He paused, and then: “Nyet, ya ochen’ seryozno. Seichas. Osvobodit’ dyevushku. Da, konyeshno, svyazat’ vsye kontsy.”
He punched another button to end the call.
He lowered the phone to his side, then sank down in the chair. The power and menace seemed to have seeped out of the man, leaving a mere Madame Tussaud waxwork: a lifelike model of a once terrifying figure.
In a monotone, he said, “It is done.”
“And how long after he makes the call before Alexa is free?”
“He must do this in person.”
“You haven’t heard of encrypted phones?”
“There are loose ends to tie up. This can only be done in person.”
“You mean, he’s going to eliminate the contractor.”
“Operational security,” Navrozov said.
“But he has to drive from Maine?”
He glowered at me. “It will take thirty minutes, no more. So. We are done here.”
“Not until I speak to Alexa.”
“This will take time.”
“I’m sure.”
“My son needs immediate medical treatment.”
“The sooner she’s free, the sooner your son will be treated.”
He exhaled, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s. “Fine. We have concluded our business here. Marcus will get his daughter, and I will get my son.”
“Actually, no.”
“No … what?”
“No, we’re not done here.”
“Oh?”
“We have more to talk about.”
He squinted at me.
“Just a few questions about Anya Afanasyeva.”
He drew breath. I knew then I had him.
“Where did she pick up such a lousy Georgia accent?”
77.
Roman Navrozov took from his breast pocket a slim black box with a gold eagle on the front. Sobranie Black Russians. He carefully withdrew a black cigarette with a gold filter and put it in his mouth.
“This is a no-smoking room, yes?”
I nodded.
He pulled a box of matches from his front jacket pocket. He took out a match and lit it with his thumbnail. He put the match to the end of the cigarette and inhaled. Then he let out a long, luxuriant plume of smoke between his rounded lips.
Navrozov didn’t just smoke Russian cigarettes; he smoked like a Russian too. Russians, especially older Russians, hold cigarettes the way Westerners hold a joint: between the thumb and forefinger. Habits like that never go away.
“Anya Ivanovna really was not a bad actress at all,” he said. “But she was not, shall we say, Meryl Streep. Clearly she needed to do more research into the State of Georgia.”
I had no reason to think that Marshall Marcus was lying about how he met the woman who called herself Belinda Jackson. He was the victim, after all. And when he’d met her at the Ritz-Carlton bar in Atlanta, he must have known she was an escort. A horny old goat like Marcus could tell, the way a spaniel can smell game.
He just didn’t know that she was no longer employed in that capacity by VIP Exxxecutive Service.
She was employed by Roman Navrozov.
My cyber-investigator had checked on the dates of her employment by the escort service and confirmed my gut instinct. Then, as he traced her background, he was able to dig much deeper than Dorothy ever could, since he had access to certain archives and records in New Jersey that she didn’t.
The woman who changed her name to Belinda Jackson, who’d dropped out of the School for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, had in fact enrolled under her real name. The name on her birth certificate: Anya Ivanovna Afanasyeva. She’d grown up in a Russian enclave in Woodbine, New Jersey, the daughter of Russian émigrés. Her father had been an engineer in the Soviet Union but could only get some low-level desk job at an insurance company here.
That was about the sum total of the facts I knew. Everything else was informed guesswork. I imagined that Anya sought work as a call girl only when she couldn’t get work as an actress. Or maybe out of some sort of rebellion against her old-fashioned émigré parents.
“I assume you provided Anya with a complete dossier on Marshall Marcus,” I said. “His likes and dislikes, his tastes in movies and music. Maybe even his sexual peccadilloes.”
Navrozov burst out laughing. “Do you really think an attractive and sexually talented woman like Anya needs a dossier to capture the heart of such a foolish old man? It takes very little. Most men have very simple needs. And Anya more than met those needs.”
“Your needs were simple too,” I said. “His account numbers and passwords, the way his fund was structured, where the critical vulnerabilities were.”
He gave a snort of derision that I assumed was meant to be a denial.
“Look, I’m familiar with the history of your career.