Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

There was a quiet intake of breath, the sort you hear just before a prayer.

“ That’s what Galina is after?” Nat asked. She turned to me. “How sure are you?”

“I memorized that code on the Bosque job, and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s her.”

“She’s our white whale,” Helen said. “The one that got away.”

“After all this time,” Mary Alice said. “I never thought she would surface again.”

Truth be told, I hadn’t thought so either. I could still taste the rage and regret the day we realized Fermín Bosque had removed her from his cave in the Valley of the Kings before we could get to her. God only knew where she had been since.

We were all thinking the same thing. Helen is the one who voiced it. “Where do you think she’s been? And how did Jovan Muri? get his hands on her?”

I shrugged. “We know Bosque had buyers for every load he took out of Egypt. She could have gone anywhere. Who knows after that?”

“It’s been decades ,” Mary Alice pointed out. “She could have been sitting in someone’s vault in a free port the whole time. She could have been hanging on a wall or shoved under a bed. Or she could have been circulating in the underworld as currency. The one thing we do know is that she couldn’t have been put up for legitimate sale or the Provenance department would have spotted her.”

I thought for a minute. “I wonder if the Provenance agent—the one who gave the Lazarovs our names—spotted something in the files on Muri? that tipped them to the fact that he had the painting.”

Nat shook her head. “That doesn’t wash. If Provenance knew Muri? had the painting or even knew where it was, they would have retrieved it. You know the policy about looted art. It goes back to the family it was stolen from, and if there are no surviving members, it’s held in the freehold.”

“That’s supposing the Provenance agent who discovered the whereabouts of Leda is clean. We already know at least one isn’t. Whoever gave the Lazarovs our names is playing their own game and it’s not by Museum rules.”

“You think the mole found a connection between Muri? and Leda ?” Helen asked with a frown. “And then gave that information to the Lazarovs? But why?”

“Money,” I suggested. “Tip off some unscrupulous folks as to where an extremely valuable piece of stolen art is and ask for a cut when they steal it.”

“Then why wouldn’t the mole just take it for themselves and keep all the profit?” Nat objected.

“That’s a dangerous business,” Mary Alice pointed out. “You’re talking about stealing from a Montenegrin gangster. It would take big fat brass ones to just stroll in and swipe the painting. Besides, Provenance traffics in information, but deals like this are done through relationships. You can’t just call up a legitimate dealer and shift a missing Raphael. You’d have Interpol on your ass in two seconds flat.”

“But you could use information to leverage a relationship with the Lazarovs,” I added. I took a deep breath and started to paint them a picture. “Imagine you’re a Provenance data nerd. You have access to some of the most dangerous and interesting secrets in the world. Maybe you’re bored one day or you have a little extra time on your hands, so you go walkabout through the databases, accessing some old files. You could do this for months, years even, before you turn up a piece of the puzzle. But eventually you realize where one of the most valuable paintings in the world is—a lost painting that hasn’t been seen in decades and is worth millions of dollars— hundreds of millions. Maybe you’ve been a good little Museum soldier all these years, or maybe you’ve just been biding your time, waiting for an opportunity like this to come along. Either way, you have extremely valuable information. But it’s going to take skills and connections you don’t have to pull it off. What then?”

“You’d have to hire someone,” Nat said. “Someone whose name you could find in the archives.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But you still don’t have any money, so what do you pay them with? Criminals don’t work on credit.”

“Information,” Mary Alice replied. “You’d pay them with information—like the names of the people who killed their father. And if the painting was the original job, that would explain why Galina was willing to walk away from us in Venice in order to get here. She has to finish the job in order to get her payday. After that, she can come after us whenever she likes.”

“She’d certainly have the money to do it,” Helen said.

I looked around this group of women I’d known for two-thirds of my life. “This mission has changed. We still need to get Galina because if we don’t, she’ll just keep hunting us down.”

“Not to mention, she just killed an associate of Jovan Muri?’s to get the painting in the first place,” Helen said.

“Are we really that fussed about a Montenegrin gangster?” Mary Alice asked, making a face.

“Gangsters are people too,” Helen said calmly. “Montenegro is a difficult place to make a living. I’m sure this man was simply trying to feed his family.”

“Also, I’m not sure we exactly have the moral high ground when it comes to choice of occupation,” Nat said to Mary Alice.

Helen continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “The point is, Galina is not just after us. She’s widened her scope and she is a danger to others as well.” She turned to me. “Finish, please.”

I waited a second to make sure I had their attention. “We need to take out Galina, but this isn’t just about her anymore. This is about the chance to finish a job we started in 1994. That painting got away from us the last time, but we have the opportunity to get her back and give her to the family she was stolen from in the first place.”

“I do hate unfinished business,” Nat said. “It’s untidy.”

Mary Alice grinned at her suddenly. “Would Marie Kondo approve? Is this sparking joy for you, Nat?”

Nat grinned back. “Hell, yeah. Let’s go get our girl and take her home.”

—

The train hadn’t stopped, and the body had been warm when we touched it—conclusion? Nobody had left the train and that included Leda. I was betting Galina wouldn’t get off with her prize until Belgrade where she could switch to a train that would take her straight to Athens and the intended buyer. It was a circuitous route, but oddly it was the most direct way if you didn’t want to fly—and taking a train is a much better way to move some contraband than flying. Train security, especially in the Balkans, is virtually nonexistent. The stations are not state-of-the-art, high-speed rail facilities with X-ray scanners and metal detectors. There are no sniffer dogs or intimidating soldiers with semiautomatic weapons, no gleaming concourses with massage chairs and gift shops and Subway storefronts. These stations are holdovers from a time when the Iron Curtain was fully drawn. Some look like bus stops— stops , not stations—while others are just concrete slabs in the middle of nowhere. If you’re lucky there might be a window into a hole where you can order a pastry or a meat pie to take with you. Seasoned travelers know to stock up at the vending machines or local grocery stores, bringing their own supplies, including toilet paper and flashlights in case of power cuts on the train. And the really experienced ones bring twice as much because you never know what to expect on a Balkan train. You need small coins for the guy walking the aisle with his cooler full of beers to sell, and you need larger notes for the border patrol guards you want to bribe because shaking down tourists from affluent countries is a blood sport. Serbian officials in particular were fond of the old “your papers aren’t in order, get off the train and come with us” routine. They would make up some document you needed and threaten you with police detention—all so you would shit yourself and cough up some spare euros or dollars to buy them off. Their only redeeming feature was that they weren’t too expensive. Forty euros would do the trick if you were lucky. But no bribe, no matter how generous, would be enough to get us off the hook if we were found with a decapitated body and a painting that occupied the top slot of the Monuments Men’s most wanted list.

In the case of our trip, the unexpected happened just before the viaduct at Mala Rijeka. It used to be the highest viaduct in the world—something for Montenegrins to brag about, but the Chinese decided to build a higher one, and nobody wants a t-shirt that says World’s Second anything. I still thought it was an impressive sight, spanning a gorge that bottomed out almost a third of a mile below. I knew how high it was because I read about it, not because you could see anything close to the full drop. The moon and some stingy little spotlights gave enough light to show the bones of the viaduct, crouching like a skeleton over the black emptiness of the gorge. The last thousand feet or so were in complete darkness, an abyss that was probably carpeted in pine and spruce forests and punctuated with rock outcroppings, but I couldn’t see, so who knows?

In spite of what happened on the scala in Venice, I’m not actually a fan of heights, and even looking at the viaduct from a short distance across the gorge and thinking about what lay below was enough to make my knees go a little rubbery. We were pulling through a tunnel—one of more than two hundred and fifty, as Helen had informed us courtesy of Lonely Planet—when there was a sudden shriek of brakes—a full-throated scream, not a squeal—and a hard stop. We had just left our compartment to start searching for Galina and Leda when it happened, and the four of us were thrown hard into each other.

“What the actual hell?” Nat said as she disentangled herself from Mary Alice.

Helen peered through the smudged window. “I can’t see anything from this angle. And it’s almost pitch-black out there.”

“We’d better check it out,” I said. I didn’t really think Galina had caused the train to stop—her best move was to slip away quietly and there was nothing subtle about this stop. But the possibility that she meant to leave the train here needed investigating. I didn’t wait to draw straws. I headed down the corridor and into the no-man’s-land of the ante-carriage. A push of the button and the door opened, letting in a rush of cool spring air. It smelled green and fresh, but as I stepped from the carriage, I caught something else, something sharp and metallic. The smell of fresh blood.

Outside the tunnel, a single large security light was helping the moon illuminate the scene. There was something that looked like blood on the tracks, patches that shone dark and wet. An engineer from the train had jumped down from his perch and was arguing loudly with a local farmer. The engineer spoke pretty standard Serbo-Croat, but the farmer was shouting in a regional accent. Still, I could make out the gist of what he was saying. Swearing is easy to translate in any language. He was telling the engineer he was the son of a shit; the engineer was telling him he should know because he smelled like he’d been screwing his own goats. By this time a few other passengers had left the train to join in the discussion, adding their own pithy comments. Opinion seemed to be going against the farmer and it was making him madder by the minute. He pointed to the track in front of where I stood and I could just make out a lump of flesh that had been something living only a few minutes before.

The discussion up front was getting more heated as passengers were demanding to know when we’d be on our way again. I listened to the answer which came with lots of gesticulating, then returned to the train to give the others the news. “It’s goats. Or a horse. The words are really similar and my Serbian is pretty rusty.”

“Oh god,” Nat said, turning pale.

“It’s not pretty, but at least it looks like it was quick,” I told her. It didn’t look anything of the sort—trains will pretty much mangle whatever’s in their path—but Nat could be squeamish where animals were concerned.

“How long are we going to be here?” Mary Alice asked.

I shrugged. “They have to clear the tracks and apparently one of the goats is wedged under the engine. Or a piece of horse is. Like I said, the words are similar.”

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“Well, there wasn’t much left,” I told Mary Alice as Natalie horked quietly. “But we’ll be here for a few minutes at least, and it looks like the entire train has emptied out to stretch their legs and look at the carnage.” The Boy Scouts had seemed particularly keen.

I didn’t have to spell it out further for Mary Alice. This was our best chance to find Galina and Tamara and the painting. With the passengers outside rubbernecking and walking the kinks out of travel-stiffened legs, there was no need to be discreet while we searched. We could do the whole train in a matter of minutes, far less time than it would take them to dismember the livestock under the train and clear the track.

We split up, Helen and Nat going forward again while Mary Alice and I headed back. The rest of the compartments were empty, doors left wide open or enough ajar that we could sweep them at a glance. We checked the Serbian compartment with its upright seats, but it was completely empty—those passengers were probably the first ones off, and I didn’t blame them. Fourteen hours sitting up was a lot to ask. Any chance to move around freely was probably welcome. I opened the door of the compartment where we’d left the dead man and took a quick peek in. Still dead and right where we’d left him up in the third berth.

We passed only one closed door in the sleeper carriage. I tapped and a gruff voice called out a response in Spanish. “Ocupado!”

“Perdona,” I called back.

“No es importa.”

We went back the way we came, meeting up with Helen and Nat outside our sleeper.

“No sign,” Helen said.

“Oh, we found her,” I replied.

Mary Alice blinked. “We did?”

I grinned. “Galina Dashkova went to boarding school in the Pyrenees. The Spanish part.”

Mary Alice let loose a stream of profanity that had even Natalie staring at her in admiration.

“How do we get her to open the door?” Helen asked. “Half the locks don’t work, but Galina and Tamara will have barricaded themselves inside.”

“Smoke?” Mary Alice suggested.

“On it,” I said, grabbing a bag of Nat’s snacks.

“What’s to stop them going out the window with the painting?” Helen asked.

“I’ll go around and cover it,” Nat said. “Give me a head start and take care of Nula,” she added, thrusting her chicken at Mary Alice before she headed out.

“I am not babysitting a goddamned chicken,” Mary Alice said, shoving the bird at me. It squawked a bit and I backed up.

“Not it,” I said.

Helen sighed. “Give her to me.” She took the chicken and opened one of the sleeper berths, tossing the bird inside. She slammed the berth closed and dusted off her hands. “Problem solved.” I could hear the chicken fussing which was a good sign.

“Natalie is going to kill you if anything happens to that chicken,” Mary Alice said.

Helen shrugged. “That’s a later problem. The now problem is how to smoke Galina and Tamara out of that compartment.”

I waved the bag of snacks I’d purloined from Nat. “I told you, I’m on it.”

They followed me to the compartment where we’d heard the Spanish reply. There was a slim chance that there actually were Spanish tourists on the train which is why I didn’t just set fire to the door itself. (That, and it was Soviet-era steel.) Instead, I knelt in front of the door and studied the space between the door and the floor. When the compartment was built, it would have fit snugly, but after five or six decades of hard wear, a gap of a good half an inch had opened—plenty for my purposes.

I opened a bag of tortilla chips and took out my lighter.

Mary Alice pantomimed at me, and I understood she was asking if that would really work. I didn’t feel like pantomiming back an explanation about the relative flammability of hydrocarbons and fat, so I clicked the lighter and blazed up a chip instead.

It caught instantly, and I shoved it under the door. There was an immediate shriek, and some stamping of feet. More important, there was an exclamation that definitely wasn’t Spanish. I lit a few more chips and shoved them where I’d sent the first, just to add to the confusion. At the same moment, I heard a thud and Nat’s voice. Banking on the fact that they would have turned to the window, I grabbed the door handle and wrenched it hard. Whatever they’d secured it with snapped under the strain, and we were in.

It took a long second to work out exactly what we were looking at. Two women sat on one of the lower berths—one was Galina and the other her murderous little friend, Tamara. Across from them was a crunchy-looking older traveler wearing Birkenstocks, thick glasses, and a crocheted vest. There was more crochet in the form of a floppy hat she wore over a long, grey ponytail. She turned to look at me, fear lighting up the dull complexion.

It took me just a second to place her, but when I did, every puzzle piece that hadn’t fit before slotted neatly into place.

My first thought was that I was going to have to send Lyndsay the P.A. a muffin basket for suspecting her. My second thought was—

“Marilyn Carstairs,” I said. “You utter and absolute bitch.”