Vanity, Vengeance And A Weekend In Vegas (A Sophie Katz Novel) (14 page)

…and I wasn’t always nice to her.

“I’m glad you got the octopus,” I
said quietly. “And I’m glad you got to see men play with their penises. You
deserve it.”

Leah giggled. “You think?”

“I know.”
 
I ran my fingers back and forth over
the duvet. “Look, I don’t really know what I’m doing right now. I don’t even
know what I
should
be doing, but while I figure that out you should try to…to fully experience
Vegas.”

Leah eyed me warily. “What do you
mean, fully experience Vegas?”

“Tomorrow morning I’m going to
come up here at…let’s say, 9 a.m. and we’re all going to order a room service
breakfast with Bloody Marys.”
 

“I can’t drink at 9 a.m.! I have
to maintain
some
sense of propriety!”

 
“Propriety? Five minutes ago you were sitting in the bathtub
with an oversexed octopus!
 
This is
Vegas. Fuck propriety.”

“But--”

I held up my hand to stop her.
“Once you have a little vodka in you take Mary Ann down to the casino. Shoot a
couple games of craps or something. Then go to the last day of the sex toy trade
show before hitting the clubs...preferably clubs that feature men in various
stages of undress as entertainment. Live a little.”

“And if you need help?”

“I promise to ask for it as long
as you promise to have fun until I do.” I glanced at her robe and dripping
hair.
 
“I’ll go and let you put
yourself back together…or whatever.”

As I got up and walked to the
door Leah called out to me.
 
“Sophie?”

“Yeah?”

“If you tell anyone about the
octopus you won’t have to worry about the mafia. I’ll shoot you myself.”

I smiled. Of all the threats I
had been dealing with that was the only one that seemed justified.

The best revenge you can reap on
the “other woman” is to let her have him.

--Death Of The party

The next morning Dena, Mary Ann
and I had a Bloody Mary breakfast up in Leah and Mary Ann’s room. Marcus chose
to sleep in. Dena also agreed to accompany both Mary Ann and Leah down to the
casino for a bit of gambling before escorting them back to the trade show. She
was clearly irked with me for going to see Alex without tell her (Mary Ann and
Marcus had ratted me out) but she didn’t make a big thing out of it. I figured
she had basically given up on the idea of talking sense into me…or maybe she
was just trying to be nice because it was clear I was in a bit of a funk.
 
Anatoly was in danger and I had no idea
what my next move should be...worse yet, he was probably with his wife. I chose
to stay in Mary Ann and Leah’s room and continue to pick at my breakfast
instead of going down with them.
 

I sat on Leah’s bed and tried to
come up with a plan. The best way to find Anatoly was to find Natasha. Would
she be at the Hotel Noir again? What about this information that everyone
seemed to think Anatoly had on a storage disk somewhere? Did it exist and if so
where
would
he
hide it?

There was a knock on the door. I
smiled as I stood up. Marcus no doubt…unless…

My heart caught in my throat.
Anatoly? Had he come back?

I practically flung myself at the
door but then stopped right before opening it…what if it wasn’t Anatoly or
Marcus. What if it was someone…bad.

“Hello?”
Please, please, please let it be
Anatoly.
 
I leaned my ear
against the door and waited for a response.

“Hello to you too. Do you still
have my gun?”

Alex.
 
I took a step back.
Should I be afraid? How did he know about this room? I went back to my purse
and pulled the gun out. I took a steadying breath and opened the door. “Yep,” I
said, pointing the gun at his chest. “Got it right here.”

Alex smiled. “Can I come in? You
can continue to hold me at gunpoint if it makes you feel better.”

I waved him in, keeping the gun
trained on him. He smiled and closed the door behind him before taking a seat
in a chair by the window. “I thought I’d make it easy for you,” he explained.
“If you shoot me it’ll be easy to clean my blood off the glass.”

“Funny,” I sat down on the bed
and gave him a blatantly fake smile. “So, how’s Fawn?”

“Ah, so you know.” Alex sighed
and shook his head.
 
“I should have
told you she was my sister. I just…I had heard a little about your history with
her…”

“You mean the history in which
she tried to kill me? That history?”

“Fawn tries to kill everyone,” he
said offhandedly, “you shouldn’t take it personally.”

“Believe it or not I didn’t…until
she called from prison to tell me about Anatoly.”

 
“Yeah, I heard about that too.”

The light from the window was
reflecting off his hair giving him an almost angelic quality…of course they say
Lucifer was once an angel too.
 
“You heard about it?” I asked, “or you were behind it?”

Alex only hesitated a moment
before answering. “Both.”

“Oh my God, you’re in league with
Fawn!” I stood up and held the gun with both hands. “I should shoot you right
now!”

“No,” he said without the
slightest note of fear or anger.

“No? No what?”

“No, I’m not in league with Fawn
and no, you’re not going to shoot me. I put Fawn up to that call because the
Ignatovs instructed me to do so.
 
They’ve been bugging your house, you know.”

“What? You mean in addition to
tapping into my phone?”

“No point in doing a half-assed
surveillance job,” he pointed out. “Usually the mafia doesn’t have a hard time
making people talk. But Anatoly is different. They thought if you confronted
him he might tell you things that he wouldn’t tell them even under threat of
torture. Especially if he thought he was at risk of losing you.”

“Wait, you’re saying that the
goal was to piss me off so that I would confront Anatoly and he would…what?
Confess to helping the FBI infiltrate the mafia? Why would he confess to
something like that when all I was questioning him about was his relationship
to Natasha?”

“To be honest, I’m surprised he
didn’t,” he said, his brow wrinkling with confusion. “Don’t you think you would
have been more inclined to forgive him if he had told you that he was helping
the FBI take down the mob? Instead he told you, what was it? Ah, yes, I
understand he told you that he had worked for the mafia because he wanted
American citizenship and the chance to sleep with Natasha. And he was surprised
that didn’t go over well?”

He had a point. I took a second
to really
look
at Alex. He was completely relaxed.
 
I might as well have been pointing a banana at him. “I don’t trust you,”
I said simply.
 
“You say you’re a
legitimate businessman but you cover up murders for the mob…”

“I told you, I don’t see it that
way,” he interrupted.
 
“I’m a
hotelier. I want my guests to be happy and no one’s happy when dead bodies show
up. So I just make sure they don’t.”

“Wow,” I breathed, truly
impressed. “You’re a master! You’re, like, the David Copperfield of bullshit!”

Alex rubbed his chin
thoughtfully. “I think I’m going to take that as a poorly phrased compliment.”

“It was a compliment…of sorts,
and I phrased it perfectly. You seem to have convinced yourself that you’re a
law-abiding citizen. You treat covering up a murder like it’s jaywalking or
letting the registration slip on your car.”

“I’ve never let the registration
slip on my car.”

“You’re not a law-abiding
citizen. You’re dangerous.”

“Not really, certainly not to you.”

“Well no, not as long as I’m the
one holding the gun.”

Alex laughed. The guy actually
laughed in the face of death. “You’re really considering shooting me with my
own gun?”

“Happens all the time. It’s one
of the main arguments used by gun control advocates.”

There was a definite twinkle in
his green eyes. “You don’t want to shoot me.”

“What I
want
are answers and since I have the
gun what I want counts for something.
That’s
the argument used by
pro-
gun
advocates and at the moment I find it so appealing I’m seriously considering
donating to the NRA.”

“It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Power,” he said softly. He stood
up, his eyes still trained on mine. “Danger.” He took another step forward

“Don’t move,” I whispered.

He took yet another step and then
another. Gently he put his index finger against the barrel of the gun. “I like
danger too,” he said, his voice was softer now, seductive and absolutely
terrifying. He let his finger slide along the barrel, then the handle and then
to my shaking hand.
 
“You are
definitely a force to be reckoned with.”

I jerked away and glared into his
smiling eyes.

From his jacket pocket I heard a
phone ring.
 
He pulled it out
without bothering to ask if that was all right. “This will be quick,” he
promised as he glanced at the screen.

I walked away from him and leaned
against the dresser. The gun
really
wasn’t having the effect I had hoped for.

Alex answered with the standard
“hello,” but what came next was a string of rapid Spanish. Not Russian,
Spanish…which reminded me of Anatoly.

I had only discovered a few
months ago that he also spoke Spanish. It had been a disturbing revelation and
not because I had anything against his being fluent in three languages. That
was sexy as hell.

Oddly enough the problem was
that it
was
sexy as
hell. When a guy speaks three languages he usually lets you know by the third
date. It made no sense that he would hide something like that from me.

And yet he had, only
inadvertently letting it slip after we had been living together for over a
year. Why had he done that?

Alex got off the phone and stuck
it back in his pocket. “Someone from my staff,” he explained. “Vegas is an
international city, helps to be multilingual.”

I didn’t answer. Obviously it was
useful for a hotel’s GM to be fluent in as many languages as possible. But
there was something more than that going on here.

 
Alex flashed me another grin. “Now, I believe you said you
had some questions for me?”

“Yeah, why didn’t Anatoly want me
to know he spoke Spanish?”

What happened to Alex’s face then
was…interesting. I had expected him to burst out laughing or just look at me
like I was crazy. He did both of those things but there was a split second
before that…the moment when his face registered the question and at
that
moment
he looked…cornered.

“Oh my God, you actually know the
answer.”

“How could anyone know the answer
to that?”
 
He peeled off his jacket
and carefully draped it over the chair by the window. “I like these chairs but
I wonder if they’ll seem a little dated in a few years.”

“Alex, why didn’t Anatoly want me
to know he spoke Spanish?”

Alex continued to study the chair
as if it was the most fascinating thing in the room. “It’s possible,” he said
eventually, “that he used some of that Spanish while working for the family.”

“Why would Anatoly need to know
Spanish to work for the Russian mafia?”

“Because some of the people in
the old neighborhood, people who worked with the Ignatovs, weren’t Russian.
Most were but… the Ignatovs wanted to expand the drug business into the Spanish
speaking immigrant communities.”

I felt my heart drop down into my
stomach. “Anatoly helped bring drugs into low income immigrant areas?”

“I didn’t say the neighborhoods
were low income,” Alex said as he finally turned his attention away from the
furniture.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I snapped. “Was
Anatoly bringing the drugs into high income immigrant areas? That would give
him a pretty small market, wouldn’t it?”

Alex chuckled and sat down in the
attractive, but-soon-to-be-dated, chair.

“For a guy who just deals with
the legal end of things, you sure do know a lot about the illegal stuff,” I
noted.

“You can’t do business with the
Ignatovs without knowing what’s up.”

“Really?” I asked. “See, if I was
running a mafia family I’d keep everything on a need to know basis. This
company-wide memo business seems counterintuitive.”

Alex smiled. “I have friends who
trust me enough to share certain things.”

“They trust you and yet here you
are spilling the beans.”

“Do you want me to keep secrets from
you?”

“No, I’m l just trying to figure
you out.”

Alex nodded and glanced down at
my hand. “Forgive me for harping on this, but how long
do
you plan on holding the gun?”

 
“It gives me a sense of security, gun rights advocate
argument number two.”

Alex shifted the chair and stared
out the window. “You know, I used to have a brother.”

“Used to?”

Alex nodded. “I don’t have a
brother anymore. Just my sister, Fawn.”

“Oh.” I drew up a mental picture
of Fawn. “Sex change?”

“Um…no. My brother’s dead.”

“Oh…sorry. How?”

“The Ignatovs needed to make a
point.” Outside the world was still bright and cheery. The perfect contrast to
Alex’s sudden change of mood.

“A point…to you?”

“No, I had nothing to do with
that particular conflict.”

“How can you still work for them
after they killed your brother?”

“I don’t have a choice. If
they’re not convinced that I’m more loyal to them than my own flesh and blood
I’ll be a marked man.”

“Your brother…did he die
quickly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

Alex got up, crossed the room and
leaned on the dresser next to me. “I want to help you…and Anatoly. Not because
I’m nice but because I’m angry.”

“Angry with the mob…” I said for
clarification.

He nodded. “I shouldn’t be forced
to prove my loyalty every fucking day by kowtowing to my brother’s murderers.”
He stared at the carpet and I noticed that his hand was now in the form of a
fist. “They’ve been nursing a viper in Rome’s bosom,” he muttered.