Chapter Four
The porch at the corner of Duke of Gloucester and Nassau was brick, built up from the street level, with arches punched into either side—the perfect place to stash a dead drop. We arranged ourselves casually around one side with Mary Alice and Helen poring over the map like curious tourists as Natalie ducked under the porch. We heard her scrabbling around, cursing a little until she finally emerged with a cobweb festooning her hair.
“Spiders,” she said, making a face as she dropped the packet she’d retrieved into Helen’s Birkin. It was too early for lunch but Helen insisted the Cheese Shop was a must-do, so we stood in a ridiculously long line for sandwiches that we took back to the Best Western. We assembled in the room I shared with Mary Alice, spreading our sandwiches and bottles of water and slices of pound cake over the two beds as Helen extracted the material from the packet.
“A dozen pictures of Pasha at various ages.” She divided them up and passed them around. “Followed by a dossier.” She kept this and skimmed it as the rest of us studied the photos.
“Dapper,” Natalie said. “I like the pinstripes.” She flashed a photo of a man who looked to be in his mid-fifties with fading sandy hair. His looks were forgettable, but you’d take a second glance at his clothes. He wore a navy suit with a wide rose-pink pinstripe, the seams perfectly matched. A violet silk pocket square was folded with precision, and he was smiling around a beautiful briar pipe with a mother-of-pearl stem. He had teeth like Richard Branson, large, white, and permanently on display in every photo.
Natalie moved on to the last photo and squealed. “You have got to be kidding.” She turned it over to show Lazarov in a straw boater and a gorgeously tailored cream suit—holding a teddy bear. “He’s dressed like Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited .”
“God, I had such a crush on him,” Helen said. “He was so sexy in The Scarlet Pimpernel .”
“?‘Sink me!’?” Mary Alice said, waggling her fingers at her eye to suggest a monocle.
Natalie’s face fell as she looked again at the picture. “I’m not sure I can kill a man with a teddy bear.”
“You killed a man with a dog,” Mary Alice reminded her. Boris Lazarov had boarded our private plane with a couple of bodyguards and an asshole of a poodle. Natalie had put her foot down, insisting she couldn’t kill a dog, so in the end, Helen had scooped it into her flight suit and parachuted out with it.
“I saved the dog,” Natalie shot back.
“Helen saved the dog,” I corrected. “And I promise, no teddy bears will be harmed in the killing of Pasha Lazarov.”
“It’s not about hurting the teddy bear,” Natalie said. “I’m not insane , Billie. It’s about the fact that he is clearly a sentimental person. And I’m just not sure a person who carries around a teddy bear is capable of trying to murder us.”
There was always a point in just about every mission Natalie worked where she got cold feet. She made the mistake of humanizing the target, trying to find a loophole to get out of the killing. It never made sense to me, because once she got her nerve back, she was always the most enthusiastic of the four of us. It invariably took a deep dive into the dossier, turning over the rocks of the target’s life to see all the nasty things wiggling around underneath in order to convince her an assassination was a necessity.
I flicked through the pictures as Mary Alice jerked her chin towards the photo in Natalie’s hand. “Maybe it’s not really his teddy bear. It could have been for a costume party.”
“I don’t think so,” Helen said slowly. “According to the dossier, he’s an Anglophile—almost pathologically so—with a particular fondness for Evelyn Waugh. He has all of his clothes custom tailored in London. The actual biographical data is pretty sketchy. Pasha was born Pavel Borisovich Lazarov on April 26, 1962—an Easter baby, hence the nickname of Pasha. He and his younger sister were both born in the south of France. His father, our pal Boris Lazarov, was Bulgarian. His mother, Irina Feodorovna Dashkova, was White Russian, old nobility. Her parents fled St. Petersburg during the revolution in 1917, and Irina and her sister, Evgenia, were born in Paris. Auntie Evgenia is the only surviving member of Pasha’s family, living in an expensive old folks’ home in Switzerland. There’s no mention of wives or significant partners. No children. He dabbles a bit in dealing art, but no real occupation to speak of. He has a town house in Belgravia.”
“Nothing about that makes me feel better,” Natalie told her.
Helen’s brow furrowed. “This might. Two different Russian oligarchs have fallen out of the windows of that town house in Belgravia.”
“God, what is it with Russians and defenestration?” Mary Alice asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe they like the splat.” I turned to Helen. “So if our guy has been doing murders in London, why haven’t the British charged him?”
Helen turned back to the dossier. “Both happened during parties and other witnesses backed up his story that the deaths were accidental. He also apparently deals drugs—designer club gear, strictly for beautiful party people. He specializes in something called red razzies.”
“Ooooh, I love those!” Natalie puts in. “They’re shaped like little raspberries and they’re flavored. Nice buzz, but you have to really hydrate because they’ll suck the moisture right out of you.”
Helen stared at her a long moment. “Thank you, Natalie. That is very informative.” She resumed her narrative. “British Intelligence had to warn him off when a minor royal almost overdosed, but they hushed it up to avoid the tabloids carrying the story.” She fixed Natalie with a firm look. “The bottom line is: we don’t need to feel too bad about killing him.”
Natalie opened her mouth to argue, but I pulled a photo of Lazarov on the deck of a sleek teak racing yacht. “Look at the side of the boat. Next to the name. See the animal painted there?”
“It’s a wolf,” she said quietly.
“A black wolf. Exactly like the obsidian one left with Lilian Flanders’s body.”
Natalie thought this over while Mary Alice studied the rest of the photo. “That’s a gorgeous boat. What do we think, fifty feet? And polished within an inch of her life. They don’t make boats like that anymore.”
Helen tapped the dossier. “It says here he has a phobia of flying—hasn’t been on an airplane since 1979.”
1979. The year we’d assassinated his father.
“I guess you can blame us for that,” I said. “Knowing your father died in an airplane crash probably messes you up for life.”
Helen went on. “He stays almost entirely in Europe, traveling by his yacht—named the Galina for his dead sister. That’s sweet, I guess. Otherwise, he travels by train. When he has to come to the U.S., he crosses on the Queen Mary 2 . This says he crossed a week ago, ahead of the hit on Lilian.”
“Makes sense if he’s that much of an Anglophile,” Natalie said brightly. “That ship is all cream teas and cricket. I’ve always wanted to sail on her.”
“Well, it looks like you’ll get your chance,” Helen said, pulling an envelope from inside the packet. It was red, marked with the Cunard logo in gold. On it was a Post-it with a note in Naomi’s handwriting. P. L. confirmed on this crossing.
“Is that—” Natalie broke off as she grabbed for the envelope. She yanked it open and four tickets spilled onto the bed. She snatched one up and grinned. “Sailing in five days from New York.”
Mary Alice turned to her earnestly. “So would Marie Kondo approve? Does this murder now spark joy for you, Natalie?”
Natalie shot her the bird and I ignored them both.
“That gives us less than a week to figure out how to murder a man on the most famous ocean liner in the world and get away with it,” I said. “Piece of cake.”