Risk by Colin Harrison

Author:Colin Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408811221
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

That night I watched Detroit beat the Yankees for the second night in a row. The team wasn’t hitting in the clutch. Only Jeter was consistent. And the middle relievers looked shaky. Like a lot of Yankee fans, I find my mood fluctuates with the fate of the team. And my mood was sour.

Then again, perhaps I was just trying to avoid thinking about Eliska Sedlacek and her exotically soft hand trailing down my middle-aged cheek. As she’d expected, her silky fingers had sent excited signals down the subway track to distant stations. But this wasn’t all that had gotten me worked up, no sir.

My wife reads in bed most nights, usually this month’s thriller of the decade, and after she’d happily tucked in, I slipped into my home office and got onto the Internet. I knew that Pravda, the Russian newspaper, maintained an English-language Web site, and I not so casually typed in Nikolai Gamov’s name. He seemed worth a Google, anyway—and, oh, boy, a story appeared, condensed from one originally published in the Seoul Herald. It explained that Gamov had been shot eight times and that a gun recovered at the scene was identified as “a Baikal,” a make manufactured in Russia. Gamov, the article noted, had been “suspected of illegal trading practices.”

I sat back in my chair, a little shocked. The girlfriend of a murdered Russian mobster wanted me to retrieve boxes of items he’d smuggled into America. Should I do it? Maybe not. Was I in real trouble? Maybe yes. I had to assume that whoever the miscreants were who killed Gamov knew about the smuggled items, in which case they might know about Eliska and might even know about me, too. Was this who had followed my taxi?

Think, George, I told myself. How can you help yourself, how can you dance away from possible ensnarement? I had an old school friend named Anthony G. who had dealt with matters like this. I could ask him. But it could take a while to reach Anthony. Meanwhile, I remembered Eliska claimed that Roger Corbett had no idea what was in the boxes she’d put in his apartment. Maybe this was true, maybe not. Either way, my investigation now took on added urgency. Did he know about Nikolai Gamov? Did he know that his new girlfriend had smuggled items and hidden them in his own apartment? Was Roger’s last call related to this arrangement? And how about the piece of paper Roger was studying the moment he died? Could Gamov’s name have been on it?

The question, I realized, then became who else had been talking with Roger in the last weeks of his life. I recalled that Dr. Greenfeld, the retired dentist to the stars whom I’d met in the print shop, had referred to a Charles Weaver in Queens as “the keeper of the secrets” of Roger’s father, and that Roger had tracked him down.

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