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“Not a problem, Miss Bogdanovich. We have trained the security staff of the Royal Aztec. You may rest assured on that score. And did I mention that the Grand Cozumel is going to pick up your bill at the Royal Aztec to make up a little for any inconvenience we may have caused?”
“How kind of you!”
[SEVEN]
Penthouse A
The Royal Aztec Table Tennis and Golf Resort and Casino
Cozumel, Mexico
1130 21 June 2007
When she had looked around Penthouse A, which occupied half of the twenty-second floor of the Royal Aztec, and found it satisfactory, Agrafina Bogdanovich thanked the Royal Aztec’s general manager and sent him on his way.
Then she unpacked, took a shower, and put on what she thought of as her itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikini and her sunglasses and went onto the balcony of the suite. She saw that a steam table had been set up, and resting above the bubbling waters thereof was a silver bowl. She lifted the lid, sniffed appreciatively of the borscht it contained, replaced the lid, and started to pull a chair up to the table.
She was in the act of opening a bottle of Dos Equis cerveza when she sensed eyes on her. She looked and saw a head looking at her over the colored-glass partition that separated the balcony of Penthouse A from that of Penthouse B.
“That’s borscht I smell, isn’t it?” the man inquired.
“It’s none of your goddamned business what it is, you goddamned perverted Peeping Tom,” Agrafina said, and threw the bottle of Dos Equis at him.
She missed, the bottle striking the glass partition instead. It shattered. The Peeping Tom fled his balcony.
Ten minutes later, her door chime went off. The general manager stood there. So did three bellmen. One of them held two dozen long-stemmed roses. A second held a silver dish with a pound of caviar in it, resting on a bed of ice. The third held an ice-filled bucket and a two-liter bottle of Stolichnaya vodka.
“Miss Bogdanovich, I come bearing these small gifts from your neighbor…”
“Señor Peeping Tom, you mean? I was led to believe I would be left alone to recover from the unfortunate incident in Las Vegas—”
“What unfortunate incident was that, my dear Miss Bogdanovich?”
“I’d rather not talk about it. And I barely had time to settle myself when this Mexican Peeping Tom intrudes on my privacy—”
“Actually, he’s Russian, not Mexican, Miss Bogdanovich.”
“Okay. Russian Peeping Tom. What do you mean, he’s Russian?”
“He’s from Greater Sverdlovsk—”
“That’s just Sverdlovsk, not Greater Sverdlovsk,” Peeping Tom said from behind the bellman with the long-stemmed roses. “And I’m actually from Kiev, not Greater Sverdlovsk.”
“And did you have a mother in Kiev?”
“Of course I had a mother in Kiev. May she rest in peace.”
“And she didn’t teach you not to leer at strange women in itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikinis while they are trying to recover from certain unpleasant things that happened to them in Las Vegas?”
“It was my nose that got me in trouble,” Peeping Tom said.
“You weren’t leering at me with your nose!”
“Your borscht smelled just like the borscht my sainted mother, may she rest in peace, used to make for me in Kiev. I got carried away.”
r /> “It’s pretty good borscht, I’ll admit that. What did you say your name was?”
“Grigori Slobozhanin,” he said, and then: “To hell with it! My real name is Sergei Murov.”
