I sat up from the car trunk in the lights of the tenement, three of the four burning brightly in the pre-dawn, a useless attempt to keep vandals away. A couple of kids smoked nearby and watched us with a cool indifference bred by coming from a distant country where rival political parties routinely burned villages.
Sophie bent her six foot plus frame down to slip an arm under me, helping me out of the trunk. I managed to lift my knees over the lid of the trunk and wobble my weight forward enough to be pulled out. Standing uncertainly, Sophie gave an unwomanly grunt with the effort and repeated, “Idiota.”
Groaning as I tried to straighten my legs, I said, “I’m getting tired of the women I care about calling me an idiot.”
As if she could have known about my discussion with Cheryl in the trunk Sophie replied, “Then you should stop behaving l’idiota.” Helping me stand with one arm, Sophie banged the trunk closed, sending Alon on his way, presumably to return the other women to wherever they came from.
The elevator, thankfully, was finally working again. I held myself up by the cage of its walls while Sophie closed the door and selected our floor. The jolting start of the lift was enough to cause me to suppress another groan, but I managed to not collapse to the floor in a heap. I felt slightly better simply by the virtue of being out of the trunk and upright.
Inside I was as grateful as a man could be that the apartment’s freezer was the ice cave it was. Sophie chipped chunks of water crystals from its brittle interior while I got out of my clothes. She wrapped the shaved ice in whatever towels she could find, placing these on the worst of my bruises. The relief burned and was cold, making me feel fevered, grateful for it at the same time I wished it would let me sleep. Instead I took handfuls of aspirin.
Dabbing at an incision on my scalp, Sophie spoke quietly. “The girl with the dark hair, her name is Nika.” I only grunted, the pains in my body pushing any care I had about our mission to the party out of my pores. Sophie continued, “She is kept, allowed to see no one. No one would say more than that.”
I almost asked her how she had convinced any of the party-goers to talk, but then kept my mouth shut. My stupidity had gotten me into enough trouble. “They were certainly pretty touchy about me mentioning her and Sergei in the same breath.”
“Perhaps they were lovers?”
“And Mitnick had him killed for it? That’s possible. But that doesn’t roll the Corsican into it anyhow.” I gave it some thought, pushing all the questions and unknowns around tenderly and carefully, like bits of broken glass. “Did you find out anything about Sergei?”
Sophie pressed a cold compress to one of my bruises, eliciting a short gasp, shaking her head with the frustration she was taking out on me. “No. No one would speak of him. I do not think he was one of them.”
I nodded my head. That might make sense. “Sergei wasn’t Russian. He was from the Ukraine.” Feeling the sharp edge of that I noted, “Assuming the information on his passport was real. Atwell mentioned Mitnick’s is Greek.”
Sophie snorted slightly, maybe at the corruption that would allow him to buy such a passport. Not sure where to go with that I added, “They didn’t get stone cold killer on me till after I mentioned the Factory. I saw the Corsican and his boys there. And Sergei’s body was found not far away.”
Sophie continued her medicinal administrations, becoming gentler as she became occupied with trying to tie all these things together. “This seems to be the spot.” I was unsure for a moment if she meant the part of me she was tending to or the Factory. I grunted, it being my primary form of communication at that moment, wishing I had taken more time to ask around when I had been there the other night. It might have saved us a lot of time now. Feeling like this was getting out of hand, and that I probably had enough information to go back to Sartre with I said, “Maybe we should leave this alone.”
Sophie’s green eyes became perplexed pools, cool and uncertain. I thought about the brunette, Nika, and that she had appeared unhappy, but otherwise undamaged. I said as much to Sophie. “If she’s not in any danger, maybe we should leave her alone.”
“I will be satisfied when I hear this from her.” Sophie’s tone was unbreachable.
I found myself getting angry at her reticence to debate this topic, instead of angry at the men who had beat me. “Sophie, she’s not a hostage. She’s a spoiled Russian brat who’s angry she can’t run around town doing however she wants.”
“Then why does the Corsican speak of her as if she were the victim?”
“We don’t even know if this Nika is the same girl that he mentioned.” I said, gritting my teeth as Sophie pressed the cold compress against me.
“Do you doubt it?” she said, leaving little uncertainty that she didn’t. Strangely, neither did I. But as much as I wanted to drive back to Mitnick’s house and finish what Sophie had started I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about the pair being kept apart by the disapproval of Nika’s guardian. Sophie rode right over this, though, with “Comunque, do you think the information we have is enough to satisfy Sartre?”
The aching in my lower back told me I had been rising up from the couch, like some beast moving to snap at bait. I lowered myself back down as I realized Sophie was right. The behavior of all the Mitnick’s men, his own reaction to the mention of Sergei and Nika, were all suspicious, but it wasn’t remotely close to proof of murder. I uttered a small swear, acknowledging defeat. “OK, so we find the Corsican, this Lanzo, and ask him if his own trouble started after he ran into this Nika. If that’s the case maybe it’ll be enough to satisfy Sartre.” And Atwell, I thought in a second-hand way.
“And then we shall get the girl.” Sophie added this onto my own conclusion as if were the most natural thing in the world.
Rather than trying to protest this I simply asked, “Why?”
Her eyes glinted with a strength that wasn’t usually visible, something that life’s hard realities hadn’t managed to crush out of her. “I will show you,” she said.
“How?” I was getting tired of being left with only one-word interrogatives.
As if trying to mollify both of us Sophie became more gentle in her administrations, layering another ice-cold towel on my thigh. “Soon. Now you must rest. There is still much to do.”
To read the next chapter, go here.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
See the author’s published work here.
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