Domino (The Domino Trilogy) (7 page)

“Your usual table, Nancy?” she asked by way of greeting.

“No, I have company tonight,” I replied, cutting my eyes over in Peter’s direction. Layla gave a single nod signaling she understood, and guided us over to a large wraparound booth in the corner. We seated ourselves on either side, and Layla handed each of us a laminated menu. Peter studied his carefully, but I just set mine aside; I already knew what I wanted.

“The usual,
hon?” Layla whispered in my ear. I nodded and she tottered off on her knee-high platform boots, giving me a not-so-subtle thumbs-up of approval at Peter. “Very hot,” she mouthed silently from across the diner as she busied herself at the milkshake station, making my favorite chocolate mocha malted concoction. Fortunately Peter was too buried in the menu to notice.

“There’s so many choices,” he observed, flipping the pages. “Any suggestions?”

“You can’t go wrong with a chocolate malted,” I said. “They make them the old-fashioned way. The burgers are great, too. And they make the best Denver omelet this side of the Mississippi.”

“Spoken like a true
connoisseur.”

“I’ve spent many a late-night cram session here,” I said just as
Layla returned and set the gigantic pillar milkshake glass in front of me.

“I almost put in your usual burger order,
hon, but I thought you might be broadening your horizons tonight.” She cast a glance in Peter’s direction. He noticed this time, and reddened.

“I will take my usual burger order,
Layla. Just add extra bacon this time, and a side of onion rings. I’m super hungry.”

She tapped her order pad with her pen. “I’d say so. And you, sir?”

Peter closed his menu and handed it to her. “I’ll have the same,” he said. “Only make my burger rare. Extremely rare, steak-tartar style. I like a bit of blood with my dinner.”

Layla
chuckled at this. “Coming right up. You want the same chocolate malted as your date, then, sir?” He smiled and nodded.

Date?
I felt my cheeks burn.  Next time I came in here I would have to give Layla a piece of my mind. “I’ll be right back, kids.” She sashayed off down the aisle towards the kitchen.

Peter watched her go, shook his head, and chuckled. “So I take it you’re a regular here.”

“Yes, you could say that.”

We stared at one another for what seemed like an eternity, but was really
only a few seconds. Ever since that first fleeting moment when he’d restrained me with the cable tie----it seemed as if the entire time and space continuum had slowed down. The world was in sharper focus, all sensations intensified. Even the feeling of the smooth Naugahyde booth seat underneath me set me on edge.

Peter finally broke the silence. “I just wanted to apologize, again,” he said. “If you give me and the show a scathing review for your magazine, I completely understand. In fact, I encourage you to.”

“I don’t take orders from my review subjects,” I replied drily, twirling my straw around and around my milkshake. I always waited a minute or two before taking the first sip----I liked the ice cream to melt to the perfect consistency first. But Layla had made this milkshake super-thick. I dug into it hard with my spoon, trying to get the ice cream to melt faster.

Peter smirked at me. “Do you always attack your prey before eating it?”
I shot him a dirty look. “I like my milkshakes to be just so, that’s all.”

“At that rate, it won’t be a milkshake anymore, it’ll just be plain old milk.”

I leaned forward and took a long, slow sip of the malted through my straw. It was still a little too thick to be sipped easily that way, but it just added to the dramatic effect. Peter’s eyes widened as I sucked up the frozen concoction, then licked the excess chocolate off my lips. “Perhaps as a foreigner you aren’t aware of this, but it’s considered rude to criticize how other people drink milkshakes in public.”

He blinked twice. “Nancy, I’ve lived in the U.S. since I was fifteen years old, and this is the first I’ve ever heard about
proper milkshake manners.  But I’ll study up on it if you think I’m being gauche.”

I smiled
to myself. In true undercover-reporter fashion I’d just managed to get some background information out of my subject without asking for it directly. Peter had just opened a window that I intended to turn into a floodgate. “So you moved here when you were fifteen,” I repeated. “Tell me about that. What was it like, being a teenager in a foreign country? What brought you to the United States? Did you speak any English?”

His mouth pressed into a hard line. “I don’t recall consulting to an interview.”
“Oh, I’m just making small talk.” But he obviously wasn’t buying the innocent routine. I would have to try another tack. “Honestly, what did you expect me to do? I’m a reporter. It’s my job to find things out about people.”

Layla
appeared with Peter’s own malted. He dug right into it with a long-handled spoon. “Point taken,” he said. “But to be perfectly honest Nancy, I don’t particularly enjoy talking about myself. I prefer to let my art do the talking instead.”

“Except tonight your art did a little too much talking.”

He winced for the third time that evening. “Yes, you might say that. Sometimes I make errors in judgment.”

I smelled another opportunity. “What do you mean? What kinds of errors
in judgment have you made in the past?”

“Oh, the usual kind,” he replied, taking a generous scoop
of ice cream from his milkshake and swallowing it whole. “Here and there.”

Boy, this guy sure was good at evading my questions. I thought back to my Introduction to Re
porting class sophomore year to the lecture Professor Willis did on how to handle hostile interview subjects. “When all else fails, just back them into a corner,” Professor Willis had told us. He’d won two Pulitzers as a young reporter at the
Plain Dealer
in the seventies, exposing corruption in Cleveland city government. I’d had a chance to scan Eric Burgess’ email on the walk over while I pretending to send my roommate a text message to let her know I’d be late. Eric hadn’t lied when he said they’d gotten in some juicy tips in about Rostovich. If even five percent of what was in that email was true, Peter Rostovich was a total freak.

“My sources say that you have ties to the Russian Mafia,” I said, hardening my tone, “and that the sexually explicit images in your art are created in part through sex trafficking. Care to comment?”

Peter became noticeably uncomfortable. He set down his spoon and pushed his milkshake away, his pained expression seeming to indicate he’d just lost his appetite. “I’ve been dodging these accusations for years,” he said, drumming his fingertips on the table. “There’s never been any truth to them whatsoever. I wish people would focus on my art, and not on rumors and innuendo.”

“Some of your accusers are credible,” I said, though I didn’t reveal what I meant by that. Eric had provided some very interesting details in his email, details I wasn’t prepared to let Peter know I had access to. Not yet. I wanted to see how he’d respond first.

“Maybe they seem credible to you,” he retorted. “But when you’re dealing with people from my part of the world, be they part of the government, the business community, or anything else, you have to take anything they say with a very large grain of salt. They aren’t like Americans in any way, shape or form. Unlike Westerners, most people in my homeland don’t place a high value on honesty. They’ll say or do anything they think will help them make a buck. It’s true of anyone who grew up under the old Soviet system. It’s even older than that, really.”

An interesting, if cryptic, response.
“I think you’re just trying to avoid my questions.”

I detected the hint of a smile on his face. “You are a very savvy reporter,” he said, then leaned back against the booth. “
And this is a very comfortable place. I love the atmosphere, and the milkshake is divine. Thank you for bringing me here.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

He winked. “I do that frequently. Oh look, our food is coming. That was fast.”

Layla
appeared, holding a single burger plate. “Here you go sir. Salt-n-Pepper burger special with cheese and bacon, extra raw. Take care that it doesn’t moo when you bite into it. Yours’ll be up in a few more minutes Nancy, since you actually wanted yours to be cooked.”

Layla
sauntered off. I sat in silence as I watched Peter pour ketchup on his French fries and mustard on his hamburger from the table bottles. He took the steak knife provided with his meal and used it to slice his huge burger in half. As he did a pool of red blood and grease poured out of the meat, soaking the bun and half the French fries. The sight nauseated me. I’d always been taught never to eat blood-rare meat because it can make you sick. But Peter dove right into the burger, seeming to relish the flavor of uncooked beef.

He chewed, swallowed, and a look of immense pleasure crossed his face.
I felt the same strange shimmer of warmth I’d felt back at the gallery when he’d bound me with the cable tie. The aura of the forbidden and the exotic was palpable, and I felt it deep in my groin. Who knew that watching someone eat a hamburger could be so erotic?

Hell, who knew that
watching
anything
could be erotic? Not me, at least not before that evening. So much had changed for me in such a short time.

“Are you all right, Nancy?” Peter’s voice broke into my reverie. “You seemed lost there for a moment.”

I shifted in my seat. “I’m sorry, I’ve just never seen anyone eat a virtually raw hamburger before. Seriously, how long did they cook it? Thirty seconds?”

“Ther
eabouts,” he said, licking some excess grease off his fingers. “Simply spectacular. Do you know how hard it is to find a restaurant in America that will cook beef properly? Most places burn the meat into oblivion because they’re too afraid of food-poisoning lawsuits.”

“Eating raw meat can kill you,” I observed. “You know,
E. coli
and all that.”

“You can
also get killed just walking down the street. Personally, given a choice I’d rather die from eating a good hunk of meat. Far more enjoyable than say, a hit-and-run vehicle or a drive-by shooting.”

“I suppose so. But I still prefer to have my food cooked before I eat it.” Still, I smell
ed another potential opening into Peter’s background. “So you like steak tartar, huh? I suppose that has to do with your upbringing.”

“Indeed it does. I also like good caviar, strong vodka, and condensed sweet milk
, American-style. The latter because we could never get any of it, except on the black market. The food shortages were very bad when I was growing up, especially at my household.”

“Why is that?”

His eyes clouded. “It’s hard for Westerners to understand. Things were very complicated in the old Soviet Union, and things were even worse for the first few years after the Soviet dissolution. I actually don’t remember much about how things were under the Communists, but I do remember how things were when that was all over. Mostly the memories are bad.”
My ears perked right up. Wow, I actually had him talking about himself for a change. I had to move quickly before he decided to clam up again. “So, how old were you when your father died?”

“I was about nine,” Peter said, polishing off the first half of his burger. He sat back against the wall of the booth, picking at his French fries but not eating them. I wondered if talking about his father made him lose his appetite. “The Communist government had been gone for almost three years by then, and we’d had some very hard times as a result. The new government was not
friendly to the higher-ranking Communist officials. Unless of course they’d gotten involved with some of the, shall we say, new ruling order, which my father didn’t.”

“By ‘new ruling order’ do you mean the Russian mafia?”

He frowned and shook his head. “You Westerners always oversimplify things. What you call the Russian Mafia is really nothing like American organized crime.  To even call it organized crime is an oversimplification. It’s hard to explain.”

“Perhaps we should just call it corruption?”

“You could. But you see, things were plenty corrupt under the Communists too----just in a different way. People back home have never encountered anything resembling a transparent Western democracy like you have here in the States. It has flat-out never existed there, not at any point in history. They understand nothing but absolute power, and bribes, and strongarm political maneuvering, and killing anyone who gets in the way. That’s just the way things have always been done in that part of the world, even back in the days of the czars.”

“But aren’t you from the Ukraine?”

He picked up the other half of his burger, studied it, set it back down. “Yes. But the Ukraine became independent only very recently. It was ruled by the Russians----Soviets and imperialists----for centuries prior to that, with a couple of stints involving the Brits and the Turks in-between.”

Of course, I knew about most of this already from my World History courses-
---Peter wasn’t really telling me anything new. Still, he was talking about something related to his background, at least in a roundabout way. Could I get him to drill down to specifics? Even if I could glean only a few morsels----his father’s name, his position in the government, how he’d died----I could then go and research it further, maybe lend some credence to the unsubstantiated tips Eric had already gathered. The gears in my reporter’s brain whirred with the possibilities. “Here’s what I’m not clear on,” I said, hoping to prod him further. “Are you Russian, or are you Ukrainian?”