Kingsley was right about one thing: Igor was dying to unburden himself. Mopping his sweaty brow with his windbreaker sleeve, he said, “I was hired by—”
“Spartak Volkov,” Kingsley said. “We know all that.”
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t know all that. Who is Spartak Volkov?”
“Russian émigré,” Kingsley said. “Tons of money, ties to both your government and mine. He hired Igor to assassinate—”
“Sarah Byrne,” said Igor, nodding. “A simple job.”
“For one with your skill set, yes. You’re a poisoner by vocation and a baker by avocation. Your passion is pastry,” Kingsley said, and then, noting Igor’s surprise, “I saw it immediately.”
“But how? You are not psychic!” Igor said.
“There are bits of calcified dough on your collar,” Kingsley said. “Your fingers are stained from food coloring. Red Dye No. 3, which you must’ve brought from Moscow, as it’s banned in England. Only an aficionado travels with his own food coloring.”
“I use but a drop,” Igor said, a tad defensive. “For my icings. Okay, and my jellies. Because Sarah Byrne, she loves to eat the English desserts. This I learn from Spartak Volkov. He makes my job easy. Sarah Byrne has been a long time from England, he tells me, and she visits now and wants her cakes. She will die for her cakes.”
“Victoria sponge: arguable,” Kingsley said. “But spotted dick?”
“Banoffee!” Igor said. “Figgy duff!”
“What on earth are you people talking about?” I asked.
“The remains of their cream tea,” Kingsley said. “Masterfully done, Igor.”
“I paid the chauffeur,” Igor explained. “He tells me she goes on Thursday to a psychic. I set up my cart outside the shop. I wear my apron. My hat. She comes. She buys. Two of everything! She goes into the shop. I hear through the window: Mirko makes tea, they eat her cakes.”
Little hairs on the back of my neck sprang to life, but I couldn’t yet account for them.
“But when I report to Volkov, he grows mad! The woman, yes, the woman should die, he says. But Mirko? No. Because Mirko the Psychic, he tells me, is also Mirko the— the—” He waved his hands.
“Money launderer?” I offered.
“Fence?” Kingsley suggested. “Procurer? Black marketeer?”
“Yes! The whole world trades with Mirko! Everybody loves Mirko! Russian, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Herzogovinian—”
“Yes, yes,” Kingsley said impatiently. “We get the drift. So you’re in trouble. You call the number on the sign in front of the shop. I answer. You’re relieved: Mirko is alive, you think. And Mr. Volkov is particularly relieved, as he has given Mirko a very large down payment on a very small rock. And now Mr. Volkov sends you with the balance, to collect his diamond. Like a common courier, but what choice do you have? Come, no need to look amazed, Igor. I happen to be a genius. But tell me: something made you suspect I was not Mirko. What was it? My accent?”
Igor shook his head. “It was the sign. ‘Walk-ins welcome. Both kinds.’ Do you remember? I say to you, ‘I myself would like to be a walk-in. How does this work?’ But you did not answer. At first I thought you don’t know the answer. But then I thought...” He shrugged. “We were there for business. For diamonds, not for spirits. We did not have all day.”
“I don’t have all day either,” I said. “Can we get back on topic? So the two poisonees, Mirko and Sarah Byrne, went into the tunnel, thinking to get away from you, Igor, because they suspected what you’d done.” I turned to Kingsley. “And you went into the tunnel after them. And my brother Robbie stayed behind in the shop. Not thinking ‘poison,’ just thinking ‘hungry,’ as he always is anytime he goes an hour without food.” I turned back to Igor. “It’s not just possible he’d be tempted by your sweets, Igor; it’s virtually certain. But my brother’s a picky eater. So what I need to know is, did you put polonium in every single thing you baked?”
A silence settled on us, so that I could hear the birds in the garden singing their twilight songs.
“How do you know my poison is polonium?” Igor asked quietly.
“Totally obvious,” I said.
“You are a psychic!” he said, with awe.
“Nobody’s a psychic!” I said. “You take pride in your work, and you like a challenge, and polonium takes talent,” I said. “And experience. You probably trained in Moscow. Lab X. And also,” I went on, “because everyone in this crazy story either is Russian or knows Russian, so everyone, upon feeling sick, thinks ‘poison’ and then they think about Alexander Litvinenko and his teapot of polonium and they’re off to the ER, screaming ‘radiation poisoning.’ Including Robbie. Which is why he disappeared. So while I feel sorry for the psychic and the opera singer, I need to think about my brother now, so you need to tell me, Chef Boyardee, did you bake polonium into everything?”
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “The flies’ graveyard, yes, and the Garibaldi biscuit. But not the — wait!” He stared at me. “What opera singer?”
“Sarah Byrne,” Kingsley told him, “was the alias used by Yaroslava Barinova whenever she was in London. She liked to go incognito. She also wore wigs.”
If Igor had been pale before, he was now the color of toothpaste. The white kind. “Yaroslava Barinova?” he gasped. “I have killed Yaroslava Barinova? The greatest mezzo since Anne Sofie von Otter?” He clutched at his heart, scrunching his windbreaker in his big baker’s hands.
I patted him on the back, but he was beyond comfort. “I deserve to die!” He pointed to Kingsley. “I give you rubles, you give me junk. Yes, I am stupid. I kill Mirko, the fence. Yes, I am sloppy. But now, now—” His voice rose to a scream. “Yaroslava — Barinova! — the pride of Perm!” His screams turned to coughing, and he reached into his windbreaker to pull out a tiny aspirin tin, from which he took a pill. He stuck it in his mouth, swallowing with a grimace. Then he began to cry. And cough. And cry.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and handed him my bottle of water. He knocked it back, drinking half, and wailed anew.
“Igor!” I yelled. “Toughen up. I’m sorry about your opera singer, but what about my brother?”
But Igor was done talking. A strangled sound emanated from him, an unearthly noise, like someone screaming with a closed mouth, or the braying of a donkey — his head reared back and then he fell forward. Kingsley and I, on either side of him, reached for him, but he dropped from the bench to his knees and into a kind of seizure, his mouth foaming. A dark calm settled over me as I held onto one arm and felt Kingsley holding onto his other, and Gladstone, one paw on the man’s knee, howled. The four of us stayed like that for some moments, arms and legs entwined in a group hug there in the Plantation Garden, until the life drained out of one of us, and we were only three.
“Polonium for the customers,” I said, “but old-school cyanide pill for himself. Poor Igor.”
“Before you get all sentimental,” Kingsley said, “consider this: Spartak Volkov had Yaroslava Barinova killed because she jilted him. A slow death, so she could think on her sins. That’s what our Igor did. His life’s work. Just eat your trail mix and try not to romanticize assassins.” We were on the train back to London, side by side, now with Gladstone between us like a snoring armrest. Our adrenaline levels were returning to normal and our fingers and toes thawing.
If Igor’s death was operatic, its aftermath was not. Kingsley had me help him remove Igor’s green windbreaker, from which prints could be lifted.