Red Templar by Paul Christopher Page A

Bondarenko. He paused again. “Just in case you and your friends are going through Belarus I’ll throw in the transit visas for nothing—it’s just a stamp.”
    “Thanks,” answered Holliday. “If that’s everything, why don’t you get your credit card swiper and we’ll let you get to work.”
    “No problem,” said the Ukrainian with a pleasant smile. “I can do it myself.”
    “No, you can’t,” said Holliday. And he wasn’t smiling at all.
    *  *  *
    At six thirty-one that evening the three men carrying the passports and transit visas of Michael Enright, Simon Toyne and Andre Belekonev left the city of Odessa on Russian Railways train number twenty, the Pivdenny Express fast train to St. Petersburg. Thirty-four hours later, they arrived in the city of the czars.
    Less than twelve hours after their departure, Gennadi Bondarenko and his girlfriend, Natasha Bohuslava Shtokalo, were found brutally murdered and their apartment ransacked. Bondarenko had been tortured savagely before he’d been killed by a bullet to the back of the head, and
gaspazha
Shtokalo had been raped a number of times before receiving the same treatment.
    In a statement to the press, Odessa colonel of
militsiya
Yuriy Fedorovych Kravchenko stated that Gennadi Bondarenko was a well-known member of the criminal establishment and the murders were clearly gang related. In addition, robbery might well have been a motive, since there was some evidence that Bondarenko dealt in large amounts of cash. There had also been rumors that Bondarenko might have been soliciting for
gaspazha
Shtokalo’s services as a prostitute, although that had not as yet been confirmed.
    When queried, Colonel of
Militsiya
Kravchenko said that neither he nor his lead investigators had any expectations of making any arrests in the near future; nor did he care. The prosecutor’s office had no interest in going forward with the investigation and he didn’t either. As the policeman bluntly put it: “The deaths of these two people simply means that there are two fewer criminals on the streets of the Odessa Oblast.”

9
    Genrikhovich lived in an old five-room apartment in a nineteenth-century stucco building on Nevsky Prospekt not far from the train station and the Hermitage. By old-fashioned Soviet standards it was lavish, sharing a bathroom and toilet with only one other apartment and having a kitchen of its own.
    The apartment had apparently been assigned to his grandfather by the local party committee shortly after the revolution. His grandfather, curator of the Hermitage’s Treasure Gallery, raised Genrikhovich’s father there, and he in turn passed it along to his son.
    Genrikhovich’s wife had fled for greener pastures after the fall of the USSR in 1991, and Genrikhovich had lived alone in the apartment ever since. The furniture was of the large, dark, Victorian variety, the chairs old, worn and comfortable, the lamps fringed. There were books everywhere, and where there weren’t books there were paintings, mostly small and gilt framed, some with their own little lamps and virtually all of them horticultural or seascapes.
    Genrikhovich excused himself and left the apartment to use the toilet facilities. Holliday wandered around the living room while Eddie sank gratefully into a plump, overupholstered chair.
    Holliday checked out the bookcase and frowned. Like the paintings, many of the books were about horticulture and the sea. Erskine Childers’s
The
Riddle of the Sands
;
Aero-Hydrodynamics and the Performance of Sailing Yachts
by Fabio Fossati;
Illustrated Custom Boatbuilding
by Bruce Roberts-Goodson;
The Gardens at Kew
;
The Gardener’s Essential Gertrude Jekyll
;
Botanica’s Trees & Shrubs
;
The No-Work Garden
by somebody named Bob Flowerdew, which had to be a pseudonym;
David Austin’s English Roses
; the bookcase was packed with them.
    He stepped over to what was obviously Genrikhovich’s “comfy chair,” a Russian version of a La-Z-Boy recliner