Austin Camacho - Russian Roulette

A tap on his window spun Hannibal’s face to his left. The man standing beside the car recoiled and raised his hands on either side of his chest.

“I’m not the enemy,” the man said. Hannibal could only guess how much anger his face was reflecting when he turned. He powered his window down, forced a smile, and let his eyebrows rise to their normal position.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to… I was thinking of something else. Something I can do for you?”

“I think it’s the other way around,” the man said. “I’m here at Mr. Ronzini’s request.” He was a medium-sized man with a neutral face, but Hannibal noticed the bulge at his waist under his gray sweatshirt.

“I see. So what brings you here?”

The man rested his elbow on the roof of Hannibal’s car, facing forward. “I’m watching him watching her.”

Another man was walking toward them across the street, on the side Cindy’s dream house was on. He was also a neutral looking man with vaguely Eastern features. He would pass the house in a moment.

“I appreciate that. Really. But maybe I should be gone before this guy spots me.”

“OK, but take this,” the man said, passing an envelope through Hannibal’s window. “Mr. Ronzini figured you’d turn up here sooner or later. He said when you did to give you this letter.”

Hannibal thanked the man, who then stood away from the car, about to turn and walk away.

“Hey, hang on a second, friend. You got a name?”

The man looked at Hannibal with no expression at all on his face.

“No.”

And then he was gone, another faceless soldier in an underground army. Pulling away from the curb, Hannibal wondered what the job description looked like for the position of thug. Did they have a union, have to update their resumes, hassle about their benefits?

Another part of his mind wondered how long Cindy and the broad-shouldered Realtor would be in that house.

Four blocks later, Hannibal stopped at a red light and used the pause to open Ronzini’s envelope. He resented Ronzini knowing that he would try to see Cindy even if he couldn’t talk to her. He hated knowing he was in this man’s debt. But it gave him some small measure of peace to know that Ronzini’s men would give their lives to defend anyone under Ronzini’s protection.

Inside the envelope he found a single sheet of expensive stationery folded in thirds. The note was handwritten, in a firm, aggressive hand that had to be Anthony Ronzini’s. Under a large letter H it read:

Thought you might want to know that Nikita Petrova didn’t leave behind the fortune most of the Russians assume he had. A quick look at Raisa P’s finances showed that she’s running out of money.

There was no signature, but none was needed.

A horn blaring behind him prompted him to surge forward and catch up with traffic. This news offered a good reason for Raisa to fool herself about a wealthy young suitor asking for her daughter’s hand. He drove home on automatic pilot, pushing this new puzzle piece around with the other bits of information he had gathered.

By the time he got home, he had to admit that he himself should have been the target of much of the rage he was feeling. His anger at Ronzini was based on his own inner belief that people were either good or bad. Bad people doing good things made him almost as uncomfortable as good people going bad.

He parked in his usual place and hurried into his own apartment without encountering another soul. He hung up his jacket, pulled off his tie, and poured Kenyan coffee beans into his grinder. Strong, fresh, hot coffee was Hannibal’s drug of choice for dealing with his emotions. In this case, that meant his anger.

Listening to the whirring gnash of the grinder’s teeth, he also had to admit that part of his anger toward Ivanovich was misplaced. It was not his fault that Hannibal had gotten so deeply involved with this case. Coffee aside, the real drug that Hannibal was hooked on was mystery and although he didn’t expect it, he had stepped into one here. While filling a carafe with water he considered the disturbing fact that, had he known what he now did about the situation, he would have been willing to investigate it anyway. Regardless of his feelings about Ivanovich, he couldn’t ignore the very real danger Viktoriya’s mob-connected mother might be putting her in, especially if Gana was on the run from the law or his country’s legal government.

Aside from the case, Hannibal’s mind was clogged with thoughts about his own isolation. Ivanovich had found it quite simple to create a situation in which Hannibal was not able to discuss the case with any of his closest confidantes. Just as he had to keep an eye on his top priority, keeping Cindy safe, he had to keep his neighbors out of the case to shield them. He trusted Ronzini on the subject of who not to mess with and knew that if Ivanovich had nothing to lose he would be a danger to all those around him.

But in the meantime, Hannibal couldn’t think of anything else he could do to finish his assignment. Like most days, when the work was done, Hannibal changed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Hours passed in solitude, filled by frozen egg rolls and a marathon of television episodes. Cindy had given him a DVD of the short-lived Blade television series. He had enjoyed it more than he had expected to, and couldn’t wait to tell Cindy. He tried hard not to notice that she hadn’t called him to talk about her day or the house she looked at. She was probably working late again, as lawyers so often do.

When the phone did ring, Hannibal checked his watch before answering. She really had worked late.

“Hello,” he said, eager to hear her voice again, even if he had to tell her he couldn’t talk.

“Come over for a drink.” It was Ivanovich’s hard, accented voice. The anger Hannibal had put away earlier in the day popped out of its box.

“Bitch, I’m done working for the day. I’ll get more answers tomorrow.”

Pause. “I thought a bitch was a woman only. Come over for a drink.” This time Hannibal noticed a slight slurring. He must have started drinking alone.

“Look, Alex, it’s after eleven. I need my sleep.”

“Aleksandr,” Ivanovich said. “Never Xander. Never Lex. Never Al. Never Alex. You are not asleep. You are alone. Like me. Come over for a drink.”

Hannibal thought about his own isolation, and about the fact that Ivanovich had not left that office for more than forty-eight hours and in that time had seen no one except Hannibal and, he assumed, a delivery boy from the liquor store. Well, he did it to himself, Hannibal thought. Screw him. He was about to say it aloud when Ivanovich appeared to remember something from their very first conversation.

“Please.”

When Hannibal walked into his office, he bypassed the wall switch for the ceiling light. His desk lamp shed the only light in the room. Ivanovich seemed more at home in the relative gloom. He was still in Hannibal’s desk chair. His pistol still lay on the desk pointed toward the door. The black photo album still lay open in front of him. But Ivanovich had changed into a t-shirt, one of those you see so often in Washington gift shops, that said “You Don’t Know Me,” and in smaller lettering, “Witness Protection Program.” He held a tumbler of clear liquid in his right hand. He put it down to pour vodka into a similar glass on the desk.

“So, you can call a man a bitch?”

“Anything can be a bitch,” Hannibal said, picking up his glass. “A man you don’t like. A woman you do like. An object like, oh, I don’t know. You poured some nasty vodka into this bitch and I picked it up. Hell, life’s a bitch.” He took a swallow from his glass, finding the drink surprisingly smooth but just as fiery as he expected.