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He nods. “Okay.”
I’m still not convinced. “GHU have been working on this too long for you to fuck it up with your theatrics.”
“I said OKAY!” he shouts back at me.
I let him go, and, together, we exit the vehicle.
Mani walks up to the painted black door just ahead of me. Before I’ve come to a standstill, he’s pummeling his fist against it. “LAPD!”
He does not have to announce himself twice.
The door swings open, revealing a giant of a man. He has to be six-eight or nine, large enough that he looms over me. His head is big and square, cut close to the scalp. His shoulders are boxy. As he stands in the doorway, glaring down at us, he almost looks comical, like an oversized action man who’s been placed in aBarbiehouse against his will.
“Yes?”
“LAPD,” Mani repeats, holding up his badge. “We’re here to see Sascha.”
The Giant doesn’t say anything. He steps back into the club, leaving the door open for us to follow.
Mani and I step into the dark building side-by-side. The interior of the club is cool. As I stand just on the threshold, letting my eyes adjust, I absorb my surroundings. The first thing that hits me is the smell. It’s stale—cigarette smoke, spilled booze, and sweat—from yesterday’s partiers. I can hear the shuffling of feet and voices chattering low as staff move about, preparing quietly for the night ahead.
As my vision slowly adapts, I take in the huge square room with the circular dance floor right in the middle. Tables with black, leather furniture perimeter three sides of the square, and a long, granite bar lines the farthest side of the wall. The DJ booth hangs from a cage that is suspended from the ceiling above the dance floor. This is not a fantasy world, I think, comparing the dark grunginess of the Mousetrap to some of the lavish clubs I frequented years back. This is a cesspool.
“Come.” The Giant imparts another monosyllable.
We follow behind him as he leads us through the center of the dance floor, past the bar, to a door at the very back of the room.
It is irrational for me to be afraid.
I know that.
But when the Giant opens the door and a long, dimly lit hallway opens up to us, I feel my adrenaline spike. Restrooms sit off to the right. A stockroom sits to the left, behind the wall that backs the bar. In front of us, the hallway stretches. The grey walls are narrow, appearing to grow closer and closer together until they meet at asingle door at the end of the corridor. The door, unlike the muted tones of the rest of the interior, is gold.
When we come to the door, the Giant knocks.
Just once.
A single rap.
“Enter.” A voice sounds from within.
The henchman opens the door but does not step through. Instead, he waits for us to pass him, and then, without another word, softly closes us in, leaving us alone with Sascha.
“What?” Sascha leans back in his chair and kicks his feet up onto the desk, assessing us through eyes that are half-shut as if he doesn’t want us to see his pupils. His hands are interlinked and lie flat on his stomach. His feet, raised on the table, are booted in snakeskin. Behind him, painted red on the grey, concrete wall, is his calling card, a viper, its mouth open to strike, its body coiled, its tail pointed downwards like a knife or an arrow.
“We have some questions about a suspicious death,” Mani starts. Moving to one of the chairs on the other side of Sascha’s desk, he sits uninvited.
“I don’t know the guy,” Sascha says immediately.
I keep standing and begin a slow walk around the room, taking everything in as much as to snoop as to throw Sascha off. I keep my steps even and my hands tucked into my pockets. I am calm as I circle, but every cell in my body is alert. Ready.
The room is big and dark with no windows. All the light comes from a single chandelier that hangs in the center of the office. The floor is stained concrete. The desk is a classic antique meant to be a display piece. The carpet underneath the desk is tatty now, but once it was a new Persian rug that probably cost a pretty penny.There is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that runs the length of one side of the room.
Sascha Sokolov isn’t what you’d expect of a violent criminal. He has no looming physicality, no awe-inspiring presence that would ever earn him the nameGodfatherorGoodfellawere he the protagonist in a blockbuster film. Were Sascha cast in a film, he’d be called Rat or Tweak. He is short, maybe five-six. He is not attractive. He has pointed features and a good head of hair that he slicks back like he’s stuck in the eighties. But his dark, beady eyes are enough to strike fear into the most hardened of men. They don’tlookat you. They dissect you as if peeling away the layers to find whatever makes you most afraid.
Being in the same room as him makes me feel unclean.
It makes Mani angry. “Girl,” he says now, his voice razor-sharp.
