Рон Рэш - The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

“Whoa. Hold up,” I said. “Do you know this dog?”

“No.”

“You do. You know this dog. This dog knows you.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“It’s not nonsense. He dragged me right to you.”

“Leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I’m walking in. A walk-in. Like the sign says. Both sorts!”

He gave me a curious look, but then glanced past me and said, “Bloody hell. Too late. Go in.”

“What?” I looked over my shoulder.

“In, in, go inside, are you deaf? Quickly.” The man took my arm and yanked me — he and the dog — through the open door.

The shop was warm, and musty with the odor of antiques and incense, the signature scents of psychics the world over. The decor was Victorian clutter. I got a fast impression of chintz, wallpaper, and books, books, books as Mirko herded me across the room to a kitchenette.

“Sit,” Mirko said, and I thought he was talking to the dog until he pushed me into an armchair and scooped the dog into my lap. He then hauled over a rococo screen and arranged it in front of me, blocking my view of the room. He leaned in so close I could smell the damp wool of his suit. “Do not make a sound,” he said. “Do not let the dog make a sound. This is critically important.”

Before I could argue the point, the tinkling bell sounded again, signaling someone entering the shop. “If you value your brother’s life, stay quiet,” Mirko said, and walked away.

That shut me up.

The dog and I listened as Mirko said hello to someone. Actually, he said zdravstvujtye. A man responded in kind. In Russian. I knew a few words of Russian, but after the pleasantries, the newcomer told Mirko to wait. A second later came the sound of Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a ballad Robbie once said made him want to cut off his ears. The music source was a cell phone, was my guess, and I wondered why we were listening to it, until I realized it masked conversation. I could pick out only random words now, during the song’s lugubrious pauses, of which there were many. Then came the sound of a zipper zipping. The urge to peek around the screen was strong, but the dog began to struggle, wanting out of my arms and onto a small, narrow refrigerator next to us, on top of which sat a large frozen turkey, thawing, and a large ceramic Blessed Virgin Mary. As I thwarted his efforts to investigate the bird, the tinkling bell sounded again, and Streisand, Diamond, and Russian left the building.

“You may come out,” Mirko said.

I came around the screen to find Mirko taking off his jacket and kicking off his shoes. Alongside him was a wheelie suitcase, fully zipped.

“So how do you know my brother?” I asked, and promptly took off my own jacket, the room being hellishly hot.

“I haven’t time for this,” he said.

“But you know where he is?”

“I do not.” Now he had his vest off and was unbuttoning his dress shirt, as adroit as a stage actor doing a quick change. “I suggest you return to your flat, with the dog-who-is-not-your-dog, and sleep off the jet lag that you’re trying to ignore. It’s four in the morning Los Angeles time, and that red-eye you took did you no favors even with an exit row and a window seat. Nor does sleeping on floors agree with you.”

My eyes must’ve widened. He smiled, before whipping off his shirt and giving me a view of his naked chest. Not a bad chest, if you don’t mind skinny, which I don’t, but I wasn’t about to be distracted. “I don’t know how you know the things you know,” I said, “but all I care about is Robbie.” The dog, perhaps reacting to my tone of voice, produced a sound that was less a bark and more the yowl of a human infant. “You tell him, Churchill,” I said.

“Churchill? I’d have said Gladstone.” Mirko walked to a bureau covered with tarot cards, opened a drawer, and took out a some clothes and a pair of Converse high-tops.

“Whoever that is.”

“Victoria’s prime minister, who more closely resembled a French bulldog.” He pulled a T-shirt over his head, followed by a hoodie, a purple Grateful Dead relic from some bygone decade.

I stooped to let Gladstone wiggle out of my arms and over to Mirko, who was pulling on his sneakers, though not bothering to lace them up. “Fine,” I said. “But you’re pretty much the only person I know in London, not counting Pet Immigration, and I’m not leaving until—”

“Suit yourself.” He stood up, ruffled his hair, and put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses. The transformation from aristocrat to geek was not just fast, it was total. From his pants pocket he withdrew a remote, which he aimed at the wall behind me.

A creaking sound like the opening of Dracula’s coffin made me turn and see a wall-sized bookcase move.

Slowly, squeakily, so disorientingly I thought, Earthquake? the bookcase kept advancing into the room, as freaky as the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I fixed my eyes at random on one frayed book called The Coming of the Fairies, willing it to stay put, but nope. It moved. When I turned my attention back to Mirko, he stepped over his pile of clothes, grabbed the handle of the wheelie suitcase, and moved to a now-palpable gap between bookcase and wall.

Behind the gap was a door. Mirko opened the door and went through it.

I grabbed the dog and followed.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he called out.

“Following you!” I called back. “What’s it look like?”

It couldn’t have looked like anything, because it was pitch-black except for the glow of Mirko’s cell, bouncing along ahead of me. What it smelled like was a dank cellar, the scent intensifying as I followed Mirko down wooden stairs. When we reached the bottom, a light popped on.

We were in a long and narrow passageway, low-ceilinged, brick-floored, and lined with storage shelves. The kind of place that makes you think bomb shelter except that it was stuffed with... stuff. Furniture, art, armaments, and god knows what else, bubble-wrapped, crated up, or just scattered about. Mirko pushed aside a Roman helmet and heaved his wheelie suitcase onto a high shelf, showing an impressive set of muscles. He gave me a quick look, then took off down the passageway.

“Keep up,” he called over his shoulder. “Unless you fancy being locked in.”

I jogged after him, clutching the dog, until some three hundred feet later the tunnel ended in a second staircase. The lights went off behind me and in darkness I followed Mirko up the stairs, bumping into him at the top. “‘S’cuse me,” I mumbled, unsettled by his proximity, and his aftershave. Bay rum. Which I liked.

“This is where we go our separate ways,” he said, working to unlock yet another door. A moment later we were out of the tunnel and in the back room of a supermarket.

It was a Tesco Metro, a British 7-Eleven. I followed Mirko through swinging doors onto the selling floor and the mundane world of Whiskas catfood and Wotsits Cheese Snacks.

Mirko marched through the Tesco with all the confidence of a store manager. I tried to match his gait and attitude, never mind that I was carrying an unattractive dog the size of a watermelon.

Once outside, he picked up the pace, his long legs at full stride, weaving his way through lunch-hour London, jammed with people. I caught up with him on the center island of some major intersection, waiting for the pedestrian signal. Before the light could turn green, Mirko stepped into the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding Volvo, and took off at a run. I said a prayer — a necessity, since the traffic was of course going the wrong way — and took off too, wincing at the horns honking at me. I followed him onto an escalator and down into London’s Underground.