“I will,” I promise.
Oh my god, what should I go do? A museum? Maybe an art gallery. I haven’t seen a single thing in St. Petersburg yet.
Pavel said to stay close, but “close” is such a relative term.
So many options at my fingertips . . .
As soon as I take a shower.
7
Dom
Ivan is pleased with the recovery of our product. He’s somewhat less pleased when he hears that we kidnapped the commissioner’s daughter and dumped her on the front steps of the Police Officer’s Ball.
“That’s a provocation,” he says to me.
“Stealing our weed was the provocation!” I retort.
“It is good that we found out about the daughter,” Sloane says. She’s curled up on the couch next to Ivan, running her fingers through the close-cropped hair at the nape of his neck. “That’s a useful piece of information. A weak spot in the impenetrable moral armor of Commissioner Erdeli.”
“I’m more interested in finding the weak spot in our armor,” Ivan says, frowning. “How did Erdeli know about our shipment in the first place?”
“I might have a lead on that,” Sloane says. “You know the dealer, Dago?”
“Of course.”
“You know his strip club?”
Ivan looks blank.
“Sis’ki,” Efrem reminds him. Efrem is recovering quite nicely from being shot in the leg and the shoulder. He still has a sling on his arm, but he can hobble around fairly well. Right now, he’s got his foot propped up on the coffee table so his leg doesn’t get stiff while we’re talking. He also stopped shaving while he was stuck in bed, so he’s got the beginnings of a thick black beard, which makes him look more bear-like than ever.
“Sis’ki,” Ivan grunts and nods. “That shithole.”
“It is a shithole,” Sloane agrees. “He brings the girls in from little towns in Moldova, Romania, Kosovo, Albania—they think they’re coming here to work as nannies or waitresses, planning to send money home to their mothers. Then he sticks a needle in their arm and makes them suck cock to pay for it.”
Her voice is calm, but I can see the disgust in her face. Sloane is no angel—or, I should say, she is a very particular kind of angel. The Angel of Death was her nickname when she used to accept contract hits. She killed politicians, businessmen, and even Bratva bosses, striking so quickly and silently that she was like the hand of god himself.
But she preyed on the powerful, not the weak.
She has no patience for men like Dago, always punching down. He’s a jackal who will snap a rabbit’s neck, while never daring to face a lion.
“Well,” Sloane says, “apparently there was a raid on his club last month. I can only imagine what the cops found in his back rooms. Yet he didn’t lose his license. He was only shut down for a day.”
“Suspicious,” Ivan says. “Not definitive. He might have paid the cops off.”
“Possibly,” Sloane agrees. “But guess who also got all his watches out of the Mapata Street pawn shop this week? Sounds like Dago made money, not like he had to dig in his pockets for a hefty bribe.”
Ivan nods slowly.
“Let’s pay him a visit, then,” he says.
“You want company?” I ask him.
“Always,” he replies.
“I’ll come too,” Efrem says.
Ivan raises an eyebrow but doesn’t object. He knows that Efrem wants to get back to work as soon as possible. Efrem has always been useful in an enforcer role. Of course, right now, he can barely sit down without wincing. But there won’t be much “enforcing” required with Dago. Four of us is overkill.
We take Ivan’s Hummer. Sloane drives, because she likes driving. Ivan rides shotgun, with Efrem and me in the back. Technically, Ivan should sit in the back since it’s the most secure position, but there’s no way he’s going to sit anywhere except right next to Sloane.
Efrem is texting away on his phone. Texts from Efrem read like drunken voicemails because his thumbs are too big, and he doesn’t proofread before hitting send.
He’s frowning, typing even faster than usual.
“Who’re you talking to?” I ask him.
“Hoza,” he says.
Hoza is his cousin in Moscow. Efrem is Ivan’s and my cousin. Between our cousins and our cousin’s cousins, there’s a lot of Petrovs spread out across Russia. A small army—if we could agree on anything long enough to fight together.
“What’s he saying?”
“He says that Avo Kazarian murdered his own son.”
“Bullshit,” I snort.
Ivan turns around from the front seat.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know Avo Kazarian?”
Ivan nods.
The Kazarians are one of the oldest Bratva families in Moscow. They’re not really Russian, not by origin. They started in Armenia, then spread out from there. They were top dogs during the Empire era. But they were cruel—even by Bratva standards. They tortured and murdered their rivals in such fucked-up ways that with every one they killed, more enemies were created. Even their closest friends and allies started to hate them.
No one would marry their daughters to Kazarian sons, because of their reputation for violence against their own wives and children.
Eventually, the Kazarians made a marriage pact with the Italian mafia instead. The eldest son married the daughter of Giuseppe Fratto.
For five or six years, everything seemed fine. The couple had two children. Then the Frattos got suspicious. The phone calls from their daughter grew shorter and rarer. She only said the same few lines, like she was reading off a script. She hadn’t returned to Sicily in months, then two years.
The Frattos demanded to see her. The Kazarians refused.
Finally, the Frattos sent their top lieutenant to break into the Kazarians’s house and report back what he saw with his own eyes.
He found Fernanda Fratto alive, but so disfigured that she was barely recognizable. Burns and slashes across every inch of her body. Every one of her teeth pulled out with pliers. Four fingers missing off her right hand.
She’d been treated like a hated prisoner, not like the cherished mafia princess of a well-respected family.
The Frattos were enraged. Thirty of them travelled from Palermo to Moscow to storm the Kazarians’s estate.
When they arrived, Avo Kazarian told them to leave or he would throw Fernanda out the top window of the mansion. The Frattos refused. Five minutes later, they saw the princess flung over the balcony, her body breaking on the flagstones three stories below.
As they ran to her, the Kazarians opened fire, killing nine of the men who had been sent, including Fernanda’s two brothers.
The fight raged on for hours. In the end, eight Frattos returned home without even Fernanda’s body to show for their troubles.
A few of the Kazarians were killed, but not Avo. When his father died, he took full control of the family, continuing to raise his two children by himself.
That’s who Efrem is talking about. He’s saying that Avo murdered his only son, the boy he had with Fernanda.
Ivan has heard the story just like I have. Still, he shakes his head. “Nobody would kill their own heir,” he says.