History
There was a side door, but Finn and his colleagues almost always called in on business visits when the club was open, using the main door. It was mid-afternoon, but Finn did the same now, ringing the bell insistently until he heard someone approaching, an ever-louder stream of Estonian expletives.
The guy who opened the door was young and sinewy. Finn wasn’t sure if he’d seen him before, but the guy recognized him and simply nodded grudgingly as he stepped aside. He closed the door behind him, and escorted Finn through the club to the stairs that led up to Karasek’s office suite.
It had been cleaned since the previous night, but Klub X was the kind of place that smelled and felt sordid even when empty. But then, he thought, maybe all nightclubs were like that in the daytime, maybe he was allowing his knowledge of Karasek to color his thoughts.
At the top of the stairs the young guy stopped, realizing he’d made a mistake, and gestured for Finn to strike a pose. He patted him down, then opened the door into the green room where Karasek’s guys seemed to spend most of their time.
They were sitting around a table now, smoking, drinking coffee, playing cards, like a cliché they were aping from American TV shows. Karasek was with them, but looked up as Finn was ushered into the room.
Very few people, asked to pick the boss out of that group, would have included Karasek in their first three choices. He looked like a hanger-on. He was average height, average build—Jack had once told Finn of Karasek’s constant but futile attempts to bulk up—with nondescript looks. He wore his hair cropped, but even that backfired, the odd shape of his head and the babyish face combining to make the style completely unthreatening. He was older than Finn but looked in his mid-twenties at most.
But if Karasek’s looks had robbed him of the natural gravitas he craved, marking him out not as an alpha male but as someone to be patronized, his actions made up for those shortcomings. Finn had never known him to throw a punch, but he also knew that some people didn’t need to.
Finn raised the brown envelope in his hand, as if that explained the reason for his visit. Karasek responded by asking the young guy a question: whether Finn was armed. He nodded to one of the men at the table, who reluctantly got up, crossed the room, and came back with a scanner. Finn submitted again, and even stood patiently as the guy double-checked, pulling Finn’s shirt up to look for wires.
Once satisfied, the guy took his seat again, and Karasek got up and came over. The young guy melted away, back out of the door.
“What can I do for you?” He knew Finn’s name, but it was a typical ploy of Karasek’s not to use it.
Finn played him back, saying, “We were hoping we might be able to do something for each other. We understand you mislaid something a couple of days ago.”
One of the guys called over, asking in Estonian if he wanted to be dealt in. Karasek waved his hand dismissively. He looked at Finn, suspicious, brimming with an anger that played out on his face like teenage petulance.
“What about it?”
“Mr. Karasek, we don’t approve of trafficking, and we have every reason to distrust your motives with regard to this girl.” Karasek’s jaw was clenched shut. “But we have some information, and on this occasion, we might be able to help with the return of the girl if you can fill in some of the details for us.” Finn allowed a slight pause to creep in before holding up the envelope again and saying, “This is a surveillance photo, taken outside the church just after your man was murdered.”
Karasek’s expression changed from anger to one of desperation and longing—it made Finn want to hit him.
“Let’s go through to my office.”
Finn smiled. One of his men called out something again and Karasek answered, the sentences too quick and too complex for Finn to understand with his basic Estonian, but he guessed it was about the card game. One of the guys said something else and they laughed among themselves, then one said in English, “Relax, we get you a hundred girls.”
There was no laughter this time. Maybe if he hadn’t spoken in English—showing off for Finn’s benefit—it would have been different, but the guy had chipped away a little too much at Karasek’s authority, and everyone else at the table knew it.