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“We’re looking for a woman,” he said. “Thirty years old. Good looking. She’s a professional killer. Does she work for you?”
“No.”
“Did any of your people recently commit suicide?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’d better take good care,” Cartwright said good-naturedly. “She seems to think those diamonds belong to her. She likes to kill people by making it look like a suicide.”
“Suicide is a sin,” he said.
“So Matt Pennington is in hell?” I said.
“Pennington?” Bogdan almost pulled off the blindfold but didn’t. Maybe it was a survival mechanism. He knew who Cartwright was, but not me. The fewer faces he saw, the better his chances he might get to live.
“You know him?”
“I’ve heard the name,” Bogdan said.
“Do you use him?” Cartwright asked.
The Russian shook his head. “He works with the Zetas. Our partners are Sinaloa. I’m telling you what I heard. He’s a good fence. Patient. Discreet.”
I said, “Now he’s got a lot of time to be patient because somebody hung him from a doorknob with a necktie. My bet is the woman did it.”
Bogdan spoke some words in Russian. The expletives weren’t difficult to translate.
Cartwright loosened the handcuffs and put the cold pack in Bogdan’s hands so he could hold it in place across his nose. His wrists were bruised from where I had notched up the cuffs.
Ed eased himself onto the bench beside me. For the first time, I saw his notebook. He had been sketching the tats on the Russian’s chest.
“Bogdan doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the woman. He doesn’t know what his bosses were going to do with the rough. I believe him. Probably give it to one of the cartels for drugs or to settle debts. You can move diamonds easily. They hold their value in cross-border transactions. They can’t be traced back to the source.”
Suddenly Abba was singing “Dancing Queen.”
It took a few seconds for me to realize it was a ringtone. By that time, Cartwright had taken away the cold pack and pulled the cellphone from Bogdan’s pants. He placed it in his bound hands. Then he produced a Beretta Storm subcompact pistol and ran it across to the man’s face before nudging it into his crotch.
“You’re going to answer, Bogdan, and you’re going to be a good little commie. Remember…” The phrase that followed sounded like Ya gavaryu pa roosky.
The meaning was clear enough: I speak Russian.
Abba stopped singing and Bogdan said, “Da?”
He listened and answered with more words, many more, but Cartwright didn’t seem perturbed.
“I found the Indian.” Bogdan switched to English. “He fought pretty well for an old man but I got him…”
Cartwright winked at me as we listened to unintelligible chirping from the other end of the conversation.
“No, I didn’t kill him. He didn’t have the diamonds. He thinks we have them, that Peralta is working for us…”
More from his interlocutor.
“I believe him. Peralta is working for himself and he has them…” His face reddened. “You don’t tell me what to do! We know where to find the Indian. He’s not our problem…I know it’s fifteen-fucking-million!”
Then he switched back to Russian and the conversation went back and forth for another two or three minutes. Cartwright listened carefully but never removed the pistol from the Russian’s jewels.
After the phone went dead, Cartwright holstered his weapon and returned the cold pack to Bogdan, who once again held it against his nose with two cuffed hands.
