33

FOOLS RUSSIAN… I MEAN, RUSH IN

There were six people living in that scary-ass house, three men and three women, but from what I could tell, the only one who regularly left it during the day was Greg Apraxin, the husband of the house’s registered owner, Mila Apraxin. It was Greg who fetched the mail, bought groceries and household sundries, delivered and received dry cleaning, visited greenhouses, picked up the occasional takeout meals, and took a laptop to various eateries that offered a wireless carrier. Much of his online activity seemed to consist of buying and selling stocks.

Was it possible that young women had been killed in divination ceremonies just so that someone could invest in the stock market wisely? I put a pin in that one. Well, more like a knife, actually. I put a very sharp knife in that one.

Greg didn’t smell of dillweed. If he had, I might have killed him then and there. In fact, Greg smelled of a subtle and no-doubt-expensive aftershave. He was a handsome man, reaching middle age and using good tailoring to hide his expanding waistline and a beard to hide his incipient double chin. His tailor-made suits were cream-colored or white, his shirts a soft yellow or light blue, and he always wore suits, though he didn’t have an official day job as far I could tell.

Greg was popular with waiters and waitresses and clerks. He had a sunny smile and chatted and twinkled and laughed frequently and tipped well.

Knowing what I knew, his act seemed obscene. Tula and I followed him in shifts, only letting each other nap while everyone in the Apraxin household was on site.

Another man left the house at night. I didn’t know his name, but this individual was extremely fit and well trained. He was dressed all in black, though not in some Hollywood version of a burglar outfit, and he moved through the unlit yards of the surrounding neighborhood like a ghost. I’m not sure I would have been able to tail him if I hadn’t had the ability to follow his scent trail.

I never got closer to him than three hundred feet.

The man was clearly making security rounds, checking neighborhood houses for any signs of unusual activity, occasionally even climbing on rooftops and lying down on sloped surfaces beneath outcroppings. Maybe checking to see if anyone was following him, maybe looking for good sniper positions.

The third man in the house never left it. He was a small old fellow, though his movements seemed spry enough. I saw him only through windows.

As for the three women, they occasionally left the house during the day to do landscaping. One of them was old and gray; one of them was dark-haired, middle-aged, and beautiful; and one of them was young and fair. At night, they traveled down to the sparse woods behind their home unescorted, wearing nothing but bikini-style sash wraps against the cold and damp. I don’t know if they were magically protected against the cold somehow or if they were just that hard-core.

It made sense that the men didn’t participate in these ceremonies. Russian male and female witches, vedmak and vedma, don’t work well together. The men in the household were clearly servants, not peers.

There was something odd about some of the trees in those woods too. I took some pictures of them via a telephoto lens and asked Tula to see what she could find out about them. As it turned out, Tula didn’t have to ask anyone.

“They are Russian olive trees.”

“I thought olives only grew…” I began.

“They are not real olives,” Tula said impatiently. “The… I guess you would call them fruit… just sort of look like them.”

“So those trees were transplanted here?” I said thoughtfully.

“I would guess so.” Tula’s broad face scrunched in on itself. “Does that matter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you know anything about Russian witches and sacred groves?”

Tula tried. “Don’t witch covens have to have thirteen members?”

“That’s just a superstition.” And it was. Judas was the thirteenth person at the Last Supper. Satanists or some wannabe witches might care about that kind of thing, but not the real thing, and certainly not vedma. They predated Christianity in Russia.

Tula walked off. “Let me know when it’s time to kill someone.”

Her comment about the number of witches got me thinking, though. There is a very specific and powerful type of Russian coven that gathers in threes. I was beginning to suspect that I was dealing with a Baba Yaga.

Not the Baba Yaga in the popular children stories—the evil old witch who rode around on a broom and lived in a house that walked around on stilt legs. I mean the Baba Yaga of the older stories; the Baba Yaga who was never one witch but three. Baba Yaga wasn’t their name, it was their title, though a lot of people get confused about that because they called each other sister.

And in all of the old stories, Baba Yaga had a penchant for abducting children.

The next morning, I followed Greg Apraxin into a coffee shop. It was the closest I’d gotten to him physically. I was dressed in a suit just like he was, though mine was darker, and also carrying a laptop. When his coffee was almost empty, I walked into an alcove outside the restrooms and took out a cell phone that Carl had given me and pretended to text into it.

As soon as Greg left to get another cup of coffee, I walked to his table and sat down, taking pictures with the cell phone I was pretending to stare absently at. I got a shot of his screen and the transparent stickers with product information that were still on the corners beneath his keyboard. It only took a few seconds.

Greg still hadn’t turned around when I got up. I proceeded as if I were taking in my surroundings for the first time and acted abashed.

“Sat down at the wrong table,” I explained shamefacedly to the two neighboring women who were watching me. Then I held up my cell phone. “Damn things eat brains.”

They laughed good-naturedly and agreed, and I went back to my own table and laptop and resumed reading up on the half-remembered stories that had made me suspect I was dealing with a Baba Yaga in the first place.

In a lot of the old fables, the Baba Yaga has three male servants called horsemen. Keep in mind that in those days, in that time, “horsemen” could mean anything from cavalry officer to chauffeur to groom to valet to messenger. One of the Baba Yaga’s horsemen was called Day and dressed brightly. Another was called Night and dressed in black. And the third was called Sun and dressed in red colors.

I thought about that. If the three women were the real power in that house, then Greg Apraxin could be considered their day servant. He was the public face of the household, a pleasant and sociable man who interacted with the public and did their day-to-day errands.

The man who was sneaking out among their neighborhood at night could be considered their night servant. He moved like a man with martial training and probably did the things that the vedma wished kept secret, unsavory acts of darkness.

But what function did that old man who never left the house serve? What the hell would a Sun Horseman do? And if the stories were just allegories about nature and had no relation to real Russian witches or how some of them organized or operated at all, where was the horseman called Moon?

I stood up while I was thinking about it. Greg Apraxin had taken his coat off while he was typing, and I still had to get a look at what was in his wallet.