Genie for Hire (21 page)

He opened his computer and created a file for his
interactions with Laskin at the gym. It was important to keep track of anything
Laskin said, no matter how minor, as well as any details he provided Laskin
about his own life. They all had to tie into his cover as Bill Adams.

When the two of them spoke at the gym, Biff had focused on
the fact that Laskin wouldn’t be at the gym on Sunday morning. As he typed out
the reason, though, he thought it might be interesting to sneak into Natasha’s
graduation as an observer. He was still curious about her reasons for posing
for Sveta, and it would be interesting to see the interaction between Laskin
and Petrov at a social occasion.

But where was the graduation? He sat back in his chair and
tried to remember everything he had heard or learned about Natasha. She was
going to Yale in the fall. In conjunction with her father’s money, that
probably meant she went to private school. He turned to the computer and did
some quick searching.

Bingo. A Natalya Petrov was registered as a graduating
senior at Miami Beach Academy, an exclusive prep school in the ritzy beachfront
neighborhood of Surfside, a couple of miles south of Sunny Isles Beach. With
only twenty students graduating, the ceremony was small enough to be held in
the ballroom of an elegant hotel in Bal Harbour.

Biff shut the computer down, roused the squirrel, and the
two of them walked out of the shopping center. He stopped for takeout Thai on
the way home, and back at the townhouse he gave all the peanuts from the
chicken satay to Raki.

When they were finished eating, Biff dressed in his most
conservative business suit and prepared for a stressful evening—spying on a man
who not only knew him on sight, but with whom he’d shared a workout that very
morning.

It was a gorgeous night to drive in along A1A with the top
down. A warm breeze coming off the ocean made the palm fronds dance, and lights
shimmered in the high-rise condos that lined the beach. With his excellent
vision, Biff could identify thousands of stars in the sky invisible to human
eyes, as well as the masts of sailboats bobbing in Biscayne Bay and the closing
blossoms of the hibiscus that lined the road.

When he reached the Bal Harbour Beach Hotel, Biff left his
car with the valet and his squirrel in a palm tree by the entrance, and walked
inside. A big sign with red and blue balloons attached announced the Miami
Beach Academy graduation was taking place in the beachfront ballroom, and he
walked down a curving staircase to the ground level.

The lobby was filled with proud parents and impossibly young
graduates in navy blue gowns over their suits and dresses, holding matching
mortarboards with red and blue tassels decorated with tiny 2011s. He identified
a niche in the wall behind a potted palm where he could lounge without seeming
hidden, yet remain out of sight of most of the crowd. The room buzzed in a
mixture of Russian, English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of
the wealthy in the northern part of Miami-Dade County.

He didn’t have a good enough fix on the voices of any of the
Petrovs to use his extra-strength hearing to identify them. So instead he had
to scan the crowd face by face until he found them, across the room from him. Viktor
was bulky stony-faced in an elegant black suit with spit-shined black dress
shoes. He had missed a few dark hairs on the left side of his chin when
shaving. He wore a yellow gold Rolex watch encrusted with diamonds, and diamond
pinky rings on both fingers. No wedding band, though.

His wife, Maria Petrovna, stood beside him, wearing a mid-calf
silk dress that was undoubtedly from a designer Farishta would recognize, yet
hung on her like a shapeless flour sack. She balanced uncomfortably on low
heels and couldn’t stop fiddling with the clasp of her tiny, jeweled purse.

Natasha stood just far enough from them to make it clear to
anyone who looked that though they were her parents, she hated them with a
fervor reserved to the adolescent. Her strapless gold taffeta dress, which had
to have been custom-tailored, was breathtakingly lovely. The seamstress had gathered
fabric in a taffeta rose to disguise her undeveloped bust, and tapered it to
accentuate her slim waist. Though it came to a demure length mid-calf, it still
showed enough of her long, slim legs to tantalize any man.

She carried her white graduation gown and white cap over one
arm. She chewed nervously on her lower lip and kept looking toward the ballroom
entrance.

Then Igor Laskin arrived, in a pearl-gray suit that had been
carefully tailored as well, to emphasize his impressive musculature. He wore a
white shirt and a purple tie embellished with gold crowns, and when he entered
the lobby he walked as if he was a king approaching his queen—with a sense of
entitlement and regal bearing that caused heads to turn and voices to murmur.

He carried a corsage for Natasha—a purple and white orchid
tipped with gold to match her gown, and to match his tie as well.

Natasha threw her arms around him and kissed him while her
parents frowned. Laskin shook Petrov’s hand, then kissed Maria Petrovna on each
cheek. The three of them made awkward conversation, painful for Biff to
eavesdrop on, until a bell rang.

From somewhere in the back a woman announced, “Parents,
family and friends may enter the ballroom. Graduates, please come around to the
side entrance.”

Natasha stepped back from Igor and looked at her parents.
She kissed her mother on the cheek, then her father, both of them still looking
unhappy. Then she joined a girlfriend to hurry off.

“You know she goes to Yale in August,” Viktor said to Igor
in Russian.

Igor bowed his head slightly. “Of course, Professor. I would
do nothing to interfere with her education.”

“Make sure you keep your word,” Petrov said. Then he offered
his arm to his wife, and they stalked forward into the ballroom.

Biff saw Laskin’s jaw tightening, but he said nothing, just
followed behind them. Biff slipped out of his hiding place and into the
ballroom and took a seat toward the rear of the crowd, watching as the ceremony
began. A state Senator gave the commencement address, and various students were
called forward to accept awards. Natasha was not among them.

Then each in turn, the graduates stepped forward to receive
their empty diploma cases and pose for photos with the dean of the academy. The
whole thing took nearly two hours, and Biff was bored out of his mind.

But he hoped there was something to be learned, and so he
stuck it out. When the last young man had crossed the makeshift stage, the dean
pronounced them all graduates, and the audience applauded—most likely in
relief, Biff thought. Then the glass doors to the outdoor plaza were opened,
and everyone streamed out for appetizers and cocktails.

The graduates returned their caps and gowns at a table by
the hotel wall as their parents lined up at the bars. Biff accepted a vodka and
tonic from the bartender, then located the Petrovs. He found a place to stand
behind a palm tree, sipped his drink, and observed.

People eddied around Natasha and her family, classmates and
parents extending congratulations. Viktor and Maria had softened a bit, glowing
with pride at their daughter’s success. Igor Laskin stood by, and Biff could
see Natasha’s girlfriends casting Laskin covert appraisals.

Members of a band appeared and took their places across from
the bar. Viktor Petrov opened his wallet to retrieve a business card for a
father of one of Natasha’s classmates and a piece of paper drifted out, landing
on the floor by his feet. He didn’t seem to notice he had lost it.

Biff was curious to see what was on it—but there was no way
he could get close enough to pick it up. He heard a short chirp and looked up
to the palm tree beside him. A squirrel bounced on the frond. Was it Raki?
Probably, unless Biff had developed a disturbing magnetism that attracted
rodents to him. He looked up at the squirrel and sent him a message.
Bring
me the paper from the floor over there
.

Raki jumped from one frond to another, and Biff thought
either he’d mixed up the message, failed entirely—or simply tried to
communicate with some other squirrel. But then Raki scampered down the palm
trunk and raced across the flagstone tiles of the oceanfront terrace.

He easily grasped the piece of paper in his paws. “Oh, look,
a squirrel,” Natasha said, pointing to him.

Raki took off like a shot across the flagstones. “Nasty
creatures,” Maria Petrovna said. “They bite, you know.”

“I think they’re cute.” Natasha put her hands on her hips
and turned to her mother. She was about to say something else when her father
glowered at her.

The same woman’s voice came over the PA system. “We invite
young ladies and their fathers, and our young men and their mothers, to come to
the dance floor.”

Natasha looked at her father. He smiled and offered her his
arm. Petrov lumbered through a slow dance with his daughter draped over him,
the pride on his face evident. Biff almost liked the man then.

Biff hung around for an hour as the crowd dissipated. When
the Petrovs left, he followed, disappointed that he had not learned anything
more interesting than that Viktor Petrov disapproved of his daughter’s
relationship with Igor Laskin.

He handed in his ticket to the valet, and when the car
arrived he put the top down, giving Raki a chance to swing into the back seat.
As they drove up Collins Avenue, the squirrel climbed between the seats to sit
beside Biff. At a traffic light, Raki chittered, and Biff looked over at him.
He was holding the paper he had picked up at the hotel in his paws.

“Thank you, Raki,” Biff said, reaching over to take the
paper from the squirrel. The light changed, so he slipped it into his jacket
pocket, and didn’t retrieve it until they were back at the townhouse.

The only thing on the slip of paper was an email address in
Russia. It looked familiar to Biff, though, so he sat down at his laptop and
pulled up his file on Sveta’s case. The address Petrov dropped matched the one
where Sveta had been sending her illicit photographs.

So Petrov knew, Biff thought. He knew that the porno photos
of his daughter had been emailed to Russia, where they had been distributed to
perverts worldwide. And he must therefore have known that Kiril Ovetschkin had been
Sveta’s distributor. There was his motive in having Ovetschkin murdered.

It was too late on Saturday night to call Jimmy Stein with
the information—and what would he do with it, anyway? Just add it to his
dossier. Instead Biff emailed him.

Once he had, the vodka and the accumulated stress of the
past week caught up with him, and he yawned. He crawled into bed and fell into
a deep, dreamless sleep. He slept late, knowing that Laskin was going to miss
his morning workout and that Biff could, too. When he did get up, he found Raki
was in the living room next to a bowl of walnuts Farishta must have left for
him. He had a nut between his paws, and looked up at Biff.

“I’m not your nutcracker,” Biff said, walking on into the
kitchen. He fixed himself a hearty breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes, bacon
and hash browns, and flipped through the Sunday paper as he ate.

When he finished, he climbed back into bed with his laptop
and checked his email. He was delighted to see one from Farishta. She had been
able to find how the dolls and the amulet had arrived in the United States.

The shipment had originated in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
According to her information, the artifacts had been smuggled over the border
between Iraq and Azerbaijan, one of the countries that had been born of the
collapse of the former Soviet Union. Biff knew that many of the Russians in
Sunny Isles Beach came from that part of the former Soviet Union, so it was
likely they would still have contacts back in the old country.

The shipment’s manifest read agricultural parts, but Farishta
wrote that it actually contained Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles. It
seemed that someone in Baku had slipped a number of additional items into the
container, which had been removed in Miami. She didn’t know what happened to
the guns, but from what Hector Hernandez had told him, and from Kiril
Ovetschkin’s travel, Biff assumed they had continued on to Managua, Nicaragua.

She was still trying to understand how the amulet and the
Div-e Sepid might be interacting, and she would be back in touch soon, she
wrote. She signed the email with a couple of smiley-face emoticons and a line
of xs and os. Yes, hugs and kisses to you too, he thought. When you get back
here, though. Not through cyberspace.

He sent back a reply, telling her what he had learned so
far, and warning her to be careful. He ended with “Raki misses you. And so do
I.” No xs and os, though.

It was a rainy, overcast day, so he stayed in, reading
everything he could find on the Div-e Sepid and associated spirits. He already
knew that “div” was Persian for demon, but learned that the Div-e Sepid was the
chief of the demons of Mazandaran, a province in the north of Iran, on the
Caspian Sea coast. He was physically huge, and could conjure a dark storm of
hail, boulders and tree trunks.

He could have been an albino, Biff read, or simply have come
from a race of very light-skinned humans who had attained some level of magical
powers. In any case he was a fearsome creature, and if he had been imprisoned
in those dolls for a long time, he was bound to be very grouchy.

He was certainly a much more powerful spirit than either
Biff or Farishta, or any genie they knew, even those members of the ruling
council of genies. Who or what had managed to trap his spirit in those dolls?
What could release him from the enchantment?

Sometimes, Biff knew, a spell could be broken simply—a kiss
from a virgin, blood from a willing sacrifice, and so on. Sometimes it required
a complex spell that could only be conjured by a master of great skill. And
sometimes it required a concatenation of objects and events that were extremely
unlikely to ever occur at random. He had no idea what would unleash the Div-e
Sepid on the world, and only hoped neither he nor Farishta would stumble on it
accidentally.