L
OGAN WALKED INTO THE
Venus Apollo nightclub for the third night in a row. The only difference a casual observer would notice in his appearance from the previous two visits was that he now walked with a pair of crutches.
He was frisked at the door by two dark-coated, scowling bouncers, one of whom had a knife scar on the left side of his face.
Passing their scrutiny, he limped to the hole in the wall inside the club where the girl took the customers’ coats. He checked his crutches too, with the coat and hat. He then limped unaided into the green velvet-draped lobby, where he was frisked again. This time, there was the flicker of recognition, even of welcome, in the otherwise expressionless face. For two nights, Logan had been making his presence known.
He was finally allowed, with the minimum of civility, to proceed unmolested into the huge kitsch cave of faux stars twinkling from the ceiling, beneath which a long curving aluminium bar set into a mock rock wall snaked into the semidarkness.
He walked with effort along the length of the bar, nodding a friendly greeting to the fashion-model hookers who, he knew from previous conversations, studied in the daytime at Moscow’s universities for their psychology degrees or veterinary diplomas. And as he had done for the past two nights, he declined their offers of a private room, two-at-a-time, anything-you-like sex and found a quiet place to sit.
He chose a seat on a curved red velvet banquette that half-encircled an unoccupied table at the far end of the long, high room. Stars glittered above him against the indistinguishable surface, and for the third night in a row, he ordered vintage Dom Perignon at $2,500 a bottle.
The girls saw an opportunity to strike up conversation about his injury. One or two came to the table, made noises of sympathy, asked him what he had done, but they didn’t stay. They were wary of him now. On his previous two nights, he had turned all of them away one by one and, as he had done so, paid them $500 each to leave him alone, with the promise of another five hundred if they stayed away. The strangely behaving American was making a name for himself at the Venus Apollo.
When he’d arrived in Moscow three days before, he’d rented an apartment in the Kitai district, where the older houses hadn’t yet been levelled by developers in the previous decade of Moscow’s smash-and-grab property boom. For $10,000 a week in cash, paid on a weekly basis, he’d taken the apartment for a month, on the reasonable assumption that the owner wouldn’t turn him in until the final payment had been made. But by that time, he’d be long gone, whichever way his mission went.
There were great advantages to be had in times of economic meltdown, he thought, if you had cash. Moscow’s high-end rental market had crashed, its nightclubs were emptied of high-rolling foreigners, and even the rich Russians who’d watched their paper assets descend into negative numbers were curbing their more outrageous displays of wealth.
He guessed that the girls at the Venus Apollo had earned more from him in the past two nights than in the previous month, and for doing nothing.
Nobody but Logan was drinking the club’s most expensive champagne, and nobody came alone unless they were looking for a girl, let alone paying the women to stay away.
The bar manager brought him the bottle in an ice bucket and swivelled the cork free. He poured a glass and asked him, as he was bound to do, what other services the club could provide—by which he meant company.
“Nothing. This is all,” Logan said.
He sat back in the gloom, sipped the champagne, and waited.
Grigory Bykov entered the club at just after midnight, the same as he had done on the previous two nights. It was a routine, Logan thought. He probably did a tour of his other business and entertainment interests before coming here. As on the two nights past, he was accompanied by four burly men in suits; big hands, big angry faces, big thighs, they swung their weight through the bar like wrestlers before a crowd at the start of a fight.
Bykov talked to the manager as he had done before—numbers, Logan assumed—and then settled into a table with the guards and a flock of girls. Later, on the basis of his behaviour so far, Bykov would go upstairs to the VIP room.
Logan drank another glass and watched the desultory scene in the club. There were few customers, fewer still who were paying anything that Bykov would call a living wage. Moscow had changed from the Babylon it had been.
The music beat against the walls and his ears, and beyond the bar, there was a dance area with flashing lights, empty but for a girl who thrust herself around a pole.
He was suddenly aware that one of the four men who had entered with Bykov was standing over him. He’d expected it, if not tonight then the next night or the one after. He looked up and saw another blank, expressionless face.
“Mr. Bykov, the owner, wants you to join him,” the man said.
“Thank him,” Logan replied. “I’m fine where I am.”
The man didn’t respond, or move.
“It’s an invitation,” he said, but his tone of voice was anything other than inviting.
“Then I’ll join him,” Logan said.
The man snapped his fingers to a barman, who swiftly appeared at the table and picked up the bucket with the half-full bottle and waited for Logan to get painfully to his feet, before following them to Bykov’s table.
Bykov didn’t get up when Logan appeared, and Logan was shown to a spare chair next to him. After some business manoeuvring his leg, he struggled into it satisfactorily.
“No dancing tonight,” Bykov said, and laughed at him.
Logan looked up and into the face of Finn’s murderer, the Russian MP with his years of Mafia experience and not much else. He saw a short man—Logan could tell, even though they were all sitting down. Bykov’s face had the marks of smallpox scars, and one eyebrow seemed to have been severed in two, giving his face a lopsided expression. His eyes were small—aggressive and defensive at the same time. His expensive suit he somehow made to appear like a sheet thrown over an unwanted sculpture.
It was a mark of wealth he wore with utter disdain for the civilised world of tailors and designers of fashion, a world he seemed metaphorically to spit on. The hands that rested on Bykov’s chair were thick and shapeless, the blunt tools of a killer.
“No.” Logan smiled back. “No dancing. I had an accident on the ice.”
Bykov wasn’t a man who smiled or laughed unless it was at somebody else’s discomfort.
“Safer inside,” Bykov said. “Inside here.”
Drinks were ordered, including another bottle of Dom Perignon, which Logan guessed accurately would find its way onto his bill later, and they all went upstairs in a lift to Bykov’s private VIP area.
“Less noise,” Bykov explained on their way up.
More girls arrived when they were seated in a wide circle of expensive sofas. It was like the setup in a Kazakh tent, Logan thought, and wondered if Bykov’s deeper origins were in Central Asia. But this time, Logan had let two girls sit on the sofa on either side of him.
“You don’t like my girls,” Bykov said bluntly.
“I like them very much,” Logan replied.
“You a blue boy or something?” Bykov said, meaning a homosexual. “You pay them to go away. Why?”
“No, not a blue boy. Just a connoisseur,” Logan said.
“You won’t find better girls than this in the whole of Moscow. In the whole world,” Bykov said, and stroked the hair of the blonde beauty next to him as if she were a dog.
“Maybe later in the week,” Logan said. “If I haven’t found somewhere else to spend my evenings.”
“How long are you in Moscow?”
“A month . . . maybe more. It depends.”
“Come to my club every night. We’ll give you a discount. Better than any you’ll find in Moscow.”
“Thank you,” Logan answered. “I may do that.”
The drinks arrived, and a new barman opened the bottle of champagne. Bykov’s guards drank beer or vodka.
“American,” Bykov stated, when they’d toasted each other.
“That’s right,” Logan said.
“What are you doing in Moscow?”
“I’m an investor.”
Bykov laughed harshly. “Funny time to invest,” he said.
“The best time,” Logan replied. “Everything’s falling. If you have cash, you can make good deals.”
“You have cash.”
“A great deal of cash,” Logan said.
“What’s your business?”
“Luxury yachts, an agency for sports players, entertainment—anything in that line that grabs my interest.”
“You have a card?”
Logan took out his wallet and removed a card with his and his company’s name.
Bykov flipped it to one of his men, who disappeared through a door at the end of the room.
“Good,” Bykov said. “Maybe we do business.”
“Maybe,” Logan said. “I’m looking for soccer players on this trip, but I’m open to other things.”
Bykov’s eyes seemed to weigh the possibilities with a kind of ignorant cunning.
The man returned to the room and gave Bykov Logan’s card, neither with nor without a nod of approval.
Logan explained at Bykov’s prompting that the L.A. Galaxy team was searching for Russian players, to supplement their harvest of European talent. Soccer, he told Bykov, is going to be big business in America someday.
Bykov, it turned out, was a soccer fan. Logan hadn’t known that. They discussed the merits of various Russian players; the Spanish, Italian, and English leagues, the gambling possibilities, and other underlying opportunities that Bykov seemed equally interested in.
Finally, at half past one, Logan said he had to go. Food and then sleep, he said. Bykov insisted that they have dinner. He would take Logan to the best all-night restaurant in Moscow, open only to members and their women.
“Maybe you take home a couple of my women,” Bykov said. “Tonight, it’s on the house.”
Bykov was bored, Logan thought. There was nothing anymore that was extreme enough to excite his years of blunted senses. Well, that was just fine.
But he didn’t go along with the Russian immediately.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Logan agreed, and after protesting that he was tired and needed a decent night’s sleep, and Bykov insisting that he would provide many things to keep Logan awake, Logan acquiesced with a display of reluctance to go to dinner.
There was a stretch Mercedes outside the club and two Porsche four-by-fours, one in front, one behind. All were black with tinted windows, and the Mercedes was custom-made, Logan noted, bulletproofed in its entirety, underneath too, against bombs.
There were four bodyguards in the Porsche in front of the Mercedes and three guards in the Porsche behind. The fourth guard who had entered the club with Bykov stepped into the front of the Mercedes, next to the driver.
They drove in convoy down towards Pushkinskaya and across the square.
The stretch limousine had windows between the nearly eight-foot interior where he and Bykov sat and the driver’s area. There were curtains, opened now, but which Logan assumed were there for when Bykov wanted to molest some female in the back seat. There was a television and a bar, a phone and fax machine, an office in fact. Bykov enjoyed showing off to Logan the communications systems, which included some kind of advanced satellite imaging system.
Bykov switched on the TV and flicked through
DV
Ds of extreme pornography, children’s cartoons, the Australian Tennis Open, and then on to a video link with his clubs and properties. He finally chose a soccer match played the previous weekend between Spartak Moscow and Lokomotiv.
Logan sat with the crutches on his left side, away from Bykov, and slowly unscrewed the bolt that connected the two halves of the one closest to him.
They had travelled a mile from Patriarshiye when Logan made a suggestion.
“Why don’t I show you my company’s prospectus?” he said. “Then we can discuss exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Why not?” Bykov said, sounding bored. Perhaps
prospectus
was a word that didn’t figure in his usual way of business.
“I can pick it up from the hotel,” Logan said.
“Which hotel?”
The game on the TV flowed up to the goal Spartak were defending, and there was a roar from the crowd as a shot hit the bar. Bykov was only half listening to Logan.
“The Kempinsky,” Logan said.
Bykov grunted. He didn’t like others to make plans. Then, as if it had been his own idea, he switched on an intercom that connected them to the driver. “Kempinskya,” he ordered irritably. Then he flicked the switch to off.
He turned to Logan. “It’s on the way, why not?” he said.
The driver looked in the mirror, acknowledging the order, and turned to the bodyguard, who radioed the two vehicles in front and behind them with the new instructions.
As the driver indicated a right turn into Okhotnyy, Bykov sat back in his seat. He fiddled with the volume control, and as he did so, Logan cut his windpipe with the Damascus steel blade gripped in his left hand. Then he withdrew it and drove it in under Bykov’s ribs and up into his heart.
There was little sound, except for the noise of the soccer match. But there was going to be a lot of blood.
With his other hand Logan pressed the button that closed the curtain to the front. He turned up the TV’s volume as Bykov gurgled, pumping pints of blood, and finally slumped sideways.
Logan saw that his hand and lower arm were covered in Bykov’s blood. He slipped into his coat in preparation for getting out of the limousine. Then he propped Bykov up in the seat next to him, as they crossed the bridge over the Moskva River. The Kempinsky was just on the other side.
Logan’s last act inside the limousine was to rifle through Bykov’s pockets, careful to avoid the blood, until he found a photo ID, which he put in his coat pocket.
The limousine drew up under the arced, porticoed entrance to the Kempinsky Hotel. Logan stepped out with his crutches at the same time as the bodyguard stepped out from the front seat. The two Porsches were up ahead and behind him as he shut the car door and hobbled away inside the lobby.
Just inside the lobby, he laid the crutches against a wall and headed, as fast as he thought was unremarkable to any observer, out to the left and towards the restaurant.