Page 88 of King’s Ransom

Now, as I entered one of the jail’s conference rooms—cinderblock walls, linoleum floor, Formica table—she was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, with her hair tied back in a messy ponytail.

She wore no make-up and her eyes were red from crying.

I took a seat opposite her. Georgy sat beside her.

‘You,’ she said. ‘You were very brave that day. You saved my little Alexei in elevator shaft and you saved me in the helicopter. Yet in all of news coverage, I have not seen you at all on the television. No interviews, no nothing. You could be hero, too. Why is this?’

‘My girlfriend was one of the FBI agents there,’ I said. ‘She was shot at the cemetery and hasn’t recovered yet. I’ve been with her at the hospital.’

Yasmina Ivanova nodded thoughtfully.

‘I didn’t do this,’ she said. ‘I have been—how you say?—setted up.’

I said, ‘They found correspondence between you and the Grandmaster, Sergei Kazan. And also with his Russian gangster buddies out by Coney Island, the Brighton Bratva crew. Was that legit?’

She scowled.

‘Okay, yes, yes, I see how this looks. First, I do not know this Grandmaster. I have never met him. But the others, Oberov’s people from Coney Island’—she grimaced in frustration—‘yes, I do know those men. But it is not what you think.’

‘What is it, then?’

She turned away.

Then she spun back and said quickly, ‘Those Russian criminals have photos of me, and videos. Nude photos and sex videos, from long before I met Aristo, from when I was a young model with no money.’

‘Sex tapes?’ I said.

I thought of the news reports about Yasmina’s connections with the Russian mobsters at Brighton Beach.

And four payments.

3, 6, 12 and 3 million dollars, as I recalled.

‘Yes,’ Yasmina said. ‘I was young, in my twenties. I came from nothing, from a small village in Russia, but here I was suddenly at huge parties in mansions in the Hamptons or penthouses in New York City.

‘There were drugs—cocaine, ecstasy—and rich men who wanted to fuck me. I was high most of the time and I let them and mostly it was fun, doing the fucking on cocaine, sometimes with billionaires, sometime politicians, sometimes Russian gangsters, sometimes with two men at same time. But I didn’t know some occasions had been filmed.

‘When I became famous a few years later—doing runway shows for Victoria’s Secret and swimwear shoots for Sports Illustrated—the Russians contacted me and said if I didn’t pay them three million dollars, they’d release the sex tapes.’

‘They blackmailed you.’

‘Yes. I paid them $3 million to make it go away,’ Yasmina said. ‘My career was taking off.’

I nodded.

‘But it didn’t go away, did it?’ I said. ‘They came back.’

That was the second payment: $6 million, I thought. They’d doubled their rate because her fame had grown.

Yasmina said, ‘That is correct. Two years later, they returned. Only this time they asked for six million. Because I was more well known. And I paid again.’

I could see where this was going, but I let her say it.

‘And then I met Aristo at a gala. I was twenty-four and now a famous model. And he wooed me. On our first date, he fly me to Paris for dinner. We stayed at the Ritz.’

I could only imagine what being courted by the world’s richest man was like.

Yasmina continued: ‘When our relationship became public a few months later, I was worried the Russians would call me again and ask for more money, but they didn’t.’