“Your real question is, how do you get the job of assassin in the Russian Mafiya? Is that not so?”
Hannibal emptied his glass anyway. “No. Let me ask you the same shit you want to know about your rival. Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?”
“I am a man born to dirt-poor farmers in Georgia,” Ivanovich said, staring at the wall like a student giving a dissertation. “Too poor to seek a proper education. So poor that I sought refuge in military service. So I signed up to fight for my country, much as your father did.”
Ivanovich paused while he refilled his glass, as if he could not talk and pour at the same time. When the bottle was empty he reached under the desk and produced another, opened it, and filled his glass to its rim.
“Little did I guess that I would be fighting my own countrymen in Chechnya.”
“That must have sucked,” Hannibal said, wondering how much alcohol Ivanovich had had delivered to his office.
“I was a teenager. A boy. But I grew up a lot in those three years. My father had taught me to hunt and I stood out on the firing range. Then my colonel said he saw something in me. Whether it was the strong hands of a farmer or the cold impatience of a boy who had nothing to lose I don’t know. Anyway, he selected me for sniper training. There was a bonus involved, so of course I excelled.”
“So you had a talent for hitting the target. How’d they know you had the nerve for killing?”
Ivanovich paced to the window and looked out for a moment. “They knew after that riot in Chechnya when I gunned down half a dozen citizens.” He quickly returned to the desk and raised his glass. Hannibal thought he was trying to rinse the taste of that memory out of his mouth.
“Sounds like you had a future in the army.”
“Yes, but the world moves and we move with it.” Ivanovich glanced at the photo album, then quickly away. “The colonel was my benefactor then. At the time, military officers often raised funds in unauthorized ways. He left the army and asked me to go with him. He had plans. He was going to America to turn his black market business into an empire. He needed a good gun at his side. He offered me more money than I had ever seen. I followed him here. How could I know I would find the girl I left behind?”
Hannibal stood to sit his glass on the desk. “Excuse me?”
“The Petrovas were neighbors back home. Nikita Petrova was also a soldier. He served in Afghanistan under fire, and in Algeria undercover. But when I was in secondary school, I knew him as the man who would only let me visit his daughter in his presence or his wife’s. I knew I loved Viktoriya even then. You see? I’ve carried this picture for so many years.”
Hannibal looked down to see a photo of Viktoriya, the girl he had only met that day. In the photo she was just a child of perhaps fourteen. “Your childhood sweetheart. Touching. And you come to the U.S. to help launch a crime family and learn that her father is in fact a godfather.”
Ivanovich turned, spilling his drink as he moved closer to stare into Hannibal’s eyes. “You asked a question. I open my heart and you greet this with sarcasm?”
Hannibal stared back, leaning even closer. “Save that shit for somebody who’s scared of you. Which maybe isn’t as many people as I thought. I know you’re here because you’re hiding out from the mob, and now I know why. Daddy wouldn’t let you have his little girl, so you got him out of the way.”
Ivanovich’s eyes blazed and for a moment Hannibal thought he would get a chance to kick this arrogant Russian’s ass. Instead, Ivanovich looked down at the bottle and refilled his glass.
“Nikita Petrova was a great man,” he said in a low voice. “He was my mentor when I arrived here and explained to me that I did not need to live in thrall to the colonel. I could be my own man and do my work for anyone in the mob. I did not kill him.”
“Well, your fellow mobsters sure think you did.”
Ivanovich strode to the window again, staring out at the darkness. “Nikita Petrova killed himself. He stepped off the roof of an apartment building he had bought over in Virginia as an investment for Raisa. Ask the police if you don’t believe me.”
“From what I’ve heard, he was respected by the underground. He was wealthy and had a great family. Now why on earth would he commit suicide?”
Just as Ivanovich turned to return to the desk, Hannibal noticed the pistol. In the second it took him to fully realize its significance Ivanovich was back beside it. “Not everyone knew his pain.”
“Pain?”
“Nikita was in constant pain,” Invanovich said, leaning against the wall behind the desk. “Shrapnel had sliced into him in Afghanistan. Doctors said that he would not survive an attempt to remove it. He had a terrible limp from it. It must have become too much for him.”
Hannibal stood at the front of the desk and casually leaned his hand on it. “But the entire Russian mob thinks you did him, as you have so many men who were in somebody else’s way. Because he was so popular, I guess you aren’t so popular. You’ll never get her back, you know. So why am I working so hard to dig up dirt on this Dani Gana guy?”
“It is as Trent Reznor says. Sometimes, just as nothing seems worth saving.” Then Ivanovich focused his eyes on Hannibal’s again. “I can’t watch her slip away.”
“So, what if Gana really is bad for her, which I doubt,” Hannibal said. “After all, he’s rich, handsome, smooth, apparently legitimate, and, by the way, he sure looks like he loves her.” He wondered if Ivanovich was drunk enough, and emotional enough, to get careless.
“You are wrong.” Ivanovich crossed his arms, his jaw jutting out. It was less the picture of a deadly killer and more a study in stubbornness.
“What if I am?” Hannibal asked, wrapping his right hand around the bottle. “She’s a farmer’s daughter turned Washington socialite. She’s got nothing to do with the way her father made his fortune here. Do you really think she’d give the time of day to a hired killer like you?” With the location of the pistol locked in his mind, he watched Ivanovich’s eyes.
“You can say this? You?” Ivanovich emptied his glass again and crossed his arms. “We are the same, you and I. Don’t you realize that?”
“I don’t go around killing innocent people,” Hannibal said, lifting the bottle to refill his glass.
“Nor do I,” Ivanovich said, his words carrying a slight slur. “I remove only those who are already preying on the innocent. Most people, they are like sheep. You know this. The people I work for are wolves, preying on those sheep. The people who hire me send me to cull the herd of the wolves that can’t follow the rules of the pack leaders.”
“Right. You’re trying to tell me that you’re just there to maintain order.”
“Yes,” Ivanovich said with a grim smile, pointing at Hannibal. “Just like you. That is why I came to you for help. Because we are alike.”
“Don’t you dare compare yourself to me,” Hannibal said. “I am not like you.”
“You don’t see yourself as a wolf?” Ivanovich crossed his arms again, leaning back against the wall, his eyes again hooded, his mouth set in a derisive smirk. “Are you then one of the sheep?”
“Nope. I’m one of the sheepdogs. I keep the wolves at bay. And you…” In midsentence, Hannibal’s left hand released his glass and darted toward the spot on the desk where the silenced automatic lay.
But it was already gone.
Hannibal leaned on his hand in an awkward position, frozen, staring at the muzzle of the silencer aim at the spot between his eyes. A few tense seconds passed in silence.
“And I?” Ivanovich said, his words no longer slurred. “I am a little faster than you. A little faster, and a little smarter than you think I am.”
Hannibal righted himself, backing off two steps. His eyes never wavered from Ivanovich’s eyes. The odor of spilled alcohol was sharp in his nose, and he thought he could feel more alcohol popping out of the pores of his forehead, but he would not let his voice waver.
“I had to try.”