Collar Robber (7 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Jay Davidovich

We didn't leave for another forty minutes, so I ended up drenching my bladder with another draft anyway. Nesselrode ordered a second Hacker-Pschorr to keep my stein from feeling lonely.

“For a second there,” he said as the waiter deposited our beers and moved away, “I thought you were going to order a German beer, just to be polite.”

“I once did something just to be polite. I'll never make that mistake again.”

“Very sound.” Nesselrode clinked his stein against mine. “Continentals don't expect
politesse
from Jews, Brits, or Americans. They stereotype Brits as meticulously correct and rude at the same time, and Americans as naively direct. Jews, they haven't figured out yet.”

Back and forth like that for close to forty minutes. Taking each other's measure, talking about everything in the world except what we hoped to accomplish that night. An outfit that depends on money from New York and Israel has to produce results now and then that impress people in New York and Israel. He was trying to get something done with
Eros Rising
that would qualify, and I couldn't blame him for that. But a tingle along my spine told me he wanted something more than that, and so far I hadn't figured out what it might be. That didn't make him a con man, but it didn't exactly rule it out.

When he'd finished his third beer—I wasn't even trying to keep up with him—he set his stein down, met my eyes, and made sure I noticed it.

“So, am I a
gonif
or a
mensch
? Or are you still making up your mind?”

“A little of each—like most of us.” I reached for my wallet to pay the tab the waiter had just dropped off. “‘Us' meaning ‘guys,' of course. Chicks can get complicated.” I pulled out a Visa card. I had plenty of cash, but I figured it might come in handy later in the evening.

“Well, thanks for partial credit on
mensch,
anyway.” Nesselrode still had his eyes locked on mine. “A step up from your first impression this afternoon, I hope.”

“Pretty much. One reason I don't trust first impressions.”

***

We took the subway to a station called Westbahnhof. No bikes on the street we reached after our climb up the stairs from the station. Not many people either, except for a blonde in lederhosen and her twin sister, shivering in a white-leather mini-skirt. Stepping out of shadows the blonde asked us something in what I assumed at first was German. Three strides past her I figured out that she'd actually been taking a stab at “Wanna date?” in English—except with a
V
in place of the
W
. Three more strides and I'd pulled
Danke, nein
out of some cubbyhole in my memory. Too late, but it's the thought that counts.

In the middle of the next block Nesselrode stopped at a building with dim light visible behind dark curtains drawn over smallish, nine-pane windows on either side of the door. He pointed to a plaque-sized sign at eye-level.

“That says, ‘This establishment welcomes native speakers of German.'”

“I'll keep my mouth shut.”

“Good plan.”

Shouldering the door open, he led me inside. A few tables with wooden chairs, and wooden benches built into the walls. Most empty. A couple of kids with “nineteen” written all over them sat on the bench in the near corner, making out in a homecoming-dance sort of way. A hawk-faced twenty-something glanced up from a laptop to give us a wary glare, then went back to committing poetry or Marxism—or hedge-fund managing, for all I knew. I picked up a smell of burning dust, like the one you get in your house in autumn when the furnace kicks back in after its summer vacation.

I followed Nesselrode to a bar running lengthwise from the back wall. Nesselrode said something that produced two bottles of schnapps. Handing one of them to me, he took the other to a table where he could keep his eye on both the door and a flight of rickety, naked stairs opposite the bar.

He checked his mobile phone. Frowned. Glanced up over my right shoulder with his eyebrows rising and his eyes widening, and shook his head. I looked in time to see a woman retreat back into shadows under the stairs. Nesselrode took a schnapps hit. Checked his mobile phone. Frowned. I looked at my watch. 9:31.

The front door opened. The chick in lederhosen came in, followed by a middle-aged, portly guy. He was working hard at not looking nervous, but not hard enough. They headed straight up the stairs. Less than a minute later the fraulein's golden braids reappeared above the bannister three steps below the second floor as she leaned over to address the bartender.

No idea what the two Teutonic syllables she barked at him meant, but they got the job done. Next thing I knew the barkeep was around the near end of the bar and hustling for the stairs. Not quite running, but not wasting any damn time either.

As the bartender clumped up the stairs I saw Nesselrode coiled tight, as if it took a lot of effort to contain himself. He managed it until we heard the first loud rap on a door that couldn't have been very far down the second-floor hallway. By the second rap Nesselrode was already rising from his chair. He put a strong right hand on my forearm.

“Stay here.”

“Bullshit.” I muscled my arm free and stood up.

“Suit yourself.”

Nesselrode headed for the stairs, with me right behind him. Somewhere around the fourth stair the door pounding stopped and I heard keys rattling. Actual keys—kind of a quaint sound in a public place these days. At the top I ignored lederhosen-chick for the second time that night and joined Nesselrode at the doorway to a room maybe ten feet down the hall seconds after the bartender got the door open.

That's as far as we got, because the bartender had stopped cold, blocking the doorway. He was nothing like tall enough to keep me from looking into the room over his shoulder, though.

I saw a man sitting on a bed that a barracks-rat would have spit on. Back braced against the wall at the pillow-end of the bed. Trousers and underpants bunched down around his ankles. Fair-sized laptop PC resting on hairy thighs and hiding what was between them. Eyes bulging, mouth gaping, tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, head lolling onto his right shoulder. The braided rope around his neck explained a lot.

I made the rope for well over two yards long, doubled and tied so that it had a loop at one end and two loose ends at the other. A neat, elegant knot secured the looped end in a choking circle around the man's lifeless neck. From the knot the doubled strand went slackly around the bedpost and back toward the body, with the two free ends lying close to the body's hip.

My eyes drifted toward his feet: gleaming black Nike Air Jordan Six-Rings. I recognized his face from the close look I'd gotten of it just before he clocked me with Proxy's attaché case. Nesselrode shook his head in weary disgust.

“No society in history has ever experienced a shortage of whores.”

Chapter Sixteen

Jay Davidovich

Nesselrode twitched reflexively toward the stairs. I moved my head maybe an inch back and forth. Unnecessary. He stifled the impulse on his own. We'd done the same instant analysis and reached the same conclusion:
Stay or go? Stay
.

Fraulein Lederhosen was the first one to do anything constructive. Scooching in between Nesselrode and the bartender, she nudged her way into the room and headed unflinchingly for the body. She snapped something at the bartender on her way. I don't know, maybe “snapped” is too strong. Maybe everything in German sounds like an order to me. I'm guessing that she'd told him to call the police, because the bartender responded by digging a phone from under his apron. Punched one button on the phone, raised it to his ear.
Has the local heat on speed-dial. Figures.

The hooker felt the body's neck and wrists. Didn't take her long. She looked back at the three of us.

“
Tod
.” Dead. Even I knew that one. No surprise, but she was right: someone had to check.

The bartender was jabbering away on the phone by now. The hooker stalked back out of the room and crossed the hallway to the john she'd brought in from the street. That drew my eyes to him for the first time since I'd seen the body: pasty face, wide eyes, rapid, shallow breaths, lips puckered in a little “o.”
Shock? Don't think so
. Then it came to me.
Sonofabitch! The guy is turned on!

Reaching under the left lapels of the john's overcoat, suit coat, and vest, the blonde fished a pack of Dunhills and a lighter from his shirt pocket. She pulled a cigarette out of the pack with her lips, then offered the john one of his own smokes. He accepted with touching gratitude. Cigarette still dangling unlit from her lips, she punched the bartender on the bicep to get his attention. When he turned impatiently toward her, she held the pack out to him. He took one too. Then she offered one to Nesselrode and me.
About time to conform to an American stereotype
.

“
Nein, danke
.” I got that out without too much trouble. Nesselrode picked up the hint and said the same thing.

“Tell them we'll wait outside until the police come,” I instructed Nesselrode as the blonde lit her cigarette and passed the lighter around.

I assume that's what Nesselrode said, because none of them batted an eye when we headed downstairs. We could probably have found a cozy corner of the bar area for the chat I wanted to have—the patrons downstairs had all prudently decamped—but we went all the way outside anyway and parked our backs against the windows to the right of the door. I flicked my eyes to look at Nesselrode without turning my head.

“The bartender knows your name, right?”

“Yes,” Nesselrode said. “So do the police.”

“I left word at the hotel about where you could find me, and I look so American I might as well have ‘YANK' stamped across my face in Day-Glo. So it wouldn't take the cops long to figure out that I was the one here with you tonight even if you didn't tell them—which you'll pretty much have to do.”

“Pretty much.”

“So we both wait,” I said. I could already hear an apologetic little siren only a few blocks away.

“Absolutely right. What is it that you insurance people call it when someone chokes himself to death while he's beating his meat to computer porn?”

“‘Auto-erotic misadventure.'”

“Think they'll buy that?”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“I have to agree.” Nesselrode glanced to his right as the sound of the siren drew nearer. “So we'd better get our story straight.”

“Simple. The truth. The absolute truth. No way we pass ourselves off as a couple of horny Rotarians who stumbled into this place looking for a little action. I came to Vienna to work with Transoxana Insurance Company's Austrian branch on investigation of a forged painting claim. You dug up the name of someone who might be able to help. We came here to meet him. Unfortunately, someone else met him first.”

“Yes, that'll have to do. Let's go back inside.”

We did. The other three, plus the woman who had briefly come out from under the staircase to try her luck with us, were gathered in a smoky group at the far end of the bar, as distant from the door as they could get. Nesselrode and I sat down at the table where we'd been killing time when all the excitement started. I could hear the low-key siren right outside the door now. Green and white light blinked through the windows.

“Absolute truth,” I whispered to Nesselrode.

“Absolute truth.”

It took less than fifteen minutes for one of the two cops who'd come to get to me. This one spoke English. After he'd copied down every scrap of information from my passport, he turned a page in his notebook and glanced up at me.

“Did you know the dead man?”

“Never saw him before in my life.”

The First Thursday in April

Chapter Seventeen

Cynthia Jakubek

“One hundred forty-five k.”

The number sat there on my computer screen over the initials PVS—the first email I'd opened after hitting my desk at 7:55 a.m. PVS meant Shifcos, but she'd sent it from
bü[email protected]
instead of the email address I remembered for her. So she'd used a company computer at Transoxana's Vienna office instead of her own laptop. That meant she was gallivanting around Austria, presumably looking for a cheaper version of the bill of sale Willy was peddling.

The thing had hit my computer a little after ten o'clock last night, so she must have sent it at the crack of dawn her time. I'd sized her up as a pretty good negotiator—good enough to know you don't want to seem too anxious to make a deal. Something must have happened yesterday to make getting her hands on Willy's piece of paper urgent enough to trump that axiom.

I was suddenly so hot to move on this thing I could barely keep my butt parked on my desk chair. Speed-dialing Willy got me voice-mail. I left a message.

“Almost a hundred-and-a-half on the table now. My gut says there's more where that came from. We need to talk in a big hurry.”

I trudged through my other emails while I waited impatiently for a call-back. Nothing from Sean or Abbey or Tally. One email about “hot Russian babe want big American man.” I turned to other work while I waited for Willy.

I'd gotten a handwritten letter yesterday from a client whose case I was handling on the taxpayers' tab. Appointed-counsel work in criminal cases generated twenty percent of my billings. The chap who'd written the letter was doing sixty-seven months for convincing people they could pay their taxes with “Citizen Warrants of Credit,” which he provided over the net for a modest deposit in his PayPal account. Someone had to handle his appeal. I'd gotten the gig.

The letter had comments on the draft brief I'd sent him for review. He couldn't understand why I'd missed the key points. He was a Sovereign Citizen/Free-Born Man of the Soil, not subject to the jurisdiction of any court! He had never accepted the benefit and protection of U.S. law! Plus, the Internet was
NOT
the U.S. Mail, so no mail fraud! And he was strictly a Wi-Fi type, so no wire fraud either! Wi-Fi doesn't use wires! That's the
whole point
of Wi-Fi! This was all
OBVIOUS
! I would please insert these points into the brief
IMMEDIATELY
!

I spent sixteen minutes dictating a letter thanking him for his input and advising him that his contentions would not find their way into the brief that I'd file later in the week. Every penny I charged for that three-tenths of a billable hour (rounded up) came out of your pockets. I deeply appreciate it and, anyway, it's a small price to pay for freedom.

The letter might have spilled over into another tenth of an hour, but the phone rang. Willy's land-line. YESSS!

“Willy?”

“No, this is Amber. Amber Gris. We met when Willy had you over for dinner after that pissing match with the condo association.”

Ah, yes. The first case Willy brought to me, nine months ago. I remembered Amber as a buxom redhead with a megawatt smile, an adoring gaze for Willy, and polite interest for everyone else.

“Right. I remember. What can I do for you, Amber?”

“Willy has a question for you. He's going to call you in, let's see, wait a minute…a little over an hour…ten o'clock our time, I guess. Unless it's eleven. No, I'm pretty sure ten. It's a time-zone thing. Anyway, he told me to give you a head's up about the question.”

“Okay. What's the question?”

“He bought some cigars. And they're like
Cuban
cigars. But he didn't
buy
them in Cuba. He bought them, like, somewhere else. Legally. From a shop and everything, not on the street somewhere. So he wants to know is it, like, a prison thing if he brings them back into the country with him?”

“Got it. Do you know where he bought them?”

“Not for sure on that. Not Italy 'cause he's flying
to
Italy right now. That's why he can't call you himself yet. 'Cause he's, like, in the air. He just said this thing for me to call you about while we were on the phone about other stuff.”

“Okay, Amber. Thanks. I'll be ready with an answer when Willy calls me.”

Hmm. Yesterday, when something pretty dramatic had apparently adjusted Shifcos' attitude, Willy had been spreading Willyisms someplace within two or three hours' flying time of Rome. Lots of places qualify, but my guess was that Willy had been breathing the same Danube-scented air as Shifcos. Could be coincidence, I guess. Sure it could.

Willy had never technically been indicted. He had come uncomfortably close about four months ago. I'd had to work my ass off to keep that one from happening, doing work that IMHO the U.S. Attorney should have done for himself. If Willy had ever killed anyone he hadn't shared that with me, although he had mentioned unpleasant dealings with, as he'd put it, “a shylock who needed killin'. But that was almost thirty years ago.” Right, so it hardly counts. So, bottom line, betting on Willy in the middle of a mess involving money wouldn't exactly qualify as a low-percentage play.

I spent ten quick minutes brushing up on the Trading with the Enemy Act. I did that just to be safe. I didn't think the upcoming call would have much to do with Commie tobacco.