Private Moscow (Private 15)

Ghani sucked on his cigarette. He’d taken off his hat and rubbed a hand through his thick salt and pepper hair. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which I tried my best to ignore in the confined, warm cabin of his rattling Skoda.

“The day after yesterday,” he said.

“The day before yesterday?” Dinara qualified.

Ghani nodded. “Yes, yes.”

I glanced at Dinara and saw that she was also alive with the thrill of a lead.

“What time?” I asked.

“Morning,” he replied. “Maybe ten o’clock.”

That was roughly an hour before Ernie Fisher was murdered.

“He ask me to take him to Lefortovo. To a fun house. He tell me wait then we go to airport,” Ghani said. “But we never go airport. When he come out of fun house, he angry. Mad. Tell me take him home. He forget something.”

“The key?” Dinara guessed.

Ghani looked at her blankly.

“Fun house?” I asked.

“You know,” Ghani replied. He arched his eyebrows, sucked on his cigarette and glanced at Dinara. “For girls.”

“He means a brothel,” Dinara clarified.

“Fun house,” Ghani repeated. “Is where I take you.”

He drew in another lungful of smoke and exhaled slowly, filling the velour-covered cabin with a thick cloud.

“You married?” he asked us.

“No,” Dinara replied. “We work together.”

“Why no?” Ghani asked. “You very beautiful,” he told Dinara. “And he got the eyes of a mountain man.”

“Is that good?” I asked.

“Yes. Is very good,” Ghani replied. “You keep woman safe. You dangerous.”

CHAPTER 65

A GROUP OF four rowdy men rounded the corner. They were pushing each other and jeering as they made their way along Energeticheskiy Passage.

Ghani was crawling along the road, which enabled Dinara to take in the neighborhood. They were in Lefortovo District to the east of the city, one of the most deprived parts of Moscow. Energeticheskiy had to be one of the low points of the area. The tall blocks that flanked the street were crumbling and covered in graffiti. One wing of the huge apartment building on the corner had been gutted by fire and the windows had been blown out, but the rest of the structure was still inhabited. Discarded food containers, empty bottles, nitrous canisters and needles littered the gray slush that covered the pavements.

Ghani’s taxi was crawling along because there was an old Mercedes ahead of them, cruising the street, the driver examining the women who stood in lit apartment windows, or who braved the freezing conditions in faux fur coats and little else.

The four rowdy men on the sidewalk chatted to a couple of fur-clad women and went into one of the rundown Soviet-era blocks. There was little doubt what this particular street was famed for.

The Mercedes stopped and the driver, a bald man in his sixties with a jowly face, beckoned a young woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty.

Ghani tooted his horn, but the jowly man ignored him.

“He’s doing business,” Ghani said.

Dinara looked at Jack and saw him frown. Was he wondering the s