Genie for Hire (18 page)

He took a deep breath. The great Indian teacher Chanakya
said, “The root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment
to be happy.”

Words to live by, Biff thought, especially if your life
spanned several centuries. He fixed himself a light dinner, wondering where
Farishta was. He was just clearing the dishes when she appeared before him,
wearing a bright blue sleeveless crop top, skin-tight pegged jeans, and
Gucci-logo sandals with a two-inch heel. Oversized sunglasses were perched on
her head. She might have just stepped out of a boutique on Miami Beach’s
Lincoln Road. “The wolves,” she said, and then she fainted dramatically in
front of him.

He jumped up to grab her. Her body was as light as air, and
he could feel her heart beating rapidly. He carried her out to the studio and
laid her down on the couch there. Then he sat down on the end of the couch and
lifted Farishta’s feet into his lap. He began massaging them gently, sending
healing energy through her body. After nearly five minutes, she awoke groggily
and looked at him.

“What happened?”

“You flew in and fainted,” he said. “The last thing you said
was ‘the wolves.’”

She rubbed her upper arms and sat up, pulling her feet from
Biff’s hands. “You were right, Bivas. Those wolf dolls have something terrible
inside them.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes. They are in the apartment of this man Petrov. In a box
inside a closet. I thought perhaps because Petrov was Laskin’s boss, I could
find a way to have Petrov demand the amulet, then take it from him before the
amulet bonded to him. I was searching his apartment when I felt the magic
inside the dolls calling me.”

Biff scooted up next to Farishta and put his arm around her
shoulders. “It will be all right,” he said. “You will recover, now that you’re
back here.”

“As soon as I saw them, they began to drain my power from
me. They were so much stronger than I am.” She turned to look at him. “Me!
Farishta! I can master the oceans and the winds. But the power inside those
dolls is more than I could combat.”

“Do you know what it is? Another genie?”

She shook her head. “Something much more evil than one of
our kind. And very old. From before time.”

“What was Igor Laskin doing with them? And how did he get
them?”

Farishta yawned. “I don’t know, my Bivas. I am just so
tired.”

He picked her up in his arms, once again surprised at how
light she was. In the past when he had carried her—and he had carried her many,
many times over the centuries—her body had been much more substantial. “Sleep,
my love,” he said, kissing her forehead. “In the morning all will be well.”

He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. Farishta was
among the most powerful genies he knew. If whatever was in those dolls could
knock her out so easily, then they were facing a very great danger.

When Biff woke the next morning, Raki was clinging to a palm
frond outside his bedroom window, tapping against the glass. “You’re worse than
a dog,” he grumbled, but he got up, leaving Farishta asleep, pulled on a pair
of running shorts, and walked downstairs. When he opened the front door the
squirrel scampered inside, then hopped up onto the banister and scrambled up to
the second floor.

 Biff shook his head. He sliced raisin bread and while it
was toasting, he poured out a shallow bowl of water and opened a bag of walnuts,
leaving them in a small pile on the floor next to the water. He put together a
tray of toast, cream cheese, orange juice and strawberries, and carried it
upstairs. When he reached the bedroom, it appeared from the squirrel’s glassy
stare and his flickering tail that he and Farishta were sharing some kind of
psychic connection.

The appearance of the food broke the bond, however, and both
of them turned their attention to Biff. “Any news from the squirrel?” he asked,
as he slid the tray in front of Farishta.

“He prefers the marble halvah to the chocolate covered
type.” She shrugged. “What do you expect? Insight from a squirrel?”

“Guess not.” He sat on the bed next to her, picked up a
piece of toast and began to spread it with cream cheese. Raki cheeped at him
and he said, “Your breakfast is downstairs.”

Raki took a flying leap from the table to the bed to the
floor, and scampered away.

“Are you feeling better this morning?” Biff asked, between
bites.

Farishta nibbled a strawberry. “These are better coated with
chocolate, you know.”

“I guess that means you’re fine,” Biff said. “Did your
discover any insight into those dolls while you slept?”

She shook her head. “But surely you must have books we can
check.”

“At the office. I’ll go over there after we finish eating
and bring some back.”

They sat together, eating and drinking, for a few minutes
without speaking. “This is very nice, Bivas,” Farishta said. “I see why you
enjoy living so simply.”

“I lost the urge to make trouble a few hundred years ago,”
Biff said, sitting back against the pillows, the last strawberry in his right
hand. “I found it more satisfying to restore order than to disrupt it.”

She turned on her side to face him. “Perhaps that is why we
get along so well. I am the yin to your yang.”

“Perhaps.”

He pulled the hull off the strawberry and placed it in her
mouth. Their eyes met. Biff felt the tug of centuries between them. Then the
squirrel bounced onto the bed between them and began chittering.

“Raki says you must get moving,” Farishta said, laughing.
“And I should sleep more before we begin our research.”

“I suppose,” Biff said. He watched as Farishta
curled up under the covers, her wild black hair splayed against the pillows,
and Biff felt a stab of emotion. Was it love? Lust? The urge to protect? He had
no idea. “You stay here and look after Farishta,” he said to Raki. “I’ll be
back later.”

He drove to the office with a welter of ideas
floating around in his head. There were so many loose threads in this case; it
was time to start knitting some of them together. The photographer, Sveta
Pshkov, was the common link between them.

Farishta had overheard a conversation between
Petrov and Laskin that indicated there were pictures of Natasha on that jump
drive. But how had Viktor Petrov known that Sveta had taken pictures of his
daughter? Surely the girl himself hadn’t told her father.

Instead of going into his own office, he went
back to Sveta’s studio. The yellow crime scene tape still blocked the
door, but Biff slid inside easily. The photos of Douschka were digital, and
Sveta had sworn that the only copies were on that jump drive. But Biff didn’t
believe her. She was too street-smart to keep only one copy of something as
ephemeral as a digital file. That meant she had to have a backup somewhere.

He didn’t know what the backup would tell him, but it was a
start. He opened her laptop and searched for her backup software. When he found
it, he started a manual backup and watched as the application
scanned through the files on Sveta’s hard drive and discovered nothing to
update. Then he clicked the app and asked it to scan for any files that were on
the remote server, but had already been deleted from the hard drive.

That operation took a minute or so, and then
the screen displayed a list of folders with gibberish names, which existed only
on the remote server.

These folders were named in a strange code of Arabic numbers
and Cyrillic letters, and Biff couldn’t make sense of them. He opened the first
folder and saw a series of erotic photos of a young blonde girl, no more than
ten or eleven, and perched on the brink of puberty. She lay against a furry
white rug, and her cheeks had been dusted with rouge, her lips painted bright
red, to contrast. The rest of the files on the drive were similar, though the
girls ranged in age from ten to late teens.

The exploitation of these girls angered him, and he would
never have agreed to work for Sveta if he had known she was a pornographer. He
forced himself to go through each folder, looking at the girls, in case he could
make some kind of connection.

Then he opened one and recognized the beautiful
young blonde who posed seductively. In some cases she was naked, while in
others she wore sexy underwear. She was not very well developed; from her small
breasts and rounded face, it appeared she had barely reached puberty.

He shook his head. What in the world could
have possessed this spoiled young girl, whose father would have bought her
anything she wanted, to have done something so colossally stupid? Natasha
Petrovna had to be smart; she had graduated from an excellent high school, and
had been admitted to Yale. She didn’t need the money, and she had to know what
she was doing. Was she just willful?

There was no use speculating on her motives.
What was done was done, and four  people – the valet Usnavy, both Ovetschkins,
and Sveta Pshkov—were dead because of her actions.

Where else might Sveta have copied them? He opened
a search box on Sveta’s laptop and entered the name of one of Natasha’s files.

While he waited, he wondered if there was
anything else he should do. He went back over the sequence of events, trying to
understand. As far as he could tell, Douschka had triggered the action by
having Sveta take those shots of her, then giving one to her boyfriend Usnavy,
who posted it in his locker at the gym.

Usnavy showed it to his friend Igor Laskin,
who recognized his boss’s wife. He told Ovetschkin, who directed him to steal
the drive from Sveta. Before he handed it over, however, Igor must have taken a
look at the contents. When he recognized his girlfriend, Natalya Petrov, he
reported back to the big boss, the Professor, her father.

So far, so good. Kill Douschka and Usnavy for
cheating. Kill Sveta for taking the pictures of Natasha. But why kill Kiril?
Wasn’t he a valuable asset to the Professor’s operation? According to Hector
Hernandez of the ATF, he was.

Biff watched as the little search dog completed
combing through everything on Sveta’s hard drive. He was rewarded when an email
message popped up which included an attachment of the photos of Natasha. They
had been sent to an email account in Russia.

That made Biff sit up. He went back to her
email program and searched for that account, where he found many messages back
and forth. He copied them all to the jump drive, disturbed by what he had
found.

Then he closed Sveta’s laptop and went back to
his office, where he chose a half-dozen books from the shelves. It was still
only ten o’clock, too early to check out Carlos Cardozo’s habits. He put the
books carefully into a backpack, shouldered it, and walked out to his car.

When he got back to the townhouse, he found
Farishta in the living room reading an edition of
Vogue Paris
, which had
certainly not been in the house when he left. An elegant blue and gold scarf,
carefully displayed to show off the logo from Hermes in Paris, tied her black
curls together, leaving the ends free to flow around her shoulders. She wore a
sleeveless silk top in a matching blue, with black silk Capri pants and black
ballet slippers.

Raki was on top of one of the cabinets,
holding a walnut between his paws and watching Farishta.

Biff sat down across from her. “I wondered how
Viktor Petrov knew that Sveta had taken those pictures of his daughter. And why
he killed Kiril Ovetschkin. So I went back to her studio.”

“Bivas. You were supposed to find me books, so
we can understand what is in those dolls.”

“I have the books. This is important, too.”

Raki took a flying leap from the top of the
cabinet to the low table in front of them. He cocked his head and looked from
Biff to Farishta.

“So tell me,” Farishta said. She sat across
from Biff.

He went through the chronology he had figured
out at the studio. “Then I found these emails,” he said. “Sveta was taking a lot
of dirty pictures of young girls, then sending them to someone in Russia, who
was selling them all over the Internet.”

“That dirty
blad
,” Farishta said, using
the Russian slang for bitch, or prostitute. “I see why Petrov had her killed.
Even if the pictures weren’t of his own daughter.”

“And why he had Ovetschkin killed,” Biff said.
“Ovetschkin was the intermediary, the one who hooked Sveta up with the
distributor.”

While Farishta considered the implications of the child
pornography scheme Kiril and Sveta had perpetrated, Biff ushered her to the
kitchen, where he opened the backpack and laid out the ancient books from his
office on the table. He handed one to Farishta. “You start with this, and I’ll
take the encyclopedia of demons.

Raki followed them in and curled up in the corner of the
kitchen. The room was quiet except for the occasional sound of a car passing
outside.  “Could it be a
bajar
?” Biff asked after a few minutes, turning
his book sideways so Farishta could see.

“No, the bajar can only take form as a cat, not a wolf.”

He went back to reading. A few minutes later Farishta said,
“Could it be Aeshma imprisoned in there?”

“A Zoroastrian demon? Aeshma of the bloody
mace? Is he connected to wolves?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not sure he could be so
powerful.”

Biff gave up on the book he had been reading and
turned to another, a very old one with a leather binding worn soft over the
centuries. A skilled craftsman had etched a whirlwind into the cover and
beneath it the book’s title, in a flowing, ancient alphabet full of slants and
curlicues.

As he reached for it, he felt it calling to
him, and without consciously choosing, he opened the book to a random page. A
very faded image of a wolf hovered in the air over the open page for a moment.