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I REMEMBERED THE Lefortovo District from my last time in Moscow. Dinara Orlova and I had encountered Madame Agafiya, the proprietor of a brothel, in the impoverished quarter when we’d been on the trail of an old friend of hers. Not much had changed since my last visit and daylight showed more of the neighborhood’s flaws. The tall blocks that dotted the area were crumbling and covered in graffiti. Discarded food containers, empty bottles, nitrous canisters, and needles were scattered in the gutters. This rundown area was once intended by the Soviets to be a residential utopia. It had forgotten once capitalism reached Russia, then left to deteriorate by politicians who saw no benefit in restoring the old place.
The bakery was on Fadeyeva Street, a road of dilapidated apartment blocks and empty shops. Most of them had been boarded up, including the old bakery, a single-story detachedbuilding about the size of a tennis court that lay between two low-rise apartment blocks. The place would once have been a community hub, providing bread and sweet pastries to the neighborhood, but now it was still and silent, slowly decaying like the buildings around it.
West parked in a spot in front. As he took off his helmet, I pulled up next to him.
“No sign of the Red Man,” he said.
“Let’s take a look around,” I suggested, removing my helmet.
He nodded and we dismounted. We walked along the potholed road, crossed the broken sidewalk, and I followed him down the driveway that ran between the bakery and the adjacent block.
We entered an open space that must have been the old delivery yard. There was a set of steel double doors that looked newer than the rest of the building. Mesh covered the rear windows, but even so some of the panes behind the protective metal grilles were cracked and broken.
Weeds were growing in the yard, particularly around an ancient bakery truck that stood on bricks.
“Any sign of the Red Man?” West asked, and I shook my head.
The yard was overlooked on three sides by a trio of five-story apartment blocks with small square windows. Most were dirty, some were cracked, and a few looked as though they were about to come away from their frames.
A booming voice shouted something in Russian and I turned to see a huge man with a thick head of red hair and a matchingbushy beard yelling at us from the ground-floor window of the apartment beside the driveway.
“I think that’s our Red Man,” I remarked.
“He’s not happy,” West said, before replying in Russian.
The man’s mood softened at the sound of West’s words, and we walked over.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“I told him we need bread,” he replied.
A three-feet-high fence separated the driveway from a narrow stretch of scrubland beside the block, and we stopped beside it.
“Americans?” the Red Man asked.
He was bare-chested, giving off a wild, unstable vibe.
“How can you tell?” West asked.
“Your clothes. Your accent. You never get it quite right,” he replied. “How is it I can do Alabama,” he said in a perfect Mobile accent, “but you folks can never nail Moscow?”
West scoffed. “Maybe we don’t eat enoughpelmeni?”
The Red Man reverted to his Russian accent. “Start eating more. Then you grow up big and strong like me.”
He stood tall, revealing that he was naked. I was glad when he leant against the windowsill again.
“You’re not here for bread, little American liar. You were sent to collect a vehicle,” he remarked. “I received a message.”
West nodded and the Red Man tossed him a set of keys.
“The small key is for the door. The other is for the Volkswagen Transporter. There are three in there. Take the blue one. It has what you need in the back. There is an inventory in the glove box. Make sure you close the door when you leave.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No need,” he replied. “Now be ready because I’m going to swear at you in Russian.”
And he did. Loudly and violently, obviously for the benefit of his neighbors. Nothing like hiding in plain sight.
