A Date You Can't Refuse (17 page)

“I don't suppose you speak Russian?”

“Not well.”

“Okay, never mind. But as long as you're googling people—” I rattled off the names Felix, Stasik, Zbiggo, Nadja, Zeferina Maria, and Bronwen, and then slowed down to spell them. She made little “I'm impressed” noises about Zbiggo, Nadja, and Bronwen. “And here's something else.” I gave her a number, asked her to call it from a phone other than her own, speak to a Mr. Wendell, and tell him that the client with the carburetor issue was waiting for him to call her back. Joey agreed to this without further questions. There is much to be said for a friend who embraces subterfuge.

I considered my best approach to the upcoming conversation, should it occur. I'd never contacted Simon this way. I'd been saving it for emergencies, and this was close enough, but the trick would be to get more information out of him than he got out of me. While I waited for him to call, I searched the Suburban for other junk that might have fallen out of my purse, and rescued some coins and a small jade Buddha that Uncle
Theo had given me. It would have been fabulous to find Chai's missing diary; instead I unearthed, from between the center console and the passenger seat, a DVD. The title was in Cyrillic, but the plastic cover left no doubt as to the subject matter. A girl stood in a doorway, holding a pizza box, wearing nothing but high heels and a beguiling smile.

My phone rang. I shoved the DVD into the glove box and hit talk.

“What the hell,” he said, “is going on with you?”

“Can I speak freely?”

“You better.”

I decided to overlook his tone of voice. “I didn't mean to hang up on you, but I can't use the phone from the compound. Anyone could pick up the extension.”

“And hear you talking to your auto mechanic. So?”

“It's complicated to explain.”

“Give it a shot.”

“Simon, I miss you so badly it's like a physical malady, I'm getting a—”

“Wollie.”

“—skin rash. What?” An SUV drove past me, with a man inside that looked remarkably like Alik.

“I don't want you working there.”

“Simon, why don't you tell me what you've found out about Yuri Milos, so I can make that determination myself?”

“Can't you just trust me on this?”

“Look—” I said.

“No,
you
look—”

“No,
you
look,” I yelled. “Do I ever give you a hard time about your career?”

“Constantly.”

“Yeah, but I don't tell you to quit. Or that the hours are too long, that it takes you away from your home, or from me, that it's dangerous—”

“This isn't your career, Wollie. You're a graphic artist.”

I looked over my shoulder at the SUV “The job supports my career. It beats minimum wage at Wal-Mart. I'm not quitting, Simon. That option's off the table.”

There was silence on the other end. I was not handling this well. And
now I was distracted, thinking it was Alik in that SUV looking for a parking place. I forced myself to speak more softly. “I'm sorry I don't want to fight with you, I'm crazy about you. I'm just—not getting enough sleep. Please tell me what you've found out, what the deal is with Yuri that has you so worried.”

His tone matched mine: enforced calm. “Yuri Milos made his money in the currency boom in the nineties. His facade of respectability is recently acquired. In the former Soviet bloc countries, in his youth, he was a political refugee, a political dissident, an environmental activist-slash-terrorist as well as a black-market profiteer and a mercenary. And an arms dealer. He's a grab bag of shady occupations and his Christmas card list probably includes half the Russian Mafia.”

“But—okay, if he's so bad, then how did he get to be a U.S. citizen?”

“I don't run Immigration,” Simon answered. “There are a lot of bad people out walking around, Wollie. The one that concerns me at the moment is the man who's signing your paycheck.”

“But what's the FBI's interest in him?” I asked. The SUV had stopped. It was the hybrid Alik had shown me in the driveway, I realized. Alik must be test-driving it.

“What do you mean?” Simon asked.

“What—what do you mean, what do I mean?”

“Why should the FBI have an interest in Milos?”

I hesitated. “Didn't you just say they did?”

“No.”

Uh-oh. “Well, I just assumed that you found out all this stuff by, you know, phoning your office. Asking to see his file.”

“It doesn't work quite like that.”

Yes, it was definitely Alik getting out of the SUV Walking toward the vet clinic? Or the UPS store? “So what'd you do, google Yuri?” I asked.

“If you'd googled him before going to work for him, like a responsible person, you'd know that very little of what I'm talking about shows up there. He's been laundered.”

Alik was going into the UPS store. I turned my attention back to Simon. “I didn't have to google Yuri,” I said. “I sat on a jury for weeks
hearing about him. If all this is true, why didn't the prosecution mention any of it?”

“Relevance. His past probably didn't figure into a slip-and-fall case. And most personal injury attorneys have no access to classified files.”

“But you do.”

He said nothing.

“You have a nice Christmas card list of your own, don't you?” I said. “And not just in your own office. Friends in the State Department too? CIA? Immigration?”

“How am I going to sleep nights, knowing you're working for this guy?”

I was starting to notice how many people, when they don't want to answer a question, just ignore it. I'd have to practice that. “Nothing you've just said proves that Yuri's into anything shady now. This isn't the former Soviet Union, it's Calabasas. The burbs.”

Silence. He knows more than he's willing to talk about, I thought. “Simon,” I said, “whatever he was—and don't we all have checkered pasts?—at present Yuri Milos runs a legitimate media training organization. So maybe he's reformed. Or maybe he hasn't, but there's nothing sinister about what he's hired me for. I just drive people around—”

“That in itself makes me suspicious.”

“Hey, my driving record, for the record—”

“And scared. Has he ever been in a car with you?”

“But let's say something problematic does happen,” I said, choosing to ignore these childish barbs. “Is there any way I can reach you?”

“Hold on,” he said, and clicked into another call.

I looked toward Gelson's, to see if my passengers had reappeared yet, and noticed that Nell was sitting at one of the wrought-iron tables outside the market. She wore a hat and sunglasses, and appeared to be studying the tabletop. Around her, people were eating, reading, talking on phones. Not Nell. Interesting. And now Alik was coming out of the UPS store, a hundred yards away, carrying a box.

He didn't seem to see Nell, nor she him. He pulled out his cell phone, moving to an awning at the veterinary clinic.

Simon came back on the line. “Okay.” He gave an audible sigh. “Wollie, I'm about to throw caution to the wind.”

“Really?” My heart stopped. Was this a marriage proposal?

“I'm going to give you a number, but you can't call it from your cell phone. Any other phone is okay just not your own. Ask for Mr. Lavosh. Got that?”

My heart started up again. Okay. No proposal. And anyway who wants the Big Moment to come over a cell phone in front of the UPS store? For that matter, was I ready for marriage? “Mr. Lavosh,” I repeated, copying down the number he rattled off. “Him again. But why are we going out of sequence?” I thought of Ulf and Wendell, the recent aliases, and the every-other-letter code. “Shouldn't you be Mr. Yellow at this point? Or Yam? Yeltzin?”

Silence.

Something occurred to me. “Are you telling me what I think you're telling me? That Mr. Lavosh is your—”

“Cover. Yes. I'm Daniel Lavosh.”

I sat there, awed by the secret I'd just been handed. “My God, your cover,” I whispered. “I will never tell anyone. You can trust me.”

“I know.” He let that sink in, and when he spoke again, his tone was brisk. “Now, when you call that number, you're a textiles client. Don't use your own phone or your name. If you call Mr. Lavosh, you're Harriet Spoon.”

“Harriet?” As Mr. Lavosh was hanging with a beautiful woman named Lucrezia, why did I have to be Harriet? “I'd prefer a name with more—”

“Harriet Spoon. With Landmark Woolens. And Wollie? I don't need to tell you, do I, the kind of danger I'd be in if you ever, even unintentionally—?”

“No, you don't. I would never—”

“Good.” There was a long exhalation. “I know you'll never use it for anything but a dire emergency.”

“I won't.”

“Although with you, dire emergencies are fairly common. Especially in light of the company you're currently keeping.”

Alik was moving again, toward his car, then stopped dead in his tracks. It appeared that he'd spotted Nell. He stuffed the UPS box under his arm, lowered his head, and hurried to his car. Curious.

“Wollie?”

“I'm here,” I said into the phone.

“Is there something you're not telling me?” Simon asked.

My heart rate sped up. “Such as … ?”

“That's an evasive response,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Baby. What kind of trouble are you in?”

“I'm not. I mean—what do you mean?”

“You didn't go home last night.”

“No. Were you—how did you—?”

“I'm a spy.”

Okay, clearly I was going to have to fork over some information. “I have a room at the compound,” I said slowly. “It's a long drive to Calabasas, so it's easier to stay there when I'm working late than to—”

“You're living with Yuri Milos?”

His tone of voice stopped my heart again. Surely this wasn't good, these cardiac stops and starts.

“Not in any romantic sense, of course, but—”

“God almighty, Wollie, you're
living
there?” Now he was yelling.

“It's a perfectly reasonable—”

“Are
you listening to me? The man deals in armaments. Guns. He's involved in affairs of state in Eastern Europe—”

“We're not in Eastern—”

“For all you know, he's stockpiling arms for a revolution. You have no idea what you're in the middle of—”

“Then give me an idea—”

“I can't.”

“So I'm supposed to accept on faith, when you say jump,' it's in my best interest—”

“Yes.”

“Well, forget it.”

And then there was silence. Simon had hung up on me. Or gotten cut
off—that happened a lot, of course, with cell phones, so it was possible. If he'd been on a cell phone.

But it felt like he'd hung up on me.

I pressed “end” on my phone, fighting the impulse to cry. How had we gotten here from there? A minute before, Simon had given me his cover name. As grand gestures go, this was more than a key to his condo or the PIN to his ATM. This was a piece of him that all his experience told him not to trust anyone with. And he'd entrusted it to me.

This wouldn't have meant as much to me even a week earlier. But now I was in the same boat, worried about my own cover and figuring the only way to ensure my safety was to keep my mouth shut and assume that every person taken into my confidence was a person who could betray me, even without meaning to, even with the best will in the world. I'd learned this from Simon. And maybe I wasn't so good at it now, but I would get better.

Except that what was good for spies, I was beginning to see, was hell on long-term relationships.

Four minutes later, I was still waiting for my Gelson's trio. Alik's car hadn't moved. But as I watched, Alik got out of the SUV and headed into the Calabasas vet clinic.

Without giving myself time to think, I jumped out of the Suburban and walked quickly to his car.

It was a black Toyota, a Highlander Hybrid, so new it didn't have plates. I peered in the windows. They were tinted in the back but not the front, so I could make out the UPS box on the passenger seat. It had a fair number of stamps and stickers on it, probably showing tracking numbers, insurance labels, and the like. I couldn't make out the return address, but I guessed, from the stamps and stickers, that it was foreign. That gave me an idea. After a glance toward the vet and another one toward Gelson's, where Nell sat, corpselike, I went into the UPS store.

The place wasn't busy. In fact, there were no customers. There were three men behind the counter, one of them young, one middle-aged, and one elderly.

“Can I help you?” the oldest and the youngest asked in unison.

“Well, I hope so. I've got a new job, and I may already be messing up.” This was close enough to the truth to be credible. “One of my bosses, a guy named Alik Milos, has a mailbox here, and—”

“Milos? He was just here,” the kid piped up. “Alik Milos.”

“Thank goodness.” I gave him what I hoped was a pathetic smile. “See, I have a big list of stuff I'm supposed to do, but if he picked up a package already—you're sure he did?”

“Yeah, he signed for it.”

“Was it the one from Europe? Wait—let me just consult my notes—” I rummaged through my purse and pulled out my greeting card sketchbook and thumbed through it. “I thought I wrote it down, but—oh, my goodness, I am in trouble if I don't stay on top of this.”

The kid picked up a spindle with little receipts skewered onto it. “Don't worry, he only comes once a week or so. Not even.” He looked through the receipts like he was going to show me. This was my lucky day.

“Is it the package from—Belarus?” I asked, stepping closer to look.

His elderly colleague moved in on him from behind the desk. “That's not information you're to give out, Brewster.”

“Oh.” Brewster put down the spindle. “Sorry.”

“No, I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't want to get you in trouble, I just—anyhow, see you next time. If I've still got my job. Which I hope I have.” I smiled my pathetic smile. “Bye.”

Walking out, I wondered what this meant. Alik had a mailbox here and picked up packages every week. But why not have them delivered to the house?

“Hey!” The voice behind me made me jump.

I turned to see the elderly man standing in the doorway of the UPS store. “Yes?” I said, walking back toward him.

“Not Belarus. Estonia.”