Orest Stelmach - The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

No one had ever mistaken my accent for a British one, but any confusion about my origins or anything else about me was welcome.

“Then why can’t you take me in there so I can get a closer look?”

“There’s a gate,” he said. “There’s security. It is not a place where one should go unless invited.”

“Why?”

The driver rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth as though I were exasperating him beyond the call of cabbie duty, or the benefit of forty euro. “The story around town is that the woman lived in Amsterdam for a while but there was a home invasion. A very ugly thing. They say she was lucky she survived. She moved to Bruges and built this house. There is a gate and there is security, and the men who work there have a fierce reputation.”

The cabbie’s inflection suggested the bodyguards had demonstrated this ferocity.

“Oh, c’mon,” I said. “Fierce reputation? This is Belgium, not the Congo. How long has she lived here?”

“A year? No. More. A year and a half. Has to be going on two.”

“Have they killed anyone yet?”

“Not to my knowledge, but I have no interest in being the first one.”

“Then there’s no problem,” I said. “People take the wrong turn, they get lost all the time, don’t they? What’s the worst that can happen?”

I pulled another twenty euro from my wallet, put it between thumb and forefinger, and rubbed it near his ear.

He shook his head with reluctance and grabbed the bill. Then he turned the nose of the car toward the new road and powered forward with surprising conviction, a torrent of Dutch words pouring from his lips as he did so.

As soon as he entered the road the headlights shone on a succession of signs that reminded me of the main road to Chornobyl. The entrance to the sight of Ukraine’s nuclear disaster was marked with warning, hazard, and “Do Not Enter” signs. This road was no different. For a moment I wondered why the formal entrance wasn’t placed at the intersection with the main road, but a mile later we rounded a bend and I understood the builder’s logic.

Soft lights illuminated a gleaming silver gate. The gatehouse beside it was also contemporary, with steel beams and glass on all sides. The modern structures seemed at such odds with the character of Bruges they jarred the senses. The gate’s purpose was to provide privacy for Sarah Dumont. If it had been placed at the mouth of the road, the gate would have achieved the exact opposite purpose. It would have been a magnet for attention. Still, Sarah Dumont’s design skills seemed questionable at best. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to build something quaint in keeping with the wooded surroundings and Bruges itself? I wondered if her choice was a function of arrogance or poor taste.

Spotlights burst with light. They obliterated our vision. The driver slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to a stop.

“This is as far as I go,” the driver said. “You’ve seen the gate, now we go.”

“Relax,” I said, as much to myself as to him. I had butterflies in my stomach, but I couldn’t imagine a woman could get killed for trespassing in a tourist city in Belgium. Besides, as my first boss, a transplant from Birmingham to New York City had told me on my first day at work in corporate America, a faint heart never fucked the cook.

I whipped the door open and stepped outside. “Turn the car around and wait for me here. Remember, if you leave without me, I can’t give you the biggest tip I’ve ever given a cabbie.”

I marched toward the gatehouse without further thought. Two figures moved around the periphery of the spotlights shining from either side of the gate. One appeared to be accompanied by a beast on four legs. A man shouted something in what sounded like Dutch. The words didn’t register.

“Stop!”

That word definitely registered and I slowed down. But once again I invoked my training from the Ukrainian girl scouts and pushed myself to act contrary to my desires. I put one foot in front of the other at an even faster clip and headed straight toward the gate.

As I neared the gate, one of the spotlights followed me. The light blinded me so badly I had to raise my hand to shield my eyes. More shouting followed, and I became aware of a dog barking. Or perhaps it had been barking all along and I hadn’t heard it over the thumping of my heart.

The light blinding me dimmed but my vision remained impaired. Purple and black images moved before me. The same two men, one holding a dog with a leash, the other a steering wheel locking mechanism. I wondered why a security guard would carry such a thing.

Both men were long and lean, and dressed in black turtlenecks and field jackets. The one without the dog barked something in Dutch at me again which I didn’t understand.

“Would you give my business card to Ms. Dumont, please?” I reached into my handbag for the black leather case that held my cards—

“Stop.”

I stopped moving, hand in bag.

The man with the steering wheel locking mechanism device charged me. The other one released his beast, which snarled, leaped at me and knocked me down. A bolt of pain shot up my hip as I crashed to the asphalt.

The dog climbed onto my chest and bared its teeth six inches from my face. That’s when I noticed the animal’s long, bushy fur, pointed ears and ferocious eyes. The animal wasn’t a dog, I realized. It was a gray wolf.

The man with the device pointed the tip of his locking mechanism at my torso. When I saw its barrel I realized it wasn’t a steering wheel locking device. It was some sort of fancy submachine gun built for the twenty-first century. A vision of Apple or Amazon extending their technological expertise into weapons flashed in my mind, and I wondered if the gun could put a bullet in a specific body part with a simple voice command.

“Are you people out of your mind?” I said. “I’m from America, on sensitive business that involves Ms. Dumont. I have a certain reputation with the financial press. You want an international incident? I can get a Bloomberg, CNBC, or MSNBC news crew out here real easy.”

I’d posed as reporter before which is why those words came to me so quickly. One of the men called off the wolf. The other helped me to my feet. They searched my bag and body with respect and efficiency. After one of them handed my bag back to me, I gave him my business card.

“Please tell Ms. Dumont that I’d like to talk to her about her son. I’m staying at the Hotel Dukes’ Plaza. I’m not leaving until I speak with her, one way or another.”

I glanced beyond the gatehouse before turning away to leave. My vision had adjusted enough for me to spy the small palace in the distance. It looked like a misplaced ice sculpture, a rectangular home carved from glass. In the driveway sat a gunmetal Audi coupe with flared haunches. Beside it, the metallic blue Porsche Macan Turbo. Lights shone in the house. I strongly suspected Sarah Dumont was home. The intensity of her security team’s performance suggested they were guarding a person or persons, not just a building.

I walked slowly back to the taxi, playing it cool so that I didn’t betray that they’d succeeded in shaking me up. Getting mugged by a wolf had a lasting effect on one’s nervous system.

On the way back to the hotel, I considered the reason Sarah Dumont had chosen Bruges as her new home. I understood the obvious allure. Bruges offered quality restaurants, world-class shopping, a unique aesthetic, and access to transportation. The Brussels Airport was a two hour drive to the south, and the English Channel an hour away in the north. But it was still an odd choice, as unlikely as the type of home she’d built and the materials from which it was made. Her choice and lifestyle seemed off to me, and carried the strong whiff of someone whose money had criminal ties. This was based on my experience with the Ukrainian and Russian mafia types, whose taste tended toward the ostentatious. In this case, Ms. Dumont’s choices weren’t so ostentatious as they were unlikely.