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“Despite what everybody says about you, Frank, on certain occasions, you can be a good guy.”
“I’m not asking what you’re going to do with it, because I don’t want to know.”
The green LED on Castillo’s handset went out.
“So long, Frank,” he said to the dead headset. “It’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”
He handed the headset to Lester, picked up his lobster fork, then glanced around the table. All eyes were on him.
“Anything wrong, Charley?” Aleksandr Pevsner asked with a smile. “You looked very unhappy while you were talking.”
“Nothing I can’t handle in the morning, Alek, when time will have taken the emergency liquid out of my system.”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought you knew that I never discuss serious things when I’ve been drinking.”
“Not even with family?”
“Especially not with this family,” Castillo said.
That earned him smiling lips and icy eyes from Pevsner.
When he looked at Sweaty, he knew she wouldn’t be smiling, and he expected to get the same icy glare from her blue eyes.
Instead, he got a faint smile—of approval, he realized with some surprise after a moment—and then, as he moved a chunk of lobster from a bowl of melted butter to his mouth, she groped him tenderly under the tablecloth.
The feeling of euphoria—or at least carnal anticipation—lasted until they were in their room. Castil
lo had waited maybe a second after Sweaty had gone into the bathroom before getting naked and under the sheets. He had been lying on his back with his fingers laced behind his head, waiting for her to join him, when his world crashed around him.
Epiphany!
Stop thinking with your dick, James Bond.
What you thought about good ol’ Alek is also true of Sweaty.
You can take the girl out of Russia, but only a fool thinking with his little head would believe you could take the SVR out of former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva.
The most important thing to any of them is family. And/or the Oprichnina.
And you are not family. And certainly not an Oprichnik.
They told me—and I believe it—that the way they’ve survived since Ivan the Terrible is by doing whatever was necessary. The translation of that is being as ruthless as necessary.
And she’s smart. God, is she smart! When Juan Carlos Pena wanted my nonexistent address in Uruguay, she came up with the Golf and Polo Club in the next breath.
Which means she had no trouble at all figuring out that I’m likely to pose problems in their current battle with their former comrades in the SVR. I told her I was going to make it clear to Pevsner that I wasn’t going to let him whack anybody without my permission. And when I got into it with Pevsner just now . . .
“I never discuss serious things when I’ve been drinking.”
“Not even with family?”
“Especially not with this family.”
. . . it had to be obvious to her that I was not going to be a good little boy and do whatever Wise ol’ Uncle Alek thinks I should do.
So what to do about that? They can’t whack me—although that remains a possibility for the future—because right now they need me.
