Take Me for a Ride (22 page)

A lump rose in Ted’s throat as he unrolled the second canvas. A little girl with auburn curls and large green eyes looked inquisitively out from this picture. She wore a green velvet party dress with a sash tied in a bow around the waist.

“Is my portrait there?” Tatyana asked. “My sister’s? I watched Mama cut them from the frames before we fled our house. She wanted to take more, but there was no time.”

“Are you wearing a green velvet party dress?”

“No, that was Svetlana. I’m in blue taffeta with white petticoats.”

Ted unrolled the final canvas, and there she was, lovely and fresh, laughing merrily at the viewer. She had masses of blond hair tied back from her face with a blue ribbon that matched the shade of her dress exactly. She knelt in a froth of petticoats that emerged like champagne bubbles from under the frock.

He wanted to break down and rail at what had happened to Tatyana’s innocence, her simple joie de vivre. What kind of monster could extinguish the light from these childish faces, no matter what their race or religion?

“What else is in the box, Ted? My guess is that he did this to others. He was so young, little more than a child himself, but something evil hid behind those soulful eyes of his. He was a predator.”

Ted looked with distaste at the box of rings and watches. “I’m afraid you may be right. There are rings—wedding rings, for the most part. And watches of all kinds.” He picked up the stack of identification papers and paged through them. “Papers belonging to entire families, all Jewish. Why would he have kept these things?”

“Maybe he was proud of his head count. Maybe he hoped to be rewarded for it by the
reich
.”

“But when it fell? Why wouldn’t he have burned them to get rid of the evidence?”

“Perhaps they are trophies,” Tatyana said.

Trophies. Revulsion washed over him.

“Somehow, I’m not surprised that he kept the little paintings of our family. As I said, he was very young. I believe that we were probably his first victims, that my father was his first kill.”

They sat silent for a few moments. Then Ted asked, “What do you want to do with these things?”

“You have the camera with you?”

“Yes.”

“Then photograph everything.” She pressed her hands flat on the table. “Because I will not rest until he is brought to justice.”

The next morning McDougal woke early and told Natalie that he wanted to go to buy an English newspaper. When he emerged from the shower, Natalie had laid out a series of colorful fabric scraps in a pattern across the floor.

She stood in a T-shirt of his with her hands on her hips, eyeing the scraps critically. The T-shirt dwarfed her petite frame, but the sight of her bare legged and probably nude under the plain cotton did things to him that the tightest miniskirt on South Beach failed to accomplish.

He came up behind her, lifted the hem of the shirt, and ran his hands over her smooth, warm skin—the flat abdomen, the gentle swell of her hips, the fuller curvature of her bottom, and the springy curls at the juncture of her thighs.

She leaned against him. “I thought you were going to get a paper,” she murmured.

He trailed his fingertips up to her small, perfect breasts and palmed them, rubbing the nipples with his thumbs. He was on the verge of lowering his zipper, pushing her down onto the bed, and sliding into her when his brain registered the pattern of the fabric scraps on the floor.

A long, narrow strip of silver bisected the composition from the top-left corner almost to the lower-right corner. In the center was a rearing horse; below it was a dragon, the strip of silver entering its mouth. Atop the horse was a warrior who could only be the heroic figure of St. George.

Several things pierced his consciousness as sharply as the weapon did the maw of the recoiling dragon:

The image of the necklace.

His true reason for being here.

His inevitable, unavoidable betrayal of Natalie.

With sudden clarity, he despised himself. She didn’t deserve to be treated the way he had to treat her. Natalie was one of the few truly good people he’d ever met, raised with the purest of academic ideals. She was content to simply repair and create objects of beauty and demanded very little in return. The malice and greed and sense of entitlement that he saw in others—they simply weren’t present in her character. She would never betray someone for material gain—like him.

Eric dropped his hands and stepped back from her, the hem of the T-shirt dropping over her body like a stage curtain on the final act.

She turned to look at him. “Is something wrong?”

He shook his head. “I’m just . . . admiring your work.”

“Oh,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “It’s still a mess, really. And I’ve got to press all the fabric.” She walked to the room’s closet and stood on tiptoe to reach the iron on the top shelf. She pulled it down, set it on the desk, and plugged it in, turning the dial to medium-high. “I’ll do that quickly while you get the newspaper. Then we can map out a plan for the day.”

He opened his mouth.

“Because I’m not staying in this hotel room, Eric, and you can’t force me to. We’re going to find my grandmother before those criminals do.” She shivered. “I’m so afraid for her.”

He sighed. “We’ll argue about it when I get back. In the meantime, at least I know you’re safe here.” He pulled on his coat and left the hotel, heading southeast in the direction of dead drop seven. He bought a copy of the
Moscow Times
from a small vendor on the next street over and kept walking. Funny, he didn’t pick up any sign of a tail today. Maybe the men were late risers.

Moscow stretched in every direction around him, a vast panorama of both ancient and modern buildings. Stalinist-Gothic spires and onion domes and flat-roofed, blocky business centers alike—they all stretched longingly toward the still-weak sun, which graced the city for only four hours a day in the month of March. Miami’s sun was a bare bulb to Moscow’s candlelit spring.

Eric hailed an official yellow cab and got in. “Gorky Park,” he said. “
Skolko eto stoit
?” What does it cost?

The driver mumbled a reasonable fare, and Eric nodded. “Main entrance,” he said.

Gorky Park stretched for almost three hundred acres along the Moskva River and had been named for the writer Maxim Gorky. Shaq would have enjoyed a nice brisk hour’s walk there, but Eric didn’t pay much attention to the park itself once he paid the driver and got out of the cab. While he pretended to scan sections of the
Moscow Times
he’d picked up, he counted trash receptacles along the main path, stopping when he got to the correct one. There he tossed an ad section of the paper toward the can, missing it deliberately. He bent to retrieve the paper and covertly swiped the Glock that had been left under the receptacle. This he shoved into the folded remainder of the paper before he stood up and tossed the ad section into the mouth of the can.

McDougal strolled back to the main entrance and walked a few blocks before hailing another taxi to take him back to the Savoy. All in all, it had been an easy little side trip, and he felt a hundred times better now that he was armed. If he and Natalie ran into any more friendly neighborhood thugs, he’d be better prepared—certainly better than old St. George, with nothing but a spear.

McDougal’s mouth curved sardonically. He might be an underhanded, double-crossing jerk of an antihero—and there was no question that Natalie would hate him once he snatched the necklace—but at least he’d do his best to rescue the damsel from distress caused by people
other
than himself.

The cab turned down peaceful Ulitsa Rozhdestvenka and pulled up outside the Savoy. Eric paid the driver and got out, turning over in his mind just how he was going to convince Natalie not to leave the hotel. Chain her to the bed? Knock her out with a couple of Benadryl in her chai?

He wasn’t looking forward to their upcoming conversation as he got into the elevator and took it up to their floor. He slipped the gun out of the newspaper, double-checked the safety, and tucked it into his waistband before he got to the door.

He was just about to slide his key card into the slot at the handle when a prickle lifted the hair at the back of his neck.

A muffled noise came from inside the hotel room. The bottom of the otherwise clean door was dirty, and it sported dents and a muddy boot print, as if it had been kicked. Something wasn’t right.

He put his ear to the door and heard a scuffle, curse words in Russian, a hard slap, and sobs. “I don’t have it!” Natalie’s voice said raggedly. “No, please—”

McDougal didn’t need to hear more. He exploded through the door, kicking it off the hinges entirely.

Two men. A distraught Natalie between them. She wore the same T-shirt as earlier, but it was ripped down the front, exposing a good deal of her. She also wore an expression of utter terror.

Powered by rage and adrenaline, McDougal knocked down the first thug in a full body slam and smashed him in the temple with the butt of the Glock. Now unconscious, the guy lay on the ground, his mouth still agape in surprise.

McDougal sprang up warily and eyed the second man, who had grabbed Natalie by the throat. Not a good situation.

“One step, I break her neck.”

He looked fully capable.

“You hurt her,” McDougal said, enunciating each word, “and I will take you apart. I will break you into small pieces.”

“Give me the fucking necklace,” said the thug to Natalie, ignoring him. “Where is it?”

Tears streamed down her face and she shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”

His grip on her neck tightened, and he lifted her off her feet as she whimpered and scrabbled at his arm.

“She doesn’t have the necklace!” McDougal thundered.

“Then who does?”

“I do.”

“You bluff.”

He shook his head.

“Give necklace to me; I let her go.”

“Let her go, and then I’ll give it to you.”

Natalie’s eyes were wide and terrified. Eric couldn’t let this go on much longer. “Put her the fuck
down
! Feet flat on the floor.
Now!
”

Surprisingly, the man did so.

More silent tears ran down her face, and McDougal revisited that primal protective rage he’d known in the street. It went to his head faster than vodka on an empty stomach.

“Necklace,” the guy demanded. Then, to Eric’s shock, he screamed and grabbed his crotch as Natalie twisted out from under his arm, throwing herself into a heap across the room and into the corner.

Brave move.
Stupid
move. But McDougal didn’t waste time analyzing it. He couldn’t risk the noise of a gunshot if they didn’t want the OMON, or Russian riot police, to descend on them, so he launched himself at the thug, who’d turned toward Natalie with a snarl.

With the same basic kick that Eric had used to take down the door, he eviscerated one of the thug’s knees. The man screamed in pain and went down, but he wasn’t done yet by a long shot.

He rolled, toppled McDougal, sat on his legs, palmed his face, and rammed his head into the corner of the room’s dresser.

Eric drove the butt of his gun upward, smashing it into the thug’s elbow and dislodging his grip on his ringing skull. He pressed his advantage immediately, using forward momentum and that same hard head of his to catch the guy in the armpit and sweep him sideways and off of him.

The thug dove for the Glock, but Eric had no intention of releasing it to him.

They rolled like animals in the tight space, thrashing into furniture and using any means necessary to get the upper hand. This wasn’t ring fighting; this was dirty, anything-goes street fighting, in the incongruous setting of the elegant Savoy.

Natalie was just a shaking blur in the corner.

McDougal wrenched away, got in a good solid kick to his attacker’s stomach and ribs. A crunch of bone told him he’d broken one. But with a wince, a sharp inhalation, and a curse, the guy just threw himself on top of Eric again.

He felt himself squish like an éclair and was vaguely surprised that no filling squirted out. The man stunk of body odor, cabbage, and dirty wool. He wrapped his hands around Eric’s neck, panting, and squeezed. His sour breath reeked of cigarettes and beer.

Shit. Time to get the Glock out of the lunatic’s reach.
He needed both hands to pry off the maniacally strong fingers shutting off the air to his larynx. Eric sent the gun spinning across the parquet floor, toward the corner where he’d last seen Natalie.

Except she wasn’t there anymore. McDougal registered this as the asshole on top of him slammed the back of his head into the floor. Where was Natalie?

A red haze filled his vision as the lack of oxygen began to affect his brain. Air. He needed some fucking air. He could feel himself weakening.

He clawed for the thug’s face, hoping to reach his eyes and jam his fingers into the sockets. He was not going to lose this fight. There was more at stake here than his own life—Natalie was in danger and he wasn’t under any illusions as to what this guy would do to her.

Eric finally got a finger pried loose from his neck. He bent it back until it snapped and the guy yowled in agony. Inevitably, his grip loosened, since the sweat of pain and exertion didn’t do him any favors, either.

McDougal almost had a second finger pried loose to break when Natalie reappeared in his line of vision, wielding, of all things, an iron.

An iron?

He doubted she had the strength to knock out the thug with it. But it might distract him just enough for Eric to get free.