why do men shoot each other in the street?”
“Money,” Stefan said.
Victor grunted. “Exactly. Money. So whether the dying man told her about Damian’s ten million dollars—which he very well may have—or something a bit different…”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s money.”
“Yes. It has to be money.”
A petite woman in black tights with a perfectly formed ass walked a pug on a leash ahead of them.
“Two cloves of garlic,” Stefan said. “All they need is a loaf of bread and some salt.”
Victor let Stefan enjoy the view for a moment. “Bread costs money,” he said. “Have you wired that money out of my personal account to Tara yet?”
“How could I? Banks don’t open until tomorrow.”
“Change in plan. Wire her seven thousand. Get the other five thousand in cash. And I want to get it to her tomorrow so she can leave town before Misha does some damage she can’t walk away from.”
“I’ll take care of that and the girl’s surgery in Kyiv first thing in the morning. Speaking of Misha…”
“Yes?”
Stefan looked away. “He offered me a job.”
“Of course he did. And you accepted.”
Stefan regarded him with a look of surprise. “You don’t seem surprised. Or upset.”
Victor veered off the trail toward the wrought-iron fence, where darkness would hide the embarrassment on his face.
“The other day,” Victor said, “when you joked I was scaring you because I was senile and you said you might leave me, what did I tell you?”
Stefan kicked a pebble out of his way. “That the day you stopped scaring me is the day I should leave you.”
Victor stopped walking and faced his sovetnik of twenty-three years. “So tell me, Stefan. Do I still scare you?”
“No, Victor. You don’t scare me anymore.”
“Then it’s time for you to go,” Victor said.
They left in opposite directions.
When Victor got home, he sank to the floor in the corner of his dark kitchen. The cat meowed and jumped in his lap. He wrapped his arms around it and kissed its head.
“It’s just you and me,” he said. “It’s just you and me, Damian.”
CHAPTER 15
ON SUNDAY EVENING, long after most churches conducted their services, another form of worship began at 7:00 p.m. at Brasilia in Willimantic, twenty miles outside Hartford.
Giant speakers suspended above a runway stage thumped with a Joan Jett rock-and-roll anthem. Two women gyrated on the floor, arching their backsides within inches of the faces of their worshipping clientele. Nadia counted thirty-three customers scattered around her brother’s club. None of them wore fine black leather coats, and none of them looked familiar.
Marko came around from behind a bar the length of a destroyer and gave her a lukewarm hug. With his shiny head and gray goatee, he looked like a prematurely old Cossack. A blast of mint gave way to the inevitable stench of alcohol.
“Oh, man,” she said in Ukrainian. “You’re drinking again.”
He blinked. “I can control it.”
“Last month, you told me you were sober for twenty-three days straight. What happened?”
“I think I can handle one cocktail.”
“Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me, Marko.”
“Just stop. You call me from your car all frantic and shit, telling me to be careful like my life is in jeopardy. Then you show up here with your holier-than-thou attitude. I don’t need this, Nancy Drew. I really don’t.”
Nadia looked around to make sure someone hadn’t crept close enough to listen. She pulled her checkbook out of her purse.
“I’m giving you an early birthday present,” she said. “It’s going to be a big one to make up for all the years we were incommunicado.” She wrote her brother’s name on the check. “I want you—no, I need you—to leave the country for two weeks. Immediately.”
He laughed in disbelief. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ain’t no one leaving the country”—he stopped laughing—“unless it’s you. What the hell’s going on?”
Nadia started filling in the amount. “I don’t have much money left, or I’d make it more. Three thousand dollars. The Bahamas. Or maybe Aruba—”
Marko grabbed her wrist and lifted the pen off the check. “Stop. Stop writing.”
Nadia tried to force the pen down, but Marko wouldn’t let her hand budge.
“Talk to me, little sister,” he said. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?”
She pulled her hand away and rubbed her wrist. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She looked around again. No one suspicious. “It’s not safe for me to do so.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you anything except that your life is already in danger. If I tell you more, someone could try to get it out of you, and I won’t put you in