“That wasn’t an armored car.”
“Give it a rest. It wasn’t me.”
“Okay, okay. Just curious.”
“You…you all right?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Heard some things. I want everything to be good between us. We’re family. I want to keep it that way.”
“We’re family, Tino. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Forget I brought it up.” Coluzzi returned to his stool and took his time drinking his beer. After a while, he said, “I need your help on something.”
“Oh?”
“Any Russians in here lately?”
“Russians?” said Jojo, as if he’d asked about aliens. “You mean, besides Svetlana and Olga?”
“Men. Clients. Maybe from the consulate. Remember, way back when, a few of them would come in here Saturday nights. We called them the Ivans. Joked around that they might be spies. Those shitty suits, smoking those lousy cigarettes. Seen anyone like that lately?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” said Jojo. “I’m in the kitchen.”
“You mind if I check receipts?”
“Credit cards?”
“Yeah.”
“Any Russians in here pay cash?”
“Not the ones I’m looking for.”
Jojo considered this. “You’re serious?”
Coluzzi nodded.
“And you’re not going to tell me what for?”
“First I need to find ’em.”
Jojo looked at him for another second, then folded the newspaper and led the way to his office. “We have a program that keeps track of all charges. You can check by date, name, transaction amount.”
Coluzzi sat down in Jojo’s chair and scooted close to the keyboard. “I’m good.”
“All yours.”
Jojo left the room and Coluzzi brought up all charges for the past six months, then looked at them by name, A to Z. There were quite a few customers with Russian last names. He concentrated on those who spent less than five hundred euros. Russian diplomats weren’t any better paid than any other state employee.
In five minutes, he had two names. Andrei Gromov and Boris Stevcek. Both men often came together. Usually Fridays. Gromov consistently spent more, but not much. Neither charged more than two hundred euros, which meant they never took a girl to the VIP room for a blow job or bought them out for the night. Lookers, not touchers.
Still, Coluzzi had no proof either worked for the Russian government. They might as easily be with one of the tech companies sprouting up these days like mushrooms or a foreign airline or just about anyone. In fact, he didn’t even know if they were really Russians and not just French citizens with Russian names.
He exited the program and logged on to the net. Earlier he’d looked at the website for the Russian Consulate. Names of employees weren’t listed, not even the consul general. The question was who best to approach with the letter. He had no friends in the Russian spy service. Even if he had, he wasn’t sure how to present the letter. Coluzzi assumed that the Saudi prince had planned on delivering it to someone at or above his own level. The printout of the email he’d found in the prince’s briefcase had indicated there was to be a rendezvous on the island of Cyprus with a man named V. Borodin. A check on the Internet indicated that the current chief of the Russian spy service was a man named Vassily Borodin.
But how does one reach the head of the SVR? You might as well try to reach God.
