Someone was behind the wheel of the Volvo parked down the street from the pharmacy known as the Faust House.
Gennady Filshin wished it were Michael Usher; carnivore capitalist extraordinaire. An American wolf in a business suit, waiting for Filshin’s improvised crime gang to deliver his prey to the window of his luxury car, just as if he were waiting for a triple espresso at a drive-in Starbucks back in Washington.
Watching the action unfold from inside a car would be Usher’s style. Filshin could even imagine him driving that ugly metal box.
When it came to cars, the man knew nothing. All that mattered was showing the world, especially here in the former communist countries, that he was well-heeled enough to drive the most expensive thing on the road. He even called his cars ‘bait’, teasing his prey, eastern European businessmen, by flaunting America’s wealth. ‘Let them see what happens when you make deals with the world’s strongest economy, Gennady.’ Usher didn’t even own the cars. He leased them for as much as some people back in Cleveland, Ohio paid on their monthly mortgage.
Filshin had enjoyed exasperating him by calling it showing off and just plain stupid, which invariably forced Usher to retreat into his standard rant on how the West worked, ‘It’s good for business, Gennady’.
Now what was good for business had taken Usher from driving ugly cars around Europe to ordering people killed.
If only the man in the Volvo were Usher. Then Filshin could take the whole B-roll melodrama his life had turned into and dump into in his lap where it belonged. But Michael B. Usher wouldn’t be foolish enough to risk his own skin by appearing in Prague at the exact time he had ordered Filshin to do this thing.
A big black poodle, its distractedowner reading the newspaper as he walked, stopped to sniff at the Volvo and urinated on a tire.
Filshin allowed himself a grin. Mephistopheles had appeared to Faust as a poodle. Perhaps Usher was here, after all. Disguised as a black poodle to remind him of his bargain. In the weird cloud-filtered orange evening sunlight the poodle’s eyes even glowed green, just as they had in the medieval Faust story.
He watched the dog pee. No, it was just an ordinary dog, and he was being foolish. But he couldn’t keep the chords of Gounod’s Faust from playing in his head. Heralding the evil to come.
Even the fall sky above looked like an opera set. The top edges of the cumulus thunderclouds were lined by golden orange light. Their bottoms, dark grey and heavy as lead, seemed undecided about whether to unleash a torrent, or to let the sun’s rays shine onto Prague’s cobbled streets.
Filshin sat ‘reading’ on a bench across the street from the pharmacy where Usher had arranged the hit on Pawlowski.
Pretending his reading was boring him, he laid down the DK guide to Prague, and watched the people walk by.
He hated this waiting, this having to be here, but he couldn’t trust his men to do this alone.
He had planned everything as well as could be done on short notice. An old personnel file from his time as a Blue Sky manager in Georgia had helped him to find the men… people he had rejected three years before.
The hiring process for the Filshin gang had veered between farce and Blue Sky Management Training 101 “How-Not-to-Hire” war story. In Georgia he had hoped he was hiring mere down-and-outers and not criminals. This time he rode the edge, hoping his new hires would step over the line, yet remain under his control. His men scared him. But if they did exactly as they were told, he might just pull this off without anyone getting hurt.
Because of time constraints, Usher had finessed the operational details. ‘A pharmacy will be perfect for this, Gennady. It will look like Pawlowski got in the way of a drug heist. End of story, problem solved.’
The pharmacy looked respectable enough. Damn that guidebook. Calling it the ‘Faust House’ was making him morose.
Filshin, as he assembled his team, had kept asking himself, why hadn’t Usher chosen a bank? Or a gas station where they could just drive by, shoot Pawlowski, and jump back onto the main road? Why this old building in the middle of Old Town with its winding cobble-stoned streets? Had Usher wanted to add another legend to the pharmacy’s chequered past? Christ, what was he? A criminal who plotted out his crimes like high art? It would have been funny in the cinema, but not in the here and now. Besides, he doubted Usher even knew who Faust was. If it wasn’t something he could earn money from, he wouldn’t care about the history of Prague, nor how the Faust House got its name.
The building’s supernatural history swirled through Filshin’s brain like Gounod’s melody.
You’re an engineer, he told himself. Think science. Science is the antidote for superstition and jitters.
During the Middle Ages people too lazy to study science often accused wise old women and men, the midwives, doctors and pharmacists who studied healing plants of being in league with the devil. Illness was God’s punishment for an intemperate life. Knowledge must be evil, they argued. If the knowledge came from God, we would all be born with it. Man had no business interfering.
In this new century the devil had been relegated to fairy tale; belief supplanted by science. Science had battled for centuries to rid itself of superstition, and for the most part it had won.
In the past alchemist pseudoscientists had become rich, right here in Prague, by claiming that belief (and a bit of funding) would let them change worthless metals into gold.
Belief was still letting people get duped.
Wasn’t that the real magic behind Usher’s success? No wasted years of studying chemical engineering, or developing new pharmaceuticals, just a little belief in the power of an expensive suit and a fancy car.
The Faust Pharmacy looked like any other old building in Prague’s Old Town, but science and belief had fought spectacular battles behind its thick walls.
During the reign of Elizabeth I of England, the guidebook said, an earless English alchemist named Edward Kelly had lived there. Kelly had promised Prague’s Rudolf II that he would find the Philosopher’s Stone and make more gold than the city could ever spend. Years of funding fruitless ‘experiments’ later, Rudolf was told by a traveling musician that the cutting off ears was an English punishment for fraud.
After finding Kelly a suitable retirement home in the Karlstein Castle dungeons, Rudolf began funding real, observation-based science, even bringing Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to his court. Their predictions of planetary position were published by Rudolf in the Tabulae Rudolphinae, copies of which were brought to England and used by Isaac Newton to develop his theory of gravitation.
Stopping Edward Kelly had been simple compared to stopping Michael B. Usher.
Leaking news of the Blue Sky barrels to the press wouldn’t work. Nothing tied Usher to the barrels, and something could point at Filshin. But Usher had to let his guard down sometime. Filshin would find something to warn the world… peeing poodles, missing ears, an article in the New York Times.
He wished the job was over, that he was back in Cleveland with Natasha sending out résumés and setting up interviews.
He wished he had never heard of Blue Sky or Michael Usher, but now he had to do this thing. If Usher asked someone else, one of his CIA friends, or an independent contractor, a mercenary who didn’t ask questions like a Russian soldier desperate for back wages, then Pawlowski really would die.
Natasha had decided he must go to Prague and do what he could to save the man. Let Usher think Pawlowski dead until they found a way out of their mess and could release him again.
If Usher wanted to play cowboy, Natasha had said, then someone had to be the Indian and lie down and pretend to die. That was the way Americans played the game.
How well she had adapted to their new homeland.
While Filshin had spent days being confused, she just ‘got it’.
“If you don’t agree to do this thing, Jenye, he will find someone else,” she had whispered late into the night, trying not to wake their children. The frightened tears beading
on her eyelashes and rolling down her cheeks trapped sparkles from the moonlight.
“Perhaps the police are different here. Perhaps we should go to them,” she suggested. But that too was frightening. The maze of competing jurisdictions was bewildering; the sheriffs, the city police, the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, Usher’s bosses at the CIA, or whoever he worked for now. How could Filshin know where to go, or who to trust? What would happen to the children if he guessed wrong? Would they have to go back to Russia before the girls finished their university degrees?
Only Natasha had seen through the confusion to the real problem. If Filshin didn’t go, Usher would hire someone else.
Everything would work out, Filshin had reassured her. It had been a long time since his army days, but he was still fit, and if he wasn’t worried, she shouldn’t be either.
The lie had made her laugh, so he laughed too. Then they made love like teenagers, like in the old days.
He had to do this. For his family, and for the man named Pawlowski.
He didn’t dare take a chance on the new crop of young east European hoodlums. They followed no rules. But his own hand-picked crew was every bit as unsavory as Edward Kelly. Some spoke no Russian, but they all had a few words of mangled English. Caspar, the German, was the only young one. The others were as old as Filshin himself. None were nice.
Popov, the bald-headed Russian, creeped him out the most, with his grinning, and his trying to sell Filshin red mercury, the oldest con in the book. Who did he think he was talking to? Just because Filshin had taken a job in the west, it didn’t mean he had left his brains behind. Popov was in his early fifties and hadn’t quite figured out that the New World Order had left Russia somewhere near the bottom. Popov ranted incessantly about well-funded, but unproductive American science and the superiority of Russian ingenuity. Funny, how he never exhibited any. It had escaped his notice that even criminal organizations needed occasional innovation, something beyond muscle, and old Soviet-style nomenklatura connections for their scams to fly.
“We’ll be partners, see? With your connections in America we’ll make a fortune,” Popov said, fishing for his smokes with prison-tattooed fingers. His yellow teeth slipped from view for a second then reappeared as his right hand, missing its index and middle fingers, lifted yet another fat brown cigarette to his wide smiling mouth and inhaled.
Right, Filshin thought, Russian scientific ingenuity was so superior that loggers in the Siberian gulag, where Moscow sent criminals like Popov, still lost fingers to frostbite. Even thieves deserved better.
Popov held his papirossa between his ring and little finger and used his thumb to flick the ashes. He left a trail on the hotel room carpet, as the Filshin gang made its plans. His rap was nonstop, like his grin. We Russians can do so much more with all that money. Russian scientists created red mercury with next to nothing, and look at what a marvel that is. Not only can red mercury initiate nuclear fission in a plutonium bomb the size of a grapefruit, but word on the street is, it can speed up supercomputer processors, increase the precision of missile guidance systems, improve aerial radar, and cool off atomic reactors.
Popov, the car thief, bragged about red mercury as only someone totally ignorant of the sciences could. Like an alchemist of old Prague boasting about turning lead into gold, he swore that red mercury could impregnate photocopied euros with authenticating watermarks. All for the bargain price of only $375,000 a kilo. Did he forget he was speaking to a fellow Russian?
Short, swarthy Mario, was a Camorristi on the lam since a Naples crackdown on the gangs that controlled the ciy’s garbage collection. He understood barely enough Russian to buy cigarettes, but his English wasn’t bad. With his American connections, wealthy cousins in New Jersey and New York, Mario would have made a better target for Popov, but he wasn’t buying either.
Caspar, tall and blonde like a Russian, was an ethnic German who spoke no German. Stalin had deported his great-grandparents from their village along the Volga to Kazakhstan. Inherited German citizenship gave him the much-coveted legal status to work in the EU, but Caspar lacked the education for anything other than manual labor. Deciding he was meant for better things than washing dishes, he turned to the underground economy and offered his services to the highest bidder, progressing from sex work on the streets of Hamburg, to drug pushing in Dublin. He had just finished smuggling two truckloads of semiautomatic rifles no longer needed by the Real IRA into Chechnya and was between jobs when Mario brought him to meet Filshin. Caspar’s charm and pleasant personality, legacies of his years in Ireland, unnerved Filshin. It was hard to keep himself from thinking about how well the very handsome Caspar would get along with his oldest daughter, who had a reputation for being difficult.
The only man Filshin could trust was Bogosian, the blue-eyed Armenian. Short, lean, and in his early forties, he had been a contractor who had managed a Blue Sky team in Georgia. Bogosian was perpetually broke, but always for the best of reasons. Most recently because he had used his Blue Sky paycheck to buy hepatitis serum to inoculate babies at the Azerbaijani government clinic in Baku. An Armenian saving Azeri babies because he had once dated an Azeri nurse who told him about the high infection rate in Azeri clinics; there was a lot to like about Bogosian. He made Filshin feel guilty for not sending money to fix that crumbling mess of a swimming pool in Kiev. Bogosian questioned what they were about to do, but he still hoped for a salaried position at Blue Sky, and Filshin let him believe this job was his ticket to America.
The sun disappeared behind clouds that threatened rain. Customers leaving the Faust House Pharmacy drew their jackets closed and pulled on gloves.
The Faust House was neither suspicious nor mysterious, he told himself. It was an ordinary pharmacy in an old building, The red cross hanging above the door was a signal that here scientific knowledge had banished superstition.
A blonde-haired man stood at the pharmacy door. Pawlowski?
Filshin took a photograph from his coat pocket. Yes.
The man undid the white silk scarf hanging around his neck and pulled it off. That was the sign.
Filshin tensed and speed-dialed his cell. He’s here, he texted.
Fifteen minutes to make the snatch. In a half an hour it would all be over.
Pawlowski stuffed his scarf into a pocket and went inside.
Filshin walked to the curb, waited for a break in traffic, and followed.
Inside, dark wood apothecary pigeonholes transmuted EU modernity into Austro-Hungarian quaintness. How many customer hands had it taken to smooth those dark brown countertop edges to beige, he wondered. The druggist stood behind the counter filling paper envelopes with pills, powders and teas, and chatted amiably.
The smell of herbal teas and soaps filled Filshin’s nostrils. A Cleveland drug store wouldn’t sell soap without plastic wrappers, and medicinal teas with their slim profit margins couldn’t be found in an American drugstore.
He felt as homesick as the American ex-pats riffling through the US candy display at the front of the shop, searching for a taste of home. What wouldn’t he give to be sharing a Malley’s chocolate shake with his America baby right now?
Filshin stayed by the window to watch the street.
His team would enter from the back alley where their van was parked.
Pawlowski put a Sports Illustrated and a Snickers bar on the counter.
“Děkuji,” the checkout girl said, and reached for his korunas with a plump hand.
Filshin watched the girl’s eyes fill with fear, as she looked over Pawlowski’s shoulder.
His team had arrived.
He willed his heart to beat more slowly.
You have no choice, Jenye. You have to do this thing.
The girl stiffened, and Pawlowski whirled around to look at the back door.
8 Prague