I took a second to recalibrate at the unexpected introduction of Katrina. “How could he have known that? And who did he say it was?”
“I should be more precise. He didn’t say he knew who it was, just that he’d deduced their existence from the effect their activities produced. He also asked me to discover whether anything was amiss with an orphanage in Kiev.”
“Anything amiss? An orphanage in Kiev!” Apparently I had decided to repeat everything he said to me. I tried to stop doing that and grabbed onto the only question that came to mind. “Was he from there? Where is Kiev? Russia?” My education had some unexpected black spots, and geography was one of them.
He gave me one of his pitying looks. “It’s in the Ukraine. I know that he was persona non grata in Kiev, in fact in the whole of the country, and couldn’t go there himself to investigate. He felt that his friend, this other priest, had been killed deliberately, not in a simple traffic accident.”
I abandoned the orphanage. “But the Internet—”
“Of limited value in this case, Theophania. The orphanage certainly has a website with some photos of the staff and a discussion of their—er—mission I think they call it.”
“Did Sergei want you to go to Kiev?” I said blankly. “That seems like a lot to ask.”
“He hoped to persuade me. However, I am also persona non grata in Ukraine. He did not know that.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at him. Honestly, I was having trouble with all of this. I had always thought he’d had a fairly significant but boring job as a senior civil servant, and occasionally, and in an amateur sort of way, did small jobs for the Foreign Office.
“Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea, modern day Kiev is like Mos Eisley.” He paused and then quoted unexpectedly, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
I did a mental stutter; I thought the only movies he watched had subtitles. I recognized the reference because Ben had an unexpected inner geek and he insisted that the Star Wars movies were as important to western culture as the Greek myths.
Grandfather pulled on his earlobe and looked into the middle distance. “That is Kiev. Agents of the Russian government, anti-Russian forces, assassins—”
“Assassins!”
“Car bombs, weapons trafficking, poison—”
“Poison!” I was reeling, and apparently back to repeating him.
“The city is like the old Wild West in America. Being a journalist, opposing Russian influence, criticizing the government, being any kind of activist—they are all extremely risky. People die simply for offending the wrong people. In any event, I cannot go there, and I told Sergei as much when we had finished our disagreement and begun to talk. He was very disappointed.”
“What was supposed to be wrong with the orphanage in Kiev? Were they dealing in black-market adoptions or something?”
“He was concerned that someone might be relaying funds to anti-Russian forces using the orphanage as a cover. Or that possibly it was some kind of money laundering operation—” He sighed. “It’s difficult to know. And now that he’s gone, we may never know. When he realized I really couldn’t help him, he was less forthcoming. He implied that something that was supposed to be happening at the orphanage was not happening.” He frowned and made an impatient gesture.
“I know a little something about an orphanage there. It’s called St. Olga’s,” I said, happy to have something to contribute to an increasingly bewildering conversation.
“Indeed, Theophania?”
I nodded. “Gavin Melnik visited there fairly recently. He said Katrina was its benefactor, and she was concerned that the orphanage was spending more money than it should. Gavin reported back that, as far as he could tell, everything checked out, but he isn’t a-a forensic accountant or anything. If Sergei thought St. Olga’s was the orphanage connected to Katrina’s death, shouldn’t we do something? Try to find out—”
“Under no circumstances, Theophania. This is far above our, er, pay grade. If his priest friend did not die accidentally, Sergei’s is the third murder associated with whatever is happening there. It is certain to be extremely dangerous and, as I said, very difficult if not impossible to investigate. An investigation of that scope requires resources and manpower. Now,” he said in a very different tone of voice, “I heard Mrs. Munn arriving at the back door. No doubt she has been to the shops. Shall I have her make us some tea?”
“There must be something we can do,” I insisted. “We don’t have to go to Kiev; we could probably find out at least some of what we need to know here, where Katrina and Sergei were killed.”
He didn’t respond but went off to speak to Mrs. Munn, who, sure enough, produced a steaming teapot and some slices of cake in short order.
I dutifully poured cups of tea and doled out cake slices for a couple of minutes before I raised the issue again. “What about the members of your ex-spies group? Can they find out anything—surely they must have contacts in Kiev?”
He made a thoughtful grimace. “It’s possible.” He sipped his tea and carefully examined his slice of cake without adding anything.
“Please, Grandfather! You know Lichlyter is going to find out you own that hoof pick, and don’t you want to find out who killed Sergei?”
He smiled at me.
“What?”
“You are apparently not considering that I might have killed Sergei myself.”
I recalibrated again. “Oh. Right,” I said blankly. “It did occur to me when I saw your hoof pick.” He gave me an approving look. “Did you? Kill him, I mean.”
“No, my dear, I didn’t.” He pursed his lips and gave me a searching look. “I’ll have a word, Theophania, with one or two of our members and see if they feel comfortable talking to us.”
The “us” gave me a little bit of a glow, and I had to be content with that. I flopped down onto his sofa. “This has been a very weird day,” I said, and then remembered something I should tell him. “When I got here, The White Cliffs of Dover was on the floor.”
He lifted the painting, looking it over front and back, then opened the safe, glanced inside, and shifted a couple of things aside. He shut it again, replacing the painting much as I had.
“Is everything where it should be?”
He nodded. “Everything.” He bit his lip. “Do you remember the combination, Theophania?”
“I wrote it down and put it in my safe deposit box, but I don’t know it offhand.”
“It’s your Great Uncle Teddy’s investiture date. Can you remember that?”
“Um, not really.”
He gave me what I could only describe as a pitying look. “Let’s find something simpler for the time being. We’ll reset it to”—he hesitated—“the name of the magazine where you sold your first photograph.”
“How do you remember that?”
I got another look. “I don’t, Theophania, but I assume that you do?”
“Yes of course.” He stepped aside and I reset the electronic lock. “It’s—”
He stopped me with shake of his head and handed me the small agenda and gold pen he’d withdrawn from his pocket. I wrote down the name, he glanced at it, then ripped off the part of the page where I’d scribbled the name and tore it into small pieces before placing half the pieces in his pocket and burying the others in the soil of a large potted aspidistra. Obviously, I’d been cavalier all my life, just tossing things into the recycling.
He opened the front door and stared at it for a moment, in much the same way as Lichlyter had, and then down at the spotless front step. “How long had you been here before I arrived, Theophania?”
“Just a few minutes. Why?”
He smiled at me. “No special reason.”
After we finished our tea, I headed back to Aromas, handing over another small fortune in cab fare. It occurred to me that, while I couldn’t fly to Kiev, I had my own computer hacker; maybe Haruto could find out if anything was odd or wrong about St. Olga’s. If he found anything questionable, I could follow up with Gavin.
I telephoned him an hour later as I followed Lucy around the Gardens. I could hear Gar Wood yowling in the background.
“Haruto—seriously, doesn’t that cat ever shut up?”
“Says the owner of the worst-tempered dog in San Francisco.”
“Okay, fair point. Would you do a bit of research for me?”
“Sure, what d’you need?”
“It may involve getting into the financials of a nonprofit in Eastern Europe.”
“I can do that. If I find anything I’ll tell them I can break their firewall and they need better security.”
“I need you to find what you can about an orphanage in Kiev. That’s in Ukraine,” I added self-consciously. “It’s called St. Olga’s. Maybe start with their website, and see if that gives you any leads to information about their finances—maybe nonprofits over there have to report their donations to the government like here—the number of kids they have, news items from when they opened. And contact information—telephone numbers, e-mails; anything you can find.”
“Okay, that all?”
I thought for a minute. “No, one more thing. See if you can find anything about a priest dying in Kiev in the past couple of months.”
He nodded. “Interesting,” he drawled. “Okay, done and done. I’ll see what I can find tonight.”
I was at home when Haruto texted at five the next morning, saying to find him when I woke up. I left Lucy asleep on the bed, walked down the back staircase of the building—a second way out in case of earthquakes—and knocked on his back door.
“Jesus, Theo—what are you doing awake at this hour?” He was wearing a blue and white kimono jacket over jeans and tatami sandals. Gar Wood was pushing her head between his ankles, vocalizing as usual. Do all Siamese sound like crying babies? I don’t know how Haruto puts up with it.
“Hi, Gar,” I said, and gave her chin a token obeisance, after which she shut up and stalked away. “Can’t sleep. What’s up? Got any more of that?” I inhaled the coffee smell from the mug in his hand.
“Sure. Don’t tell Nat.” He poured coffee into another mug and handed it to me on his way to getting a carton of half-and-half from the fridge.
“So what’s up?” I said, blowing on my coffee.
“Come inside. I have something to show you.”
I’d slipped off my shoes and left them by the door. He’d never said anything about this little shoe-shedding ritual, but there was a small shoe rack by the door with his shoes on it, and a couple of pairs of sandals for guests, so it seemed only polite to follow his example. I liked his place; he shared my aesthetic, which is to say, there wasn’t much in it. We had never discussed religion, but I think he was a Buddhist. He had turned his smaller bedroom into a meditation space, with tatami mats and a noren curtain painted with mountains replacing the door. Almost the only furniture in the rest of his apartment were a large antique tansu chest against the wall opposite the fireplace, and a handful of legless chairs on the beautifully finished hardwood floors. He had done the refinishing here, and in my flat, in exchange for a break on the rent. I knew his second bedroom was full of blinking, high-tech equipment, but he kept the door closed, so nothing disturbed the serenity of the apartment.
He draped himself onto one of the chairs, put his coffee on the floor, and picked up his laptop. It looked almost miniature in his big hands. “I started by looking for a priest who’d died or disappeared, and I found two.”
That was a jolt. Truthfully, I hadn’t really expected him to find anything.
“Who were they?”
“I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but the first one, six months ago, was Yaroslaw Hryhorenko. He was in his eighties, and he died of pneumonia. He’d been parish priest at the same church for, like, fifty years; his death and funeral made the local papers.”
“Who was the other one?”
“His name was Artem Ponomarenko. Killed in a hit-and-run a couple of months ago. No witnesses; no one was ever charged.”
“Was he a parish priest, too?”
“Nope. He was secretary to the local bishop, which is a bigger deal than it sounds, apparently.”
“Wow. Poor Sergei.”
“No, his name was Artem.”
“I meant, I’m pretty sure he was the friend of a friend, and the friend’s name was Sergei.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead, too.”
“Okaaay. Anyway, they were the only two in the last year.”
“Right. What’s next?”
He grinned. “The first thing to know is that I’m good, really good, at breaking through firewalls.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“The second thing to know is that I would never expect an orphanage, even one in Eastern Europe, to bury their data and bounce it all over the world with fake IP addresses.”
“Wow. Truly?”
“I got there in the end, but whoever did this has something to hide.”
“So what did you find out?”
“On the surface everything looks legit. Without mad skills”—he grinned at me again—“no one looking at it would have any idea things aren’t what they look like. They bank online. Money comes in; money goes out, and it’s spent on what you’d expect: food, the light bill, books, stuff like that.”
“But?”
“The accounts are phony. There’s no there, there.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. The orphanage exists; it must have bills to pay. Where’s the money going?”
“Still don’t know. And that’s not all. I’m not sure where the money’s coming from, either. That’s where things start bouncing around.” He shook his head. “It looks like simple bank transfers, but—it’s not.” He shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you. I’ll keep looking if you want. The only trouble is, if I haven’t already, it might set off a red flag somewhere. After a while, when I realized things weren’t kosher, I used a sniffer program to help me avoid notice, but before that…” He shrugged again. “Not sure.”
“Who would know how to set up something like this? I mean, is it the Pentagon, or some kid in his mum’s basement?”
“It took some serious skill, but I could do most of what I’ve seen so far. It could be one person.”
“Or a small government program? Like, I don’t know, a bunch of spies?”
“I suppose…”
And I knew how to find a bunch of spies.