Photos. 8x10, glossy, high definition.
The top photo was taken with a telephoto zoom lens—Pugli in the passenger seat of a battered red Lada Niva from the last century. His right hand is wrapped in a red-soaked bandage…and by hand, I mean stump; there is no hand—that must have been what got crunched by the press.
Nico passes the photo to me, his face impassive.
The next few photos show Pugli in various activities, all taken by the same zoom lens from a great distance. Eating awkwardly with his left hand. Crossing a street, the stump held against his stomach. Gesturing angrily at a henchman. Riding in another car—a silver Peugeot, newer.
"So we know he's in Europe," Solomon says. "Let's get that jet spooled up again."
Nicolae literally gasps when he flips to the next photo. "That appears to be unnecessary."
I take the photo from him, an odd and overwhelming mixture of emotions rifling through me at what I see.
Pugli.
Dead.
It's a police photo of his home in Lyon. The front doors are wide open, showing the expansive marble foyer and the suits of armor and authentic Greek and Roman busts. Pugli is on his back on the foyer floor in a pool of blood.
It's a disturbingly gory image.
His throat has been cut from ear to ear, his tongue pulled out to hang down from the open flap. His eyes are gouged out. He's naked. His cock and balls have been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth.
Cash—I see Euros, US Dollars, Brazilian Reals, Colombian Pesos, Romanian Leu, and more—have been dumped out and scattered around him, soaked in blood, sticking to him.
"Jesus," Sophia breathes. "Jesus." It takes a lot to shock the daughter of a cartel kingpin.
Nicolae is clutching the photo in trembling hands. His face is stony and impassive.
"My love?" Tatiana whispers, touching his jaw. "Speak to us."
"He is dead." It's flat, emotionless.
He flips to the next photo—an autopsy photo, gore-free, the corpse cleaned and draped with a sheet up to the shoulders. It is unequivocally Roberto Pugli.
The last photo shows a message inscribed on the floor of the foyer next to Pugli's body, written in his blood, in Romanian Cyrillic. He flips the photo over—the translation is written in blue felt tip pen: "For our girls. Rot in hell."
After the photos is a single sheet of printer paper with a short, handwritten note and a signature.
Dental records, facial recognition software using the official Interpol dossier, and fingerprints all confirm that the decedent is Roberto Antonio Pugli. Power to the entire block was cut for 10 minutes. Local authorities got a hit on a black Sprinter van leaving the area, but quickly lost track of it. Between you and me, Lieutenant Dragos, no one is looking for his killers. My team's best guess, based on interviews I personally conducted with the residents of the village his men recently hit, and the message written in Romanian, is that the village was protected by someone very powerful in the world of Romanian organized crime. As your American friends would say, he fucked around and found out.
Nils shared some of your story with me, Nicolae. You did not deliver the killing blow, and perhaps this is for the best. He is dead, and he suffered. Justice has been served, I think.
I hope you will know freedom.
Your friend,
Major Lisel Neufeld
"He is dead,"Nicolae repeats.
Silence.
His eyes lift; he releases the letter; Solomon catches it, scans it, and passes it around.
Shocked, Nicolae staggers backward, a frown scrunching his brow, and sinks onto a nearby bench. "I…I cannot believe it. I have…I have hunted that man for so many years. I have dreamed of the moment I…" he pulls a knife out from a sheath secured horizontally to his belt along the small of his back; the black blade is long and serpentine and wickedly sharp. He stares at it. "I have dreamed of the moment I plunge this very blade into his heart and watch the life bleed out of his fucking eyeballs."
No one speaks.
