We are going to find this fake professor. And with him, maybe Kiro.
It’s noon by the time my main man Tito and I get to Viktor’s northwest Chicago neighborhood, a hidden pocket that is pure Russian mafiya territory. We park a ways down, just a precaution. My ankle still hurts from an injury some weeks back, but I can walk. Run if I have to.
You’d think you were in Russia, to walk down the street, smell the food, hear the chatter. We find Mischa, one of Viktor’s guys, on his stoop a few houses down, and he’s greeting people all around in the mother tongue.
People are tight here, and there are eyes everywhere. If we were cops or muscle from Bloody Lazarus’s gang, the whole neighborhood would be alerted.
We get to Viktor’s condo, a brownstone row house, and knock. Yuri opens the door and puts his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”
He leads us to the living room where Viktor is sacked out on the couch, cradling a bottle. Instead of a coffee table in front of the couch, there’s a wall of monitors set up on a bookcase.
“What the fuck is this?”
Again Yuri puts his finger to his lips.
“Be quiet? It’s noon.” I frown. This isn’t like my brother. Viktor may be an impulsive hothead, but he doesn’t drink and pass out in the middle of the day. I go to him, but Yuri pulls me back.
“Let him sleep,” he whispers.
“What the fuck?” I whisper back, thoroughly alarmed. I saw Viktor not five days ago, and he seemed…distracted. But okay.
Yuri stations Tito in front of the monitors and gives him instructions on what to watch for on the strange array of nine screens, then he pulls me into the kitchen.
“What’s going on? Is Viktor drunk?”
“Sleep deprived.” Yuri looks out the kitchen window. “More or less.”
“More or less? Talk to me.” I join him at the window and touch the curtain—every room is beautifully decorated. You’d think somebody obsessed with home décor magazines lived in the place. Well, aside from the insane shelf of monitors flashing captive girl vids. “Is this about Valhalla? We have what we need now. We don’t need to get crazy here.”
Yuri says something in Russian that sounds like swearing, just from the tone of it. He loves Viktor as much as I do.
I gaze around. The kitchen is seriously stocked. Nice, too. The kind of shit I’d buy. “He doesn’t need to monitor them like he’s the fucking Secret Service,” I say. “He needs to win the auction and get in. You all have the tech ready to go?”
“Yeah, everything is ready to go with Valhalla.” Yuri opens a cupboard and then another. There’s a ton of food. Lots of sweet stuff. This is not the type of shit Viktor eats.
“What’s up with all the food?” I ask.
“Checking a theory,” Yuri grumbles. “Follow me, Aleksio.” He leads me out of the kitchen and up the wooden staircase to the bedroom.
The bedroom is also done up like a home décor mag. Like a fucking woman’s bedroom. Yuri flings open the closet. And lets out of streak of Russian that’s probably more swearing.
He pulls out a hanger with a white leather miniskirt, puts it back, and paws through the rest of the stuff. All women’s clothes.
“Whose shit is this?” I ask. Viktor doesn’t have a woman.
Yuri pulls more women’s clothes from the closet—boots, skinny black jeans, a blood-red vintage-looking cowboy shirt with black embroidery, a floppy white hat, a faded jean jacket with flowers. A Ramones T-shirt. This last he tears off the hanger and tosses across the room. “Blyad!”
Okay, that word I know. It’s their version of “Fuck!” “Talk to me, Yuri.”
He turns to me. “Tanechka clothes.”
“Tanechka.” I narrow my eyes. “His girlfriend who died. The woman he…”
“Killed, yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
Yuri picks up the skirt. “These clothes, these are the sorts of things Tanechka would wear. She loved black boots. She loved cowboy shirts. This red shirt—she had this very shirt. I don’t know how Viktor found these things. Perhaps online. He did not bring them to America with him, I know. He has been busy. And if I look in that chest of drawers, Aleksio, we will see ripped tights. Faded T-shirts. A white knit hat with a puffball on top. Tanechka’s famous hat.” He picks up a red T-shirt that says “Gone Fishin.’” “Tanechka loved stupid American sayings like this.”
He puts it down, and I see here that Viktor’s not the only one who grieves for Tanechka.
“What has he told you about Tanechka?” Yuri asks.
“She was the love of his life. He killed her in some kind of gang honor thing, and it turned out—”
“That she was innocent,” Yuri says.