“Will I have a gun?”
“Yeah.”
Gordon folded his arms, nodding. “Okay then.”
Yuri Tolkov pulled the Mercedes into the driveway of a small cape-style house on a dead-end street in Melrose. Petrenko sat in the passenger seat and an older soft-looking man sat in the back. Yuri checked the address against a piece of paper he had, then indicated to Petrenko that they had the right house. All three men left the car, Yuri and Petrenko leading the way to the front door. The older man carried a leather bag as he trailed behind, walking as if he had pebbles in his shoes.
“There will be three Arabs, right?” Petrenko asked.
“That was the agreement.”
After they knocked on the door, a window curtain was pushed aside and a man with an angry scowl opened up and signaled impatiently for them to step inside. He was in his early twenties, thin as a rail, and had a sub-compact Glock 9mm pistol shoved in his waistband. Sitting on a sofa were two other Arabs. One was a heavyset man with a thick beard trimmed close to his face, the other was also rail-thin, angry-looking and with features that looked sharp enough to cut paper. All three Arabs were wearing leisure suits.
Yuri told Petrenko in Russian that the angry looking man on the sofa was the one on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list and went by the name Abbas.
Anger flushed Abbas’s face when he heard the Russian. “The agreement was we speak English only,” he said, his eyes simmering. “Another word in Russian and the hell with you!”
Petrenko showed a humorless thin smile. “Relax,” he said, “my employee was just being polite. All he said was that it smells like the inside of a shoe in here. I have to agree with him. Not only that, it is like an oven. Could you open a window or turn on an air conditioner?”
Abbas stared dumbly at Petrenko for a moment and then barked out a command in Arabic to the man who had escorted them in. With his scowl deepening, the man moved over to one of the windows and opened it a crack.
“We have ten diamonds for you to appraise,” Abbas said, his face still mottled with anger. “Eighty others just like these are being held in a safe place.”
Petrenko, unblinking, dropped his smile. “We can agree on a price, but later we will have to appraise all the diamonds and make adjustments as necessary.”
“You won’t have to make any adjustments, but we do not have to argue this now.” Abbas slipped a hand into an inside jacket pocket and pulled out a small silk bag. He extended the bag to Petrenko who didn’t bother moving. Instead, the older man with the leather bag took the diamonds and was escorted to a table where he could examine them. He took a portable xenon lamp, a small scale, a Schneider loupe, and bottles of different solutions from his bag, then hunched over the diamonds, examining and weighing each one. When he was done, he hobbled over to Petrenko and in Russian told him the ten diamonds were of high quality and worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“English! We agreed English only!” Abbas screamed. He barked out a string of commands in Arabic. The Arab standing near Petrenko reached for his Glock. Petrenko feigned a jab with his right hand and almost instantaneously rabbit-punched the man in the chest with his left, his fist moving as a blur. The punch knocked the Arab off his feet. As he hit the floor, his Glock bounced out of his waistband and landed a few feet from him. Before he could reach for it, Petrenko stepped on his hand and picked the gun up himself. The heavyset Arab started for his inside jacket pocket but stopped as he realized Yuri had the edge of an eight-inch switchblade against his throat.
Petrenko removed the magazine from the Glock and handed the empty gun to Abbas. “If I wanted to kill you and steal your diamonds I could do so easily,” he said. “I do not wish to do that, though. I am hoping you and your friends will stop acting like children and that this can be the first of many business transactions between the two of us.”
Abbas was shaking with a combination of fear and rage. “We had a deal! Only English!”
“He doesn’t speak English, only Russian,” Petrenko said, waving a hand towards the jeweler. “All he said to me was that the clarity of the diamonds is sub par and they are only worth twenty thousand dollars.”
“That’s right, each diamond is worth twenty thousand dollars!”
“No, twenty thousand dollars for all ten. Because I want future business deals between us, I will pay you sixty percent of what all ninety diamonds are worth. A hundred and eight thousand dollars.”
“They are worth twenty times that!”
“No they are not.” Petrenko stopped for a moment to rub the area above both temples. “And quit shouting. You are giving me a headache. So do we have a deal?”
Abbas was close to epileptic, both too furious and scared to do anything but move his lips in some sort of internal dialogue. He looked helplessly at his two companions. The one next to him still had a knife edge held against his throat, the other was sitting on the floor holding his injured hand.
“You can turn me down if you want to,” Petrenko added. “There will be no hard feelings on my part. If you want, try to find someone who will pay more. You can always take a trip to the New York Jewelry District and see if anyone there will do business with you.”
Abbas tried answering, but couldn’t get the words out. Finally, after his third attempt, he sputtered, “You will kill us if I turn you down.”
“No, I don’t think so. You don’t want to do business, fine, we leave. But I don’t think you’re going to find a better price.”
Yuri backed away. The heavyset Arab had turned somewhat green, and was rubbing his throat where the blade had left an indentation. Abbas looked at him and then his companion still sitting on the floor. He licked his lips. “I will think about your offer,” he said sourly.
Petrenko shrugged. “You know how to reach me. Don’t think too long, though.” He then turned and left the house. The jeweler hobbled out next. After that, Yuri closed his knife and walked backwards out of the house.
Once in the car Yuri turned to Petrenko. “You sure you don’t want to go back in there and take those diamonds? Five minutes we’re done.”
Petrenko shook his head. “If we’re patient they will sell us all of their diamonds. And more in the future. We’re offering only a fraction of what they were looking for. They will need to make up the difference by bringing in more diamonds to sell us. For them, diamonds are easy to smuggle into this country, cash is not.” He paused as he made a fist and rubbed a thumb over his knuckles, feeling the hard calluses that covered them. “Besides,” he added, “if I went back in there I would want much more than five minutes.”
9
After his messy divorce, Captain Kenneth Hadley jumped from the Somerville to the Lynn police force when the opening presented itself. All he did, though, was trade one problem for another. Maybe he no longer had his ex-wife stumbling into his station screaming her accusations at him whenever she damn well pleased, but the job was no better. Just as in Somerville, he had to deal with the same urban crimes – car thefts, break-ins, drugs, youth gangs – but in Lynn he now had to deal with Russian mobsters. And, as in Somerville, he now suspected that he had an officer drinking on the job. When Resnick had stepped into his office, Hadley detected a strong whiff of bourbon on his breath. Couldn’t the guy at least have had the decency to chew on a few mints before reporting back to the station? Resnick, though, seemed coherent, with no change in his typical bulldog manner and the same burning intensity. Hadley decided to let the matter drop. The guy was his best detective and there was nothing to indicate that this was anything more than an isolated incident. Still, he felt exhausted listening to Resnick complain about Viktor Petrenko and he was pretty sure the alcohol had something to do with loosening his detective up.