False Impression

Greg Abbot.

He glanced around the crowd.

Kelly Gullickson.

He studied the faces of the relations and friends who had gathered in memory of their loved ones.

Anna Petrescu.

Fenston knew that Petrescu’s mother lived in Bucharest and wouldn’t be traveling to the service. He looked more carefully at the strangers who were huddled together and wondered which one of them was Uncle George from Danville, Illinois.

Rebecca Rangere.

He glanced across at Tina. Tears were filling her eyes, certainly not for Petrescu.

Brulio Real Polanco.

The priest bowed his head. He delivered a prayer, then closed his Bible and made the sign of a cross. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he declared.

“Amen,” came back the unison reply.

Tina looked across at Fenston, not a tear shed, just the familiar movement from one foot to the other—the sign that he was bored. While others gathered in small groups to remember, sympathize, and pay their respects, Fenston left without commiserating with anyone. No one else joined the chairman as he strode off purposefully toward his waiting car.

Tina stood among a little group of mourners, although her eyes remained fixed on Fenston. His driver was holding open the back door for him. Fenston climbed into the car and sat next to a woman Tina had never seen before. Neither spoke until the driver had returned to the front seat and touched a button on the dashboard to cause a smoked-glass screen to rise behind him. Without waiting, the car eased out into the road to join the midday traffic. Tina watched as the chairman disappeared out of sight. She hoped it wouldn’t be long before she called again—so much to tell her, and now she had to find out who the waiting woman was. Were they discussing Anna? Had Tina put her friend in unnecessary danger? Where was the Van Gogh?

The woman seated next to Fenston was dressed in a gray trouser suit. Anonymity was her most important asset. She had never once visited Fenston at either his office or his apartment, even though she had known him for almost twenty years. She’d first met Nicu Munteanu when he was bagman for President Nicolae Ceausescu.

Fenston’s primary responsibility during Ceausescu’s reign was to distribute vast sums of money into countless bank accounts across the world—bribes for the dictator’s loyal henchmen. When they ceased to be loyal, the woman seated next to Fenston eliminated them, and he then redistributed their frozen assets. Fenston’s speciality was money laundering, to places as far afield as the Cook Islands and as close to home as Switzerland. Her speciality was to dispose of the bodies—her chosen instrument a kitchen knife available in any hardware store in any city and, unlike a gun, not requiring a licence.

Both knew, literally, where the bodies were buried.

In 1985, Ceausescu decided to send his private banker to New York to open an overseas branch for him. For the next four years, Fenston lost touch with the woman seated next to him, until in 1989 Ceausescu was arrested by his fellow countrymen, tried, and finally executed on Christmas Day. Among those who avoided the same fate was Olga Krantz, who crossed seven borders before she reached Mexico, from where she slipped into America to become one of the countless illegal immigrants who do not claim unemployment benefits and live off cash payments from an unscrupulous employer. She was sitting next to her employer.

Fenston was one of the few people alive who knew Krantz’s true identity. He’d first watched her on television when she was fourteen years old and representing Romania in an international gymnastics competition against the Soviet Union.

Krantz came second to her teammate Mara Moldoveanu, and the press were already tipping them for the gold and silver at the next Olympics. Unfortunately, neither of them made the journey to Moscow. Moldoveanu died in tragic, unforeseen circumstances, when she fell from the beam attempting a double somersault and broke her neck. Krantz was the only other person in the gymnasium at the time. She

vowed to win the gold medal in her memory.

Krantz’s exit was far less dramatic. She pulled a hamstring warming up for a floor exercise, only days before the Olympic team was selected. She knew she wouldn’t be given a second chance. Like all athletes who don’t quite make the grade, her name quickly disappeared from the headlines. Fenston assumed he would never hear of her again, until one morning he thought he saw her coming out of Ceausescu’s private office. The short, sinewy woman may have looked a little older, but she had lost none of her agile movement, and no one could forget those steel gray eyes.

A few well-placed questions and Fenston learned that Krantz was now head of Ceausescu’s personal protection squad. Her particular responsibility: breaking selected bones of those who crossed the dictator or his wife.

Like all gymnasts, Krantz wanted to be number one in her discipline. Having perfected all the routines in the compulsory section—broken arms, broken legs, broken necks—she moved on to her voluntary exercise, “cut throats,” a routine at which no one could challenge her for the gold medal. Hours of dedicated practice had resulted in perfection. While others attended a football match or went to the movies on a Saturday afternoon, Krantz spent her time at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Bucharest. She filled her weekend cutting the throats of lambs and calves. Her Olympic record was forty-two in an hour. None of the slaughtermen reached the final.

Ceausescu had paid her well. Fenston paid her better. Krantz’s terms of employment were simple. She must be available night and day and work for no one else. In a space of twelve years, her fee had risen from $250,000 to $1 million. Not for her the hand-to-mouth existence of most illegal immigrants.

Fenston extracted a folder from his briefcase and handed it across to Krantz without comment. She turned the cover and studied five recent photographs of Anna Petrescu.

“Where is she at the moment?” asked Krantz, still unable to disguise her mid-European accent.

“London,” replied Fenston, before he passed her a second file.

Once again she opened it and this time extracted a single color photograph. “Who’s he?” she inquired.

“He’s more important than the girl,” replied Fenston.

“How can that be possible?” Krantz asked, as she studied the photo more carefully.