excerpt
Lona Rabinovitch returned alone in a good mood to her hotel room after her outing with Sergey Ivanovich, the guy from Kazan. It had all been a rush job—zip around the Beryozka store for cartons of cigarettes, French cheeses, brandy, then have the acquiescent Sergey—he really was sweet—take her by taxi to the apartment of her Moscow accomplice to pick up a number of items, as previously arranged, for transit.
Sergey proved a loyal and tenacious bodyguard—it was a stroke of her typically wonderful luck that he had been available as an escort because she hadn’t wanted to visit Krov’s apartment without protection. On the previous occasion in Moscow when she had to do her business with him in the street, he had grabbed her arm savagely and had not been intimidated by the many spectators or the street police. Really, he knows I would never expose his black market scam, she thought. So he’s got me over a barrel.
“Comrade Krov, you scare me,” she said aloud before realizing that even in this dingy hotel room infrequently used by western visitors, there might be microphones. She shushed herself but continued to hum.
Her list, written in a kind of shorthand in her black book had been drawn up by the consortium in New York. The men that ran this profitable importing scheme had also provided her with a list of contacts, hired hands who would find objects fast, or who already had them for easy sale, though how any one of those friendly, entrepreneurial guys had ever got connected with a creep like Krov, she couldn’t understand.
As it was, she had taken on smuggling an additional item out of the Soviet Union, purely because she had fallen in love with it. Now she pulled it out of her purse. It was a small icon, St. John Chrysostom, …
Libros Libertad 