When Christmas Comes by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Published: 2021-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

12

“It’s like some sort of horror-movie version of a fairy tale,” Victoria told him. “She was like a princess locked in the evil wizard’s tower.”

Winter made only a murmured sound as he pored over the documents. Victoria had printed them out and spread them over every space she could find. The public defender’s office on the second floor of the county courthouse was not exactly expansive. Two desks close together, a whiteboard on one wall, and an outer alcove for the assistant; that was all there was. Now almost all of it was buried under documents.

The descriptions on the pages were terse. The language was bland federal officialese. There was not much detail, and whole pages were blacked out—redacted to use the DC term. But Victoria was right: as Winter read them, what came into his mind was the book he had seen in the school library, the book Jennifer had written and illustrated for the children, the fairy tale about the ghost in the tower.

Jennifer’s real name, it turned out, was Anya Petrovna. She had been kidnapped from her school in Kiev at the age of sixteen. She had been brought to the United States and essentially imprisoned in a mansion hidden in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles. A security guard informed her she was now the property of Mikhail Oblonsky. Oblonsky was a former KGB agent who had gone gangster after the Soviet Union fell. Ultimately, he had taken over the West Coast branch of the Russian mafia.

There was a photo of Oblonsky on one of the pages. He was a three-hundred-pound monster. His hairy body was covered with tattoos. His face was something like the face of a jungle god carved out of stone. His acts of violence were legendary. His enemies didn’t die, they vanished, leaving nothing behind but whispered stories about the intricate torments they had suffered before the light of life went out.

But Oblonsky hadn’t brought Anya to America for himself. She was a gift for his son, Grigor. There was a photo of Grigor in the documents too. He was young and muscular, also hairy, also tattooed. He had a head shaped like a wedge, thick at the brow, pointed at the chin. His face was the face you would see if you had a nightmare about a Russian gangster. He was savage, certain, dead-eyed. When Oblonsky’s enemies vanished, it was Grigor who arranged the vanishing. He enjoyed his work. The screaming made him laugh.

But Grigor was a worry to his father. He was wild. He was also stupid. He took drugs. He talked too much. He slept around. There were rumors that not everyone he slept with was, strictly speaking, female. There were rumors that some of these not-female bed partners had also vanished after they tried to blackmail Grigor by threatening to tell his father.

His father did not believe these rumors, except deep in his heart where he did believe them. He decided what Grigor needed was to settle down with a good virgin bride from the homeland.

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