A Date You Can't Refuse Read online

  Presumed?

  Tacked onto the last page was a Post-it with sprawling handwriting: “Subj. good candidate, meets criteria re driving record, criminal record, credit rating, health. Marked loyalty to friends, strong ties to brother, uncle. May be turned to asset if required, use appeal to idealism. Pref. to keep ignorant. IQ unavailable.”

  The door opened. I jumped up, slamming my file shut.

  Alik stood there. “Hi.”

  “Hello!” I stepped in front of the desk. Hands behind my back, I picked up the “Wollie Shelley” file, then fished around for the yellow legal pad with the passport information.

  “Okay not good.” Alik moved past me. “Safe wide open, passports everywhere. Kimberly can be really careless. Yuri will throw a fit.”

  I shuffled away. “Miss Bjöeling, too, seems a little high-strung. What's she in for?”

  Alik stretched his leg to kick the office door shut. “She's ‘in for’ physique transformation, aka diet, exercise, and cosmetic surgery, but the real challenge …” He paused, counting passports. One was missing, of course—Stasik's. In the copy machine.

  I sidled over to the copier, still facing Alik. My free hand worked to lift the cover of the copier. “So for Bronwen, we're a fat farm?”

  Alik counted again. “Don't say the f-word in front of Kimberly. It's ‘UFP,’ untapped fitness potential.” He turned back to the desk. “Where's Stasik's?”

  “What?”

  “His passport.” He turned. “Something you need, by the way?” Probably I appeared to be handcuffed, with my arms tucked behind me, trying to extract the passport from the copier. To make matters worse, Olive Oyl was now sniffing me.

  “I'm worried,” I said. “Yuri asked me why I was driving all the trainees last night, yours included. I did my best, but I'm not great at—” Olive Oyl was now licking my hands.

  “Lying.” Alik smiled. It was his father's smile. “I like that. It means you don't do it enough. Forget it. If Yuri asks me, I'll tell him. Anything else on your mind, Wollie?”

  Only that Stasik's passport was now clutched in Olive Oyl's teeth. On impulse, I let her have it. I fed her the passport.

  A honking horn got Alik's attention. “Gotta go,” he said, and tossed the passports into the safe. He shut it, then turned to see Olive Oyl. “Jesus, Olive!” he said. “Aren't you too old for this? Drop it. Drop it. Release. I'm telling Kimberly. You want to be crated up?”

  He got the passport, opened the safe, and shoved it in with the others, then locked it. And then he was gone.

  I refiled my own file, tore off the yellow legal pages I'd made notes on, and gave Olive Oyl a kiss on my way out. “Good work,” I said.

  In the driveway, five men were gathered around a black SUV, talking animatedly. In Russian, I realized. I circled back and came up behind Alik, who was under the car's hood.

  “Alik, I'm taking off, be back for lunch.” I turned to the closest of the strange men and grasped his hand. “Hello, there. I'm Wollie. Social coach.”

  “Pyotr.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Pyotr.” I moved to the next man. “Hi. Wollie Shelley.”

  “That's Sergei, and Alyosha, Andrej, and Josip,” Alik said, speaking quickly. “Wollie, what do you think of this car? We're thinking of buying it. It's a hybrid.”

  “Cuter than the Suburban,” I said.

  “Yeah, ‘The Tank.’ You don't like it?”

  “No, it's just—”

  “No one likes it. Yuri bought it in Europe years ago, and it's been refurbished so many times, its own mother wouldn't recognize it.”

  “Refurbished how?” I asked, my interest piqued.

  “Diesel to battery, back to diesel, then biodiesel …”

  “I guess I should be happy it's automatic.”

  “It wasn't, for about a month. But the improved mileage was minimal, and no one liked to drive it, so at some point we gave it a new transmission.”

  No one liked to drive it?

  One of the men said something in Russian that evoked a laugh from the others. I continued to the garage, scared by the last thing I'd heard, the one English word among all the Russian ones.

  It was “Chai.”

  EIGHTEEN

  My sad little car was in the garage, being worked on by a strange little man who said only, by way of introduction or explanation, “What Yuri tell me do, I do.” He then hit the on button of a loud vacuum cleaner, drowning out my cry of “But it's my car!”

  This wasn't part of the deal, that my car would be—what, rigged? Like the Corvette that Chai had driven to her death? Because surely that's what Crispin suspected. And what about staying in a room I could be locked into? Had Bennett Graham mentioned that when he'd recruited me? Had Yuri? None of this had been in the job description.

  I hopped into the Suburban, so eager to be away that at this point I'd drive a horse and buggy. The good news was that my purse was there, on the floor. Stuff had spilled out, but my money and credit cards were safe.

  Halfway down the driveway, I swerved to avoid Parashie, who was flagging me down. Behind her came Grusha.

  “Where are you going?” Parashie asked when I'd rolled down the window. “Can we come with you? Can you drop us at the store? We have no ride. Yuri and Kimberly have taken the Voyager and Grusha will not drive Alik's Porsche.”

  How sad. I loved the idea of Grusha in her housedress gunning the engine of a Porsche GT. “Sure. Hop in.”

  “And Nell too,” Parashie said. “She is just coming.”

  The English instructor rushed toward us, head down, hand in front of her face as if hiding from paparazzi.

  “There seems to be a car shortage,” I said. “Should I not be driving this—”

  “No, we have cars,” Parashie said. “Only Kimberly, her Audi has a problem today and goes back to the shop. It is the oil, you see. Vegetable oil. Always it's in the shop.”

  “Audi, huh? Is it a stick shift?”

  “No, it's normal.”

  “So, Parashie, do you drive a stick?” I asked.

  “Yuri says I'm too young to drive. Next year, yes.”

  “Next year?” Grusha exclaimed. “No. Five years, maybe. Ten years.”

  “Ten years?” Parashie cried. “I'll be two hundred years old!”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Do you drive a stick shift, Grusha?”

  “Of course.”

  “How about you, Nell?”

  “Nell doesn't like to drive,” Parashie said. “Yuri wants her, but Nell has agoraphobia, so for her it is no fun.”

  “I was sorry to hear about that, Nell. That must be difficult.” Then I added, as casually as I could, “How about Chai? Did she drive a stick?”

  “I don't know,” Parashie said. “Nell, you can sit here, I will go in the back. Wollie, can you drop us at Gelson's? Or Vons? Any market. Just we need greens for dinner. And then we wait for you. You have to drive home too, yes? For lunch?”

  “Gelson's,” I said. “Is that in the little mini-mall with the—”

  “Veterinarian, UPS shop, karate, card place, photo place, clothes cleaner, hair salon, and nails.” Parashie showed impressive mall knowledge, as befitted a teenage girl.

  “No frozen yogurt place?” I asked.

  “Yes, that also. But it's new.”

  Parashie kept up a steady stream of talk during the ten-minute ride to Gelson's, punctuated by the occasional hrmphs of irritation or contradiction from Grusha. Nell remained silent. I did too, preoccupied as I was by the knowledge that there was no obvious need for anyone in the household to drive a stick shift. The possibility that Chai had learned to drive one out of necessity was dwindling.

  I dropped the trio in front of the market, all of them with canvas shopping bags, either an old-school European habit or a New Age California habit. I parked at the south end of the lot, after cruising past the frozen yogurt place, then turned on my cell phone and called Joey.

  I described my nocturnal visit from Crispin,
and Joey was nearly as concerned as Uncle Theo had been. “He says she was murdered? That must've scared the pajamas off you. Definitely tell your handler.”

  “My—”

  “Your FBI contact that I'm not supposed to know about. The feds won't want anyone interfering with their investigation, so you can't go to the cops. Although it sounds like there's no hard evidence for the cops anyway. But I'll check out Crispin too. Last name Harris, you said? I need a new project. It's either this or Sudoku. Anything else you need?”

  “I don't suppose you speak Russian?”

  “Not well.”

  “Okay, never mind. But as long as you're googling people—” I rattled off the names Felix, Stasik, Zbiggo, Nadja, Zeferina Maria, and Bronwen, and then slowed down to spell them. She made little “I'm impressed” noises about Zbiggo, Nadja, and Bronwen. “And here's something else.” I gave her a number, asked her to call it from a phone other than her own, speak to a Mr. Wendell, and tell him that the client with the carburetor issue was waiting for him to call her back. Joey agreed to this without further questions. There is much to be said for a friend who embraces subterfuge.

  I considered my best approach to the upcoming conversation, should it occur. I'd never contacted Simon this way. I'd been saving it for emergencies, and this was close enough, but the trick would be to get more information out of him than he got out of me. While I waited for him to call, I searched the Suburban for other junk that might have fallen out of my purse, and rescued some coins and a small jade Buddha that Uncle Theo had given me. It would have been fabulous to find Chai's missing diary; instead I unearthed, from between the center console and the passenger seat, a DVD. The title was in Cyrillic, but the plastic cover left no doubt as to the subject matter. A girl stood in a doorway, holding a pizza box, wearing nothing but high heels and a beguiling smile.

  My phone rang. I shoved the DVD into the glove box and hit talk.

  “What the hell,” he said, “is going on with you?”

  “Can I speak freely?”

  “You better.”

  I decided to overlook his tone of voice. “I didn't mean to hang up on you, but I can't use the phone from the compound. Anyone could pick up the extension.”

  “And hear you talking to your auto mechanic. So?”

  “It's complicated to explain.”

  “Give it a shot.”

  “Simon, I miss you so badly it's like a physical malady, I'm getting a—”

  “Wollie.”

  “—skin rash. What?” An SUV drove past me, with a man inside that looked remarkably like Alik.

  “I don't want you working there.”

  “Simon, why don't you tell me what you've found out about Yuri Milos, so I can make that determination myself?”

  “Can't you just trust me on this?”

  “Look—” I said.

  “No, you look—”

  “No, you look,” I yelled. “Do I ever give you a hard time about your career?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Yeah, but I don't tell you to quit. Or that the hours are too long, that it takes you away from your home, or from me, that it's dangerous—”

  “This isn't your career, Wollie. You're a graphic artist.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the SUV “The job supports my career. It beats minimum wage at Wal-Mart. I'm not quitting, Simon. That option's off the table.”

  There was silence on the other end. I was not handling this well. And now I was distracted, thinking it was Alik in that SUV looking for a parking place. I forced myself to speak more softly. “I'm sorry I don't want to fight with you, I'm crazy about you. I'm just—not getting enough sleep. Please tell me what you've found out, what the deal is with Yuri that has you so worried.”

  His tone matched mine: enforced calm. “Yuri Milos made his money in the currency boom in the nineties. His facade of respectability is recently acquired. In the former Soviet bloc countries, in his youth, he was a political refugee, a political dissident, an environmental activist-slash-terrorist as well as a black-market profiteer and a mercenary. And an arms dealer. He's a grab bag of shady occupations and his Christmas card list probably includes half the Russian Mafia.”

  “But—okay, if he's so bad, then how did he get to be a U.S. citizen?”

  “I don't run Immigration,” Simon answered. “There are a lot of bad people out walking around, Wollie. The one that concerns me at the moment is the man who's signing your paycheck.”

  “But what's the FBI's interest in him?” I asked. The SUV had stopped. It was the hybrid Alik had shown me in the driveway, I realized. Alik must be test-driving it.

  “What do you mean?” Simon asked.

  “What—what do you mean, what do I mean?”

  “Why should the FBI have an interest in Milos?”

  I hesitated. “Didn't you just say they did?”

  “No.”

  Uh-oh. “Well, I just assumed that you found out all this stuff by, you know, phoning your office. Asking to see his file.”

  “It doesn't work quite like that.”

  Yes, it was definitely Alik getting out of the SUV Walking toward the vet clinic? Or the UPS store? “So what'd you do, google Yuri?” I asked.

  “If you'd googled him before going to work for him, like a responsible person, you'd know that very little of what I'm talking about shows up there. He's been laundered.”

  Alik was going into the UPS store. I turned my attention back to Simon. “I didn't have to google Yuri,” I said. “I sat on a jury for weeks hearing about him. If all this is true, why didn't the prosecution mention any of it?”

  “Relevance. His past probably didn't figure into a slip-and-fall case. And most personal injury attorneys have no access to classified files.”

  “But you do.”

  He said nothing.

  “You have a nice Christmas card list of your own, don't you?” I said. “And not just in your own office. Friends in the State Department too? CIA? Immigration?”

  “How am I going to sleep nights, knowing you're working for this guy?”

  I was starting to notice how many people, when they don't want to answer a question, just ignore it. I'd have to practice that. “Nothing you've just said proves that Yuri's into anything shady now. This isn't the former Soviet Union, it's Calabasas. The burbs.”

  Silence. He knows more than he's willing to talk about, I thought. “Simon,” I said, “whatever he was—and don't we all have checkered pasts?—at present Yuri Milos runs a legitimate media training organization. So maybe he's reformed. Or maybe he hasn't, but there's nothing sinister about what he's hired me for. I just drive people around—”

  “That in itself makes me suspicious.”

  “Hey, my driving record, for the record—”

  “And scared. Has he ever been in a car with you?”

  “But let's say something problematic does happen,” I said, choosing to ignore these childish barbs. “Is there any way I can reach you?”

  “Hold on,” he said, and clicked into another call.

  I looked toward Gelson's, to see if my passengers had reappeared yet, and noticed that Nell was sitting at one of the wrought-iron tables outside the market. She wore a hat and sunglasses, and appeared to be studying the tabletop. Around her, people were eating, reading, talking on phones. Not Nell. Interesting. And now Alik was coming out of the UPS store, a hundred yards away, carrying a box.

  He didn't seem to see Nell, nor she him. He pulled out his cell phone, moving to an awning at the veterinary clinic.

  Simon came back on the line. “Okay.” He gave an audible sigh. “Wollie, I'm about to throw caution to the wind.”

  “Really?” My heart stopped. Was this a marriage proposal?

  “I'm going to give you a number, but you can't call it from your cell phone. Any other phone is okay just not your own. Ask for Mr. Lavosh. Got that?”

  My heart started up again. Okay. No proposal. And anyway who wants the Big Moment to come ov
er a cell phone in front of the UPS store? For that matter, was I ready for marriage? “Mr. Lavosh,” I repeated, copying down the number he rattled off. “Him again. But why are we going out of sequence?” I thought of Ulf and Wendell, the recent aliases, and the every-other-letter code. “Shouldn't you be Mr. Yellow at this point? Or Yam? Yeltzin?”

  Silence.

  Something occurred to me. “Are you telling me what I think you're telling me? That Mr. Lavosh is your—”

  “Cover. Yes. I'm Daniel Lavosh.”

  I sat there, awed by the secret I'd just been handed. “My God, your cover,” I whispered. “I will never tell anyone. You can trust me.”

  “I know.” He let that sink in, and when he spoke again, his tone was brisk. “Now, when you call that number, you're a textiles client. Don't use your own phone or your name. If you call Mr. Lavosh, you're Harriet Spoon.”

  “Harriet?” As Mr. Lavosh was hanging with a beautiful woman named Lucrezia, why did I have to be Harriet? “I'd prefer a name with more—”

  “Harriet Spoon. With Landmark Woolens. And Wollie? I don't need to tell you, do I, the kind of danger I'd be in if you ever, even unintentionally—?”

  “No, you don't. I would never—”

  “Good.” There was a long exhalation. “I know you'll never use it for anything but a dire emergency.”

  “I won't.”

  “Although with you, dire emergencies are fairly common. Especially in light of the company you're currently keeping.”

  Alik was moving again, toward his car, then stopped dead in his tracks. It appeared that he'd spotted Nell. He stuffed the UPS box under his arm, lowered his head, and hurried to his car. Curious.

  “Wollie?”

  “I'm here,” I said into the phone.

  “Is there something you're not telling me?” Simon asked.

  My heart rate sped up. “Such as … ?”

  “That's an evasive response,” he said.

  “Is it?”