy my painstakingly written note. On the other hand, I was frightened. On the third hand, Yuri had just handed me the opportunity to actually do what Bennett Graham had hired me to do. Find passports.

I glanced out the door. The coast was clear.

Even scared, I could do this much. I'd said yes to Bennett Graham and the reasons I'd said yes were still good reasons, and maybe I could quit tomorrow or the next day and he'd still keep his promise about P.B. If I gave him something worthwhile. I had to try. Also, I couldn't just flake out two days into the job. Three or four days, okay. But two was pathetic.

But wait! Surveillance cameras. Should I be worried about that? I looked around. Nothing looked like a lens. Which was not to say there wasn't one hidden in the electric pencil sharpener, for instance. But I
decided that (a) no one at MediasRex had enough time on their hands to watch camera footage all day long; (b) if some off-site security company was watching, they'd be looking for suspicious activity; so, (c) if I didn't do anything egregiously attention-grabbing, I'd be okay. I just had to look normal, not spylike.

I turned to the desk. A computer flashed its screen saver, the MediasRex logo. I tapped the space bar experimentally, and the screen changed to a bunch of documents. They had titles like “Week Log” or “OHP4,” nothing as helpful as “Illegal Activities.” I clicked on one called “Bio,” hoping for some nice biographical dirt on someone, but it was a treatise on converting standard-engine cars to diesel. I tried a few more—I'd look like I was checking my e-mail, right?—but found nothing of interest. And this could use up hours of my life. I scribbled document titles on a scrap of paper, in case Bennett Graham was interested, casually hid the paper in my shoe, and turned back to the desk.

It was neither shipshape nor a complete mess. I found spreadsheets and faxes in various languages, but no passports. I checked the cubbyholes above the desk. No passports. Searching desk drawers and files could take hours and I had only seventy-five minutes to spy, leave the property, phone Simon, and get back to start work.

I scratched my ear and “dropped” my earring, giving me a reason to explore the floor. Aha. Under the desk was a safe. Closed, but not locked. I looked inside.

Passports.

I heard someone behind me. I spun around.

Olive Oyl nosed the door open and ambled in.

“Okay, come,” I whispered. “Sit.”

The aging mutt obligingly shuffled forward, but her “sit” was a mere transitional moment en route to a slump. Once on the floor, she offered her stomach for my perusal.

“Very lovely,” I whispered and got up off the floor, passports held surreptitiously.

They came in different colors, from different countries, but I didn't stop to admire the packaging. I kept them on my lap and wrote furiously
on a yellow legal pad, getting name, passport number, and date, country, and city of birth. The scratching of my pen sounded loud, and a drop of sweat actually landed on my writing. From the library I could hear the hum of the English class going on, but couldn't distinguish the words or speakers.
They can't hear you either
, I told myself.

The sound of knocking sent me flying out of my chair, but it was only Olive Oyl's tail thumping on the hardwood floor, in a vertical wag. Her eyes were closed. Dreaming of dog biscuits, maybe.

I had to speed things up. I stuck Stasik's passport in the copy machine and hit the button. The machine shrieked.

Paper jam.

I frantically jiggled the cover and found the offending shreds of paper and cleared them out. Then I saw the paper tray was empty. I opened a drawer, looking for extra paper, and saw instead files, one of which stopped me cold. It said “Wollie Shelley.”

I grabbed it. I opened it. I sat.

Page one was the results of my Myers-Briggs test; I was “a moderately expressed intuitive personality and a distinctly expressed feeling personality.”
Hmm
. Next was a four-page typed report that detailed my life in terse prose. I skimmed it fast. There were all my addresses for the last ten years, except for the three weeks I'd spent in Simon's penthouse.
Thank God
. Employment history, listing nearly two decades of odd jobs. Brief engagement, preceding year. Brother, paranoid schizophrenic, often institutionalized. Paternal uncle, Theodore, Glendale. Mother living in Ojai, served two weeks in county jail in 1964.
Really?
Father missing since 197—-?, presumed deceased.

Presumed?

Tacked onto the last page was a Post-it with sprawling handwriting: “Subj. good candidate, meets criteria re driving record, criminal record, credit rating, health. Marked loyalty to friends, strong ties to brother, uncle. May be turned to asset if required, use appeal to idealism. Pref. to keep ignorant. IQ unavailable.”

The door opened. I jumped up, slamming my file shut.

Alik stood there. “Hi.”

“Hello!” I stepped in front of the desk. Hands behind my back, I picked up the “Wollie Shelley” file, then fished around for the yellow legal pad with the passport information.

“Okay not good.” Alik moved past me. “Safe wide open, passports everywhere. Kimberly can be really careless. Yuri will throw a fit.”

I shuffled away. “Miss Bjöeling, too, seems a little high-strung. What's she in for?”

Alik stretched his leg to kick the office door shut. “She's ‘in for’ physique transformation, aka diet, exercise, and cosmetic surgery, but the real challenge …” He paused, counting passports. One was missing, of course—Stasik's. In the copy machine.

I sidled over to the copier, still facing Alik. My free hand worked to lift the cover of the copier. “So for Bronwen, we're a fat farm?”

Alik counted again. “Don't say the f-word in front of Kimberly. It's ‘UFP,’ untapped fitness potential.” He turned back to the desk. “Where's Stasik's?”

“What?”

“His passport.” He turned. “Something you need, by the way?” Probably I appeared to be handcuffed, with my arms tucked behind me, trying to extract the passport from the copier. To make matters worse, Olive Oyl was now sniffing me.

“I'm worried,” I said. “Yuri asked me why I was driving all the trainees last night, yours included. I did my best, but I'm not great at—” Olive Oyl was now licking my hands.

“Lying.” Alik smiled. It was his father's smile. “I like that. It means you don't do it enough. Forget it. If Yuri asks me, I'll tell him. Anything else on your mind, Wollie?”

Only that Stasik's passport was now clutched in Olive Oyl's teeth. On impulse, I let her have it. I fed her the passport.

A honking horn got Alik's attention. “Gotta go,” he said, and tossed the passports into the safe. He shut it, then turned to see Olive Oyl. “Jesus, Olive!” he said. “Aren't you too old for this? Drop it. Drop it. Release. I'm telling Kimberly. You want to be crated up?”

He got the passport, opened the safe, and shoved it in with the others, then locked it. And then he was gone.

I refiled my own file, tore off the yellow legal pages I'd made notes on, and gave Olive Oyl a kiss on my way out. “Good work,” I said.

In the driveway, five men were gathered around a black SUV, talking animatedly. In Russian, I realized. I circled back and came up behind Alik, who was under the car's hood.

“Alik, I'm taking off, be back for lunch.” I turned to the closest of the strange men and grasped his hand. “Hello, there. I'm Wollie. Social coach.”

“Pyotr.”

“Pleased to meet you, Pyotr.” I moved to the next man. “Hi. Wollie Shelley.”

“That's Sergei, and Alyosha, Andrej, and Josip,” Alik said, speaking quickly. “Wollie, what do you think of this car? We're thinking of buying it. It's a hybrid.”

“Cuter than the Suburban,” I said.

“Yeah, ‘The Tank.’ You don't like it?”

“No, it's just—”

“No one likes it. Yuri bought it in Europe years ago, and it's been refurbished so many times, its own mother wouldn't recognize it.”

“Refurbished how?” I asked, my interest piqued.

“Diesel to battery, back to diesel, then biodiesel …”

“I guess I should be happy it's automatic.”

“It wasn't, for about a month. But the improved mileage was minimal, and no one liked to drive it, so at some point we gave it a new transmission.”

No one liked to drive it?

One of the men said something in Russian that evoked a laugh from the others. I continued to the garage, scared by the last thing I'd heard, the one English word among all the Russian ones.

It was “Chai.”

M
y sad little car was in the garage, being worked on by a strange little man who said only, by way of introduction or explanation, “What Yuri tell me do, I do.” He then hit the on button of a loud vacuum cleaner, drowning out my cry of “But it's
my
car!”

This wasn't part of the deal, that my car would be—what, rigged? Like the Corvette that Chai had driven to her death? Because surely that's what Crispin suspected. And what about staying in a room I could be locked into? Had Bennett Graham mentioned that when he'd recruited me? Had Yuri? None of this had been in the job description.

I hopped into the Suburban, so eager to be away that at this point I'd drive a horse and buggy. The good news was that my purse was there, on the floor. Stuff had spilled out, but my money and credit cards were safe.

Halfway down the driveway, I swerved to avoid Parashie, who was flagging me down. Behind her came Grusha.

“Where are you going?” Parashie asked when I'd rolled down the window. “Can we come with you? Can you drop us at the store? We have no ride. Yuri and Kimberly have taken the Voyager and Grusha will not drive Alik's Porsche.”

How sad. I loved the idea of Grusha in her housedress gunning the engine of a Porsche GT. “Sure. Hop in.”

“And Nell too,” Parashie said. “She is just coming.”

The English instructor rushed toward us, head down, hand in front of her face as if hiding from paparazzi.

“There seems to be a car shortage,” I said. “Should I not be driving this—”

“No, we have cars,” Parashie said. “Only Kimberly, her Audi has a problem today and goes back to the shop. It is the oil, you see. Vegetable oil. Always it's in the shop.”

“Audi, huh? Is it a stick shift?”

“No, it's normal.”

“So, Parashie, do you drive a stick?” I asked.

“Yuri says I'm too young to drive. Next year, yes.”

“Next year?” Grusha exclaimed. “No. Five years, maybe. Ten years.”

“Ten years?” Parashie cried. “I'll be two hundred years old!”

I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Do you drive a stick shift, Grusha?”

“Of course.”

“How about you, Nell?”

“Nell doesn't like to drive,” Parashie said. “Yuri wants her, but Nell has agoraphobia, so for her it is no fun.”

“I was sorry to hear about that, Nell. That must be difficult.” Then I added, as casually as I could, “How about Chai? Did she drive a stick?”

“I don't know,” Parashie said. “Nell, you can sit here, I will go in the back. Wollie, can you drop us at Gelson's? Or Vons? Any market. Just we need greens for dinner. And then we wait for you. You have to drive home too, yes? For lunch?”

“Gelson's,” I said. “Is that in the little mini-mall with the—”

“Veterinarian, UPS shop, karate, card place, photo place, clothes cleaner, hair salon, and nails.” Parashie showed impressive mall knowledge, as befitted a teenage girl.

“No frozen yogurt place?” I asked.

“Yes, that also. But it's new.”

Parashie kept up a steady stream of talk during the ten-minute ride
to Gelson's, punctuated by the occasional
hrmphs
of irritation or contradiction from Grusha. Nell remained silent. I did too, preoccupied as I was by the knowledge that there was no obvious need for anyone in the household to drive a stick shift. The possibility that Chai had learned to drive one out of necessity was dwindling.

I dropped the trio in front of the market, all of them with canvas shopping bags, either an old-school European habit or a New Age California habit. I parked at the south end of the lot, after cruising past the frozen yogurt place, then turned on my cell phone and called Joey.

I described my nocturnal visit from Crispin, and Joey was nearly as concerned as Uncle Theo had been. “He says she was murdered? That must've scared the pajamas off you. Definitely tell your handler.”

“My—”

“Your FBI contact that I'm not supposed to know about. The feds won't want anyone interfering with their investigation, so you can't go to the cops. Although it sounds like there's no hard evidence for the cops anyway. But I'll check out Crispin too. Last name Harris, you said? I need a new project. It's either this or Sudoku. Anything else you need?”