Orest Stelmach - The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

“You’re right about that.”

“Not an automobile enthusiast? How can that be when you drive that old 911?”

“I wasn’t talking about the car. I meant you’re right. This is a masquerade. It’s about a person pretending to be one thing but actually being another.”

I tried to enter Sarah Dumont’s address into Simmy’s navigation system, but her home had been built after the map in his system had been designed. Instead, I found the address for the City Center under tourist sites, entered it, and we took off for Bruges.

“Why are you driving yourself?” I said.

“Because I want to prove that I can still do the small things. That I can be a hands-on kind-of guy. Is it working?”

“You bet,” I said.

We stopped once to get gas, use the restrooms and buy food. I chose a protein bar, the bodyguards opted for ham and cheese sandwiches, and Simmy stuck with coffee. We hustled through our stop with a minimum of conversation and were back on the road in less than fifteen minutes. I called Sarah Dumont from the car after we left the rest stop. She’d warned the guards to be careful, told me to stop being paranoid, and once again hung up on me. We arrived in Bruges’ City Center in the early afternoon, covering the entire one hundred and fifty miles in less than three hours.

I’d taken the taxi to Sarah Dumont’s house twice, so I thought I’d have no problem navigating us to her house.

I was wrong.

I made two blunders, including sending us down a narrow one-way street. I could feel Simmy tense when he had to come to a stop, call his boys on the mobile phone, and tell them to back-up. There wasn’t enough room to execute a K-turn. He took a few audible breaths as though to calm himself down, but sounded serene as spring.

“What looks like a disaster is actually an opportunity,” he said, as he gunned the engine in reverse.

“It is?” I said.

“Certainly. It’s an opportunity for us to prove to ourselves that we’re mentally strong, that we’re invulnerable, and that we’re fully composed and prepared to capture this killer.”

I glanced at him twice to make sure some spirit hadn’t inhabited his body. “We are?”

“I know you’re just having fun with me when you say that. After all, you’re the warrior and I’m the spoiled rich man. Am I right?”

Once he’d backed out of the alley, he whipped the car around and passed the bodyguards.

I corrected my mistakes and got us to the familiar fork in the road.

“That way,” I said, pointing up the hill.

I dialed Sarah Dumont’s number to let her know we were a mile away. My call rolled over to voice mail. As I listened to her recorded message telling me to be sure I really needed to talk to her and only then to leave my name, number and a brief message, I suspected she’d recognized my digits and simply didn’t want to speak to me anymore.

But when the gate came into view I feared otherwise. I feared otherwise because there was no one in sight.

“Where are the guards?” Simmy said. “You said there’d be guards.”

“Maybe one of them is in the guardhouse. It’s kind of big. There might be a bathroom in there.”

Simmy called the bodyguards and barked some clipped instructions that consisted of the kind of shorthand people who work closely develop over time. I didn’t fully comprehend it all, but I knew they were going to check the guardhouse.

Simmy pulled up to the gate. The bodyguards turned their car around and backed-up with their trunk facing the house.

“What are they doing?” I said.

“Preparing for a quick departure, just in case. This way we’re ready to go in either direction. Just like American politics. In Russia it would be much easier. If you want to live, there is only one direction to go and that is forward. Outside of Russia, you can never be sure. Wait in the car.”

He exited the vehicle. I flung the door open and followed him to the guardhouse. Simmy stopped and glared at me but knew better than to waste his energy trying to stop me.

The forest obscured the sunlight from above. The glass house stood beyond the gate surrounded by trees. Both of Sarah Dumont’s cars were parked in front of the entrance in the same places, except their locations were reversed from the previous night. There was no sign of life. The entire property appeared to be taking a nap.

Inside the guardhouse, a tall chair faced the window with a view of the road. The chair was empty. A computer rested on a narrow desktop between the chair and the window. The monitor displayed an article written in Dutch and included a picture of two soccer players vying for the ball. Vanilla crème cookies spilled from an open bag onto the desk. Steam rose from a mug of coffee. Someone had been here a moment ago, I thought, but I didn’t share my observation with anyone for fear of making any unnecessary noise.

A door led to a back room. I could tell from the structure’s exterior dimensions that the space was a small one, no bigger than a pantry or a small bathroom.

Simmy looked beyond me and nodded.

I turned. The bodyguards had arrived. One stood on my heels hulking over me like a giant human Pez dispenser ready to gobble me up. A glint of metal caught my eyes. I looked down and saw the stainless steel gun in his hand. The other bodyguard stood outside, scanning the house and the road. He held an assault rifle. It looked slick, terrifying and seductive.

It was when I turned back that I got the biggest shock of all.

Simmy was knocking on the door to the back room. His knock sounded like banging on a hollow drum because the door appeared to be a cheap empty shell. What astonished me was that his fingers were wrapped around his own gun.

No one answered. He glanced at me as he waited.

“You have a gun?” I said.

He answered me by holding my eyes for an extra second. Then he knocked once more, waited for a count of three, and grabbed the doorknob.

It rattled but didn’t turn completely. It was locked.

Simmy nodded at the bodyguard closest to him again. Then he stepped back toward me and let the bodyguard slide past us.

I leaned into his ear. “Why do you have a gun?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Because I’m prepared. Why don’t you have one?”

“Because I don’t want to shoot myself.”

He nodded. “I was with the military police in the army. You weren’t. With my men and me at your disposal your arsenal is complete. All is as it should be.”

The bodyguard rammed the door with his shoulder. The door frame cracked. He rammed it twice more.

The door caved in. The bodyguard stood in the doorway obscuring the interior of the room. Simmy stepped up beside him and looked inside.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, in a clipped and breathless manner.

The bodyguard thrust his gun into his left hand and stepped further into the room. When he bent over to check for pulses, Sarah Dumont’s guards were revealed.

They were both dead.

The crimson wall in Iskra’s bedroom had transfixed me with its gruesome depiction of the evil that one human being could perpetrate against another. The guards’ bodies had an entirely different effect on me. They made my nerves stand on edge with the knowledge that all our lives, in fact, were in danger. But they also boosted my confidence. The murder of these men, seemingly innocents in this matter, was tragic collateral damage. And yet it proved my theory about the killer to be correct and, as a result, galvanized my senses.

While the bodyguards and Simmy exchanged words, I snuck in from behind them. The carcass of the guards’ pet, the wolf who had attacked me, lay beside their bodies. One guard had been killed by a shot to the forehead. The other had been shot twice in the chest before also being shot in the head. Perhaps the killer had surprised them at the gate, shot the first guard in the head, then fired two rounds into the other guard’s chest before the man could square his weapon. Then he’d finished him off with the shot to the forehead. The wolf had probably been tethered to his post and never had a chance.